Venue: Auditorium, University of Technology Eindhoven, The Netherlands
The annual midwintermeeting of the Benelux "Werkgemeenschap
on Information and Communication Theory" was this year dedicated
to "High quality Audio". The meeting was cosponsored
by the Audio Engineering Society and the IEEE Benelux Chapter
on Consumer Electronics. The interesting theme in a time of exciting
communication developments such as Internet and new emerging standards
as MP3, attracted a large number of attendants: about 160 people.
As in the past years, the meeting took place in the beautiful
"Blue Room" of the Auditorium, thanks to the support
of Dr. Frans Willems and Dr. Tjalling Tjalkens of the University
of Technology Eindhoven.
The program was organized by Dr. Ronald Aarts (Philips Research
Labs Eindhoven, Netherlands), Prof. Kees Immink (University Essen,
Germany) and Prof. Peter de With (University Mannheim, Germany).
Prof. de With chaired the morning session and Dr. Aarts chaired
in the afternoon.
The program contained the following lectures:
The overview lecture of Dr. Brandenburg provided an excellent
overview of ongoing developments and standards. Furthermore, fundamental
research breakthroughs of the past decade, such as the masking
property of the human ear, were indicated and shown by demonstrations.
Dr. ten Kate discussed important system aspects when communicating coded audio signals over the Internet. Examples of important control issues are the buffering of audio packets, in order to provide full decoding quality, despite the rather varying quality of the Internet, and the timing of decoding and representation.
Prof. Houtsma of the Eindhoven Center for User-System Interaction presented key properties of human listening to audio signals, perfectly accompagnied by meaningful demonstrations. His talk provided the bridge between psychoacoustical phenomena and emerging audio systems of the past decade.
Ing. Bruekers gave an excellent tutorial on the various ways to build a lossless audio coding system and the cornerstones and techniques of such systems.
Finally, Dr. Beerends presented a new vision on how to judge
audio and speech signals. Instead of recovering the original quality
as closely as possible, he
proposed to perform restoration of audio signals in such a way
that they are perceived and assessed as being of high quality.
Prof. de With closed the day by challenging people to transfer
ideas to the video domain and vice versa, and thanking all speakers
and audience for their attendance.
This successful midwintermeeting is part of a series in which
new developments are presented to a broad audience in tutorial
form. In the past years, general themes such as the above and
e.g.
object-oriented AV coding (last year) prove to be a useful and
attractive concept for drawing a large audience. This is also
supported by the excellent facilities of the University Eindhoven
which can be reached easily, and the support of co-organizing
societies such as the AES and IEEE Benelux Chapters.
Prof. Peter H.N. de With,
Mannheim, January, 2000.