A stereophonic enhancement system is described which expands the perceived width of the stereo sound image. The system accepts electrical audio signals comprising a two-channel (left and right) stereo pair and produces enhanced left and right stereo signals for use with conventional two-channel audio recording and playback systems. The system includes control circuitry which monitors the dissim...

The antique stereophonic recording and playback format is going to be replaced by new surround sound formats in the near future. At the moment, various surround techniques are being investigated in many artistic and technical applications. The main concern is to find an appropriate recording and playback format which supports the natural spatial hearing cues. Therefore, surround sound systems s...

Conventional stereophonic processes allow playback of mono audio signals with a stereo effect. The stereo effect is limited to mimicking ambience or signal independent left/right separation and thus no realistic sound stage is reproduced. This paper proposes two techniques for converting old mono recordings to two or more channel stereo signals with a realistic sound stage and ambience. One tec...

This combined fMRI and MEG study investigated brain activations during listening and attending to natural auditory scenes. We first recorded, using in-ear microphones, vocal non-speech sounds, and environmental sounds that were mixed to construct auditory scenes containing two concurrent sound streams. During the brain measurements, subjects attended to one of the streams while spatial acoustic...

In this article, the authors propose an optimally designed fixed beamformer (BF) for stereophonic acoustic echo cancelation (SAEC) in real hands-free communication applications. Several contributions related to the combination of beamforming and echo cancelation have appeared in the literature so far, but, up to the authors’ knowledge, the idea of using optimal fixed BFs in a real-time SAEC sys...

In stereophonic acoustic echo cancellation, the two stereophonic channels are usually strongly correlated, which leads to non-unique solution of adaptive filters. Therefore, the filter misalignment gets large and the tracking capability is poor. In this paper, a novel decorrelation method based on psychoacoustic effect is proposed for stereo acoustic echo cancellation. Spectral dominance effect...

This paper proposes a novel broad-band noise reduction technique in stereophonic situations. The method utilises a combined non-recursive multi-stage sliding subspace projection and adaptive signal enhancement. Simulation results based upon real stereophonic speech contaminated by broad-band noise components show that the proposed method yields a performance improvement in the speech enhancemen...

In this paper, we propose an original method to include spatial panning information when converting monophonic recordings to stereophonic ones. Sound sources are first identified using perceptually motivated clustering of spectral components. Correlations between these individual sources are then identified to build a middle level representation of the analysed sound. This allows the user to de...