Keith McElveen

Founder & CEO

Wave Sciences

About Me

Keith is an electrical engineer who has spent much of his career asking questions about sound that seem simple until you try to answer them. How do our ears follow one conversation in a crowded room? Why can a camera system focus on one subject while blurring others, even when they lie in the same direction, but an audio system cannot? These questions have taken Keith and his colleagues at Wave Sciences into some unexpected areas of acoustics, signal processing, and human perception. Keith enjoys discovering how familiar physical principles can lead to surprising solutions to difficult engineering problems.

Sessions

  • What If a Spatial Filter Had Depth?
    16:20 - 16:50 UTC | Tuesday 10th November 2026 | Bristol 1
    Beginner
    Intermediate
    Advanced

    Beamforming is one of our fundamental tools for spatial filtering. Electronically steer an array in a direction, and signals arriving from that direction pass while signals arriving from other directions are attenuated. But in photographic terms, the resulting spatial filter has essentially “infinite depth of field”: signals along the same “look direction” are not distinguished by range. The “flower” and the “mountain” behind it both remain in focus. What if we could focus sound more like a camera, adding depth to direction so that we can select a particular location in 3D space? This talk introduces acoustic focusing, a physics-based […]