Events

Date: 8 May 2025   Time: 14:00 - 15:00

Location: Room 3.02, Peter Landin Building

You are invited to join us for an EECS-C4DM seminar on Thursday 8th May from 2 to 3 pm, where Prof Ville Pulkki will be presenting his work on spatial audio and more. Attend in person in Peter Landin 3.02 or virtually via Zoom.

Topic: Superhearing, Laser Beams, and Windy Yelling: Spatial Audio Oddities Unleashed!
Speaker: Prof Ville Pulkki (Aalto University, Acoustics lab)
Date/time: 8 May 2025, 2 - 3pm (with tea, coffee and live demos (!) immediately after)
Location: 3.02, Peter Landin Building (access via Bancroft road entrance)
Zoom link: qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/2387202947

Abstract:
Prof Pulkki will be providing a broad summary his career defining topics:

• Virtual source positioning over multichannel loudspeaker setups
• Reproduction of spatial sound with techniques taking into account bottlenecks in human spatial hearing
• Why do people think that it is hard to yell against the wind, although it is a physical fact that human radiates more sound when yelling upwind than downwind.
• How a request for a small and powerful impulsive source that could be placed inside a violin led to development of impulse response measurements using focused pulsed laser beams.
• Spatial superhearing technologies, where inaudible wave or radiation fields are made audible and localizable to the user. For example, ultrasonic superhearing allows to hear bats flying around, echolocating superhearing enables blind people to perceive reflections of ultrasonic clicks from surrounding environment, and underwater superhearing allows divers to better avoid hazardous boats.

Bio:
Prof Ville Pulkki (Aalto University, Acoustics lab) has been active in the field of acoustics for 30 years, and a professor at Aalto University for 10 years. His doctoral thesis (and project work before that) focused on a technique for positioning virtual sources over multichannel loudspeaker arrays and delved also on perceptual side of the matter, both with subjective tests and binaural auditory models. After the PhD he used the gained knowledge on the resolution of human directional hearing to develop a parametric time-frequency-domain technique for reproduction of sound fields, a version of which has also been standardized recently. In addition to spatial audio, prof Pulkki has done research and teaching on communication acoustics. He co-authored the textbook Communication Acoustics: An Introduction to Speech, Audio and Psychoacoustics (John Wiley & Sons 2015).