Austrian Academy of Sciences

Austria

The Acoustic Research Institute (ARI) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences is an interdisciplinary research institution of Austria’s leading non-university research facility. It undertakes top-level research in auditory cognitive neuroscience, psychoacoustics and experimental audiology, acoustic phonetics, musicology and bioacoustics, physical and computational acoustics, and mathematics and signal processing. Each of the groups is active in both fundamental and applied research, aiming for scientific excellence, particularly in interdisciplinary projects.

Role in SONICOM

In SONICOM, we will work on auditory models enabling other groups to estimate the impact of various measures on spatial perception and on methods towards creating self-personalizing headphones. Further, we will create a SONICOM ecosystem, an open-source playground of software packages, experiment data, and machine-learning approaches, available to researchers interested in personalized spatial AR/VR systems.

Team members

Piotr Majdak is the project’s PI at the Acoustic Research Institute (ARI). He works on better understanding the mechanisms underlying spatial hearing and on applying that knowledge to improve acoustic and audio systems. Specifically, he investigates spatial hearing in normal-hearing listeners by providing spatial cues to the auditory system. Here, understanding HRTFs plays a crucial role in his academic life.

Katharina Pollack will work in the parametric pinna model. She studied audio engineering and is currently doing her PhD on the non-rigid registration of meshes of human pinna.

Michael Mihocic works at ARI’s laboratory providing technical and software support for the experiments in the lab.

Christiane Herzog has been working in the administration of the Institute since 2011. In this function, she supervises many of the Institute’s projects, including their accounting. She will assist with the project management.

Nicki Holighaus is a mathematician and expert on AI-based signal processing. He is the leader of the interdisciplinary machine-learning team of the ARI and will assist us in the AI-related questions of SONICOM.

Wolfgang Kreuzer is a mathematician and senior researcher working in the field of physical and computational acoustics. He will support our work on the parametric pinna model.

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