I am delighted to announce that, as part of the newly awarded research project “From Silence to Story: Revisiting TCD’s Long Room through Acoustics and Immersive Storytelling,” our interdisciplinary team is offering four fully funded PhD opportunities across a range of disciplines. This is a unique chance to join an ambitious, collaborative project at the intersection of acoustics, computer science, digital media, and storytelling.
I am happy to support MSCA postdoc applications to work with me at Trinity College Dublin. For more details go here. Application deadline is April 30, 2026.
Sebastian J. Schlecht and I are Paper Co-Chairs for the upcoming AES Spring Convention in Helsinki, Finland. The submission deadlines for the different paper categories start at January 27, 2023. All details about the submission process can be found here.
After signing up for the waitlist a few weeks ago, I just got access to openAI’s DALL-E 2 beta service. DALL-E is a machine-learning based image generator based on natural language processing. In other words, you type in a description of your desired image, and press the “generate” button. After a few seconds, you’ll see four images, as interpreted by the image generator which you then can further refine. DALL-E can generate astonishing results, if you need images like a Teddy bears mixing sparkling chemicals as mad scientists in a steampunk style as in this demo.
But what knows DALL-E about Audio Technology?
I used some of my 40 credits to find out. The first query was about spectrograms. Would DALL-E know how the spectrum of a sone tone look like? You’ll see the answers below. This doesn’t look right, does it?
DALL-E’s interpretation of “A spectrogram of a sine tone“
OK, next I tried a few audio buzz words, hoping for some insights into DALL-E’s view of the world. You see some of my query results below. Most images reveal typical stereotypes known from stock photos. Looking at the “Immersive Audio” results, wearing flannel shirts and touching your headphones is essential for acoustic immersion.
I am involved in the organization of two upcoming conferences: The next AES convention in May and the 3rd Workshop on the Internet of Sounds in September.
Needless to say, I look forward to many high-quality submissions, (especially) about spatial audio and the internet of audio things.
More details on the conference websites (see links below).
I’ve designed the curriculum for the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg’s first Audio Processing for the Internet of Things course and will be teaching via Zoom. Details here. The course is only open to FAU students, but I’m open to sharing my resources with colleagues and students interested in this field.
While doing some background research for a future publication, I quickly checked the search trends for a few keywords. To my surprise, just a few days ago, one of my favorite keywords Spatial Audio had a spotlight moment not seen in 5 years:
A closer look revealed that the spike happened on June 23rd. What happened there that made so many people google for spatial audio?
The Apple Worldwide Developers Conference happened. It was announced that the AirPods Pro will get a big upgrade this fall—a “spatial audio” feature! I presume lots of tech savvy people were curious to find out more about spatial audio. Let’s see how this trend continues …
