The TWO!EARS project aims the development of an auditory model that will incorporate both signal-driven (bottom-up), and hypothesis-driven (top-down) processing. The anticipated result is a computational framework for modelling active exploratory listening that assigns meaning to auditory scenes. In conjunction with the project’s 1st year anniversary, parts of its software framework and its database have been made publicly available:
- The Two!Ears Binaural Simulator enables the creation of binaural audio signals for different situations. This is done via the usage of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) or binaural room impulse responses (BRIRs), which are provided in the Two!Ears data repository. The Two!Ears Binaural Simulator uses the signal processing core of the SoundScape Renderer.
- The purpose of the Two!Ears auditory front-end is to extract a subset of common auditory representations from a binaural recording or from a stream of binaural audio data. These representations are to be used later by higher modelling or decision stages. The auditory front-end is capable of working in a block-based manner.
- The Two!Ears data repository contains freely available data ranging from head-related impulse responses up to human quality ratings for different spatial audio systems.
The data is collected from different sources outside and inside the Two!Ears project.
TWO!EARS is a project funded by the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) of the European Commission, as part of the Future Emerging Technologies Open Programme “Challenging current thinking” (call FP7-ICT-2013-C).