Majdak, Doz. Dr. Piotr

Biography

After completing a technical school for electrical engineering, Piotr Majdak studied audio engineering at the University of Technology in Graz (TU-Graz) and at the University of Music and Dramatic Arts in Graz (KUG). During his studies, he  developed hardware and software for measurement tools and process-controlling devices. Piotr Majdak graduated with the Master's thesis entitled "Implementation of a head related binaural technique", in which he dealt with a real-time binaural system called Ambisonics. In that project, Ambisonics allowed the inclusion of the listener’s head movements without the need for time-variant filtering, and therefore a reduction of the computational power. As part of the thesis, the binaural system was implemented for a digital signal processor platform including a head-tracker. The Master's thesis was done jointly with Markus Noisternig. In 2002, he joined ARI as a junior researcher being involved in setting-up the group "Psychoacoustics and experimental audiology". In 2008, he finished his PhD about sound lateralization in cochlear-implant listeners, in which the effects of different aspects of the interaural time differences on sound lateralization are described. In 2015, his habilitation for the area "Acoustics and audio engineering" was approved, which allows him to supervise PhD students at the KUG.

Research Interest

General research field is spatial hearing, in particular:     Sound localization in normal-hearing, hearing-impaired, and cochlear-implant listeners;     Virtual acoustics;     Effects of head-related transfer functions (HRTFs) and its numerical simulation;     General binaural effects in electric hearing. Piotr Majdak was the main developer of ExpSuite, an open-source software framework for psychoacoustic experiments in normal-hearing and cochlear-implant listeners, used at ARI since 2003 and now mainly developed by Michael Mihocic. Piotr Majdak is the main developer of the SOFA API and the Auditory Modeling Toolbox.