New professor at the AudioLabs: Nils Peters
15.06.2020 Link
As of June, a new professor joined the AudioLabs: Prof. Dr. Nils Peters. He will be an Audio Signal Processing professor with a focus on the Internet of Things. Since 2013, he has been an acoustics and audio DSP research engineer and team leader at Qualcomm Technologies in San Diego, California. At Qualcomm Technologies, Nils researched, developed, and implemented spatial audio techniques. Hired to develop novel 3D audio analysis and audio coding algorithms, the major results of his work were adopted into the MPEG-H 3D Audio standard.
Nils has international and interdisciplinary expertise in spatial audio, psychoacoustics, auditory cognition, room acoustics, signal processing, machine learning, audio coding, Human-Computer Interaction, AR/VR, and standardization. He is the North American Co-Chair of the Technical Committee for Spatial Audio of the AES.
Nils has always worked and studied in an interdisciplinary scientific and creative context, e.g., with composers, ensembles, sound installation artists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists.
Nils, who is trained in classical guitar, studied Electrical Engineering and Audio Engineering (Dipl.-Ing. Elektrotechnik-Toningenieur) with a focus on acoustics, digital signal processing, and sound recording at Graz University of Technology and University for Music and Dramatic Arts, Austria. This interdisciplinary program is known for its uniquely comprehensive curriculum, which requires physics, circuit engineering, musicianship, music theory, and sound design. For his Ph.D. studies, he deeply explored questions of spatial perception of music in the context of music technology at the Schulich School of Music, McGill University, Montreal, Canada. His Ph.D. dissertation focused on “Developing sound spatialization tools for musical applications with emphasis on sweet spot and off-center perception”. Nils also gained course development and teaching experience at graduate and undergraduate levels in music technology and architectural acoustics. With his postdoctoral research at the University of California, Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) and the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI), he continued investigating multichannel audio processing techniques and applications. The knowledge he gained in his postdoctoral research project, “Content Analysis of spatial sound scenes: separation, classifying, and tracking of sounding objects and acoustical properties in 3D using a 144-channel spherical microphone array”, yielded journal publications and his first granted patent. He also guest lectured, and organized and invited guests, such as our very own Prof. Dr. Frank Wefers, for the CNMAT Spatial Audio Lecture Series.
If you want to know more about him, check out his website at nilspeters.info.
We are happy and proud to have Nils as the sixth professor in our honorable AudioLabs and wish him a great time here in Erlangen.
