Dear friends, colleagues, and guests at ProComm 2025!
If you were to ask me what one of the particular strengths of SDU’s campus Sønderborg is, then I would probably say: Building bridges! – Not only because a country with almost 400 islands generally likes to and often does build bridges. In my case, other bridges are meant. For example, those between the communication and engineering. Interdisciplinary exchange, collaboration across borders, and fun in addressing and solving problems that directly emerged from the everyday life of companies, “sounding” or talking machines, and – of course – public speakers that is what defines us at SDU Sønderborg. The agenda of the CIE Acoustics Lab reflects this special spirit very well.
The CIE Acoustics Lab brings together traditional humanities scholars on the one hand and technicians and engineers on the other. We create innovations by applying phonetic knowledge to non-phonetic problems; and we try to advance phonetic knowledge through developing new instruments and analysis techniques or by making these instruments and techniques more accessible and effective for relevant groups in society. People or their unique and highly complex networks of communicative signals and meanings are at the heart of our lab. And this heart is framed by tools, techniques and technologies.
Read more about Acoustics Lab at SDU:
Here are some examples of ongoing projects and activities:
VirtuVoce – The first voice gym
VirtuVoce empowers people to master oral communication across diverse platforms from podcasts and TikTok to school presentations and political debates. We provide the support that especially young or unexperienced voices need to gain confidence and make an impact. How is this done? Through a combination of immersive virtual reality experiences and effective and fun exercises that, together, form the world’s very first voice gym. Users engage in missions that require their voice, unlocking treasure chests, building bridges, and captivating audiences. A mobile-phone app supplements the experiences, provides additional AR feedback, and makes the voice gym accessible to people also outside VR frameworks.
Arrowhead™ fPVN – fPVN
The ambition of Arrowhead flexible Production Value Network (fPVN) project is doubling the European industrial productivity by applying transformative, autonomous, and evolvable information interoperability for resilient and adaptive production value networks. We at the CIE Acoustics Lab are one of more than 30 international partners in this project – and the only one that is concerned with professional communication in general and speech signals in particular. Our task: to develop voice- or sound-controlled human-machine interfaces for noisy factory halls that make many buttons, touchscreens and walking paths superfluous. To this end, we are developing a communication vocabulary that is, amongst other things, noise-resistant, intuitively applicable, and easy to learn across languages.
HospiBot
Partnering with five major hospitals in the German-Danish border region, the project addresses the severe skill shortage found in hospitals by designing mobile service robots that can help with tasks like cleaning, greeting and guiding patients, parking registration, and other logistical tasks like finding lost items. The key challenges are twofold: the robots must function well in loud and hectic environments. The biggest challenge, however, lies in the interaction with people, i.e. in the “human touch”. We have to build robots that look friendly, that people like to interact with, and that actually help in everyday life. It is easy to create the perfect technical solution, but if people don’t use it, it is just skated over and ends as a flop. Our team at the CIE Acoustics Lab is helping to ensure that the nonverbal, especially vocal, communication meets these challenges, including emotions, attitudes, and empathy, both in terms of their situational application and recognition by the robot.
Allgoodspeakers ApS | Public Speaking Training
AllGoodSpeakers is a Danish speech-technology company founded in 2019 by Dr. Oliver Niebuhr. The company focuses on enhancing public speaking skills and vocal charisma through scientific methods and innovative technology. They utilize techniques such as Acoustic Voice Profiling® and have developed various tools to measure and improve speaker performance. AllGoodSpeakers provides training and assessment services to businesses and educational institutions across multiple countries.
Two-phase vibroacoustic technology research project
Vibroacoustic technology uses low-frequency sonic vibrations as an effective and non-invasive way to stimulate the vagus nerve, which activates the parasympathetic nervous system or a “rest and digest” state. We at the Centre for Industrial Electronics (CIE) Acoustics Lab have conducted a two-phase research project into this modality, to understand how it can improve well-being and reduce stress. Validated using speech prosody, EEG and ECG biosignal measurements, Phase-I in 2023 measured the efficacy of the Danish designed VibroAcoustics Bass Module on perceived stress, to find relaxation increased across all parameters. Phase-II in 2024 compared the module to a guided mindfulness meditation from which results are in the pre-processing stage. The CIE Acoustics Lab team will continue to research into this technology to better understand how sound and vibration can be used to improve well-being, and how speech-prosody is a sensitive biomarker well-equipped to indicate changes in emotional psychological and physiological states.
