Gil Soulodre
On Tues May 14, 2013 the Boston Section of the Audio Engineering Society featured "Dereverberation and Other Audio Trickery" by Dr. Gil Soulodre, FAES at Devlin Hall on the Boston College Campus.
The presentation focused on "Signal Decomposition Technologies"; the idea of extracting different types of "streams" from audio signals. The extracted stream could be an individual sound source, reverb or noise within a mix of audio.
He outlined the general approach to using "Perceptual Based Processing", which takes into account how the human auditory system works to guide the processing, for improving the performance of a broad range of audio applications. He provided audio processing examples for each of the signal extraction types discussed.
He gave an in-depth look at Dereverberation, extracting the reverberation stream from any audio signal which may contain a reverb.
He gave examples of applications being used in some products (e.g. Noise Reduction, Microphone Arrays with stream extraction using Hyper-directional microphones, etc.).
As a final summary: "The performance of many audio processing task can be significantly improved by exploiting the various properties of the human auditory system".
Dr. Gil Soulodre has over 30 years experience in the audio field, both as a mixing engineer and a researcher. He is a prolific writer of scientific papers in the areas of concert hall acoustics, auditory perception, subjective testing, DSP processing, and multi-channel audio. He has invented a wide variety of audio processing algorithms and authored more than 30 patents. Through his company Camden Labs, his development efforts include products in the areas of telecom, military communications, the music recording industry, microphone processing, hearing aids, music compression, and automotive audio. Dr. Soulodre is a Fellow of the AES and has received recognition and awards from the Acoustical Society of America, the American Institute of Physics, the IEEE, and the Canadian Government. In 2006 he received the AES Publications Award. Most recently the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences awarded Dr. Soulodre with a 2011 Emmy Award for Technical and Engineering Achievement.
