janina fels
Interactive Virtual Reality for Hearing Research:
Opportunities, Limitations, and New Insights
CV
Janina Fels is full professor and director of the Chair and Institute for Hearing Technology and Acoustics at RWTH Aachen University. She has been on the RWTH faculty since 2012, previously as professor of medical acoustics. She studied electrical engineering and received her diploma (2002) and Ph.D. (2008) from RWTH Aachen. After a postdoctoral stay at the Center for Applied Hearing Research (DTU) and Widex in Denmark, she was visiting scientist at the Institute of Neuroscience and Medicine (INM-1), Forschungszentrum Jülich (2012–2015).
Her research focuses on perception and communication in complex acoustic environments across different listener groups, including classroom and open-plan office acoustics. She develops methods and technical systems for realistic listening experiments in virtual acoustic scenes and is spokesperson of the DFG priority program SPP 2236 “AUDICTIVE”.
Fels has received several distinctions, including the Lothar Cremer Prize of the German Acoustical Society (2013), membership in the Young Academy of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences and Arts (2014), the FAMOS für Familie Award from RWTH Aachen (2017), the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society Best Paper Award (2019), and the Brigitte Gilles Award (2021).
She served as general co-chair of DAGA 2016 and vice chair of the 2019 International Congress on Acoustics in Aachen. She is a member of the DFG Review Board for Mechanics and Mechanical Engineering (Acoustics), currently serving as deputy spokesperson. In 2025 she was elected vice president (2025–2028) and president-elect (2028–2031) of the German Society of Acoustics (DEGA).
Understanding everyday hearing requires approaches that go beyond traditional laboratory experiments with isolated sounds. This plenary introduces interactive audiovisual virtual reality (VR) as a methodology to “bring real life into the lab” and to study perception, attention, memory, and communication in complex, yet experimentally controlled environments. VR can recreate realistic acoustic scenes while allowing for systematic manipulation. However, it also has limitations, such as reduced social and situational context, which must be carefully considered.
This talk will highlight the general principles that emerge when auditory and visual information are combined in such environments. Visual cues have been found not to automatically improve listening; their benefit appears to depend on task demands, the difficulty of the acoustic scene, and the need to integrate information across modalities. Overall, VR will be discussed as a tool for investigating these often nonintuitive interactions between seeing and hearing and for linking controlled experimentation with ecologically meaningful listening situations.
These developments point toward a future in which hearing is studied within interdisciplinary frameworks that embed auditory perception and processing in rich, audiovisual VR environments. These approaches draw on expertise from acoustics, psychology, and computer science to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of human multimodal perception.
louena shtrepi
Crossing boundaries: the role of architectural acoustics in shaping the design process
CV
Louena Shtrepi is an Associate Professor at the Politecnico di Torino, Italy, in the Department of Energy “Galileo Ferraris” within the Building Physics group. She studied architecture and received her diploma (2011) from both Politecnico di Torino and Politecnico di Milano. She received her engineering PhD degree in 2015 in Metrology: Measuring Science and Techniques (Politecnico di Torino), which was awarded the Newman Medal (Newman Student Award Fund and Acoustical Society of America) for excellence in the study of acoustics and its application to architecture.
Since 2012, she has been working on acoustic materials properties, acoustic simulations and measurement uncertainty. Her approach relies on studying applied acoustics aspects involving different methods and tools and crossing boundaries between disciplines. Her work has been developed considering both innovation in design aspects and testing methods at different scales from the material to the building and urban scales. Her research aims to raise awareness about acoustic design integration from the early stages of the architectural design process by actively involving architects and designers. Her work aims to facilitate knowledge transfer between the different stakeholders involved in the design of the built environment.
She teaches different engineering, design and architecture courses such as: “Engineering of Sound Systems” in the MSc program in Cinema and Media Engineering, “Adaptive Public Spaces” in the MSc program Architecture for Sustainability, “Food Space Design: Light, Sound, Climate” in the BSc program Sustainable Design for the Food System.
She is a Mentor of the Teaching and Language Lab of Politecnico di Torino, supporting and strengthening innovative teaching within the university. She is an elected member (2023) of AIA (Associazione Italiana di Acustica) board and serves as deputy editor of RIA (Rivista Italiana di Acustica). She was chair of the European Acoustics Association Summer School 2023, which hosted more than 250 international students and lecturers.
Architectural objectives fall into three main categories: structural performance, physicalenvironmental performance, and aesthetic and cultural performance. The acoustic performance relies in the second category with an important, yet not fully explored, impact on the other two. To further push the boundaries between categories in the design workflow, research on acoustic-performance based design has shown the benefits of the acoustic knowledge and quantifiable measures used to inform the design process from its earliest phases.
This plenary aims to highlight how this approach strengthens the aesthetic and qualitative objectives leading to a more human-centric design. Moreover, it explores how the integration of acoustics with other environmental factors (e.g., thermal, lighting, air quality) that are conventionally considered more “mainstream”, improves multidomain decisionmaking during conceptual design, ensuring that quantifiable criteria are integrated from the outset through the systematic use of performance feedback.
This talk will also be an opportunity to highlight the limitations of the current cultural and technical approaches by presenting some of the acoustic integration challenges in the design of acoustic environments through examples at different building scales. The aim is to illustrate possible future directions of research in architectural acoustics of everyday life spaces, which still presents important gaps to fill in within a multidisciplinary integration framework in the current architectural practice and architectural acoustic education in the context of growing sustainability demand and human-centric approach.
jean-philippe groby
Perfect absorption of audible sound and optimal design of absorbers
CV
Jean-Philippe Groby currently holds a research Professor position at the Laboratoire d’Acoustique de l’Université du Mans (UMR CNRS 6613). His research in physical acoustics focuses on the design, manufacturing, and characterization of complex structures for the control of audible sound, such as metamaterials, meta-surfaces and metafluids, as well as porous and poroelastic materials.
The scattering matrix of a system that perfectly absorbs the acoustic energy has properties that can be used effectively to design complex structures. These properties are first examined and analyzed. Examples of systems that provide perfect absorption when bounded by a rigid backing, by an impedance boundary condition (baffled duct), or unbounded (transmission problem) are then presented. Finally, the conditions for their optimal design are provided and illustrated with examples.
piotr majdak
Auditory modeling for realistic binaural audio
CV
Piotr Majdak is Senior Research Associate at the Acoustics Research Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) where he leads the research group “Binaural Audio and Auditory Modeling” (BAAM). He studied electrical and audio engineering at the University of Technology and the University of Music and Performing Arts, both in Graz, Austria. In 2008, he received his Ph.D. degree in “Psychoacoustics and signal processing”. His habilitation followed in 2015 in the field of “Acoustics and Audio Engineering”. He regularly teaches at universities in Vienna and Graz.
Piotr works at a better understanding of the mechanisms underlying spatial hearing and at applying that knowledge to improve acoustic and audio systems. Having his academic background in psychoacoustics, signal processing, and audio-engineering, he strives after translating his fundamental results in cognitive science to the audio-engineering community. Computer algorithms and toolboxes, open-source and reproducible research are his keys to reaching out (amtoolbox.org, sofaconventions.org, ecosystem.sonicom.eu).
Piotr published over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles, proceedings, and book chapters. He is member of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA), Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO), the Austrian and German Acoustic Associations (ÖGA, DEGA), Chair of the technical committee for Psychological and Physiological Acoustics of the European Acoustics Association (EAA), and the Vice-president for the Central Europe of the Audio Engineering Society (AES).
Every day, millions of people use headphones to listen to music, while watching movies or playing video games, and to communicate with others. Unfortunately, the sounds presented via headphones are usually perceived inside the listener’s head rather than at a realistic external position. This is because binaural sound reproduction via headphones typically lacks head tracking and bypasses the natural filtering of sound by the listener-specific shape of the outer ear and head. Knowing how accurately those characteristics need to be engineered in order to evoke a realistic spatial percept is of great importance for developing more efficient and effective rendering solutions. In this talk, I will review acoustical and cognitive mechanisms involved in binaural sound reproduction, and propose auditory modeling as a framework to assess the quality of binaural reproduction, showing how auditory modeling can help achieve more realistic binaural audio.