Dolby Atmos Know-How Useful for Better Teleconferencing, New Patent Suggests

Dolby Labs is spinning off its experience with metadata for Dolby Atmos object-based immersive audio into a new field of multichannel teleconferencing over ordinary mono phone lines and cellphone connections, a newly published patent application shows. The application (US 2016/0330326), published Nov. 10 at the Patent and Trademark Office, credits Francis Quiers of the U.K. as inventor of a system that dates back to a series of patent applications made since 2012. It stakes claims on the idea of steering the voices of different conference participants’ into different sound-field positions for rendering through multiple speakers or through stereo headphones. The patented trick is to analyze the room positions of different participants’ voices in a teleconference and then describe those positions using the “dual-tone multiple frequencies” (DTMF) signaling system, which is conventionally used for inaudible control and switching of ordinary phone calls. Dolby’s application suggests using DTMF tones in a frequency range of between 5 and 6.4 kHz, which is above the most important speech frequencies, so the tones can be filtered out of ordinary speech audio without compromising quality or intelligibility. Rendering different voices to different sound-field positions improves intelligibility, the application says. Dolby representatives didn’t comment on the commercial implications of the invention.