On the night between Sunday and Monday, March 16, 2026, Professor Emeritus Jens Blauert passed away after a short but serious illness at the age of 87. His extraordinary academic career covered more than five decades, and his contributions laid the foundations for modern methods of analyzing and modeling human binaural hearing. These achievements were recognized with numerous international honors, including the Gold Medal of the Audio Engineering Society in 2008 and the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America in 1999.
Jens Blauert studied Communication Engineering at RWTH Aachen University, where he received his doctoral degree in 1969 for his thesis “Examinations for Listening to Direction in the Median Plane with a Fixed Head,” supervised by Volker Aschoff. Aschoff, was a leading figure in communication engineering who had a significant early intellectual and scientific influence on him. After completing his PhD, Blauert obtained his habilitation in 1973 at the Technical University of Berlin. There, he developed his seminal book Räumliches Hören, published in 1974 by S. Hirzel Verlag. An expanded English version of this volume, the book Spatial Hearing: The Psychophysics of Human Sound Localization, was largely completed during his stay at Bell Laboratories (1974–1975) and was later published by MIT Press in 1983.
This book has since become a classic reference in spatial hearing, offering a comprehensive synthesis of research in psychophysics, psychology, and acoustics. It enabled engineers to develop methods for describing acoustic source location, orientation, and distance across a wide range of spatial scenarios. Blauert’s early work highlighted the frequency-dependent nature of perceived sound direction particularly in the median plane and established a theoretical framework for the parametric description of binaural, monaural, and integrated auditory cues. He emphasized spatial hearing as a fundamental human sensory function for orientation, as well as a key mechanism in communication that should be exploited in engineering applications such as 3D audio, virtual reality, hearing aids, and acoustic system design—fields central to audio research and technology.
In 1974, Blauert was appointed to the Chair of Electrical Engineering and Acoustics at Ruhr University Bochum, where he founded and led the Institute of Communication Acoustics (IKA) until his retirement in 2003. During this same period, he worked at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey as a visiting researcher. This visit proved crucial for the future development of IKA, as it enabled him to complete Spatial Hearing, bringing international recognition to both the field and the book’s author. At Bell Labs, he was also exposed to pioneering interdisciplinary work integrating acoustics, psychoacoustics, digital signal processing, and computational modeling. There, he also collaborated with Manfred Schroeder, the great German scientist in physical acoustics and signal processing. Publications from Bell Labs during that era laid the foundations for modern methods of measuring, analyzing, and processing acoustic signals, contributing to the emergence of modern digital audio technology. A crucial driving force behind these developments was the utilization of psychophysics, a field in which both Schroeder and Blauert made important contributions, continuing a long German academic tradition.
Over the years, IKA evolved into a leading center for research in acoustics, signal processing, and hearing, with a strong emphasis on their role in effective human communication, hosting visitors and collaborators from around the world. As with most of us, music was always an important part of Jens’ life. Jens played very well the acoustic bass and the institute regularly hosted jam sessions of the IKA Swing Jazz Band. Jens also performed with other jazz bands in the Bochum area and later in Berlin, where he moved after his retirement.
As head of IKA, Jens supervised 52 PhD students—an impressive number in our specialized field. His research spanned binaural and spatial hearing, speech technologies, psychoacoustics, virtual auditory environments, sound quality, and acoustic measurement and modeling. He served as an international academic ambassador, fostering connections through visits, sabbaticals, and lectures worldwide, including a visiting professorship at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. He was also a founding member of the German Acoustical Society and actively supported European scientific collaboration, contributing to the establishment of the European Speech Communication Association (ESCA) and serving as President of the European Acoustics Association (EAA), which later honored him for his long-standing contributions.
Since 2000, Blauert entered a highly creative period of scholarly writing. With his remarkable ability to inspire his collaborators and his clear vision of future developments, he edited Communication Acoustics (2005, Springer), a volume of review chapters by leading researchers covering key areas of modern sound communication. He also co-authored Acoustics for Engineers (2008, Springer) with Ning Xiang.
Perhaps his most ambitious “retirement project” was the conception and founding in 2008 of the international scientific initiative AABBA (Aural Assessment by Means of Binaural Algorithms), an open research group focusing on the computational modeling of human spatial hearing. AABBA requires contributions from PhD projects across independent academic groups and has proven a remarkably successful concept, recently hosting its 18th consecutive annual meeting, with contributions from multiple generations of researchers, and widespread exposition of the topic through conference sessions, workshops and publications.
For the systematic investigation of binaural computational models under real-time conditions, Jens Blauert, at the age of 75, initiated the consortium project TWO!EARS (2013–2017), which was funded by the European Commission. The focus was on the inclusion of top-down feedback mechanisms, as well as the use of audiovisual virtual reality and robotics testbeds for the evaluation of the algorithms.
Through his coordination of AABBA and TWO!EARS contributors, Blauert also produced two major volumes: The Technology of Binaural Listening (2013, Springer/ASA Press) and The Technology of Binaural Understanding, co-edited with Jonas Braasch (2020, Springer/ASA Press). The first volume presents state-of-the-art approaches to binaural modeling and applications such as aural scene analysis, dereverberation, audio quality assessment, perceptual coding, hearing aids, cochlear implants, robotics, human–machine interfaces, and speech intelligibility prediction.
The second volume marks a significant shift in Blauert’s intellectual focus during the final decades of his life. It emphasizes the importance of meaning and semiotics in spatial hearing, advocating “processing symbols instead of signals.” The book contains chapters covering previously unexplored aspects of hearing, including cross-modal inference, the formation and interpretation of auditory objects, the understanding of aural spaces, and the role of cognitive mechanisms in audio technology.
In his later years, Blauert argued that modeling auditory cognition requires a fundamental rethinking of traditional scientific epistemology which relies on scientific realism, i.e., the concept of a physical world independent of observers giving rise to sensory events. Instead, Blauert suggested that the world and everything in it appears and exists as percepts generated during biological brain functions (i.e., it is our “brainchild”). Some of these ideas were applied to the evaluation of sound quality in his 2012 JAES paper A Layer Model of Sound Quality, co-authored with Ute Jekosch. Until his passing, Jens Blauert was working and expanding on this vision, offering invaluable guidance for future research directions in audio engineering.
Jens Blauert is survived by his daughter Heike Blauert-Lühe and his grandchildren, Luise and Peter. For those fortunate enough to have known him, he will be deeply missed—not only as a mentor and friend, but as an example of intellectual brilliance, generosity, curiosity, drive, and determination. His extraordinary scientific legacy has transformed the acoustics and audio engineering community, providing knowledge and innovative tools to explore and apply spatial sound in ways attuned to human perception and cognition.
John Mourjopoulos
