Tatsuya Hirahara

Tatsuya Hirahara received B. Eng., M. Eng., and Dr. Eng. degrees in electronic engineering from Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan, in 1978, 1980, and 1983, respectively. From 1983, he worked for NTT-ECL Yokosuka, ATR Auditory and Visual Perception Labs., Hearing Research Group at NTT Basic Research Labs., ATR-International Corporate Planning Division, NTT Communication Science Labs. as Executive Manager, and ATR Human Information Science Lab. as Director. He was also a visiting researcher at the Speech Communication Group of the MIT-RLE in 1987 and the Eaton-Peabody Laboratory of Auditory Physiology in 1994.
Since 2006, he has been Professor of Faculty of Engineering at Toyama Prefectural University . His long-term research goal is to determine how speech and other sounds are processed by the human auditory system. He is now running research projects on dynamic binaural system for 3-D auditory display and high-sensitivity small sensors for body-conducted sound.
Before he joined Toyama Prefectural University,he was working on following research topics; mimic voices of talking birds, acoustic characteristics of cleft palate speech, electrophonic effects, Japanese text-to-speech synthesizer, auditory front-ends to automatic speech recognition system, headphones suitable for psychoacoustic experiments, and representation of speech in the auditory system.