Armin G. Kohlrausch

“I am a big fan of interdisciplinary cooperation across boundaries of research traditions and organisations, and acoustics is an ideal field in which to live this passion.”

Armin Kohlrausch is a Full Professor and Chair of Auditory and Multisensory perception at Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Originally trained as a physicist and acoustician, his main areas of expertise include human perception, room acoustics, audio signal processing, and in general terms human-sound interaction. His main scientific interest is the experimental study and modeling of auditory and multisensory perception in humans and the transfer of this knowledge to (industrial) applications. 

In his work, he focused on creating and using well designed acoustic stimuli to further our understanding of and capacity to model internal processes in the human auditory system. His quantitative modeling work, done in cooperation with a great number of excellent younger colleagues, has a lasting influence on current-day time domain auditory models. In recent years, he focuses more on environmental aspects, like negative effects of sounds in specific environments such as hospitals and open workspaces, and has built up a fruitful cooperation with the department Building Physics and Services of the TU/e.

Armin Kohlrausch studied physics at the University of Göttingen (Germany) and specialized in acoustics. He received his MSc in 1980 and his PhD in 1984, both on perceptual aspects of sound. From 1985 until 1990 he worked at the Drittes Physikalisches Institut at the University of Göttingen. Here, he was responsible for research and teaching in the fields psychoacoustics and room acoustics. In 1991 he joined the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven and worked in the speech and hearing group of the Institute for Perception Research (IPO), a joint venture between Philips and the TU/e. Since 1998, he combined his work at Philips Research with a Professor position for auditory and multisensory perception at the TU/e. In 2004 he was appointed research fellow of Philips Research and in 2016 he retired from Philips.

He is a member of a large number of scientific societies in Europe and the US. Since 1998, he has been a Fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and he has served as Associate Editor for the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, for the Journal of the Association for Research in Otolaryngology and currently for Acta Acustica united with Acustica. In 2017 he was honored with the Helmholtz medal of the German Acoustical Society for his exceptional contributions to binaural psychoacoustics, auditory modeling, and multisensory perception. In 2019, the German Acoustical Society awarded him the honorary membership.