Sountrol

Inspiration

Since COVID-19 hit, everything has changed to online - all lectures, job meetings, etc. However, not all speakers in those meetings / lectures have good quality mics and awesome vocal techniques to produce the best sounds. Hence, we decided to create an app that can help the speaker / listener have a better audio experience.

What it does

It enhances the audio experience by the listener and / or speaker. We discovered that audio discomforts can be categorized into the following:

1) Basiness / Boominess. These types have a lot of 'Bass' in the Audio. This happens frequently due to the speaker's natural voice more than the mic qualities. The sound becomes 'muffled' that it is often hard to hear what they are saying.

2) Boxiness. These are the MOST COMMON audio discomforts. It happens a lot especially with laptop built-in mics. It is also caused mostly due to poor acoustic treatment of the room. You can hear a lot of this 'boxiness' in places like ETLC lecture rooms.

3) Sharpness. These are common when the volume becomes loud. This is mostly common with laptop built-in mics as well. Long exposure to this 'Sharpness' can hurt your ears a lot.

4) Hissness. These are the uncomfortable sound that we can hear when someone makes a 'sssss' sound.

How we built it

Since we needed to have this running real-time, we could not use languages like Python. We used JUCE Framework which is built upon c++. Then, we processed the Audio Buffer with our algorithm so that these uncomfortable sounds can be eliminated.

Challenges we ran into

Audio programming, or even Audio in general was something we had almost no knowledge of. Hence, learning how Audio works and how the processing of Audio works was our biggest challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The fact that our program is working is something we are very proud of.

What we learned

We learned a lot about Audio and things like, how audio works in terms of frequency, and how the filtering process works. Also we learned a lot about c++ as well.

What's next for Sountrol

Later on, we want to integrate WASAPI (Window Audio Session API) for windows and also integrate machine learning into this app so that it would automatically process the audio to the user's needs.