Spatial Hearing with Incongruent Visual or Auditory Room Cues

In day-to-day life, humans usually perceive the location of sound sources as outside their heads. This externalized auditory spatial perception can be reproduced through headphones by recreating the sound pressure generated by the source at the listener’s eardrums. This requires the acoustical features of the recording environment and listener’s anatomy to be recorded at the listener’s ear canals. Although the resulting auditory images can be indistinguishable from real-world sources, their externalization may be less robust when the playback and recording environments differ. Here we tested whether a mismatch between playback and recording room reduces perceived distance, azimuthal direction, and compactness of the auditory image, and whether this is mostly due to incongruent auditory cues or to expectations generated from the visual impression of the room. Perceived distance ratings decreased significantly when collected in a more reverberant environment than the recording room, whereas azimuthal direction and compactness remained room independent. Moreover, modifying visual room-related cues had no effect on these three attributes, while incongruent auditory room-related cues between the recording and playback room did affect distance perception. Consequently, the external perception of virtual sounds depends on the degree of congruency between the acoustical features of the environment and the stimuli

Characterization of Tajogaite volcanic plumes detected over the Iberian Peninsula from a set of satellite and ground-based remote sensing instrumentation

Three volcanic plumes were detected during the Tajogaite volcano eruptive activity (Canary Islands, Spain, September–December 2021) over the Iberian Peninsula. The spatiotemporal evolution of these events is characterised by combining passive satellite remote sensing and ground-based lidar and sun-photometer systems. The inversion algorithm GRASP is used with a suite of ground-based remote sensing instruments such as lidar/ ceilometer and sun-photometer from eight sites at different locations throughout the Iberian Peninsula. Satellite observations showed that the volcanic ash plumes remained nearby the Canary Islands covering a mean area of 120 ± 202 km2 during the whole period of eruptive activity and that sulphur dioxide plumes reached the Iberian Peninsula

Evaluating real-world benefits of hearing aids with Deep Neural Network-based noise reduction: An Ecological Momentary Assessment study

PURPOSE: Noise reduction technologies in hearing aids provide benefits under controlled conditions. However, differences in their real-life effectiveness are not established. We propose that a Deep Neural Network (DNN)-based noise reduction system trained on naturalistic sound environments will provide different real-life benefits compared to traditional systems. METHOD: Real-life listening experiences collected with Ecological Momentary Assessments (EMAs) of participants who used two premium models of hearing aid (HA) are compared. HA1 used traditional noise reduction; HA2 used DNN-based noise reduction. Participants reported listening experiences several times a day while ambient sound pressure level (SPLs), signal-to-noise ratio (SNRs) and hearing-aid volume adjustments were recorded. 40 experienced hearing-aid users completed a total of 3614 EMAs and recorded 6812 hours of sound data across two 14-day wear periods. RESULTS: Linear mixed-effects analysis document that participants’ assessments of ambient noisiness were positively associated with SPL and negatively associated with SNR but are not otherwise affected by hearing-aid model. Likewise, mean satisfaction with the two models did not differ. However, individual satisfaction ratings for HA1 were dependent on ambient SNR, which was not the case for HA2. CONCLUSIONS: Hearing aids with DNN-based noise reduction resulted in consistent sound satisfaction regardless of the level of background noise compared to hearing aids implementing noise reduction based on traditional statistical models. While the two hearing-aid models also differed on other parameters (e.g., shape), these differences are unlikely to explain the difference in how background noise impacts sound satisfaction with the aids. <br/