# SonicSieve: Bringing Directional Speech Extraction to Smartphones Using Acoustic Microstructures

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.10793 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.10793/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 26 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Apr 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Common Voice: A Massively-Multilingual Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.06670/) (2019)
- [LibriTTS: A Corpus Derived from LibriSpeech for Text-to-Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02882/) (2019)
- [SEGAN: Speech Enhancement Generative Adversarial Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09452/) (2017)
- [Pyroomacoustics: A Python package for audio room simulations and array processing algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.04196/) (2017)
- [TF-GridNet: Integrating Full- and Sub-Band Modeling for Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.12433/) (2022)
- [Asteroid: the PyTorch-based audio source separation toolkit for researchers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04132/) (2020)
- [ACCDOA: Activity-Coupled Cartesian Direction of Arrival Representation for Sound Event Localization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15306/) (2020)
- [The Cone of Silence: Speech Separation by Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.06007/) (2020)
- [SALSA: Spatial Cue-Augmented Log-Spectrogram Features for Polyphonic Sound Event Localization and Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00275/) (2021)
- [Device-Robust Acoustic Scene Classification via Impulse Response Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.07499/) (2023)
- [Semantic Hearing: Programming Acoustic Scenes with Binaural Hearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00320/) (2023)
- [Look Once to Hear: Target Speech Hearing with Noisy Examples](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06289/) (2024)
- [Monaural source separation: From anechoic to reverberant environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07578/) (2021)
- [Hybrid Neural Networks for On-device Directional Hearing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05893/) (2021)
- [ClearBuds: Wireless Binaural Earbuds for Learning-Based Speech Enhancement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13611/) (2022)
- [All Neural Low-latency Directional Speech Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04879/) (2024)
- [Reflection-Aware Sound Source Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.07791/) (2017)
- [Towards Unified All-Neural Beamforming for Time and Frequency Domain Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08348/) (2022)
- [Deep Learning Based Speech Beamforming](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.05383/) (2018)
- [Temporal-Spatial Neural Filter: Direction Informed End-to-End Multi-channel Target Speech Separation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.00391/) (2020)
- [Multi-Microphone Speaker Separation by Spatial Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07143/) (2023)
- [EarCough: Enabling Continuous Subject Cough Event Detection on Hearables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.10445/) (2023)
- [The Human Auditory System and Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.00084/) (2023)
- [ToMoBrush: Exploring Dental Health Sensing using a Sonic Toothbrush](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01933/) (2024)
- [DeWinder: Single-Channel Wind Noise Reduction using Ultrasound Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.06137/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Lightweight and Generalizable Acoustic Scene Representations via Contrastive Fine-Tuning and Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03728/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Imagine placing your smartphone on a table in a noisy restaurant and clearly capturing the voices of friends seated around you, or recording a lecturer's voice with clarity in a reverberant auditorium. We introduce SonicSieve, the first intelligent directional speech extraction system for smartphones using a bio-inspired acoustic microstructure. Our passive design embeds directional cues onto incoming speech without any additional electronics. It attaches to the in-line mic of low-cost wired earphones which can be attached to smartphones. We present an end-to-end neural network that processes the raw audio mixtures in real-time on mobile devices. Our results show that SonicSieve achieves a signal quality improvement of 5.0 dB when focusing on a 30deg angular region. Additionally, the performance of our system based on only two microphones exceeds that of conventional 5-microphone arrays.