Sep 10
If you’ve ever listened to a recording of yourself and thought you sound completely different, you’re not alone. But more than that, you were also correct. Here’s why it sounds different.
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Aug 13
Deep down we all know we shouldn’t crank our music or listen to headphones with the volume really high, but we still do. And if you’ve ever wondered if years of hard rock has done any serious damage, here’s an easy way to find out.
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Jul 05
Well this is a first. No, really, a man going by the name of PH is the first known diagnosis of a deeply odd and presumably infuriating condition: He hears voices out of sync, as though he’s watching a movie with out-of-sync dubbing.
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Jun 25
Rich Lee has freed himself from the frustrations of misplacing or having to untangle his headphones ever again. How? He’s what’s known as a grinder: someone who experiments with surgical implants or body-enhancements, and he’s come up with a doozie. Implanted in his tragus—the stiff protrusion just in front of your ear canal—is a small magnet that works like an earbud built into his head.
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Jan 09
If you and your partner are expecting a new addition to the family, now might be a good time to clean up your language. New research suggests that babies begin to pick up language from within the womb. More »
Dec 04
How do you learn a concept if there is no word for it? That’s a question people who are deaf and pursuing science often struggle with. The answer is not exactly easy, and involves a group effort across the non-hearing community. More »
Nov 20
Honda’s HEARBO robot can separate and locate four sound sources at once (video)
Posted in: Today's Chili 
Robots are already adept at all manner of things, from hunting to feeling, but over at Honda’s Research Institute, one team is focused on an ability bots aren’t so hot at yet — hearing. Puny humans can quickly deduce the direction of a sound and assess its significance, while also ignoring unimportant background noise. Honda is trying to replicate these traits with HEARBO, a robot with eight microphones hidden in its head. Using its HARK software system, HEARBO can distinguish between and locate the position of up to four unique sound sources simultaneously to within one degree of accuracy. It can also filter out din generated by its own 17 motors with a method called “ego-noise suppression.” HEARBO’s sound localization skills are shown in the first video below, while the second proves it can beat match, dance poorly, and isolate voice commands when music is playing and motors are whirring. The overall goal of Honda’s efforts is to generally advance intelligent speech and sound recognition technology. We can’t help but wonder, however, if bots will just end up using it to pinpoint our screams when the inevitable occurs.
Continue reading Honda’s HEARBO robot can separate and locate four sound sources at once (video)
Filed under: Robots
Via: Gizmag
Source: IEEE Spectrum, Honda Research Institute
Nov 19
While more and more devices are beginning to be able to understand what we’re saying, one problem that we face is that not everything that we communicate is in the form of a verbal cue. With that in mind, the roboticists at the Honda Research Institute have been working on a robot that can not only understand words, but other sounds.
HEARBO (the HEAR-ing roBOt) uses a technology called Computational Auditory Scene Analysis to distinguish various sounds from its environment. This allows it to not just pick out verbal communication, but everything from the beep of an alarm clock to the mailman knocking on your front door. It can then use this information to make decisions about what to do.
The specific version of the technology being used for HEARBO is called HARK, an open source library that breaks down the understanding of sounds into three steps: localization, separation and recognition. This allows it to not only distinguish sounds in a noisy location, but exactly where they are coming from. In fact, the technology can nail down the direction that sound is coming from down to 1 degree of accuracy. Currently, the system can distinguish up to four different sounds going on at once, but in theory more microphones could allow it to handle even more sources.
Here’s a short demonstration video showing how the robot can understand what’s going on despite the world’s most annoying alarm clock going off the whole time:
And here’s an example of HEARBO easily distinguishing music from human commands, identifying song attributes, and even dancing a little bit:
So why develop such a robot? The technology could be used for things like robot butlers that could automatically answer the doorbell, or do things like turn off the TV if the kids have been using it for too long.
[via iEEE Spectrum]
Nov 08
You wouldn’t immediately think of the ear’s cochlea as an energy source, but MIT knows that every mammal effectively has a pair of very small power plants because of the ionized environment. School researchers are trying to harness that energy through a new sensor that exploits the whole ear canal system. As eardrum vibrations naturally create a usable voltage from brain signals, the prototype can build enough charge in a capacitor to drive a very low-power wireless transmitter that relays the electrochemical properties of the ear and potentially diagnoses balance or hearing problems. The beauty of the system is its true self-sustainability: once the transmitter has been been jumpstarted with radio waves, it powers itself through the resulting transmissions. Energy use is also sufficiently miserly that the sensor doesn’t interrupt hearing. Work is still early enough that there’s a long way to go before such implants are part of any treatments, but there’s hope that future chip iterations could help fix inner ear maladies, not just report on them. Something tells us, however, that the doctor won’t ask us to take two dubstep tracks and call back in the morning.
Filed under: Wearables, Science, Alt
MIT ear-powered wireless sensor sustains its charge through sound originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 08 Nov 2012 11:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Aug 28
Apple, Samsung to argue potential bans on infringing phones December 6th in US District Court
Posted in: Today's Chili 
Ardent followers of the Apple v. Samsung hearing in California have another date to circle in their calendars: December 6th. AllThingsD and Reuters report Judge Lucy Koh has put that down as the day the two companies can make their cases over two key steps in the process since the verdict (check out our breakdown of the decision and what its $1.05 billion damage award means here) was handed down Friday evening. Apple is requesting an injunction to block the sale of Samsung phones that were found to infringe upon its patents, while Samsung wants to have the jury’s verdict set aside. This changes the plans for the previously scheduled September 20th hearing, which will focus on Samsung’s effort to get the injunction lifted on its Galaxy Tab 10.1 that was found not to infringe upon Apple’s design patent. Whether you’ll be tuned in to Twitter for each line by line update or avoiding the internet altogether, at least now you know which day to plan for.
Filed under: Mobile
Apple, Samsung to argue potential bans on infringing phones December 6th in US District Court originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Aug 2012 21:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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