AES 5th International Conference on Automotive Audio

With this talk I would like to kick off the conference by reflecting upon the automotive audio industry today, where we are coming from and what might lie ahead.

This talk may pose more questions than it provides answers but hopefully this will spark some healthy debate for us to continue discussions throughout the conference. The automotive industry is changing faster than ever before. Young automotive brands have taken substantial market shares, electrification is changing the perception of what a vehicle can be, and software development and deployment is more important than ever before. Still business models, development plans and organization structures remain largely unchanged for many of the traditional automakers and their supply chain. Will this be sustainable in the future or do things fundamentally need to change also within automotive audio?

Active noise control has been successfully applied in headphones; however, many challenges emerge when it is applied in automotive cabins. Active control of tonal engine noise in automotive cabins was the focus in the past few decades, now more and more efforts are being made to reduce broadband road/tire noise. In this talk, I will give an overview on recent progress in active noise control in automotive cabins, explore the upper limit frequencies of effective control for both global and local control, and discuss the challenges, physical limitations, and future research directions.

Immersive audio has the potential to revolutionize the way we experience media, but its adoption can be accelerated by an open format designed to benefit both creators and consumers. This talk will discuss the development of a new format based on the principles of openness, interoperability, and extensibility. It is open in the sense that it is freely available to anyone to use, under a royalty-free license. It is interoperable in the sense that it can be used with a variety of different hardware and software platforms. And it is extensible in the sense that it can be easily adapted to support new features and technologies.

The benefits of an open format are numerous. For creators, it means that they have more freedom to create immersive audio experiences, without being constrained by expensive tools. For consumers, it means that they have more choice in terms of the immersive audio content and have great user experience on any device. And for the industry as a whole, it means that immersive audio can reach a wider audience.