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

Benjamin Dieudonne

Robert Luke

Arturo Moncada-Torres

Andreas Prokopiou

Dimitar Spirrov

Tilde Van Hirtum

Jan Wouters

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.

Invitation Seminar Tobias Busch - 18 January 2017

Bekijk de webversie

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.     Copyright KU Leuven

Invitation Seminar Astrid De Vos - 5 December 2016

Bekijk de webversie

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.     Copyright KU Leuven

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 

Research Seminar Jonas Vanthornhout October 19, 2016

Bekijk de webversie

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.     Copyright KU Leuven

Seminar Anouk Sangen 26 October 2016

Bekijk de webversie

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.     Copyright KU Leuven

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

Noise level

Dynamic range

THD + Noise (at -3 dB FS)

Intermodulation distortion

Stereo crosstalk

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

Noise level

Dynamic range

THD + Noise (at -3 dB FS)

Intermodulation distortion

Stereo crosstalk

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

Noise level

Dynamic range

THD + Noise (at -3 dB FS)

Intermodulation distortion

Stereo crosstalk

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: