Monday 28 November 2016

ExpORL at ARCHES 2016 Meeting + ICanHear Conference

For the last 9 years, ARCHES has been a great platform for scientists and researchers in Europe dedicated to audiology to present their work, network with other partners, and discuss new ideas. Last week, the ARCHES 2016 Meeting took place in Zurich, Switzerland.

Furthermore, it was directly connected with the ICanHear Conference at the same venue. ICanHear is a project part of the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme. It successfully funded PhDs and postdocs and, sadly, will be coming to an end next December. 

ExpORL had an active participation in both of them. Jan Wouters provided an overall talk of the work done here at the lab. Invited talks by Benjamin Dieudonne and Tilde Van Hirtum had positive feedback and interesting Q&A sessions. ICanHear fellows Andreas Prokopiou (now at Warwick, UK), Robert Luke (now at Melbourne, Australia), Dimitar Spirrov, and Arturo Moncada-Torres presented posters with their most recent work, having good discussions among the attendants.

We would like to thank the organizing committee for such great conferences!









Contact Information

Friday 25 November 2016

Convert PDF presentations to PowerPoint PPT

At some conferences, presentations in PDF format (e.g. from a Markdown/Pandoc/Latex toochain) are not accepted. As it seems that everybody has standardized on Powerpoint, I've uploaded a small script that converts slides from PDF to Powerpoint to GitHub. Quite amazing what 30 lines of shell together with Ghostscript and LibreOffice can do.

PS: I tried to produce PPTX files directly. Don't ask.

Gerrit, Jenkins and git submodules

In our lab, we use git repositories hosted with Gerrit and Jenkins as a CI system. When working with git submodules, a change in a submodule is most often associated with a change in the super project. When pushing both of them to Gerrit with
cd submodule
git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master
cd ..
git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master
the build fails on Jenkins because it is not able to find the used submodule revision in the downloaded data for the submodule.

The reason boils down to git fetch only downloading refs/heads/*, while the uncommitted changes in Gerrit are at refs/changes/*

No reason to despair though, because you can actually tell git fetch to download all kinds of refs:
git submodule foreach git config \ 
  remote.origin.fetch "+refs/changes/*:refs/remotes/origin/changes/*"
git config \
  remote.origin.fetch "+refs/changes/*:refs/remotes/origin/changes/*"
git fetch 
git submodule update
Now, all changes from Gerrit are available locally.

For Jenkins, disabling the internal submodule handling and adding the following lines to the build scripts is good enough:
git submodule update --force --init --remote
git submodule foreach git config --replace-all \
  remote.origin.fetch "+refs/changes/*:refs/remotes/origin/changes/*" "changes"
git submodule foreach git fetch
git submodule update
Because the git log output can become a bit overwhelming with all the refs, using an alias with the following parameters results in a reduced log with only the refs that are actually included in a branch
log --graph --decorate --pretty=oneline --abbrev-commit  --exclude=*/changes/* --all
You can still get a log with all refs by manually adding another --all at the end.

Friday 18 November 2016

Invitation Seminar Tobias Busch - 18 January 2017

  Bekijk de webversie  
 
KU Leuven
Invitation Holy Hour
ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences
 

Auditory environment and language development of children with cochlear implants

Tobias Busch

Research Seminar in framework of doctoral education

When?

Wednesday, 18 January 2017, 15h00-17h00

Where?

Seminar room HP2 (04.227)
O&N II - KU Leuven
Herestraat 49
B-3000 Leuven

Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation.

 
 
   

Wednesday 16 November 2016

Invitation Seminar Astrid De Vos - 5 December 2016

  Bekijk de webversie  
 
KU Leuven
Invitation Holy Hour
ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences
 

Neurophysiological markers for auditory temporal processing deficits in dyslexia

Astrid De Vos

Research Seminar in framework of doctoral education

When?

Monday, 5 December 2016, 9:00h

Where?

Seminar room HP2 (04.227)
O&N II - KU Leuven
Herestraat 49
B-3000 Leuven

Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation.

 
 
   

Monday 7 November 2016

Busy October at ExpORL

Besides bringing Halloween vibes, October was a very busy month at ExpORL. Here is a summary of the most important events from the last few weeks.

50th Anniversary of the LAW Program + Prof. Manders Retirement

On Saturday, October 8th we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Speech Language and Audiology Sciencies (Logopedisch en Audiologie Wetenschappen in Dutch, LAW). It was a great event that brought together all the people that have contributed to our program. We are very happy we were able to celebrate such occasion with a great audience.

Here it is to 50 years more of forming competent speech therapists and audiologists compromised with improving people's lives!




Furthermore, we also honored the retirement of Prof. Eric Manders. After a brilliant trajectory and active participation in the LAW program, he will be missed. 



(Photo credits: Maaike Van Eeckhoutte)

New doctors!

Two members of our lab successfully defended their PhD projects! On October 19, Ellen Van Den Heuvel presented her thesis "Pragmatic Language Skills in Chilcren with 22q11.2 Deletion Syndrom and Williams Syndrome". On October 27, Robert Luke presented his thesis "Supra-Threshold Electrical Evoked Auditory Steady-State Responses in Cochlear Implant Users". Both of them did an amazing job.

Congratulations to Dr. Van Den Heuvel and Dr. Luke!





Contact Information
Ellen Van Den Heuvel 
Robert Luke

Research seminars

At last but not least, Sam Denys, Jonas Vanthornhout, Charlotte Vercammen, and Anouk Sangen presented their Research Seminar. They showed their work so far and were positively evaluated by their corresponding Thesis Advisory Committees. Good job!

Contact Information
Sam Denys
Jonas Vanthornhout
Charlotte Vercammen
Anouk Sangen 

Wednesday 19 October 2016

Research Seminar Jonas Vanthornhout October 19, 2016

  Bekijk de webversie  
 
KU Leuven
Invitation Holy Hour
ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences
 

Objective and automatic measurement of speech intelligibility

Jonas Vanthornhout

Research Seminar in framework of doctoral education

When?

Wednesday, 19 October 2016, 14:00h

Where?

Seminar Room HP7 (05.208)
O&N II - KU Leuven
Herestraat 49
B-3000 Leuven

Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation.

 
 
   

Friday 30 September 2016

Seminar Anouk Sangen 26 October 2016

  Bekijk de webversie  
 
KU Leuven
Invitation Holy Hour
ExpORL, Dept. Neurosciences
 

Children with single sided deafness 

Auditory, language and cognitive development
with and without a cochlear implant

Anouk Sangen

Research Seminar in framework of doctoral education

When?

Wednesday, 26 October 2016, 16:00h

Where?

Seminar Room HP2 (04.227)
O&N II - KU Leuven
Herestraat 49
B-3000 Leuven

Please reply to this email if you are planning to attend the presentation.

 
 
   

Wednesday 21 September 2016

Technical comparison of sound cards: Presonus AudioBox USB/FocusRite Scarlett 2i2


At ExpORL we've standardised on RME sound cards (in particular the Hammerfall DSP Multiface II and Fireface UC) for all our behavioural and objective experiments. While these perform very well, they're also very expensive. We therefore explored whether two much cheaper sound cards, the Presonus AudioBox USB and FocusRite Scarlett 2i2, would be suitable for certain experiments with less strict requirements, such as speech intelligibility in noise.

We concluded that the Presonus AudioBox USB is not suitable for faithful playback nor recording because there is too much stereo crosstalk. The FocusRite Scarlett 2i2 is suitable for faithful playback or recording of audio. However, one has to be aware of the following constraints:
  • Its output dynamic range (around 96 dB) might might be to small for e.g. tone audiometry for hearing impaired people.
  • The sound card is not suitable for playback and recording simultaneously, since the inputs are directly routed to the main output, even if direct monitoring is switched off (for which there is a hardware switch)
  • Input and output gains are adapted with analog hardware knobs (as opposed to the RME sound cards that are set within the driver software). We advise to set the monitor level at the maximum for optimal performance and to avoid ambiguous calibration; input gains should be adjusted such that no clipping occurs.

We analyzed the sound cards using RightMark Audio Analyzer (RMAA) and used the RME Fireface UC as a reference. We used stereo sound cables to obtain balanced input/output. For each test, we used 44 kHz, 32-bit (float) audio. Our test results can be found below.


Complete sound card tests (input coupled to output)

Summary

Test
AudioBox USB Audio
Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB
RME Fireface UC
Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB:
-0.20, -0.52
-0.01, -0.07
+0.03, -0.03
Noise level, dB (A):
-94.4
-95.8
-109.9
Dynamic range, dB (A):
94.8
95.6
109.9
THD, %:
0.0048
0.0009
0.0016
IMD + Noise, %:
3.776
0.0071
0.0019
Stereo crosstalk, dB:
-42.9
-95.5
-109.5

Frequency response

Spectrum graph

Noise level

Spectrum graph

Dynamic range

Spectrum graph

THD + Noise (at -3 dB FS)

Spectrum graph

Intermodulation distortion

Spectrum graph

Stereo crosstalk

Spectrum graph

Inputs only (output of RME)

Summary

Test
AudioBox USB Audio
Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 USB
Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB:
+0.04, -0.17
+0.05, -0.33
Noise level, dB (A):
-98.6
-98.2
Dynamic range, dB (A):
100.4
98.1
THD, %:
0.0031
0.0018
IMD + Noise, %:
0.027
0.0042
Stereo crosstalk, dB:
-99.3
-98.6

Frequency response

Spectrum graph

Noise level

Spectrum graph

Dynamic range

Spectrum graph

THD + Noise (at -3 dB FS)

Spectrum graph

Intermodulation distortion

Spectrum graph

Stereo crosstalk

Spectrum graph

Outputs only (input of RME)

Summary

Test
AudioBox USB Audio
Scarlett 2i2 USB
Frequency response (from 40 Hz to 15 kHz), dB:
+0.06, -0.22
+0.01, -0.08
Noise level, dB (A):
-96.9
-96.9
Dynamic range, dB (A):
96.7
96.6
THD, %:
0.0047
0.0011
IMD + Noise, %:
0.012
0.0044
Stereo crosstalk, dB:
-95.6
-89.7

Frequency response

Spectrum graph

Noise level

Spectrum graph

Dynamic range

Spectrum graph

THD + Noise (at -3 dB FS)

Spectrum graph

Intermodulation distortion

Spectrum graph

Stereo crosstalk

Spectrum graph
We could not eliminate low frequency crosstalk for Presonus AudioBox USB. High frequency crosstalk disappeared for the FocusRite Scarlett 2i2 with the MONITOR-knob turned at its maximum: