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

washington.edu

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

#401

Post by gravescale »

thsksbd wrote: post #236
gravescale wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, I hope the trend of playing louder and louder music in cafes, restaurants and bars dies out. I don't hold out much hope because as far as I can tell it's done to make everyone "shut up and drink". I could believe it adds at least 50% to sales because when you can't hear a word anyone says, all you can do is smile and nod and take a swig. And if the place is already full anyway, they don't care if you lea…

Not just restaurants and bars. Artificial sounds is everywhere. There was a musician (fairly accomplished in his field) who woke up one day and started hating all music because he realized you cannot escape it. He wrote a book about it but I forget his name.

Interesting.

As an aside, I searched for "musician book can't escape music" and your comment was on the front page of the Google results in sixth position. In fact it was in nearly every search I tried. I couldn't find such a book with moderate trying, just a BBC Point of View transcript on the same thing.

It's personally not a problem I've really noticed in my day to day (for example, today I would only hear music on my headphones at work and as part of TV others in the house are watching at home), though I probably don't spend my time in the same places a musician would.

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

#402

Post by thsksbd »

gertlex wrote: post #257
thsksbd wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Instead of fancy shmancy AI, could a pupil tracker on eyeglasses be used to estimate where a person wants to hear and use phasing to amplify the signal from there? You have two microphones already, spaced about 30 cm apart...

Microphones are cheap right? Just have multiple on each ear while you're squeezing in the AI features too :)

The problem, as I understand it, is that the wavelength of sound is very big relative to the microphone spacing.

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

#403

Post by RhysU »

kdfjgbdfkjgb wrote: post #245
RhysU wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Designers for bars and clubs will take the clientele into account in subtle sensory ways. One once told me how he designed a club known to cater to those having trysts-- it had many isolated booths where the lighting prevented seeing into the booths from the main areas.

the club was already known for that before it was designed?

Sorry, redesigned or a second spot. I forget the details.

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

#404

Post by [deleted] »

superultra wrote: post #185
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…

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…

[deleted]

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

#405

Post by roughly »

dekhn wrote: post #355
roughly wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re near Berkeley, CA, one of the owners of the restaurant Comal also owns a sound company that builds that kind of system, and they use Comal as a showplace. The effect is astounding - it’s an industrial-style design, and it’s got auditory “ambiance”, but you can have a full conversation at normal speaking volumes with everyone at the table. It’s the kind of thing where once you experience it, you’ll judge the…

Oh neat: https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-08/restaurant... Meyer Sound which did the sound install for the space is a long-time well-known innovator in sound tech- for example, establishing vertical line arrays. Years ago the son of the founder was doing advanced space modelling for the best sound (basically, entering the room geometry and simulating with helmholtz equations). I will go there just for t…

Yep, that's the place. When you go there, two things to look for - one is the ring of speakers around 10ft up on the walls, and the other is the forest of small capsule-shaped microphones hanging from the ceiling. It's a really impressive system, although AIUI it's ludicrously expensive - it's there for marketing, Comal did not pay full price for the system.

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

#406

Post by 0_____0 »

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?

On the cheap, Earasers. They're small enough that they're almost invisible, and they're designed to attenuate roughly evenly across the audible spectrum. That makes them great for concerts, but other folks here claim that the top-heavy attentuation profile of non-music specific earplugs is actually better for speech.

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

#407

Post by 0_____0 »

burntwater wrote: post #400
0_____0 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the SNR is already low enough that you're having issues discerning speech, lowering the volume won't help.

For decades now, when I enter a bar or restaurant I turn down the volume of my hearing aid. Not because everything is too loud, but because it allows me to hear spoken speech much better. It doesn't work quite as well on modern digital hearing aids as it did on older analog, and I don't fully understand the mechanics of it, but it's what I do.

That's interesting. I wonder if there is a frequency dependent attenuation present in the volume control on the old ones.

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

#408

Post by roughly »

floatrock wrote: post #349
roughly wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you’re near Berkeley, CA, one of the owners of the restaurant Comal also owns a sound company that builds that kind of system, and they use Comal as a showplace. The effect is astounding - it’s an industrial-style design, and it’s got auditory “ambiance”, but you can have a full conversation at normal speaking volumes with everyone at the table. It’s the kind of thing where once you experience it, you’ll judge the…

Comal is one of the subjects of that podcast episode

Should've guessed! I'd really love to find more places with similar systems & investments in acoustics. It makes such a huge difference in the experience.

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

#409

Post by TeMPOraL »

mhb wrote: post #223
TeMPOraL wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile, I hope the trend of playing louder and louder music in cafes, restaurants and bars dies out. It's an accessibility nightmare, especially (but not only) for people with hearing loss. I thought it's well established that they're doing it entirely on purpose. Restaurants, cafes and bars don't make money on you chilling out and having a good time with friends; they make money on you buying food and drinks. T…

This explanation doesn't really work for the cafes that allow people to take up space at tables for long periods just guilt-ordering a minimal amount.

The only thing worse for a cafe than to be full of people who aren't in a hurry to leave, is to be empty. During slow business hours, the venue will happily cut customers some slack, because as long as they're seen at tables, they're doing free marketing for the place. See: social proof.

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

#410

Post by seoulmetro »

pests wrote: post #44
seoulmetro wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most episodes are just slightly more invasive and unrealistic versions of technology we have had for ages rather than the usual "they saw the future".

I think you are being too dismissive. We watch ads, not by force, but voluntarily for free services or currencies in mobile games. Politicians can do basically whatever they want. We have cameras and even glasses that record everything we do. V-Tubers are more popular by the minute. People get blackmailed for their online activities, wrong as they might be. Kids walk around with parent-forced app's to track their loc…

Yes. These aren't new concepts that sprung up after Black Mirror.

If I'm being dismissive it's because these things can be dismissed as revolutionary.

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