AUDICTIVE Conference 2023
 (Picture: String Quartet during the Welcome Session, © Torsten W. Kuhlen) |
The third year of the DFG Priority Program AUDICTIVE was complemented by an international, interdisciplinary conference in Aachen taking place in the top floor of the Super C building at RWTH Aachen University. About 120 researchers from three continents participated in the three-day event and were warmly welcomed by the string quartet of the Aachen Student Orchestra. The SPP2236 entitled Auditory Cognition in Interactive Virtual Environments (short: AUDICITIVE) was initiated in 2018 by Janina Fels, Torsten W. Kuhlen, Sabine J. Schlittmeier (all RWTH Aachen |
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University), Alexander Raake (TU Illmenau), and Steven van de Par (Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg). The conference, summarizing the first results of Phase 1 (2020-2023) was organized by the coordinator and speaker of the SPP Janina Fels and her institute. |
 (Picture: SPP2236 Initiators with Jamilla Balint (middle), the main conference organizer, © Andrea Bönsch) |
 (Picture: Torsten W. Kuhlen welcoming keynote speaker Frank Steinicke, © Andrea Bönsch) |
The AUDICTIVE Conference featured three keynotes by renowned researchers from the three key disciplines of AUDICTIVE: On the first day, Barbara Shinn-Cunningham talked about how peripheral and central factors together control auditory attention in complex settings (area Acoustics). |
On day three, Alexandra Bendixen presented her interdisciplinary research on sensory prediction in auditory scene analysis, audiovisual interplay, and VR evaluation (area Psychology).
| All eleven funded projects in SPP 2236 presented the results of the last three years. Chinthusa Mohanathasan (Psychology), Cosima A. Ermert (Acoustics), and Jonathan Ehret successfully presented their cumulated results of our interdisciplinary project "Listening to, and remembering conversations between two talkers: Cognitive research using embodied conversational agents in audiovisual virtual environments”. |
 (Picture: Jonathan Ehret and his two colleagues presenting their results, © Andrea Bönsch) |
Furthermore, national and international researchers, not directly involved in the priority program itself, were given the opportunity to present their work as posters during three poster sessions sparking lively discussions at 18 posters. Here, Jonathan Ehret and Andrea Bönsch contributed to a poster about our ongoing RWTH Seed-Fund Research Project VoLAix - A VR-based Investigation of the Speaker's Voice and Dynamically Embedded Background Sounds on Listening Effort in University Students in Aix-la-Chapelle (OPS712) which examines the influence of voice quality and background noise on listening effort.
