It is proposed to continue the development of an assistive listening device for the hearing- impaired. This device would monitor the acoustic environment to detect and separate individual sounds from background noise and from each other. It would identify familiar sounds. It would describe unfamiliar sounds in terms of their similarity to known sounds and in qualitative terms related to perceptual notions such as loudness, duration, pitch, and abruptness. A multiple-microphone version could also provide information on the location of sources. The research goals of Phase II are to improve the identification of acoustic events, the perceptual description of sounds, and the identification of speech. The developmental goal is to make a prototype device, packaged in a lap-top computer, that can recognize 100 different sounds in real time, and describe any sounds it can't recognize. When enhanced with a multiple-microphone array, this device should demonstrate sound localization capability and improved handling of simultaneous sounds.
