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A better experience for audioconference users

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Today video/audio conference is a virtual space where many of us spend their working hours. Still the experience of a conference suffer from many deficiencies depending on the fact that the way audio is captured and conveyed to the virtual space is inadequate. Our brains can separate the voice of competing speakers, and remove the effect of non-ideal acoustical properties of the physical space and/or the background noise in the same in the same physical environment. However, when the acoustic…

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Restoring damaged speech

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The third context of the Context-based Audio Enhancement (MPAI-CAE) standard is restoration of damaged speech. Unlike Audio Recording Preservation where audio has clear provenance – the magnetic tape of an open reel whose analogue audio has been digitised – Speech Restoration System does not make a reference to anything analogue. It assumes that there is a file containing digital speech. For whatever reason, it may be so that portions of the file are damaged – maybe the physical medium from…

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MPAI springs forward to an intense 2022

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Established on 30 September 2020, MPAI spent the first 3 months giving itself a structure ensuring the execution of its mission "develop Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based data coding standards". Its first full year of operation – 2021 – has been engaging but rewarding: 5 Technical Specifications (TS)  have been approved and released in the following domains: Finance. Human-machine communication. Audio enhancement. AI Framework Ecosystem Governance. The Company Performance Assessment TS was complemented by 3 additional specifications: Reference Software (RS). a conforming…

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31 December 2021 – MPAI takes stock of the work done

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One year ago today, MPAI could take stock of 3 months of work: an established organisation with the mission of developing Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based data coding standards, a first identification of a program of work, progression of several work items and a published Call for Technologies for one of them. What can MPAI say today? That it has lived a very intense year and that it can declare itself satisfied of what it has achieved. The first is that it…

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Audio preservation saves memory

Another context of MPAI Audio Enhancement is preservation. Many audio archives urgently need to digitise their records, especially analogue magnetic tapes, because of their life expectancy is short if compared to paper records. International institutions (e.g., International Association of Sound and Audio-visuals Archives, IASA; World Digital Library, WDL; Europeana) have defined guidelines, sometimes only partly compatible, but appropriate international standards are lacking. The Audio Recording Preservation (ARP) use case of the MPAI-CAE standard (CAE-ARP) opens the way to effectively respond…

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A standard for “better” audio

Standards for audio exist: MPEG-1 Audio layer II and layer III (so called MP3) and a slate of AAC standards serving all tastes offer efficient ways to store and transmit different types of mono, stereo and multichannel audio . MPEG-H offers ways to transmit and present 3D audio experiences. Never before, if not at the level of company products, however, was there a standard whose goal is not to preserve audio quality at low bitrates, but to improve it or,…

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