Binaural beam-forming with dominant cue preservation for hearing aids

For people with hearing impairment, it is important to have good speech intelligibility, while also being able to localise the sound sources. Many beam-forming algorithms for hearing aids have been proposed, that minimise the noise, in combination with spatial scene preservation of the target and the interferers. By constraining the spatial cues...

Source localization of auditory steady state responses to monaural and binaural beats

Background: When two acoustic sinusoids of slightly different frequencies are presented in the same ear, the listener perceives a beating sound with a rate the difference frequency between the two sinusoids. In the dichotic presentation of two acoustic sinusoids with slightly different frequencies, separately at the two ears, the listener...

Improving the visitor's end-of-festival experience

Visitors who return from a festival experience an empty feeling combined with fatigue. In this thesis, this experience is called the void. An established psychological phenomenon called the Peak-End rule describes how events are judged by both their peaks, be they positive or negative, and their ends. The end of festivals is now often perceived...

Interferer selection for binaural cue preservation in joint binaural linearly constrained minimum variance beamforming

Spatial cues allow a listener to determine the direction sound is coming from. In addition, recognising spatially separated sound sources facilitate the listener to focus on specific sound sources. Because of this, preservation of spatial cues in multi-microphone hearing assistive devices is important to the listening experience and safety of...

Spreading Fairphone’s philosophy across consumer electronics

The goal for this project was to determine opportunities for Fairphone to expand their portfolio and develop and validate a concept that deserves to carry the Fairphone name. Hence the title: ‘Spreading Fairphone’s philosophy across consumer electronics’. The project is split into three phases: Analysis, Conceptualization, and Materialization....

3D Audio for Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy

Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is an effective method to treat anxiety disorders and comes with many advantages over exposure in vivo, the latter being exposure in real-life. VRET is done by exposing patients gradually with their fear by using immersive virtual environments (VEs). Most attention in VRET research goes to visuals and less...

Binaural CASA algorithm for speech source localization: Advancements in noisy and reverberant situations

In this thesis a binaural CASA localization algorithm is developed for the implementation in a binaural hearing aid with downstream speech enhancement. Two binaural CASA localization algorithms, based on the Albani model, are proposed to enhance the localization performance in noisy and reverberant acoustic environments. The Albani model is...