EECS & C4DM Seminar: Prof Ville Pulkki: Superhearing, Laser Beams, and Windy Yelling: Spatial Audio Oddities Unleashed!
QMUL, School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
EECS Seminar & Centre for Digital Music Seminar Series
Seminar by: Prof Ville Pulkki
Date/time: Thursday, 8th May 2025, 2pm
Location: 3.02, Peter Landin Building, Mile End Campus, QMUL, E1 4NS
Zoom: https://qmul-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/2387202947
Title: Superhearing, Laser Beams, and Windy Yelling: Spatial Audio Oddities Unleashed!
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).