If a meeting participant on the other side can manage to parse the words that you’re saying, they’re not likely to speak up and say, “Hey, I’m having a little bit of trouble hearing you.” They’ll just let the meeting continue. And if you don’t have a really strong level of audio quality, you’re asking the people that you’re talking to devote way too much brainpower to just determining the words that you’re saying. And you’re going to be fatiguing to listen to. And your message won’t come across. In contrast, if you’re willing to take a little bit of time with your audio set up, you can really get across the full power of your message and the full power of who you are to your peers, to your employees, your boss, your suppliers, and of course your customers. Back in 2020, this very quickly became a marketing story that we had to tell immediately.
And I have to say, it’s so gratifying to see Brian’s research in the news because, to me, it was like, “Yes, this is what we’ve been experiencing. And this is what we’ve been trying to educate people about.” Having the real science to back it up means a lot. But from that, development on improvements to key audio processing algorithms accelerated across the whole AV industry.
I think, Megan and Brian, you probably remember hearing loud keyboard clicking when you were on calls and meetings, or people eating potato chips and things like that back on those. But you don’t hear that much today because most platforms have invested in AI-trained algorithms to remove undesirable noises. And I know we’re going to talk more about that later on.
But the other thing that happened, thankfully, was that as we got into the late spring and summer of 2020, was that educational institutions, especially universities, and also businesses realized that things were going to need to change quickly. Nothing was going to be the same. And universities realized that all classrooms were going to need hybrid capabilities for both remote students and students in the classroom. And that helped the market for professional AV equipment start to recover because we had been pretty much completely shut down in the earlier months. But that focus on hybrid meeting spaces of all types accelerated more investment and more R&D into making equipment and further developing those key audio processing algorithms for more and different types of spaces and use cases. And since then, we’ve really seen a proliferation of different types of unobtrusive audio capture devices based on arrays of microphones and the supporting signal processing behind them. And right now, machine-learning-trained signal processing is really the norm. And that all accelerated, unfortunately, because of the pandemic.
Megan: Yeah. Such an interesting period of change, as you say. And Brian, what did you observe and experience in academia during that time? How did that time period affect the work at your lab?
Brian: I’ll admit, Megan, I had never given a single thought to audio quality or anything like that, certainly until the pandemic hit. I was thrown into this, just like the rest of the world was. I don’t believe I’d ever had a single video conference with a student or with a class or anything like that before the pandemic hit. But in some ways, our experience in universities was quite extreme. I went on a Tuesday from teaching an in-person class with 300 students to being on Zoom with everyone suddenly on a Thursday. Business meetings come in all shapes and sizes. But this was quite extreme. This was a case where suddenly I’m talking to hundreds and hundreds of people over Zoom. And every single one of them knows exactly what I sound like, except for me, because I’m just speaking my normal voice and I have no idea how it’s being translated through all the different levels of technology.
I will say, part of the general rhetoric we have about the pandemic focuses on all the negatives and the lack of personal connection and nuance and the fact that we can’t see how everyone’s paying attention to each other. Our experience was a bit more mixed. I’ll just tell you one anecdote. Shortly after the pandemic started, I started teaching a seminar with about 20 students. And of course, this was still online. What I did is I just invited, for whatever topic we were discussing on any given day, I sent a note to whoever was the clear world leader in the study of whatever that topic was. I said, “Hey, don’t prepare a talk. You don’t have to answer any questions. But just come join us on Zoom and just participate in the conversation. The students will have read some of your work.”
Every single one of them said, “Let me check my schedule. Oh, I’m stuck at home for a year. Sure. I’d be happy to do that.” And that was quite a positive. The students got to meet a who’s who of cognitive science from this experience. And it’s true that there were all these technological difficulties, but that would never, ever have happened if we were teaching the class in real life. That would’ve just been way too much travel and airfare and hotel and scheduling and all of that. So, it was a mixed bag for us.
#power #sound #virtual #world
