How do you feel when you are dining with friends in a very noisy restaurant? Noise often becomes a serious problem in public spaces. It is known that humans will involuntarily speak up when they cannot hear their voices, which is also known as the Lombard Effect in psychoacoustics. Similar phenomenon also occurs when people feel voice of others are unintelligible because of the noise. In public spaces such human behaviour will cause a negative spiral, i.e. people speak up because it is noisy which makes the environment more noisy, therefore the noise level in the environment will be increased exponentially. This project will attempt to develop a warning system that measures the noise level in real-time and gives people a warning to encourage them to speak with their voice down. Although the ultimate goal of this research is to develop a system that works on mobile devices (e.g. a mobile app), this preliminary research project will focus on verifying feasibility of the idea itself. The objectives of the project include but not limited to:
- Developing a digital signal processing algorithm that measures the noise level and implementing it on a PC-based system;
- Developing a GUI based interface to give a warning to users;
- Conducting subjective tests to investigate if the warning would help people to speak down.
Undergraduate
This project requires fundamental knowledge in digital signal processing and realtime software design. Students taking this project should have passed MECHENG370 after 2015 otherwise they are expected to enrol in ELECGENG733 as an elective. Having passed MECHENG313 would also help students to develop the system but is not a prerequisite.
Lab allocations have not been finalised