what is immersive sound immersive sound is what we experience in our everyday life so when we walk on the street to walk in the park we hear sounds located around us we can determine their position their distance the environment which they're in and all this is what we refer to as immersive sound here in the audio experience design team at Imperial College London we work at trying to simulate immersive sound in a virtual environment such as this so here we have multiple loudspeakers we have 31 of them and we can position sound sources and simulate as if there was actually a source around us at the same time we're using 31 channels while we only have two ears so what about getting directly to the two years maybe with a pair of headphones and embedding and coding in the signal that we deliver all what our brain needs in order to determine where sound sources are located but in order to do this we need to account for individual differences everybody has a different hearing system for example someone might have a larger or a smaller external part of the ear someone might have a larger or smaller head therefore the two years might be closer or farther apart and also the shoulders and the Torso might affect the way we receive sound in 3D and the way sound is altered depending on again morphological features of our head and ears as an example this is how you would hear with one ear shape and this is how you would hear with another ear shape so in order to make our virtual immersive sound as realistic as possible and to make people believe that actually there are sources around us that are a person talking behind me or a car moving around me or an helicopter passing about I need to account for all these differences so there are two ways we can deal with this problem the first one is to take into account all these individual differences in our simulation system so adapting the technology to the person in this case we can for example acoustically measure our specific filter for example we can put two microphones at the entrance of the ear canal and using a system such as this measure how our head will filter the sound differently depending on where it's coming from of course though this is an expensive system and this is a time consuming activity so we can find actually other ways of doing this using for example simpler Technologies such as a 3D scanner or a phone to take a picture of our ear and then thanks to my machine learning and artificial intelligence we can use that picture to derive the filter the function the way that our hearing system modifies the sound coming from around us our acoustic signature another way to approach this problem would be for you to adapt to the technology in past research it has been shown that we can adapt to altered spatial hearing cues for example if I put two tubes at the in my ear canals I am virtually making my head larger and at the beginning I wouldn't be able to localize sound sources correctly but with a little bit of training my brain and my hearing system is able to adapt to these altered cues and relearn how to localize sources properly here at Imperial we have shown that we can do this also in virtual reality so for example we can train someone to use someone else's ears and we do this using a series of very short training tasks one of them could be for example a shooting game so you see a Target and you hear a sound coming from the Target and you need to determine the position and shoot at the beginning you have both Visual and auditory feedback and then slowly the visual feedback disappears so you don't see the source anymore and you only hear it and you need to rely on your auditory system to determine its position with this process with just a few short I'm talking about 10 12 minute sessions we are able to train our hearing system to localize with years that are not ours so this is what we do within the sonicom project which is a new funded research that involves several Partners around Europe looking specifically at the matter of personalization of immersive audio whether adapting the technology to the person or adapting the person to the technology we can extend this approach Beyond virtual reality simulation and Beyond the more Leisure side of immersive audio for example if someone has severely altered hearing conditions could be due to a hearing loss but also to using a hearing aid or maybe a cochlear implant a cochlear implant modifies highly the way we receive sound and the way we hear normal single normal signals such as speech or maybe a car coming or or sound from our everyday life and at the same time it reflects a lot the way we localize sound sources people with Cochlear implants generally are not able to localize sound sources as well as people with a normal hearing an example of how a person with the cochlear implant might hear you can hear that this is particularly distorted [Music] so one way of improving this situation is obviously to develop better technology that is more suited to one or another specific individual but the cochlear implant user can also train to use these altered cues more successfully and to extract the information they need for example to localize down sources to listen to music or to listen to speech in a noisy environment so what we're doing is we've developed a series of virtual reality games where the cochlear implant users is immersed in realistic immersive sound environment for example a cafe where they need to fulfill an order from a client or maybe a shooting task where they need to localize a source and shoot or again playing music or listening to music in all these tasks the spatial aspect of sound is essential cochlear implant users need to use both their years together in order to perform these tasks and what we're aiming to is not only for them to become better at playing the games but for them to acquire some perceptual skills that can they've been transferred into their real life and improve their quality of life so this is what we do within the Bears project which is funded by nihr it's the research arm of NHS and we are aiming for this technology to be first trialed and then deployed within NHS clinical practice this is the research we do in the audio experience design team at Imperial Cottage London you can follow us from our website and learn more about our research you can visit us and attend some of our demonstrations foreign