Summary of the Hanse Workshop on Speech Segregation

Presenter: Chris Darwin

The Hanse Institute of Delmenhorst, Germany hosted a 2-day conference on "Auditory scene analysis and speech perception by human and machine" Aug 22-24 2004. The meeting was the first in the series of Hearing meetings recently inaugurated by the Hanse Institute. It was organised to follow directly on from a summer school at Oldenburg that had a similar (though broader) focus.

We secured sponsorship from six different organisations two of whom sent a representative to the meeting. The meeting was advertised both by personal contact and also on the "Auditory List" - an open email group. The meeting aroused considerable interest and around a dozen potential participants could not be accommodated. The total number of participants was around 55, with 17 lectures and 19 posters. There was a good mixture of engineers vs. psychologists, of different sub-fields (psychoacoustics vs. speech vs. music) and of established vs. junior researchers. The Auditory List publicity brought in a number of young researchers from laboratories that would not otherwise have heard of the meeting. These people benefitted particularly from the meeting and in turn made a useful (often broadening) contribution to it. We took particular pains to encourage interaction between junior and senior participants. The environment of the Hanse Institute helps foster these interactions.