Microsoft Teams gets music mode and music detection for better quality

Microsoft is adding a high fidelity mode to Teams for users who want to play music through its video conferencing software. Teams will also get a function to detect music, after which users will be given the tip to turn on the hi-fi mode.

According to Microsoft, the audio quality in Teams is optimized by default for conversations with the lowest possible bitrate. If participants in a meeting want to play music or play an instrument, that would not come into its own.

That’s why Teams gets a hi-fi mode and music detection. When enabled, Teams can detect during a call if music is being played intentionally. Users will then be given the option to enable Hi-Fi mode, which improves the sound quality for music.

Teams already uses machine learning noise suppression. If there is music or other noise in the background during a call, the software tries to filter it out. The music detection function and the pop-up to enable Hi-Fi mode are also intended to prevent accidental filtering of music.

Microsoft says it has trained a neural network called MusicNet with more than a million audio clips. That should ensure that Teams is good at distinguishing music from other noise. Microsoft does not want the pop-up to appear when no music is playing and has set a target that the false positive rate should not exceed 0.1 percent. Microsoft has published details about the creation of MusicNet in a paper.

According to Microsoft, the hi-fi mode is also suitable to improve the quality of conversations and to better transmit medical audio signals. Automatic music detection should be available to all Teams users “in the coming months.”