Products

Acoustical Focus

Where Sound Meets Focus

The Cocktail Party Problem

Undamaged human hearing is truly amazing and sets the standard by which hearing technologies are judged. Even the most technologically advanced hearing solutions have never achieved - in the words of Colin Cherry in 1953 - “our ability to listen to and follow one speaker in the presence of others.” He called this the Cocktail Party Problem.

Why are people with normal hearing so much better at hearing speech in noise? The answer is simple: just as two eyes let us see in 3D and use visual depth perception to focus on and distinguish objects, human hearing uses two ears to hear in 3D so that our acoustic depth perception can focus on and distinguish individual sounds from a noisy “cocktail party” background. Existing hearing technologies are unable to replace that lost 3D depth perception.

Hear The Difference Our Refocusing Software Makes, Even In A Cocktail Party

Our patented algorithm mimics human hearing by combining acoustic “glimpses” of a person’s voice with machine learning to focus on each voice based on where it originated from in 3D, and blur any sounds originating from elsewhere.

Hear it for yourself - preferably with headphones. The first clip is what cocktail party babel sounds like before our software:

Now we will focus on the talker directly in front, while blurring out the others but still retaining the natural sound of her British accent:

Next we will focus on a different talker with a British accent on the other side of the room, about 5 paces away:

Wave Sciences is the first to achieve this long sought ability: a robust, general solution to the Cocktail Party Problem that works in uncontrolled, real-world conditions, regardless of reverberation, co-speech, and distance.

Acoustical Focus

Acoustical Focus is our audio forensics and speech enhancement software application which incorporates this breakthrough refocusing engine for sound, which we call GLIMPSE. Acoustical Focus is available to run on Ubuntu Linux, with other operating systems to follow. Contact us to arrange an online demonstration or trial.