Psychoacoustics

This study examined the hearing and contact calls of wild-caught Australian budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) and compared these data to hearing and vocalizations in the much more extensively studied domesticated budgerigar. The spectral energy in the contact calls of both wild-caught and domesticated budgerigars falls almost exclusively in the frequency of 2-4 kHz. Absolute and masked thresholds were similar in both

To provide guidelines for the development of two types of closed-set speech-perception tests that can be applied and interpreted in the same way across languages. The guidelines cover the digit triplet and the matrix sentence tests that are most commonly used to test speech recognition in noise. They were developed by a working group on Multilingual Speech Tests of the International Collegium of Rehabilitative Audiology (ICRA). The recommendations are based on reviews of existing evaluations of the digit triplet and matrix tests as well as on the research experience of members of the ICRA Working Group. They represent the results of a consensus process. The resulting recommendations deal with: Test design and word selection; Talker characteristics; Audio recording and stimulus preparation; Masking noise; Test administration; and Test validation. By following these guidelines for the development of any new test of this kind, clinicians and researchers working in any language will be ...

It is currently common practice for sound engineers to record digital music using high-resolution formats, and then down sample the files to 44.1kHz for commercial release. This study aims at investigating whether listeners can perceive differences between musical files recorded ...

Indigenous dance & music across the world has long been an important topic of sociocultural studies conducted by people from various related fields and Indian tribes are no strangers to this ethno musical single dimensionality of their society. Since the advent of Ethnomusicology during late 19th century the holistic investigations of music as well as dance has opened doors for psychologists and linguistic scientists to study indigenous behavior & language.

The methodological approaches to this include collection of audio-visual recordings that along with the contextual information supplied helps linguistic scientists and psychologists to produce an analytically derived qualitative analysis of the ancestral dance & music of the tribal groups in India.

This paper further accentuates the above mentioned aspects of Psychology & Linguistics of Indian aboriginal music & dance, firstly, by highlighting the Psycho Acoustic effects of indigenous dance or music performed during ceremonies, especially the after life rituals and secondly, by emphasizing on the Phonetic Characteristics of the indigenous songs, that is an important factor in discovering the mother language of the currently spoken Indian indigenous languages.

The paper elaborates on both these points by using theoretical references from different associated fields and by the means of fieldwork done via participant observation during the course of Ethnographic Filming amongst the Gond Tribes of Bastar.

The purpose of this study is to identify issues with the visual models of sung vowels currently used within singing voice pedagogy and voice science texts, and to propose a conceptual framework and new visual models that may more accurately characterize objective elements of timbre present in the singing voice. The timbre of the classical female (and countertenor) voice exposes blind spots in these spectrographic and schematic models, notably that they accommodate certain ambiguities present in speech, but problematic when applied to singing (especially high-pitched, melismatic singing). Essentially, above the treble staff, vowel clarity disappears entirely not because of vowel substitutions or modifications, but because the  simplicity of the listener’s percept is too distant from the timbral complexity of speech. The manner in which this vowel clarity changes as pitch ascends informs a meaningful discussion of the psychoacoustics of sung pitches throughout the range of both male and female voices, and suggests locating the source of timbre not within the singing body (at the point of production), but rather within the listener’s paradoxically limited hearing mechanism (at the point of perception). The author hopes to point toward a still elusive general theory of vocal tone color by proposing the following five principles of singing voice perception currently absent in the voice science and vocal pedagogy literature: absolute spectral tone color, the multiple missing fundamentals, local spectral coherence, weak tone color bridging, and the obvious true fundamental. This thesis explores both immediate pedagogical implications of this framework for singers and voice teachers, and also points to substantial revisions to the models used in the singing voice pedagogy and voice science literature.

OBJECTIVE: Localization involves processing of subtle yet highly enriched monaural and binaural spatial cues. Remediation programs aimed at
resolving spatial deficits are surprisingly scanty in literature. The present study is designed to explore the changes that occur in the spatial performance
of normal-hearing listeners before and after subjecting them to virtual acoustic space (VAS) training paradigm using behavioral and
electrophysiological measures.
MATERIALS and METHODS: Ten normal-hearing listeners participated in the study, which was conducted in three phases, including a pre-training,
training, and post-training phase. At the pre- and post-training phases both behavioral measures of spatial acuity and electrophysiological
P300 were administered. The spatial acuity of the participants in the free field and closed field were measured apart from quantifying their binaural
processing abilities. The training phase consisted of 5–8 sessions (20 min each) carried out using a hierarchy of graded VAS stimuli.
RESULTS: The results obtained from descriptive statistics were indicative of an improvement in all the spatial acuity measures in the post-training
phase. Statistically, significant changes were noted in interaural time difference (ITD) and virtual acoustic space identification scores measured
in the post-training phase. Effect sizes (r) for all of these measures were substantially large, indicating the clinical relevance of these measures in
documenting the impact of training. However, the same was not reflected in P300.
CONCLUSION: The training protocol used in the present study on a preliminary basis proves to be effective in normal-hearing listeners, and its
implications can be extended to other clinical population as well.
KEYWORDS: Virtual acoustic space training, spatial acuity, RMS error, interaural threshold differences, spatial P300

Apresentamos neste trabalho uma introdução às definições de onda sonora, vibração e estudo do movimento harmônico tal como definições musicais de melodia e harmonia. Descrevemos o processo histórico da divisão numérica do intervalo musical e apresentamos os questionamentos sobre sua aceitação devido à limitação do ouvido humano em perceber tons diferentes. Utilizando uma visão analítica sobre esses aspectos e considerando a evolução musical, mostramos que a gama musical a qual possui o maior número de frações de denominadores baixos é ideal para exprimir a música que a percepção humana, em geral, é capaz de discernir. Repetimos esta característica para investigar e comparar a percepção musical para duas espécies de pássaros e relacioná-las à percepção musical humana.

A dissertation examining increasing loudness within music and broadcast by examining its manipulation through technology in the commercial market. The history of our relationship to loudness and the key reasons for its incremental rise and development are uncovered; a current analysis shows the problem, examples, academic debate and the commercial function and changing listening habits of consumers. The implications of hyper-compressed music for engineers and consumers are presented, covering technical and socioeconomic aspects before solutions are explored in reducing excessive loudness. A summary of the primary research is presented before ending with a conclusion.

There is no exact model for the relationship between the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and evoked or perceived emotion. Music has long been a privileged field for exploration, while the contribution of soundscape research is more recent. It is known that health is influenced by the sonic environment, and the study here presented aimed to investigate the nature and strength of relationships between soundscape features and physiological responses linked to relaxation or stress. In a controlled experiment, seventeen healthy volun-teers moved freely inside a physical installation listening to soundscape recordings of nature, urban parks, eateries, and shops, reproduced using 3D ambisonic techniques. Physiological responses were continuously captured, then detrended, downsampled, and analysed with multivariate linear regression onto orthogonal acoustic and perceptual stimuli features that had been previously determined. Measures of Peripheral Temper-ature regressed onto SoundMass, an ac...

This brief summary updates the definition of 3 main types of musical texture: heterophony, polyphony, and homophony - and explains why they are all unsuitable for the earliest phylogenetic forms of musicking, as described by the theory of musilanguage by Steven Brown. This theory, adopted by many scholars of the origins of music, models the evolution of human proto-music and proto-language from animal calls. I introduce a new term, “isophony,” specifically tailored to the sonic texture of musilanguage, and distinguish its texture from heterophony, polyphony, and homophony. Audio examples are provided for reference.

Sound plays an essential role in customers’ daily interactions with products, often influencing their cognitive processes, their emotions, and more generally their behavior. As this realization takes hold, more and more companies begin to take an active interest in the acoustic design of their products. This article demonstrates how marketers can effectively use customer perceptions to guide product sound design. The proposed approach is illustrated by a research collaboration with a coffee machine manufacturer.

"Both music and speech have the capacity to communicate emotions to listeners through the organization of acoustic signals. Furthermore, there is evidence of shared acoustic profiles common to the expression of emotions in both domains. Previous research therefore provides a basis to theorise the existence of a general mechanism for the expression and recognition of emotions in speech and music, although the generality and ecological validity of these studies is limited. This research project combines a controlled experiment and computational modelling to investigate the perceptual codes associated with the expression of emotion in the acoustic domain. Previous research using this method has shown that spatiotemporal dynamics in psychoacoustic features of music are associated with two psychological dimensions of affect underlying judgments of subjective feelings: arousal and valence (Coutinho & Cangelosi, 2009; Coutinho & Cangelosi, 2011). The empirical study reported here provides human ratings of emotions perceived in excerpts of film music and natural speech samples for a large range of emotional states. The computational study creates a computer model that retrieves the relevant information from the acoustic stimuli and makes predictions about the emotional expressiveness of speech and music close to the responses of human subjects. Extending previous findings, we show that a significant part of the listeners’ reported emotions to music and speech prosody can be predicted from a set of seven psychoacoustic features: loudness, tempo/speech rate, melody/prosody contour, spectral centroid, spectral flux, sharpness, and roughness. The implications of these results are discussed in the context of cross-modal similarities in the communication of emotion in the acoustic domain.
Key words: Emotion, Arousal and Valence, Music, Speech prosody, Psychoacoustics, Neural Networks"

Mit einem Minimum an mathematischen Formeln und in leicht verständlicher Sprache bietet das vorliegende Buch auf dem aktuellen Stand der Forschung eine grundlegende Einfüh-rung in die einzelnen Fachgebiete der Musikal ischen Akustik (Instrumenten-, Raum-und Psychoakustik, Auditorische Szenenanalyse, Musikalische Wahrnehmung und Klangsyn-these) sowie in die Geschichte, Perspektiven und Methoden dieses vielschichtigen Bereichs der Musikwissenschaft. Am Beispiel einer Konzertsituation wird der Weg von der Schallerzeugung am Musikinstru-ment bzw. der Singstimme über die Schallausbreitung im Raum bis hin zum Ohr des Zuhörers und der dahinter stattfindenden kognitiven und alltagsrelevanten Schallverarbeitung erläu-tert. Hierbei werden sowohl die aktuellen Messmethoden und akustischen Ana lyseverfahren berücksichtigt als auch die Funktionsweise und Geschichte der elektronischen Musikinstru-mente und der modernen Audiotechnik.

Desde el año 2014, el sonido de los monoplazas de Fórmula 1 han generado múltiples titulares por no estar a la altura de lo esperado. Las altas instancias del mundo del motor, conscientes de la mala reacción, han realizado diferentes experimentos para paliar este problema sin conseguir resultados convincentes. El presente documento ahonda en las causas de este problema desde una perspectiva musicológica, auditiva y psicoacústica, debido a las múltiples similitudes que podemos encontrar entre los efectos de este sonido y los de la música a nivel emocional, así como desde la perspectiva de la sociología de la música y del deporte y los puntos de encuentro entre ambas subdisciplinas, como la existencia del fenómeno fan.
Se abordará también la búsqueda de una estética del sonido y del ruido en este tipo de espectáculos. Para lograr estos objetivos se recurre, principalmente, a una primera fase de análisis en la que se estudiarán los principales sonidos de la Historia de la Fórmula 1 por medio de espectrogramas, obtenidos por medio de Sonic Visualiser. Tras esto, se acude al trabajo de campo, por medio de la realización de cuestionarios, para consultar a los diferentes sectores que conforman el deporte, tales como aficionados, periodistas, pilotos, ingenieros y otros profesionales del sector.

Science-based voice pedagogy curricula routinely focus on the anatomy and physiology, vocal fold dynamics, kinesiology, vocal tract acoustics, and motor learning properties of the singing body. The role of the hearing mechanism in defining the sound of a singer is frequently under-explored. However, the human senses are physical systems with limitations that shape one’s mental image of reality. This mental image is called a percept. The eye cannot produce a detailed image of a very far or very near object, and sensitivity to touch is not uniform across the entire body. Such limitations change the percept of, rather than the objective nature of, an object. As the sound wave produced by a voice is a physical phenomenon, one can explore the underlying rules of hearing to ask how one might possibly perceive the human voice. This is another way of asking what sounds the human voice is capable of making.

This may seem like an academic, tree-falling-in-the-woods distinction: that all the richly colored and varied sounds we hear exist as a silent, color- less soup of vibrating air until they are perceived. However, sound waves can be understood as instructions for timbre, not the timbre itself. The way in which the human hearing mechanism reacts to those instructions limits, colors, and in some cases creates aspects of the voice. Psychoacoustics is
the field of study concerned with these phenomena. This article will explore and synthesize three such psychoacoustic limitations relevant to singing: auditory roughness, the resolvability of harmonics into the pitch, and absolute spectral tone color. My hope is that the resulting framework may inform the way that registration, vowels, and formants are taught in the voice pedagogy classroom.

Spatialisation accuracies of commercially available plugins, Wave Arts Panorama and Longcat H3D, were tested in listening tests using 7 expert subjects and experimental methods. Binaurally rendered trains of pink noise bursts were played over headphones and subjects were asked to localize 72 sound source locations. The spatialisation accuracy of H3D plugin was significantly better than of Panorama in the azimuthal plane. However the spatialisation accuracy in elevation was significantly indifferent for both plugins where they have accurately spatialised only 2/3 of the rendered positions. The study was concluded that for the critical simulation of 3D audio environments, the tested plugins are not suitable. The assumptions leading to the conclusion were also stated as well as the suggestions for future works.