The voice is there. So why do so many of us still reach for the remote or turn on subtitles? The problem may not be volume, but everything that happens to dialogue before it reaches us: the mix, the codec, the television, the room and, finally, our own hearing and attention. In this article, I explore why intelligibility has to be preserved from source to listener — and how technologies such as DTS Clear Dialogue, SpeakBar and Auracast are approaching different parts of the s

What happens when the listener is no longer just at the end of the audio signal chain? Recent research is beginning to measure not only sound, but also what happens in the body, the inner ear, and the brain while we listen. One experimental system has gone further, using neural attention to amplify the conversation a person was trying to follow. In this article, I explore the path from measuring the listener to making human attention part of the audio system itself.

A recent study about blue whales led me down an unexpected path. What began as a fascinating discovery about whale songs became a much broader reflection on communication, cities, audio, artificial intelligence, and the changing soundscape we all share. This is the connection I wasn't expecting.