Microsoft continues to develop its Teams application, made essential for many by teleworking. After adding a walkie-talkie mode, the editor tackles the transmission of music. For this, it is necessary to prevent the music from being considered as noise and to transmit it with the best possible quality. These new advances will be useful, for example, for distance music lessons.
By default, Teams is designed to eliminate background noise during conversations. But Microsoft has developed a function that automatically identifies music.
For this, the editor uses artificial intelligence and trained a deep neural network with a million sound clips containing voices and music. The editor then tested its function with a thousand additional sound clips, provided by contributors. These excerpts include different styles of music played by a wide variety of instruments (guitar, piano, trumpet, etc.), with acoustics from various locations.
Finally, the artificial intelligence was able to detect more than 81% of the sound clips containing music, with a rate of only 0.1% for false positives (voice or noise mistaken for music).
A new mode for transmitting music
When the music is detected, a message is displayed and suggests activating the new High Fidelity transmission mode.
In this mode, the sound is digitized at 32 kHz instead of 16 kHz, which makes it possible to reach a frequency range of 16 kHz instead of 8 kHz. The app can thus transmit frequencies that are useful for music, but useless during a conversation with only voice. Lossy compression is applied, but with a bit rate of 128 kbit/s, or even 48 kbit/s if the network bit rate is insufficient, compared to 16 kbit/s, or even less, for voice transmission (the codec goes down to 6 kbit/s with decent quality for conversations).
Finally, the High Fidelity mode can also be activated manually in the app settings. Microsoft advises using good quality microphones and speakers for music transmission and avoiding Bluetooth devices if possible, which introduce further sound compression.
The High Fidelity transmission and automatic music detection functions will be rolling out over the next few months in Teams.
Source: Microsoft