Does a fixed energy-gate threshold survive different rooms on an always-on audio pendant, and what does an adaptive one buy in battery life?
research/ambient-gateroc
Does a fixed energy-gate threshold survive different rooms on an always-on audio pendant? Synthetic audio, 20 seeds x 4 background levels: any fixed threshold that keeps speech recall >= 0.9 leaves the gate open all the time in the loudest room (57.6 h, no gating gain), while one adaptive threshold (4x a 5 s running-minimum floor) gives 82-90 h at recall 0.89-1.00 in all four; stylised, nothing measured on hardware
What it found
A stylised follow-up to ambient-wearable. Synthetic harmonic ‘speech’ bursts (−36 to −20 dBFS) over pink-ish background noise at −60, −50, −40 and −30 dBFS plus short transients (20 seeds × 120 s per room) are passed through a Python port of the pendant’s energy gate (checked frame by frame against the compiled C), and the gate-open fraction is turned into battery hours with the same power model. Any fixed threshold that holds worst-room speech recall at 0.9 or more ((−30 dBFS or lower)minus;34 dBFS or lower on the grid I swept) stays open nearly all the time in the loudest room, giving 57.6 h, the always-streaming figure. One adaptive threshold (4× a 5 s running-minimum noise floor) gives 82–90 h at recall 0.89–1.00 in all four rooms. Within a single room the two trade-off curves are almost the same; the adaptive gate’s gain is that one setting transfers. Stylised: synthetic audio, uniform one-microphone model, assumed power parameters, nothing measured on hardware or real speech.
A figure from its own output
Paper, code and results
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Produced with AI assistance (Claude). Results are from the code in this repository and are simulated or stylised unless the abstract says otherwise; nothing here implies affiliation with or endorsement by any lab, researcher or company cited. MIT licensed.