Project Handout

Your final project consists of a significant portion of the grade in this class. Important dates are as follows:

• On Tuesday June 13, I will meet with each of you individually to discuss possible project topics. If too many people are interested in one topic, I may try to persuade you to work on something else.
• By Friday June 16 5pm, each of you will email me a a description of your proposed project (at least one paragraph in length).
• From that day onward, each Friday (by 5pm) until the final day of class, each of you should email a description of your progress for the week (even if there is no progress).
• By Friday, June 23 5pm you all should email me a link to a webpage that, at the very least, contains your project title and abstract you emailed the previous week.
• Oral Presentations: Each you will give two presentation on your ideas and accomplishments. The length of presentations will vary from 5 minutes to 30 minutes in length (the exact amount of time will be negotiated). The first presentations will be in a few weeks and the final presentations during the last weeks of the course (the dates will be negotiated).
• Your final project reports are due on the last day of class, Friday August 11 at 5pm.

Your final grade for the project will be based on the on-time completion and quality of each of the above items.

Project Report:
Your final project report will be a web page-you do not need to print it out. Just email the address to me. Most word processors are capable of outputting html code so this should not be a big hassle. A big advantage of using a webpage for your report is that you can include color figures and examples of sounds that you use or produce. If you have never designed a webpage before, this is your opportunity to learn. The report should be written as if it were to be submitted to a conference. The typical report will contain the following components:

1.

A concise description of the engineering problem.

2.

A summary of previous solutions to the problem. You should include at least one reference to a paper you have read (not a textbook).

3.

Related biological knowledge related to the engineering problem.

4.

A detailed description of your solution to the problem.

5.

Matlab simulation results.

6.

A discussion of the significance of these results and how your solution differs from previous attempts.

7.

The appendix should contain complete messy derivations and any other information too detailed to keep in the main body. Do not include matlab code unless you can password protect it.

Project Presentation:
You will not be graded on how good a speaker you are, but on the work you have done and how well you prepared for the talk. Powerpoint presentations with audio demonstrations (if possible) are strongly encouraged.

Project Topics:
You are strongly encouraged to come up with your own idea for a project based on your own experience. Extra points for novelty and creativeness. Projects normally should be consistent with the themes of this course: (1) Using biological mechanisms to improve engineering systems or (2) Using biological modeling to improve our understanding of the nervous system. You can work in one or two-person teams with the understanding that multiple-person projects require correspondingly more effort. Just a few of the possible topics include:

1.

Implement front-end processing models such as the cochlea, filter banks, wavelets, etc.

2.

Study and implement perceptual audio coders

3.

Methods of feature extraction for coding and recognition

4.

Models for spectral differences between sounds. Come up with a method to produce a numerical measure of the difference between two sounds.

5.

Study, simulate and or implement sound localization algorithms, monaural or binaural.

6.

Biologically inspired beamforming techniques.

7.

Synthetic 3D environments: modify sounds to make them appear to come from different locations.

8.

Cocktail party problem (simultaneous speakers)

9.

Biologically-inspired sound recognition techniques.

10.

Simulate hearing pathologies, i.e. how do things sound when you have different sorts of hearing problems, use poor hearing aids or have cochlea implants.

11.

The use of the precedence effect in engineering systems.

12.

Improved echo cancellation algorithms

13.

Audio enhancement techniques (loudness, intelligibility, or sound quality).

14.

Study microphone construction and determine the fundamental threshold limitations compared to human hearing.

15.

Study methods of sound reproduction that pay attention to human hearing.

16.

Computational room acoustics: how will signals sound in various room designs?

17.

Equalizing the acoustics of a room.

18.

Exactly what happens to recorded speech when the microphone is moved farther away from your mouth?

19.

Room acoustics using sound reinforcement (adding extra speakers to improve the natural acoustics).

20.

Improved loudspeaker designs

21.

Underwater acoustics algorithms

22.

Study/simulate hearing abilities in other animals or in insects.

23.

Understand better the role of phase in the auditory system

24.

Perform psychoacoustics experiments on yourself and your friends.

As always, real sounds are better than synthetic sounds. Any real-time implementation of any of the above on a DSP or fast Pentium is particularly desirable. Java implementations are also encouraged. You are welcome (as always) to email to talk to the instructor about your project ideas.