Seminar by Prof. Tapio Lokki

Why a concert hall could act as a compressor or an expander?

"In this talk I’ll first present the facilities and activities of the Aalto Acoustics Lab (https://www.aalto.fi/en/aalto-acoustics-lab). Then, I tell the main results of my one decade long research on the sensory evaluation of concert hall acoustics. One novelty that we found is the effect of concert halls to change the music we perceived in a non-linear manner. In other words, in some halls the dynamics in music is compressed and in some other halls the difference in orchestra music in pianissimo and in fortissimo is much larger. This phenomenon can be explained by combining the varying spectrum of the orchestra and non-linear aspects of human hearing."

Short Bio :
Prof. Tapio Lokki was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1971. He has studied acoustics, audio signal processing, and computer science at the Helsinki University of Technology (TKK) and received an M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering in 1997 and a D.Sc.(Tech.) degree in computer science and engineering in 2002. Then he continued at TKK as a lecturing researcher teaching virtual reality and making research on virtual auditory
environments. At 2007 he was appointed as an Academy Research Fellow, which is highly competed independent research position in Finland, for a period of five years.
At present Dr. Lokki is a Professor and a Head of the department with the Department of Signal Processing and Acoustics at Aalto University, where he leads the virtual acoustics research team.
The passion of Prof. Lokki is to understand how rooms modify sound that we hear. To pursue the encompassing understanding of room acoustics, his team is investigating auralization, spatial sound reproduction, binaural
technology, and novel objective and subjective evaluation methods, as well as physically-based room acoustics modeling methods. Particularly, the interest has been in concert halls, in which the team has developed new
measurement techniques, analysis methods for spatial impulse responses, and sensory evaluation methods to understand the perceptual differences between concert halls. Furthermore, Prof. Lokki has been continuing a longterm research on augmented reality audio and novel hearing protection devices. Professor Lokki's recent novel research areas are hearing in noisy and reverberant spaces as well as bio-based absorption materials.
Prof. Lokki has published over 80 journal articles and over 150 conference papers. He has been awarded by the International Commission of Acoustics (ICA Early Career Award 2013), the Audio Engineering Society (Fellow 2017), the Academy of Finland Award on social impact (2011). Prof. Lokki is a member of the Acoustical Society of America, a fellow of the Audio Engineering Society, and an honorary member of the Acoustical Society of Finland.