ARCHITECTS aiming to create rooms with crowd-pleasing acoustics could soon rely on a pair of virtual ears to sound out their designs.
The software-based ears are the brainchild of at Cardiff University in the UK, and colleagues, who think they can be used to transform blueprints into “sound maps” which show how discernible speech would be, compared with background noise, at various positions in a room.
Their virtual ears address a particular acoustic problem: singling out a voice against background babble. Culling’s system models how sound should travel in a room, then it works out how two competing sources would be perceived at…
