Aalto Acoustics Researchers Win a Publication Award in a Conference in Portugal

Researchers of the Aalto Acoustics Lab received together with German researchers from the International Audio Labs the Award for the Second Best Paper at the International Conference on Digital Audio Effects DAFX-18 in Aveiro, Portugal, on Thursday, Sept. 6, 2018. The research group consists of Dr. Sebastian Schlecht (International Audio Labs, Germany), Benoit Alary (Aalto), Prof. Vesa Välimäki (Aalto), and Prof. Emanuel A. P. Habets (International Audio Labs, Germany). The paper is entitled ”Optimized velvet-noise decorrelation”. It proposes a new method for cancelling the correlation in a sound signal using a short velvet-noise sequence, which is optimized for the human hearing. The method can be used to convert a mono recording to a stereo recording and in multi-channel sound reproduction, among others. Velvet noise was originally discovered by the late professor of the Helsinki University of Technology, Matti Karjalainen (1946-2010), and his colleague Hanna Järveläinen. Velvet noise has several useful properties in audio signal processing, and more applications for velvet noise are continuously developed.