Hervé Lissek

Nationality: French, Swiss

EPFL STI IEM LWE
ELB 040 (Bâtiment ELB)
Station 11
1015 Lausanne

EPFL STI IEM LWE
ELB 040 (Bâtiment ELB)
Station 11
1015 Lausanne

Expertise

Acoustics and audio engineering, Electroacoustics.
Room acoustics.
Active noise control.
Acoustic metamaterials.
Assisted reverberation.
Psychoacoustics.
Sound spatialization

Expertise

Acoustics and audio engineering, Electroacoustics.
Room acoustics.
Active noise control.
Acoustic metamaterials.
Assisted reverberation.
Psychoacoustics.
Sound spatialization

Mission

Head of the Acoustic Group at the Laboratory of Wave Engineering LWE.


Research topics :
  • Active Electroacoustic Resonators: turning conventional loudspeakers membrane into broadband sound absorbers/reflectors through active control;
  • Acoustic Metamaterials: engineering acoustic structures to bend the laws of physics, such as negative refraction, or breaking the Fresnel-Descartes laws of refraction.
  • Development of ElectroAcoustic MetaMaterials, bridging the gap between active electroacoustic resonators, and acoustic metamaterials.
  • Development of Plasma-based loudspeakers: generating sound out of a thin layer of ionized air, without resorting to a physical membrane radiators.
  • Development of Plasmacoustic Metalayers: leveraging the massless and transparent properties of plasma-based loudspeakers to control sound wave propagation (absorption, reflection, transmission) without resorting to a "physical" material.

Teaching activities:
  • Electroacoustics (Bachelor)
  • Laboratory in ICT (Bachelor)
  • Audio engineering (Master)
  • Labs in Acoustics (Master)
  • Projects in Acoustics (Bachelor & Master)

PROJECTS

Ongoing- SALUTE (H2020-CS2, coord. ECL, France)

- SmartAnswer (H2020-ITN, coord. VKI, Belgium)

- ARTEM (H2020, coord. DLR, Germany)

- Compressive Sensing (SNF)
Completed - INTERACTS (CTI, with Goldmund sa, Relec sa, HEPIA): development of electroacoustic absorbers for the equalization of rooms in the low-frequency range

- BHA(L&S) (CTI, with Phonak ag): development of signal processing techniques for localization and spatialization in hearing aids

- i3DMusic (Eurostars - CTI): enable enhanced playback of existing musical content on up to date and emerging 3D audio systems

-
X-Noise EV
- OPENAIR (call FP7-AAT-2008-RTD-1): OPtimisation for low Environmental Noise impact AIRcraft
- CTI-VeoVox: microphone arrays dedicated to speech recognition devices, for telecommunications applications (KTI funding).
- TEENI (call FP7-AAT-2007-RTD-1): Turboshaft Engine Exhaust Noise Identification
- ACT-Noise: Active Control for Tampers Noise (FOEN funding)
- QTT: Quiet Traction Transformer (FOEN funding)
- X3-Noise (call FP6-2005-Aero-1): Aircraft External Noise Research Network and Co-ordination.
- CTI-myVox(TM): microphone arrays dedicated to speech recognition devices, for telecommunications applications (KTI funding).
- CTI-Keystrokes: methodologie for the acoustic qualification of keystroke noise (KTI funding).
- Active materials with variable acoustic properties: new techniques for absorbing noise by way of active acoustic impedance matching.
- Sound design: development of characterization, modelization, and design techniques for enhancing sound quality of manufactured objects.
- Audio: electroacoustic transducers design for audio, telecommunications, and active noise control.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

Dr. Lissek's core competences are related to electroacoustics, namely know-how on loudspeaker and microphone design, acoustic transmission lines description via lumped element models, as well as the design of arrays of transducers for sound reinforcement and acoustic imaging, especially for communication (line arrays, wave field synthesis) applications or noise metrology (beamforming, near-field holography, goniometry). Together with this specific skill, he and his group claim a broader acoustic expertise such as the characterization and model of complex sound sources, including structure-fluid interactions, sound propagation models within complex 3D fields including weather effects and other fluid and thermodynamic interactions, and auditory issues of sound (namely psychoacoustics, including sound design).

As a combination of these competences, active noise control has become a hot activity of Dr. Lissek in the last decade, leading to the development of practical concepts for active noise cancellation, active impedance control, or the recent shunt loudspeakers techniques used as acoustic absorbers, the core of these developments remaining the electroacoustic transducers. As a consequence of the latter, the acoustic group led by Dr. Lissek is investigating new research areas such as acoustic metamaterials, that should lead to acoustic cloaking capabilities.

SHORT BIOGRAPHY

After a PhD in Acoustics (Les Matériaux Actifs à Propriétés Acoustiques Variables, Université du Maine, Le Mans), Dr. Lissek joined the Laboratoire d'Electromagnétisme et d'Acoustique to supervise the active noise control activities of the Acoustic Research Group, headed by Prof. Mario Rossi.
Since 2006, Dr. Lissek took the leadership of the Acoustic Group, and launched several expertise activities together with new research topics at EPFL, especially in the frame of Aircraft Noise Research in EU projects (FP5-Silence(R), FP6-X3 Noise, FP7-TEENI, OPENAIR, XNOISE EV). He is also appointed expert by the EC to evaluate research proposals in calls for projects in Aeronautics within FP7.
Since 2015, Hervé Lissek and the Acoustic Group are affiliated to the Laboratoire de Traitement des Signaux LTS2
Dr. Lissek is now heading a team of 6 people, among which 4 PhD students, 1 Post-doc, and 1 Engineer.

Selected publications

Les Matériaux Acoustiques A Propriétés Acoustiques Variables

Hervé Lissek
Published in Thèse de doctorat, Université du Mans, France in 2002

A preliminary study of an isodynamic transducer for use in active acoustic materials

Hervé Lissek, Xavier Meynial
Published in Applied Acoustics, 64 (9), pp 917-930 in 2003

Acoustic transmission line metamaterial with negative/zero/positive refractive index

Frédéric Bongard; Juan R. Mosig; Hervé Lissek
Published in Physical Review B in 2010

Electroacoustic absorbers: Bridging the gap between shunt loudspeakers and active sound absorption

Hervé Lissek; Romain Boulandet; Romain Fleury
Published in Journal of the Acoustical Society of America in 2011

Observation of Vehicle Axles Through Pass-by Noise: A Strategy of Microphone Array Design

Patrick Marmaroli; Mickael Carmona; Jean-Marc Odobez; Xavier Falourd; Hervé Lissek
Published in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems in 2012

Acoustic Dispersive Prism

Hussein Esfahlani; Sami Karkar; Hervé Lissek; Juan R. Mosig
Published in Scientific Reports in 2016

Ultrabroadband sound control with deep-subwavelength plasmacoustic metalayers

Stanislav Sergeev; Romain Fleury; Hervé Lissek
Published in Nature Communications in 2023

Infoscience

Research

Acoustic antenna and arrays

Development of distributed acoustic sources or sensors in view of controlling directivity and radiation properties of sound sources.

Acoustic metamaterials

Acoustic metamaterials are engineered structures that exhibit acoustic properties not readily available in nature, such as negative mass density, negative bulk modulus, or negative refraction index.

Psychoacoustics

Listening test procedures and processing techniques wit a view to assessing sound quality of audio systems.

Electroacoustic resonators

Bridging the gap between shunt loudspeakers and active sound absorption.

Teaching & PhD

PhD Students

Qin Liu

Past EPFL PhD Students

Maxime Volery, Mathieu François Padlewski, Rahim Vesal

Past EPFL PhD Students as codirector

Romain Boulandet, Patrick Marmaroli, Thomas Stefan Zurbrügg, Lukas Rohr, Etienne Rivet, Gilles André Courtois, Hussein Esfahlani, Helena Peic Tukuljac, Vu Thach Pham, Vincent Grimaldi, Stanislav Sergeev

Courses

Audio engineering

EE-548

This lecture is oriented towards the study of audio engineering, room acoustics, sound propagation, and sound radiation from sources and acoustic antennas. The learning outcomes will be the techniques for microphones and loudspeaker design, as well as room acoustics.

Electroacoustics

EE-348

This lecture will give the EE students strong ground knowledge on the acoustical engineering through a formalism that they already know, namely electrotechnics. The main learning outcome of the lecture is the understanding and the design of acoustic systems such as acoustic filters.

Lab in acoustics

EE-490(a)

Apply the knowledge acquired in Audio lectures (room acoustics, acoustic material characterization, loudspeaker measurements, etc.), and provide additional useful illustrations (full wave simulations on COMSOL Multiphysics to better understand some physical phenomena).

Lab in information technologies

EE-390(c)

Get familiar with experimental aspects of the main domains of the orientation "Information and communication technologies"