Ville Pulkki: Superhearing, Laser Beams, and Windy Yelling — Spatial Audio Oddities Unleashed!

Prof Ville Pulkki (Aalto University, Acoustics lab) has been active in the field of acoustics for 30 years, and a professor at Aalto University for 10 years. His doctoral thesis (and project work before that) focused on a technique for positioning virtual sources over multichannel loudspeaker arrays and delved also on perceptual side of the matter, both with subjective tests and binaural auditory models. After the PhD he used the gained knowledge on the resolution of human directional hearing to develop a parametric time-frequency-domain technique for reproduction of sound fields, a version of which has also been standardized recently. In addition to spatial audio, prof Pulkki has done research and teaching on communication acoustics. He co-authored the textbook Communication Acoustics: An Introduction to Speech, Audio and Psychoacoustics (John Wiley & Sons 2015)

In addition to providing a broad summary on these career defining topics, Prof. Pulkki has promised to discuss some of his recent research projects:

• An ultrasonic spatial superhearing device, which allows the user to hear and localize sources, e.g. bats flying around.
• How a request for a small and powerful impulsive source that could be placed inside a violin led to development of impulse response measurements using focused pulsed laser beams.
• And why do people think that it is hard to yell against the wind, although it is a physical fact that humans radiate more sound upstream than downstream.