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AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

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Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#361

Post by jives »

UI_at_80x24 wrote: post #233
superultra wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could not hear anyone in any crowded situation. At middle age I thought my hearing was leaving. Yet every audiologist I went to said my hearing was fine. So I found the best audiologist in my fairly large metro area, and scheduled a year in advance (the wait list was that long). After a whole day of tests the audiologist comes in and says I have good news and bad news and good bad news. The good news is that my hea…

Not to act like an arm-chair doctor but have you ever considered that you may be on the ASD spectrum? That function of being able to mentally 'filter out' specific voices within a crowd is (semi?) common signal of autism. More accurately; I'm like that and I am autistic, I've read that it happens to a lot of others.

I'm recently diagnosed, and I'm this way with auditory and visual input. If I go to a crowded sports bar with TVs, I'm basically useless.

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#362

Post by duped »

londons_explore wrote: post #352
floatrock wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> restaurant and public space designers have stopped thinking about sound. Most bars opened in the last 15 years have cement floors, very little sound insulation, and they’re based on the idea that you’re not having a good time unless your ears are ringing. Recently listened to a really good podcast about this phenomenon https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gastropod/id918896288?... (or pick your favorite podcast ap…

> restaurants can have good sound design, but it doesn't come cheap. Carpet the ceiling and the walls. Super cheap, super effective. Ideally carpet the floor too - and if you use carpet tiles then when a customer spills something uncleanable on a tile it's a 5 minute non-expert job to pull up a tile and put in a new one.

> Carpet the ceiling and the walls. Super cheap, super effective.

Super dangerous and illegal, too.

The reason that professionals don't do this is because no one will permit it, not because there's some scam on acoustic foam and diffusers... well there is but it's not the acousticians' fault. It's a massive fire hazard.

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#363

Post by zerd »

93po wrote: post #346
oldkinglog wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't "dampen" be applied to oscillators? It means "To lessen; to dull; to make less intense" in this case.

i think the point is that it's one of those words misused so widely that dictionaries updated the definition to include the incorrect use. dampen means to make something wet, or at least originally that's what it meant

According to https://www.etymonline.com/word/dampen it's meant "to dull or deaden, make weak" from 1630s and "to moisten, make humid" from 1827.

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#364

Post by rangestransform »

kk6mrp wrote: post #285
LeifCarrotson wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lowering the volume can help with the SNR, because neither the signal, the noise, nor the lowering effect caused by earplugs are consistent with respect to frequency. Highly objectionable, harsh 4-8 kHz noise that might echo around a concrete and steel venue is blocked well by good earplugs, while low-frequency 100-400 Hz speech is ineffectively blocked.

Do you have a good earplug recommendation?

I go to live music a lot so I invested in some custom molded earplugs from 1of1custom.com

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#365

Post by chefandy »

chefandy wrote: post #335
countvonbalzac wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't there some cheap ways to muffle sound? Wood floors, rugs, curtains, artwork, acoustic panels, etc.

Stuff that works well in homes often is a lot more complicated to implement in restaurants, where you're: a) constantly fighting grease buildup and hard-to-remove dust that clings to greasy or damp surfaces, b) often have a profit margin of like 2% if you're one of the successful ones, c) aside from looking clean, you have to worry about pest control, fire codes, health codes (you can't have built-up dust falling in…

Unrelated blathering because a lot of folks in tech don't have much exposure to this stuff and I always enjoy seeing a slice of someone else's life: In general a lot of people are understandably perplexed by seemingly simple, avoidable problems that they encounter in restaurants-- you can chalk almost all of them up to misinformation, or deliberately obfuscated factors. Firstly, there's a ton of inaccurate folk knowledge about the way restaurants work... (most infuriatingly to me is the food safety stuff. Look up the incubation time for most foodborne illnesses and consider how many people blame some lower GI symptoms the meal that met their stomach lining 3 hours earlier.) Also, a big part of the restaurant mystique is making it all seem sort of easy, uncomplicated, and fun, even for regulars and the 'friends and family' crowd; underneath that thin veneer, it's absolute insanity. I've worked in tech and the restaurant business extensively. Most days, the pressure level is "we just discovered a possible active intruder in our production systems" for at least a few hours. It's exhausting, and one of the reasons drug and alcohol addiction is so prevalent. Knowing that an entire staff is breaking their back so you can have a fun cozy bite to eat makes the experience palpably worse, but it's true. That's why you'll usually find people who've worked in the service industry are serious over-tippers. You have to give up a lot of your humanity to do that work, and a lot of people you encounter respect you less instead of more for having made that sacrifice.

I've proudly convinced so many people to not go into that business, though I've also convinced a few people to give it a shot. It's not a good choice for most people, but some people can't really do much else and be happy. In many ways, its especially tolerant to neurodivergent folks with different skillsets being downright useful in different roles. It's hard as hell though. There's a good reason that CIA (the school, not the spies) requires 6 months of full-time back-of-the-house restaurant work to get admitted to their degree program.

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#366

Post by glial »

This is pretty amazing -- and a practical application of a solution to a notoriously tricky problem called the "cocktail party problem."[1] For a small subset of researchers, writing an algorithm to isolate a voice in a crowd is on par with e.g. writing an AI to play Go.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#367

Post by albert_e »

simmons wrote: post #353
treflop wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s something called Auditory Processing Disorder where you are not able to able to differentiate sound and it supposedly can develop later in life. I’ve had it since I was a kid because I always passed the hearing tests but every other kid had no trouble listening to music and understanding the words and so on so I put two and two together. Anyway, I have never been able to understand anyone in any loud public s…

Thank you for the name of this disorder and link! I've also had this my whole life, and I knew it was a thing that wasn't terribly rare (based on reading comments from others in the past, here on HN and elsewhere), but I think this is the first time I've seen a name for this condition. The Wikipedia page seems to really describe my condition, except for the potential overlap with ADHD. For example, the "difficulty fo…

One thing I feel in my personal experience --

while I am doing something -- inability to switch attention to someone speaking to me if they do not first ask for my attention (excuse me / hello / myname / cough / knock) before diving into speaking in sentences.

very often by the time i start paying attention to them speaking -- they are 4-5 words into their sentence and I have missed the context of what they are talking about and i have to ask them to stop and repeat from start

This has happened with me in multiple settings (work and personal life)

Not sure if this is a common thing along with APD - which i recognize some symptoms of in myself

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#368

Post by duped »

countvonbalzac wrote: post #300
floatrock wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> restaurant and public space designers have stopped thinking about sound. Most bars opened in the last 15 years have cement floors, very little sound insulation, and they’re based on the idea that you’re not having a good time unless your ears are ringing. Recently listened to a really good podcast about this phenomenon https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/gastropod/id918896288?... (or pick your favorite podcast ap…

Aren't there some cheap ways to muffle sound? Wood floors, rugs, curtains, artwork, acoustic panels, etc.

Honestly the cheapest way to muffle sound is to not create it in the first place. Guests make noise to hear themselves over other guests and the din of the room, the quieter the room, the quieter the guests, etc.

Essentially, the louder the noise floor, the louder the signal has to get to be intelligible at every table, which raises the noise floor, creating a feedback loop. Good acoustic design in a space accounts for this by minimizing how much acoustic energy is present in the room - both by removing it (with acoustic treatment), spreading it away from sources (by isolating tables/booths, using hard surfaces to reflect sound away, etc), and preventing it from being created in the first place. For example, keeping bus stations behind galley doors and training staff not to clink silverware/glasses/dishes when filling bus bins and avoid playing loud music, etc.

In my experience, most restaurants fail at this because all the people who do it well are in the high-end restaurant business, which most restaurants are not. If the key to a space that isn't too loud is to limit the number of patrons, have dining room space allocated to treatment between tables, have highly trained staff with consistent management, and a big enough kitchen space with heavy enough doors to isolate the sound within - your only option is to be a high end restaurant.

But the high end places fail at it because they don't care and want to maximize the guest throughput because their margins still suck.

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#369

Post by brulard »

duped wrote: post #362
londons_explore wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> restaurants can have good sound design, but it doesn't come cheap. Carpet the ceiling and the walls. Super cheap, super effective. Ideally carpet the floor too - and if you use carpet tiles then when a customer spills something uncleanable on a tile it's a 5 minute non-expert job to pull up a tile and put in a new one.

> Carpet the ceiling and the walls. Super cheap, super effective. Super dangerous and illegal, too. The reason that professionals don't do this is because no one will permit it, not because there's some scam on acoustic foam and diffusers... well there is but it's not the acousticians' fault. It's a massive fire hazard.

source? Seems like with this logic, wood, wallpapers etc. would be illegal as well. Doesn't make sense to me

Re: AI headphones let wearer listen to a single person in a crowd by looking at them

#370

Post by ljf »

serial_dev wrote: post #162

If the size could shrink to the size of a small earplug, I'd love to use this as a person who is not hearing-impaired (at least they couldn't diagnose me with it, so now I'm not sure if their diagnostics sucks, or I'm just a normal person and others pretend better that they hear everything well) . In groups and with friends, it's inevitable that you end up in a busy restaurant or a bar, and it always frustrates me th…

As an older adult I've realised I most likely have ADHD - I've always struggled to focus in busy places, unless the person has my attention - as soon as we are in a group or people all talking or pitching in, and I can't focus on one face, I'm lost. My hearing is fine (I assume) - but I've come to realise I can't process information when there is too much going on.

My family will often have the TV on, games playing on phones, and talking too - I just can't hack it.

Equally the option to work from home has revolutionised my productivity - without having 10 things to filter out, I can just focus on getting the task in hand done. In an office I often get lost and distracted, and have to power through the noise.

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