Get Ready for Next Generation Surround Sound

Ultra-realistic surround sound is a step closer for everyone thanks to a new method that will cheaply and efficiently compute the way individuals hear things.

Currently, creating accurate virtual sound fields through headphones is almost exclusively the domain of high-budget military technologies and involves lengthy and awkward acoustic measurements. The new approach eliminates the acoustic measurement step altogether and promises to produce the required results in mere minutes.

The breakthrough has been made by researchers at the University of Yorks Department of Electronics, funded by the EPSRC. The researchers are working in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Sydney, Australia.

The team are now working to commercialise the idea. Tony Tew, lead researcher at York explains, We envisage booths in the high street, like those used for passport photos, where customers can have the shape of their head and ears measured easily. The shape information will be used to quickly compute an individuals spatial filters.

Spatial filters encapsulate how an individuals features alter sounds before they reach the eardrum. The changes vary with direction and so supply the brain with the information it needs to work out where a sound is coming from. Tews booth would record the spatial filter measurements on to a smart card, readable by next-generation sound systems. The result sounds heard through headphones should be indistinguishable from hearing the same sounds live.

Rapid-growth portable technologies, such as mobile communications, wearable computers and personal entertainment systems, largely depend on ear phones of one sort or another for their reproduction of sound. Ear phones are perfect for creating a virtual sound field using the York-Sydney teams method. Realism is only one benefit; the ability to place virtual sounds anywhere around the head has applications in computer games and for producing earcons (the acoustic equivalent of icons on a visual display). Next-generation hearing aids programmed with the wearers spatial filters will be able to exploit the directional information created by the ear flaps and so help to target one sound while rejecting others.

Tony Tew says, Our main goal is for personalised spatial filters to figure in a wide range of consumer technologies, making their benefits available to everyone.

Notes for Editors:
In general, the location of sounds to our left and right can be inferred from the difference in their time of arrival and intensity at each ear. This is exploited, albeit in a limited way, in stereo music recordings. However, distinguishing sounds from the front and behind is a more subtle process and relies on the features of the ear flaps (pinnae). The spatial filters created in this research will be derived with the aid of 3-D images of the pinnae.

This research is being undertaken in close collaboration with academics at the University of Sydney, Australia. They have pioneered the techniques for using the information about face shape captured by the York group to produce the personalised spatial filters, more usually called Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTFs). These HRTFs can be programmed as software processes or built into microchips that can alter an electronic signal so as to mimic the effects of the head and outer ear before the signal is fed into the ear canals through a pair of headphones. The Australian Research Council funds the University of Sydney work.

The reproduction of sound first started with the use of a single speaker before progressing to stereo. Nowadays, home cinema can use six or more speakers to give listeners a feeling of being immersed in sound. However, these systems were never intended to recreate sounds that are indistinguishable from the live experience. Beyond surround sound lie the developing technologies of wavefront synthesis and ambisonics, for example, which are much more capable of conveying the direction and even the size of a sound source. Both rely on arrays of loudspeakers. Generally speaking, the more loudspeakers, the better the performance, but also the greater the cost. The method being pursued at York and Sydney employs the technique of binaural sound synthesis, which seeks to recreate the illusion of sound all around the listener simply using two channels of sound, one channel delivered to each ear.

Hearing a traditional stereo signal through headphones normally gives the impression that the sounds are located inside the listeners head. Personalised binaural audio is different from stereo, however, because it includes the subtle distortions to the sound caused by the effect of the head and ear shapes of the listener. As such, it is a fundamentally different way of creating accurate total immersion in a sound field compared to the use of multi-channel loudspeaker arrays.

Brain Scans Reveal How Gene May Boost Schizophrenia Risk

Clues about how a suspect version of a gene may slightly increase risk for schizophrenia* are emerging from a brain imaging study by the National Institutes of Health’s (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). The gene variant produced a telltale pattern of activity linked to production of a key brain messenger chemical.

Areas in prefrontal cortex where blood flow (yellow) was linked to midbrain dopamine synthesis, in opposite directions in subjects with val and met COMT gene type. PET data is superimposed on 3-D MRI view of brain. (Source: NIMH Clinical Brain Disorders Branch)

Link

'Robotic' dental drill to be tested on humans

“A “robotic” dentist’s drill is to be tested on humans in Europe and the US, and could represent the first step towards more automated dental procedures.

The drill, developed by Tactile Technologies, based in Rehovot, Israel, is designed to take the complexity out of dental implant work. It could make operations cheaper, quicker and less painful for patients, its developers claim.”

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7288

'Mini' Ion Accelerator

University Of Nevada, Reno Professor Showcases ‘Mini’ Ion Accelerator
“Tom Cowan’s team is thinking smaller, but with big impact. Particle accelerators are a key research tool in a high energy physicist’s arsenal, but they take up a lot of space — miles and miles of it. But at the University of Nevada, Reno, smaller is better.

Tom Cowan’s team is thinking smaller, but with big impact. Particle accelerators are a key research tool in a high energy physicist’s arsenal, but they take up a lot of space — miles and miles of it. But at the University of Nevada, Reno, smaller is better.”

Link

Happiness helps people stay healthy

“This study showed that whether people are happy or less happy in their everyday lives appears to have important effects on the markers of biological function known to be associated with disease,‚Äù says clinical psychologist Jane Wardle, one of the research team. ‚ÄúPerhaps laughter is the best medicine,‚Äù she adds.”
(http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7282)

A trusting boss is a successful boss

A study at the University of Bonn shows that when the boss keeps breathing down your neck, your motivation plummets
‘Homo economicus’ is a sluggard. He simply lets any work pile up if he needn’t fear any repercussions or financial losses. Management therefore need to keep an eye on him if they want to see results. This at least is a basic tenet of Economics.
Yet things are different in reality and very much so, if we are to believe a new study of the problem. In it the team headed by the Bonn economist Professor Armin Frank concludes that supervision can have devastating effects on motivation and efficiency.

Prof. Falk is a professor at the University of Bonn and the research director at the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA); the German financial weekly WirtschaftsWoche calls him one of the most influential economists in Germany. Together with his colleague Dr. Michael Kosfeld from the University of Zurich he investigated, in a simple experiment, how people react to supervision. 144 Swiss students took part in the experiment. The researchers then split the group up into game pairs consisting of two players, a ‘boss’ and an ’employee’. At the beginning of the game the employee got 120 points in a virtual account, while the boss had to make do with 0 points.

The employee could then invest some of the points this amount corresponded, so to speak, to the work done. The boss’s account was credited with twice the amount invested by the employee as his ‘earnings’. However, beforehand the boss was allowed to decide whether he wanted to give his employee a completely free hand or whether he wanted to ‘dictate’ a minimum workload of 10 points so as not to go completely empty-handed. The amount in the account could later be turned into hard cash those taking part were given 20 centimes per point.

A selfish ‘homo economicus’ ought, according to the prevailing theory, to always pay the minimum i.e. 0 points if the ‘boss’ gave him a free hand, and otherwise 10 points. The boss would thus always do better if he kept his employee under supervision. ‘However, surprisingly enough, the amounts the employees invested dropped as soon as the boss started to supervise them,’ Prof. Falk explains. The difference was quite considerable: only 32 per cent of all those taking part gave 10 points or less if they were not supervised. However, if the boss fixed 10 points as the minimum, more than half gave exactly this minimum amount. On average the ‘supervised’ employees only gave 17.5 points. If they had a free choice, this amount was a third higher, although every point cost them real money.

Distrust is punished

‘After the game a lot of the participants stated that they had interpreted the insistence on a minimum amount by their boss as a lack of trust,’ Prof. Falk adds. ‘And why should I do more for somebody than is absolutely necessary if they do not trust me?’ On the other hand the bosses who opted for supervision admitted that they had fixed the minimum amount because they were afraid that they would otherwise go away empty-handed. ‘The game shows the traits of a self-fulfilling prophecy, ‘ is how Prof. Falk summarises the results: ‘Anyone who is suspicious of the willingness to work of their employees is in fact punished by poor work levels; whoever is optimistic and gives them free rein is rewarded.’

However, the study also showed that under strict supervision the work levels rose: for example, if the boss fixed the minimum amount at 20, on average he received exactly as many points as when he gave his employees a completely free hand. ‘If there has to be supervision, it should be done properly,’ Prof. Falk concludes. ‘Otherwise the negative effects predominate.’

How realistic the game results are is shown by an observation made by David Packard, co-founder of the computer firm HP. In the 1930s he was working for the US company General Electric. Tools and parts were well guarded to ensure that the employees did not steal anything. In his memoirs Packard shows how effective this was. ‘Faced with this obvious display of distrust, many employees set out to prove that it was justified, walking off with tools and parts whenever they could.’

The original article can be found on the internet at ftp://ftp.iza.org/dps/dp1203.pdf

Why billionaires live longer

“The world’s richest people die of the same causes as mere mortals. But a fat bank account helps delay the inevitable. Here’s why.

By Forbes

Think trophy wives, boating accidents and feckless dependents are the primary causes of death for billionaires? Think again. Billionaires are killed by the same unglamorous things that kill the rest of us: diseases such as cancer, heart attacks, kidney failure and others.

The only difference is they may live a little longer.”

Link

High-tech Probes Sneak Inside Your Cells

“The newest generation of nano-sized probes should give scientists a look into the secret lives of nuclei within your body, researchers say.
The tiny probes, called quantum dots, are a melding of biology and technology. The crystalline semiconductors with a biological protein coating are no larger than a few hundred atoms. Importantly, they shine brilliantly when hit with a laser.”

Link

Environmental Heresies

An environmentalist reconsiders four areas of modern environmentalism in The Technology Review:

“Over the next ten years, I predict, the mainstream of the environmental movement will reverse its opinion and activism in four major areas: population growth, urbanization, genetically engineered organisms, and nuclear power.

Reversals of this sort have occurred before. Wildfire went from universal menace in mid-20th century to honored natural force and forestry tool now, from ‚ÄúOnly you can prevent forest fires!‚Äù to let-burn policies and prescribed fires for understory management. The structure of such reversals reveals a hidden strength in the environmental movement and explains why it is likely to keep on growing in influence from decade to decade and perhaps century to century.”

http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/05/issue/feature_earth.asp?trk=nl

'Two brained' chips to boost PC performance

"Chips with two identical processing cores run faster than single-core processors by dividing calculations into parts and tackling them simultaneously. "Today is a historic date for the computer industry as PCs begin having ‘two brains’ instead of one," said Don MacDonald, vice president of Intel’s Digital Home Group. "

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7281&feedId=online-news_rss20