Brain-Controlled Hearing Aids Could Cut Through Crowd Noise

A study published in Science Advances describes a prototype hearing aid from Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute, which detects whom the wearer is listening to and amplifies only that speaker's voice, reports Scientific American . The device employs artificial intelligence to separate voices and compare them with a listener's brainwaves to recognize and amplify the speaker being paid closest attention to. Columbia University's Nima Mesgarani and his team created an algorithm trained on subjects' auditory experience of recordings of two voices — one male, one female — speaking simultaneously. Participants were told to focus first on one voice, and then the other, while the sound and their electrical brain signals were fed into the algorithm. The algorithm sorted the sounds, then amplified the attended voice while attenuating the other. "These two inputs go inside this box, and what comes out of it is the modified audio in which the target speaker is louder," Mesgarani notes.