This post describes our paper “Binaural Audio Source Remixing for Microphone Array Listening Devices” presented at ICASSP 2020. You can read the paper here or watch the video presentation here.

Microphone arrays are important tools for spatial sound processing. Traditionally, most methods for spatial sound capture can be classified as either beamforming, which tries to isolate a sound coming from a single direction, or source separation, which tries to split a recording of several sounds into its component parts. Beamforming and source separation are useful in crowded, noisy environments with many sound sources, and are widely used in speech recognition systems and teleconferencing systems.

Since microphone arrays are so useful in noisy environments, we would expect them to work well in hearing aids and other augmented listening applications. Researchers have been building microphone-array hearing aids for more than 30 years, and laboratory experiments have consistently shown that they can reduce noise and improve intelligibility, but there has never been a commercially successful listening device with a powerful microphone array. Why not?

The problem may be that most researchers have approached listening devices as if they were speech recognition or teleconferencing systems, designing beamformers that try to isolate a single sound and remove all the others. They promise to let the listener hear the person across from them in a crowded restaurant and silence everyone else. But unlike computers, humans are used to hearing multiple sounds at once, and our brains can do a good job separating sound sources on their own. Imagine seeing everyone’s lips move but not hearing any sound! If a listening device tries to focus on only one sound, it can seem unnatural to the listener and introduce distortion that makes it harder, not easier, to hear.

A source remixing system changes the relative levels of sounds in a mixture while preserving their spatial cues.

This paper proposes a new type of array processing for listening devices: source remixing. Instead of trying to isolate or separate sound sources, the system tries to change their relative levels in a way that sounds natural to the listener. In a good remixing system, it will seem as if real-world sounds are louder or quieter than before.

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This post describes our paper “Motion-Robust Beamforming for Deformable Microphone Arrays,” which won the best student paper award at WASPAA 2019.

When our team designs wearable microphone arrays, we usually test them on our beloved mannequin test subject, Mike A. Ray. With Mike’s help, we’ve shown that large wearable microphone arrays can perform much better than conventional earpieces and headsets for augmented listening applications, such as noise reduction in hearing aids. Mannequin experiments are useful because, unlike a human, Mike doesn’t need to be paid, doesn’t need to sign any paperwork, and doesn’t mind having things duct-taped to his head. There is one major difference between mannequin and human subjects, however: humans move. In our recent paper at WASPAA 2019, which won a best student paper award, we described the effects of this motion on microphone arrays and proposed several ways to address it.

Beamformers, which use spatial information to separate and enhance sounds from different directions, rely on precise distances between microphones. (We don’t actually measure those distances directly; we measure relative time delays between signals at the different microphones, which depend on distances.) When a human user turns their head – as humans do constantly and subconsciously while listening – the microphones near the ears move relative to the microphones on the lower body. The distances between microphones therefore change frequently.

In a deformable microphone array, microphones can move relative to each other.

Microphone array researchers have studied motion before, but it is usually the sound source that moves relative to the entire array. For example, a talker might walk around the room. That problem, while challenging, is easier to deal with: we just need to track the direction of the user. Deformation of the array itself – that is, relative motion between microphones – is more difficult because there are more moving parts and the changing shape of the array has complicated effects on the signals. In this paper, we mathematically analyzed the effects of deformation on beamformer performance and considered several ways to compensate for it.

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This post describes our paper presented at CAMSAP 2019.

Imagine what it would sound like to listen through someone else’s ears. I don’t mean that in a metaphorical sense. What if you had a headset that would let you listen through microphones in the ears of someone else in the room, so that you can hear what they hear? Better yet, what if your headset was connected to the ears of everyone else in the room? In our group’s latest paper, “Cooperative Audio Source Separation and Enhancement Using Distributed Microphone Arrays and Wearable Devices,” presented this week at CAMSAP 2019, we designed a system to do just that.

Our team is trying to improve the performance of hearing aids and other augmented listening devices in crowded, noisy environments. In spaces like restaurants and bars where there are many people talking at once, it can be difficult for even normal-hearing people to hold a conversation. Microphone arrays can help by spatially separating sounds, so that each user can hear what they want to hear and turn off the sounds they don’t want to hear. To do that in a very noisy room, however, we need a large number of microphones that cover a large area.

Complex listening environments include many different sound sources, but also many microphone-equipped devices. Each listening device tries to enhance a different sound source.

In the past, we’ve built large wearable microphone arrays with sensors that cover wearable accessories or even the entire body. These arrays can perform much better than conventional earpieces, but they aren’t enough in the most challenging environments. In a large, reverberant room packed with noisy people, we need microphones spread all over the room. Instead of having a compact microphone array surrounded by sound sources, we should have microphones spread around and among the sound sources, helping each listener to distinguish even faraway sounds.

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This post describes our new massive distributed microphone array dataset, which is available for download from the Illinois Databank and is featured an upcoming paper at CAMSAP 2019.

The conference room used for the massive distributed array dataset.

Listening in loud noise is hard: we only have two ears, after all, but a crowded party might have dozens or even hundreds of people talking at once. Our ears are hopelessly outnumbered! Augmented listening devices, however, are not limited by physiology: they could use hundreds of microphones spread all across a room to make sense of the jumble of sounds.

Our world is already filled with microphones. There are multiple microphones in every smartphone, laptop, smart speaker, conferencing system, and hearing aid. As microphone technology and wireless networks improve, it will be possible to place hundreds of microphones throughout crowded spaces to help us hear better. Massive-scale distributed arrays are more useful than compact arrays because they are spread around and among the sound sources. One user’s listening device might have trouble distinguishing between two voices on the other side of the room, but wearable microphones on those talkers can provide excellent information about their speech signals.

Many researchers, including our team, are developing algorithms that can harness  information from massive-scale arrays, but there is little publicly available data suitable for source separation and audio enhancement research at such a large scale. To facilitate this research, we have released a new dataset with 10 speech sources and 160 microphones in a large, reverberant conference room.

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