Dereverberation and reverberation of audio, music, and speech

Delegates from around the world gathered in the beautiful city of Leuven to network, hear about the latest research into reverberation and dereverberation, listen to demonstrations, and discuss future prospects for the field. Some delegates were also excited to visit a local pub with a selection of over 2000 beers-a world record. Toon van Waterschoot, conference chair, welcomed the delegates to the conference. The conference topic was motivated by recent work on reverberation and dereverberation, including a number of review articles, the 2014 REVERB (REverberant Voice Enhancement and Recognition Benchmark) challenge, and the DREAMS (Dereverberation and Reverberation of Audio, Music, and Speech) research project. The scope of reverberation and dereverberation itself covers a large range of topics and experts in many areas including signal processing, psychoacoustics, room acoustics, and machine learning gave presentations during the conference. Toon reminded delegates of the call for papers for a special issue of the AES Journal (see p. 169), thanked the committee members for their hard work to prepare for the conference, and thanked the European Commission for its financial support. The conference had an ambitious technical program. Each morning, a keynote lecture was presented to the delegates, arranged ably by Timo Gerkmann. The keynote speakers gave excellent overviews of their respective topic areas, ensuring that everyone who attended was up to speed with the basic principles and history of reverberation synthesis and room modeling, perception, and dereverberation techniques. The technical content of the conference was mainly delivered in nine paper sessions with a total of 30 invited and contributed papers, coordinated by papers chairs Stefan Goetze and Ann Spriet, supported by a demonstration session. The topics covered by the technical program aligned with the keynote lecture topics, and are described here by theme.