Chris Kyriakakis

Last updated
Chris Kyriakakis
Born
Thessaloniki, Greece
Nationality American
Alma mater Caltech
Known forNew methods for automatic acoustic correction
Scientific career
Fields Audio signal processing, acoustics, archaeoacoustics
Institutions University of Southern California

Chris Kyriakakis (born 1963) is a professor of electrical engineering, author, and inventor of audio technologies. He is the co-inventor of the Audyssey MultEQ digital room correction system. [1] In 2004 he co-founded Audyssey Laboratories.

Contents

Biography

Kyriakakis attended high school at Anatolia College in Thessaloniki, Greece. He received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering and Applied Science from Caltech in 1985 and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Southern California in 1993.

Kyriakakis was appointed to the EE Systems faculty at USC in 1996 where he became the founding director of the USC Immersive Audio Laboratory. He teaches audio signal processing, acoustics, and psychoacoustics at the University of Southern California. He was part of the original team of researchers that founded the Integrated Media Systems Center, a National Science Foundation engineering research center that was awarded to USC in 1996. He later served as the Director of the Computer Interfaces group. He became Deputy Director of IMSC in 2003.

Kyriakakis has authored and co-authored nearly 100 peer reviewed technical papers. In 2006 he co-authored the book Immersive Audio Signal Processing. [2]

His first notable contribution in the field of audio was the introduction of the concept of Virtual Microphones. [3]

Kyriakakis' research has received funding from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, the United States Army, as well as several industry sponsors.

Recent work

Together with Prof. Sharon Gerstel (UCLA), Kyriakakis is part of an interdisciplinary group that is studying the role of acoustics in Byzantine churches. [4] [5] [6] In 2017 he organized a virtual 8th century performance in Byzantium 2.0: Acoustic Time Travel [7]

Recognition

In 2011 his research was featured in The New York Times . [8]

In 2012 his research was featured in NPR All Things Considered. [9]

In 2016 his research on Archaeoacoustics was featured in The Atlantic , [10] Open Culture, [11] Faith and Form,; [12] CBC Radio Spark [13] Escape Velocity, [14] and Trojan Family Magazine. [15]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acoustics</span> Branch of physics involving mechanical waves

Acoustics is a branch of physics that deals with the study of mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including topics such as vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics technology may be called an acoustical engineer. The application of acoustics is present in almost all aspects of modern society with the most obvious being the audio and noise control industries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Acoustical engineering</span> Branch of engineering dealing with sound and vibration

Acoustical engineering is the branch of engineering dealing with sound and vibration. It includes the application of acoustics, the science of sound and vibration, in technology. Acoustical engineers are typically concerned with the design, analysis and control of sound.

A soundscape is the acoustic environment as perceived by humans, in context. The term was originally coined by Michael Southworth, and popularised by R. Murray Schafer. There is a varied history of the use of soundscape depending on discipline, ranging from urban design to wildlife ecology to computer science. An important distinction is to separate soundscape from the broader acoustic environment. The acoustic environment is the combination of all the acoustic resources, natural and artificial, within a given area as modified by the environment. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) standardized these definitions in 2014.

3D audio effects are a group of sound effects that manipulate the sound produced by stereo speakers, surround-sound speakers, speaker-arrays, or headphones. This frequently involves the virtual placement of sound sources anywhere in three-dimensional space, including behind, above or below the listener.

10.2 is the surround sound format developed by THX creator Tomlinson Holman of TMH Labs and the University of Southern California. Developed along with Chris Kyriakakis of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, 10.2 refers to the format's slogan: "Twice as good as 5.1". However, there actually may be 14 discrete channels if the left and right point surround channels are included. He states that 5.1, a name which he himself came up with in 1987 was chosen as it was "the minimum number of channels necessary to give a sense of spaciousness". Holman and others state that higher sampling rates, which is a recent trend in digital recording, does not have a significant perceivable effect and that the next frontier in sound engineering is to increase the number of discrete channels to meet human spatial sound perception. As of 2015, several decoding, UHD, or virtual expansion processors have approached numbers as great or greater than 10.2.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital room correction</span> Acoustics process

Digital room correction is a process in the field of acoustics where digital filters designed to ameliorate unfavorable effects of a room's acoustics are applied to the input of a sound reproduction system. Modern room correction systems produce substantial improvements in the time domain and frequency domain response of the sound reproduction system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Wave field synthesis</span> Technique for creating virtual acoustic environments

Wave field synthesis (WFS) is a spatial audio rendering technique, characterized by creation of virtual acoustic environments. It produces artificial wavefronts synthesized by a large number of individually driven loudspeakers. Such wavefronts seem to originate from a virtual starting point, the virtual source or notional source. Contrary to traditional spatialization techniques such as stereo or surround sound, the localization of virtual sources in WFS does not depend on or change with the listener's position.

Archaeoacoustics is a sub-field of archaeology and acoustics which studies the relationship between people and sound throughout history. It is an interdisciplinary field with methodological contributions from acoustics, archaeology, and computer simulation, and is broadly related to topics within cultural anthropology such as experimental archaeology and ethnomusicology. Since many cultures have sonic components, applying acoustical methods to the study of archaeological sites and artifacts may reveal new information on the civilizations examined.

The ASA Silver Medal is an award presented by the Acoustical Society of America to individuals, without age limitation, for contributions to the advancement of science, engineering, or human welfare through the application of acoustic principles or through research accomplishments in acoustics. The medal is awarded in a number of categories depending on the technical committee responsible for making the nomination.

Bishnu S. Atal is an Indian physicist and engineer. He is a noted researcher in acoustics, and is best known for developments in speech coding. He advanced linear predictive coding (LPC) during the late 1960s to 1970s, and developed code-excited linear prediction (CELP) with Manfred R. Schroeder in 1985.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to acoustics:

LARES is an electronic sound enhancement system that uses microprocessors to control multiple loudspeakers and microphones placed around a performance space for the purpose of providing active acoustic treatment. LARES was invented in Massachusetts in 1988, by Dr David Griesinger and Steve Barbar who were working at Lexicon, Inc. LARES was given its own company division in 1990, and LARES Associates was formed in 1995 as a separate corporation. Since then, hundreds of LARES systems have been used in concert halls, opera houses performance venues, and houses of worship from outdoor music festivals to permanent indoor symphony halls.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Audio engineer</span> Engineer involved in the recording, reproduction, or reinforcement of sound

An audio engineer helps to produce a recording or a live performance, balancing and adjusting sound sources using equalization, dynamics processing and audio effects, mixing, reproduction, and reinforcement of sound. Audio engineers work on the "technical aspect of recording—the placing of microphones, pre-amp knobs, the setting of levels. The physical recording of any project is done by an engineer... the nuts and bolts."

Jens Peter Blauert is a German scientist specializing in psychoacoustics and an emeritus professor at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where he founded the Institute of Communication Acoustics. His major scientific fields of interest are spatial hearing, binaural technology, aural architecture, perceptual quality, speech technology, virtual environments and tele-presence.

Audyssey Laboratories, Inc. (Audyssey) is an American-based company specializing in technologies that address acoustical problems in sound reproduction systems used in homes, cars, studios, and movie theaters.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Salford Acoustics</span>

Salford Acoustics offers Acoustics and Audio Engineering Courses, undertakes public and industrial research in acoustics, carries out commercial testing, and undertakes activities to engage the public in acoustic science and engineering. It is based in two locations: (i) 3 km west of Manchester city centre, UK, in the Newton Building on the Peel Park Campus of the University of Salford, and (ii) on the banks of the Manchester Ship Canal at MediaCityUK.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lamberto Tronchin</span>

Lamberto Tronchin is an Italian acoustician, engineer, theorist, musician, and professor of musical acoustics and environmental physics at the University of Bologna.

Olya Dubatova is a Russian born visual artist. Since 2008 she has exhibited internationally. She lives in California and New York City.

Sound scenography is the process of staging spaces and environments through sound. It combines expertise from the fields of architecture, acoustics, communication, sound design and interaction design to convey artistic, historical, scientific, or commercial content or to establish atmospheres and moods.

Ronald M. Aarts,, an IEEE fellow, is a Dutch electrical engineer and physicist, in the field of electroacoustics and in biomedical signal processing technology.

References

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