bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
A prototypical pitch pattern of unaccented Japanese words
Authors: Shport Irina
Published: October 2013

Unaccented words are described as having a rising pitch pattern in Tokyo Japanese. The production and perception of F0 patterns in three-mora unaccented words that varied in segmental type of the word-medial mora were investigated. In production (N=864), F0 rose across words having a short vowel in the initial syllable (V-type), and F0 was flat across words having a long vowel or nasal coda in the initial syllable (V:/VN-type), p<.01. In perception (N=384), 70% of words with the V-type first syllable were correctly discriminated from accented words, whereas 56% of words with the V:/VN-type first syllable were correctly discriminated. Pairwise comparisons between word types revealed that the accentual pattern of CVC:V words was discriminated significantly better (by 24%) than that of CVNCV words, p<.01. These results indicated that unaccented words with rising, as opposed to flat F0, were more accurately discriminated from accented words. This might be due to a non-prototypical nature of flat F0 patterns in three-mora unaccented words. In other words, the mental representation of unaccented words may be characterized by a rising pitch pattern.
Spectral emphasis as a stress cue in the Latinamerican Spanish
Authors: Renato Alejandro C.
Published: October 2013

Several studies have reported that spectral emphasis is a reliable correlate of stress, e.g., [Sluijter and van Heuven, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 100(4), 2471–2485] that is to say, harmonics situated above 0.5 kHz present more prominence in a stressed vowel. The spectral balance or spectral emphasis was then examined as a cue related to loudness or intensity. The present work analyzes the relationship between the descripted phenomenon and the vowel pitch, in order to relate the contribution of higher harmonics with the probable perceived pitch and evaluate their actual weight. The virtual pitch theory [Terhardt, Stoll and Seewann, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 71(3), 679–688] provides a way to understand this relationship. To achieve this purpose a speech production study was done with native latino-american spanish speakers. The corpus consisted of minimal stress pairs of bi and trisyllabic lexical items with and without stress in a carrier sentence. Analysis was developed in two steps. In the first step were obtained the values in frequency and sound pressure level in decibels for a frame of each harmonics through a tracker algorithm. In a second step, the virtual and spectral pitch was extracted from the first step data, in accordance with pitch virtual theory. Results show an increase of weight of spectral pitch in frequences superior to 0.5 kHz.
Effects of vocal pitch level and perturbation magnitude on the pitch-shift reflex
Authors: Liu Hanjun , Larson Charles R.
Published: October 2013

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the responsiveness of the pitch-shift reflex to small magnitude stimuli, vocal level, and pitch-shift direction. English speakers received pitch-shifted voice feedback (10, 20, 30, 40, and 50 cents, 200 ms duration) during vowel phonation at a high pitch and a low pitch level. Mean response magnitude increased as a function of stimulus magnitude, but when expressed as a percent of stimulus magnitude, declined from 100% with 10 to 37% with 50 cent stimuli. Response magnitudes were larger and latencies were shorter with a high pitch level (15.8 cents; 130 ms) than a low pitch level (12.8 cents; 152 ms). Similar results were found with downward stimuli compared to upward stimuli (15.7 cents versus 13.1 cents; 126 ms versus 155 ms). Data from the present study demonstrate that vocal response magnitudes are equal to small perturbation magnitudes, and they are larger and faster with a high-pitched voice and downward directed pitch stimuli. These results suggest that the audio-vocal system is optimally suited for compensating for small pitch rather than larger perturbations. Data also suggest the sensitivity of the audio-vocal system to voice perturbation may vary with pitch level.
Information conveyed by voices
Authors: Gerratt Bruce R. , Kreiman Jody
Published: October 2013

Two approaches for dealing with interrater variability in voice quality judgments have recently been proposed. The first [Shrivastav et al., J. Speech Lang. Hear. Res. 48, 323–335 (2005)] advocates reducing rating errors after data collection by averaging many ratings of each voice by each rater and then standardizing the resulting means. The second [Gerratt and Kreiman, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 110, 2560–2566 (2001)] controls rating error at the source by applying a method-of-adjustment task, which controls variability due to attention, variable internal standards, etc. Using this second method, we accounted for 87% of the variance in listeners perception of noise level for 40 voices. This low level of residual variance (errors) raises the following question: Does averaging ratings reduce the information within listeners responses along with measurement errors? To address this question, 20 listeners provided 10 breathiness ratings for 40 voices. The likelihood of exact listener agreement was calculated and compared to data from the method-of-adjustment task. We also compared amounts of variance accounted for by differences between voices in quality (a metric of information captured). We hypothesized that the averaging and standardizing approach would produce both lower interrater agreement and lower amounts of variance accounted for than the method of adjustment technique. [Work supported by the NIH/NIDCD.]
Computational study of glottal flow aerodynamics
Authors: Peltier L. Joel , Krane Michael
Published: October 2013

We present model simulations for flow through an idealized, time-varying glottis as a building block step to a fully coupled fluid-structure interaction model. The CFD code used is AcuSolve, a finite-element flow solver, second-order accurate in space and time, from AcuSim Corp. of Mountain View, CA. Relative mesh motion in the glottis is achieved using a sliding mesh technique. The code supports highly skewed cells, allowing glottal closure. The geometric configuration and flow conditions of the computed flow match the rigid vocal fold model experiments (4500<Re<11,000, 0.01<f*<0.06) reported by Krane et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. (2007)]. Details of the pressure and velocity fields and how they evolve with opening and closing of the glottis are presented, extending the information contained in the experimental database.
Prosodic features of Mandarin utterance final particles
Authors: Li Bin
Published: October 2013

Utterance final particles (UFPs) in Mandarin are generally regarded as discourse markers. The focus of this paper is two most frequently used UFPs: NE and A, which share overlapping discourse functions and may appear in identical utterances. From traditional discourse perspectives, NE has been described as functioning in a variety of ways, such as emphasizing, reminding, and retorting. Functions of A may include explaining, reminding, and affirming. These characteristics, more idiomatic than grammatical, pose difficulty in language processing and second language acquisition. This study proposes an acoustic approach to the study of these UFPs, and hypothesizes a trade-off relationship between the prosody of an utterance and a UFP. Our first aim is to investigate the prosodic features of utterances with and without particles, testing the hypothesis on a trade-off relationship between a UPF and its context. Our second aim is to compare across particles NE and A in search of categorizing acoustic correlates, as the two are among the most confused particles by Mandarin learners.
Numerical prediction of coherent integration time at 75 Hz, 0.03 s temporal resolution at 3250 km
Authors: Spiesberger John
Published: October 2013

Coherence time of sound is modeled for a 3250 km section in the Pacific at 75 Hz, 0.03 s resolution. The model is based on the temporal evolution of a standard spectrum of internal gravity waves and an accurate approximation for the acoustic wave equation. Modeled coherence time extends up to about 40 min. The probability is 0.6 that the signal-to-noise ratio first decreases at times of 13 min or less. Afterward, the s/n usually increases, reaching a peak near 40 min. The 40 min time is longer than experimentally reported coherence times of 12.7 min [J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 105, 3185–3201 (1999)]. The experimental value is similar to the modeled time of 13 min or less at which the probability is 0.6 for finding the s/n ratio to decrease for the first time. The experimental value of 12.7 min was found using a single Doppler correction speed yielding maximum output of the impulse response. Analysis of accelerations of the source and receiver indicates a variable Doppler correction scheme should be used to estimate coherence time. The experimental procedure for assuming a constant Doppler speed correction appears to be invalid. [Work supported by the ONR.]
Transverse coherence in a winter ocean
Authors: Mignerey Peter C.
Published: October 2013

In December 2003 an ocean acoustics experiment was conducted in 75 m of water on the New Jersey Shelf in a nearly isothermal ocean. Sources broadcast 300 and 500 Hz narrowband signals at 15 dB SNR along a 20 km range to a bottomed horizontal line array oriented transverse to the acoustic propagation path. Estimates of the mutual coherence function were obtained by ensemble averaging 137748 samples obtained over a period of 13 days, and compared to a canonical exponential form. It was found that the data were not properly described by an exponential. Rather, the data comprise two regimes: one with an exponential decay rate between 0.8–1.2 and coherence length of 12 wavelengths, the other with an exponential decay rate of 0.3 and coherence length of 27–166 wavelengths. The changeover between the two regimes occurs at hydrophone separations of 4–9 wavelengths. A scintillation index near one indicates that the acoustic fluctuations are dominated by phase variability. It is concluded that these data are not well-described by a simple exponential form and that work is necessary to develop an acoustic fluctuation theory appropriate for this environment. [Work supported by the Office of Naval Research.]
Holographic and conventional bistatic synthetic aperture sonar imaging of cylinders: Comparison and ray interpretation
Authors: Baik Kyungmin , Dudley Christopher , Marston Philip L.
Published: October 2013

When synthetic aperture sonar is used to image elastic targets, subtle features can be present in the images associated with the dynamical response of the target being viewed. In an effort to improve the understanding of such responses as well as to explore alternative image processing methods, a laboratory-based system was developed in which targets were illuminated by a transient acoustic source and bistatic responses were recorded by scanning a hydrophone along a horizontal line. Images were constructed using a relatively conventional bistatic SAS algorithm and were compared with images based on supersonic holography. The holographic method is a simplification of one previously used to view the time evolution of a target’s response [B. T. Hefner and P. L. Marston, ‘‘Acoustics Research Letters Online’’ 2, 55–60 (2001)]. In the holographic method, the time evolution of the cross-range image was used to construct a two-dimensional image with an effective range coordinate. Various features for cylindrical targets were interpreted using quantitative ray theory. This includes contributions from guided surface elastic waves as well as transmitted-wave features. [Work supported by the Office of Naval Research.]
The effect of non-Gaussian noise on detection of sinusoids in the ocean
Authors: Jemmott Colin W. , Culver R. Lee , Ballard Jeffrey A. , Sibul Leon H.
Published: October 2013

Passive sonar detection algorithms are often derived under the assumption that the signals of interest are embedded in additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). However, measurements of low-frequency ambient noise in the ocean are often poorly modeled by this distribution. Detectors derived under the AWGN assumption will suffer lower performance in the presence of non-Gaussian noise. In this paper, ambient noise is modeled using the generalized Gaussian distribution, a three-parameter distribution that can be adjusted so as to match many sources of low-frequency ambient ocean noise. The signal model is sinusoidal with known frequency and amplitude but random phase. Unfortunately, the resulting likelihood ratio is not mathematically tractable for this signal and noise model, so several approximations to the optimal detector are investigated. Using Monte Carlo simulation, the performance of the detectors is compared for a variety of signal and noise parameters.
Advantages of using diffracting cylinders and spheres in acoustic arrays
Authors: Gillett Philip W. , Johnson Marty , Carneal James
Published: October 2013

Acoustic arrays are designed using numerous geometries for different purposes. Line arrays provide for high beamformer gains in perpendicular directions, while circular and spherical arrays sacrifice those gains for the ability to discriminate between different sound source directions. Localization performance is limited to a specific frequency band governed by the geometry and spacing of the acoustic array elements. A different approach to acoustic array design is given involving the use of a rigid body as a mounting surface for the array elements. By placing elements directly onto a rigid object, the overall array performance is enhanced at lower frequencies, effectively producing a larger aperture than for a free field array of identical geometry. Evenly spacing elements around a cylinder allows nearly equal performance in all azimuth directions, enabling accurate bearing resolution on the plane of the array. Furthermore, placing elements around a rigid sphere produces an array that can provide both azimuth and elevation angles for incident sounds. To take advantage of potential performance increases, an inverse method approach is introduced that involves characterizing arrays in an anechoic environment and finding an inverse relationship to calculate bearing information from measured sound.
Localization and tracking of acoustic stimuli using millimetric artificial lateral line flow sensing arrays
Authors: Pandya Saunvit , Yang Yingchen , Liu Chang , Jones Douglas L.
Published: October 2013

We report on the successful development and implementation of acoustic dipole localization and tracking algorithms for millimeter-scale flow sensors arranged in an artificial lateral line configuration. Our previous work includes the development of an artificial lateral line system a novel, bioinspired flow sensing array. The artificial lateral line aims to mimic the lateral line sensory organ of many species of fish, an organ that allows the fish to perform near-field hydrodynamic imaging to navigate, capture prey, or align to a flow stream. Many of the stimuli that these fish sense can be modeled as near-field dipoles with widely understood acoustic signatures. In our previous work, we successfully developed an artificial lateral line using micro-flowsensors for applications such as dipole localization, wake tracking, and flow imaging. However, while the applications and the platform were both novel, potential uses were limited due to the size of the microsensors (and correspondingly the sensor arrays) as well as the limited distribution of the technology. In this paper, we show for the first time that a commercially available array can also be successfully used as an artificial lateral line for observing the above-mentioned phenomena, thereby enabling a new biomimetic millimeter-scale flow-sensing platform.
Granoff Music Center: A multipurpose facility.
Authors: Hoover K. Anthony , Moore Matthew
Published: October 2013

The Granoff Music Center at Tufts University is distinguished by its emphasis on classical, traditional, and world music. Completed in February 2007, it finally collects the entire Music Department under one roof after a century of inadequate office, rehearsal, and performance spaces that were scattered throughout the campus. Its intent was to house rehearsal and performance spaces whose acoustical environments are each distinctive so that the entire complex becomes multipurpose. Furthermore, the design essentially dismissed electroacoustic reinforcement or enhancement in favor of ‘‘natural’’ acoustics. This paper reviews the history, design, value engineering, and results of the facility, and the emergence and rapid escalation during construction of a multimedia program including multichannel recording, sound system, and A/V system features.
Perspectives on perceptual timing.
Authors: McAuley J. Devin
Published: October 2013

There has been a notable increase in research on the neural bases of timing in recent years. A focus of much of this work has been on identifying the locus and functional characteristics of a putative central clock mechanism under the assumptions that (1) both human and nonhuman animal timings involve similar pacemaker-accumulator mechanisms and (2) the functional characteristics of the internal clock are the same whether timing an isolated duration, such as a stoplight, or dancing to music, even though the latter requires perceiving a periodic beat, while the former does not. This talk presents research from an alternative dynamic perspective that emphasizes the importance of assessing (1) the timing of extended temporal sequences characteristic of music rather than isolated durations and (2) individual differences. [Work supported by the GRAMMY Foundation.]
Comparison of vowels in maternal speech to adults and to children with hearing loss.
Authors: Dilley Laura , Bergeson Tonya
Published: October 2013

Previous research has indicated that when speaking to normal-hearing children, maternal caregivers' speech is characterized by a vowel space which is expanded relative to that produced when speaking to other adults. The present study investigated the characteristics of the vowel spaces produced by mothers interacting with hearing-impaired children who had recently received a cochlear implant (CI), relative to those produced when interacting with another adult. Mothers were recorded interacting with their hearing-impaired children with CIs in quiet play sessions at 3- or 6-month interval postimplantation as well as in semistructured interviews with another adult. Measurements of F1 and F2 for the vowels /i/, /ɑ/, and /u/ in stressed syllables were taken, and the areas of the resulting vowel triangles for the two production conditions were compared. Preliminary results show that when speaking to their hearing-impaired children with CIs, vowel spaces of mothers were not expanded relative to when speaking to another adult. The results will be compared with vowel spaces produced to normal-hearing children and hearing-impaired children with hearing aids. These findings have implications for developing intervention strategies aimed at caregivers for improving speech and language skills in children with CIs. [Work supported by NIH-NIDCD R01DC008581.]
Online processing of acoustic cues used in speech perception: Comparing statistical and neural network models.
Authors: Toscano Joseph , McMurray Bob
Published: October 2013

Most phonological contrasts are signaled by multiple acoustic cues, yet it is unclear how these cues are combined during speech perception. Formal computational modeling offers a useful tool for studying this process. Two computational approaches are presented here. The first is a mixture of Gaussians (MOG) model that forms categories and combines cues based on their statistical distributions [Toscano and McMurray, Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society (2008)]. The second is a neural network model that combines statistical learning and dynamic online processing [McMurray and Spivey, Proceedings of the Chicago Linguistic Society (1999)]. Both the MOG and the network use the statistical distributions of speech sounds to form categories. The MOG offers transparency in that its categories correspond directly to distributional statistics measured from phonetic data. However, it does not capture the online processing observed in behavioral experiments that suggest that the speech system makes preliminary commitments before all cues are available [McMurray, Clayards, Tanenhaus, and Aslin (submitted)]. The network offers an approach that may allow us to observe this processing. Thus, while the MOG may better clarify the relationship between acoustics and phonological categories, the network may better model the process of speech perception. [Work supported by NIH.]
Categorization and generalization of multiple dimensions in nonspeech stimuli.
Authors: McGuire Grant
Published: October 2013

Nonspeech (NS) stimuli have seen considerable use for exploring linguistic perception questions. One problem with such studies is extrapolating results found using abstract sounds to specific linguistic phenomena. This paper reports a series of experiments using noise-tone pairs, which have all the advantages of NS sounds but also have sufficient similarity to speech sounds to make connections with linguistic data. These sounds were used in several perceptual learning experiments exploring categorization and generalization. Subjects were trained to categorize using a single dimension or two integrated dimensions and then asked to label different sets of novel stimuli to assess generalization and dimensional reliability. Preliminary results demonstrate that learned dimensions were preferred for categorizing novel sounds and that generalization of integrated dimensions depends strongly on the relationship between the two dimensions. These results are discussed in terms of linguistic categories and theories of perceptual learning.
A measurement survey of the acoustic conditions in home offices.
Authors: Christensen Megan J. , Wang Lily M.
Published: October 2013

As home offices are becoming more prevalent in our society, it is critical to ensure that the acoustic conditions in those environments are suitable for optimal home office worker performance. In this paper, a measurement survey is presented of existing conditions in several home offices within the metropolitan Omaha, Nebraska area. The data that were gathered include background noise levels (both with and without ventilation noise), air-borne sound attenuation of the office envelope, and logged data of the office sound levels during a typical 48-h period over the work week. Summaries of the findings will be discussed and are useful in understanding how residential design and construction should be modified to improve the acoustic conditions of home offices.
Acoustic and vibratory characterization of in-room footfall noise: Part 2.
Authors: Tanen Robert M. , Silver Jonathan C. , Vigeant Michelle C. , Celmer Robert D.
Published: October 2013

Prior to Phase I of this study [ J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 22], existing footfall literature was primarily focused on transmission between spaces, i.e., IIC. This study measured the sound power and vibratory spectra produced by footfalls using both human subjects and standard tapping machines. One tapper had rubber-tipped drop weights and the other had cored samples of shoe soles used by human participants. Within a reverberation room, 12 floor profiles were tested with the tapping machines. Human subjects were tested with three previously tested floors and a new floor profile. Fourteen male and female subjects walked on the floor surfaces while wearing three different types of footwear: leather-soled shoes (hard), rubber-soled shoes (medium), and sneakers (soft). Sound power spectra and vibratory signatures for each condition were measured using the procedures of ISO 3741. The current study verified repeatability from Phase I to Phase II, produced sound power footfall data for vinyl flooring applied directly to concrete, and developed improved correction curves to model tapping machines as human footfalls. Similarities between the rubber-tipped tapper and women's leather shoes and a comparison of sound power and corresponding vibratory signatures are discussed. [Worked supported by The Paul S. Veneklasen Research Foundation.]
Sound quality of laminate flooring systems.
Authors: Wilson James , Cunefare Kenneth
Published: October 2013

The laminate flooring industry identifies the ability of a laminate floor to recreate the sound of traditional hardwood floors as an important metric for their perceived quality and acceptance. The market describes the inability of laminate flooring to reproduce the natural sound of wood as a drawback to their market appeal. Therefore, if a laminate flooring composite can be offered to the market, which recreates the natural wood floor acoustic experience, the floor will offer additional value to the consumer. Products on the market today exist, which do improve the sound quality of laminate flooring composites. However, there is no unified standard to justify or prove marketing claims made by manufacturers. Prior work in the area focused on the spectral content of the signal. In the area of psychoacoustics, many additional metrics exist to describe the human perception of sound, which aids in describing sound quality. These metrics can be utilized to characterize the sound of traditional hardwood floors and laminate systems, beyond what has been done in previous work. By employing these metrics and then correlating them to subjective sound jury perception, it is possible to better predict the sound quality of a laminate floor.
Study of Lamb wave dispersion in porcine myocardium.
Authors: Nenadic Ivan , Urban Matthew , Greenleaf James
Published: October 2013

Diastolic dysfunction is the impaired ability of the left ventricle (LV) to passively fill during diastole and maintain its stroke volume at physiologic filling pressures and is associated with impaired relaxation and reduced compliance of LV. Knowledge of the quantitative values of the myocardial viscoelastic properties would improve the clinician’s ability to evaluate diastolic dysfunction in patients. To gain better understanding of the viscoelastic properties of the LV as a function of geometry, we studied Lamb wave propagation in different directions in excised porcine free-wall myocardium. The phantom consisting of a dissected porcine LV free-wall embedded in gelatin was fixed in a water tank. A mechanical shaker was used for harmonic excitation over a range of 40–500 Hz and a 7.5 MHz ultrasound transducer was used for motion measurements. Motion amplitude and phase at different depths of the sample were analyzed to obtain dispersion curves in four orthogonal directions. The data were fitted to the Lamb wave equations and shear elasticity and viscosity coefficients were estimated. The values of μ1 and μ2 were 13.75 ± 0.96 and 5.86 ± 0.75 Pa s. Our results suggest that the viscoelastic characteristics of the porcine LV free-wall in orthogonal directions were similar.
Development of a lung tissue fatigue and failure model.
Authors: Wochner Mark S. , Ilinskii Yurii A. , Hamilton Mark F. , Zabolotskaya Evgenia A.
Published: October 2013

The time-dependent nature of mammalian lung damage due to acoustic excitation at the lung resonance has been documented in recent experiments [Dalecki et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 116, 2560 (2004)]. A finite-element based model of human lung response to low-frequency underwater sound has been developed to calculate induced shear stresses and strains, but until now we have not attempted to simulate progressive damage. Unlike for many man-made materials, there are very little experimental data from which fatigue parameters can be calculated for soft tissue. This presentation discusses our investigation into methods of modeling the cyclic fatigue known to occur in mammalian lungs exposed to low-frequency underwater sound. Attempts will be made to correlate reported thresholds for lung damage to computational results obtained by our model. Discussions of the limitations of such an approach and future applications will be discussed. [Work supported by ONR]
Kinematics and kinetics of music-induced movement.
Authors: Toiviainen Petri
Published: October 2013

Music listening is often associated with spontaneous body movements, frequently synchronized with the musical beat. While there exists an extensive body of work on synchronization of tapping, spontaneous movements to music have been investigated to a much lesser extent. The present study investigated the kinematic and kinetic aspects of spontaneous movements using a high-resolution motion-capture system. Various kinematic variables were estimated from the data, while body-segment modeling was utilized to obtain estimates of kinetic variables, such as forms of mechanical energy as well as instantaneous power produced during the movements. Although the participants produced a wide variety of movement patterns, some commonalities between them were found. On the kinematic level, it was found that musical beat was most clearly represented by movements in the vertical direction. On the kinetic level, the instantaneous internal power of the body showed clear peaks at the instants of musical beat. The results indicate that, regardless of the wide variety of spontaneous movement patterns, musical beat tends to be associated with bursts of instantaneous muscular power. This could suggest that the perception of the temporal structure of music is associated with imitation-based corporeal representations.
Conductors’ temporal gestures: Spatio temporal cues for visually mediated synchronization.
Authors: Luck Geoff
Published: October 2013

A growing body of research utilizies computational feature-extraction methods to quantify both music and music-related movement. The use of signal processing and visualization techniques, for example, is widespread in the music information retrieval community. At the same time, similar techniques are being applied to the analysis of movement data acquired using motion capture systems and are being increasingly used to quantify both temporal and expressive movements of musicians and others engaged in music-related activity. One such activity is conducting, and this talk will focus on one specific aspect of this activity: how a conductor conveys the beat to musicians using gesture alone. A number of studies involving a variety of response paradigms, both movement and music feature extraction techniques, and both laboratory and live settings will be presented. Results of these studies suggest that perception of the beat is less related to spatial cues than it is to temporal cues, with periods of high acceleration along the trajectory of a gesture being the best predictor of perceived beat location. In other words, conductors communicate the beat primarily by varying the speed of movement along the trajectory, not by changing the direction of movement.
A hybrid model of timbre perception.
Authors: Terasawa Hiroko , Berger Jonathan
Published: October 2013

Timbre is a fundamental attribute of sound. It is important in differentiating between musical sounds, speech utterances, and characterizing everyday sounds in our environment as well as novel synthetic sounds. A hybrid model of timbre perception, which integrates the concepts of color and texture of sound, is proposed. The color of sound is described in terms of an instantaneous (or ideally timeless) spectral envelope, while the texture of a sound describes the temporal structure of the sound, as the sequential changes of color with an arbitrary range of time-scale. The computational implementation of this model represents a sound’s color as the spectral envelope of a specific window, and its texture as the granularity (or microtexture) of the corresponding window. The temporal structures across windows from both color and texture parts of the model serve as the texture of a sound in a larger time-scale. In support of the proposed theory a series of psychoacoutic experiments was performed. The quantitative relationship between the spectral envelope and subjective perception of complex tones used Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients as a representation. A perceptually tested quantitative representation of texture was established using normalized echo density.
Auditory roughness profiles and musical tension/release patterns in a Bosnian ganga song.
Authors: Vassilakis Pantelis , Kendall Roger A.
Published: October 2013

Within western musical tradition, auditory roughness constitutes one of the perceptual correlates of dissonance. In a previous study [P. N. Vassilakis (2006), “The worlds of music: Culture-dependent emotional reactions to an improvisation on the mijwiz,” Proceedings of the 51stSEM:, University of Hawaii, Manoa, HI, pp. 197– (2006) an application that calculates roughness profiles of musical pieces [P. N. Vassilakis, “SRA: An online tool for spectral and roughness analysis of sound signals,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 120, 3677 (2006)], based on a previously published roughness calculation model [P. N. Vassilakis, “Auditory roughness as means of musical expression,” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 12, 119–144 (2005)], was used to examine if and how tension/release patterns within a stylized improvisation on the Middle Eastern mijwiz relate to auditory roughness changes. An extension of that study, the present experiment, examines the relationship between roughness and tension/release patterns in a Bosnian ganga song. Patterns were obtained by a Bosnian ganga singer/scholar and by American-raised musicians in a perceptual experiment. Similarly to the mijwiz study, cultural background differences were associated with tension/release judgment differences as well as with differences between tension/release patterns and auditory roughness time profiles. The results provide further evidence that the concepts of musical tension and release and their relationship to auditory roughness are culture-specific.
Applying the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) ultrasonic noise ceiling values.
Authors: Lenhardt Martin
Published: October 2013

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) voted in 2003 to accept the American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH) increased threshold level values (TLVs) for airborne ultrasound from the more stringent levels set previously as a result of ultrasonic sickness studies reported in the 1960s. The impedance mismatch between the air and the body, which prevents most ultrasonic energy absorption, was the rationale. The TLVs were increased by 30 dB, unless solid or liquid coupling is possible, allowing the unintended transfer of acoustic energy into the worker. The TLVs were set based on two lines of evidence: (1) detectability of directly coupled ultrasound and damage reported from ultrasonic exposure. The risk of ultrasonic exposure underwater is also addressed in direct coupling to an ultrasonic source. The measurements needed are airborne sound pressure level up to 100 kHz, waterborne sound pressure up to 100 kHz, and high frequency vibration. Only a 2–5 dB threshold shift for 13–17 kHz for over three years has been reported after airborne exposure. The eye was found to be a window into the skull for ultrasonic energy, reducing the impedance mismatch to 33 dB, weakening the argument that high skin impedance is an acceptable barrier.
The presence of infrasound in our everyday life.
Authors: Lefkowitz Kimberly , Bommer Arno S. , Bruce Robert D.
Published: October 2013

There has been a great deal of research in the past ten years pertaining to infrasound. The effect on humans and animals of high levels of infrasound in both water and air has been studied. The effect of infrasound on structures was examined. In some situations, there has been paranoia over the effect of infrasound and, in other cases, infrasound has been overlooked completely when examining an acoustical problem. This study addresses an important element that remains to be studied, the prevalence of infrasound in a variety of locations. Infrasound was measured in a house, at a bus stop, at a typical office environment, and a variety of other situations that a typical person would be exposed to during the course of a week. These levels are then compared to less typical sites such as refineries, dredging areas, manufacturing plants, and community areas where noise complaints have been lodged. These comparisons give a preliminary understanding of peoples’ exposure to infrasound.
The sound field reproduction method based on the spacial covariances and its reproduction efficiency.
Authors: Hagiwara Hiroki , Takahashi Yoshinori , Tohyama Mikio , Miyoshi Kazunori
Published: October 2013

This paper describes a sound field reproduction method based on the spatial covariances. Wave surface control and convoluting the head related transfer function are major techniques for sound field reproduction. On the contrary, Takahashi and Tohyama, coauthors of this report, considered that the spatial impressions of a sound field, which we perceive through our ears, are reproduced by preserving the relative relationship between the observation points even if the wave surface is not completely controlled. Moreover, they proposed a new sound field reproduction method that can control the point-to-point covariance in a sound field [19th ICA, RBA15-012]. In this work, we demonstrated about the differences between the covariance based method and the conventional methods, such as stereophonic playback and boundary surface control based on the Kirchhoff–Helmholtz equation. Then, we discussed the performances of several methods on the point of view of reproductivity and device cost.
Influence of static force on bone conduction threshold measurement.
Authors: Brault Lynn , Han Woojae , Lansing Charissa , Chambers Ron , McNew Jared , Bellina Alessandro , O’Brien William D.
Published: October 2013

The influence of static force on bone conduction threshold measurement behavioral bone conduction thresholds are evaluated in clinical settings using a standard headband. The standard headband is designed to apply 5.4 N of static force to the oscillator (ANSI S3.6-1996 R2004), but in practice the static force varies with head size over a range of several Newtons. The influence of the varied force on behavioral thresholds is uncertain. These thresholds have clinical utility in determining the type and severity of hearing loss and research utility in modeling bone-conducted sound pathways. Behavioral bone conduction thresholds for a group of normal-hearing young adult listeners (ages 18–30) were obtained in 1-dB steps as a function of several force levels (2 N, 5 N, variable force) using custom-calibrated and standard headbands for mastoid and forehead oscillator placements across a frequency range from 250 to 8 kHz in sixth-octave bands. No significant differences in behavioral thresholds were obtained as a function of the static force levels tested, although the results supported previous findings that bone conduction thresholds are more sensitive for mastoid than forehead placement. The impact of static force levels on performance for speech understanding with bone conduction listening systems requires further study. [Work supported by AFOSR FA9550-06-0128.]
Interaction between speech coding and semantic predictability in speech perception.
Authors: Srinivasan Nirmal , Carrell Thomas D.
Published: October 2013

The present experiments investigated how humans process speech presented in the form low-passed natural sentences (5000 Hz), cell phone coded sentences, and computer synthesized sentences. Spin sentences [Kalikow et al., (1977) and Bilger et al., (1984)] were presented in a background of multispeaker babble using these three coding representations. Word accuracy and visual-motor task performance were measured. Intelligibility was based on the participants' accuracy in repeating the final word of the sentence. Attention was based on the participants' performance on the simultaneous pursuit rotor task [Srinivasan and Carrell (2007)]. In the pursuit rotor task, a stylus was used to maneuver a cursor on a computer display with the goal of keeping the cursor aligned as closely as possible to a moving target. Word accuracy was higher for predictable sentences than for unpredictable sentences for all three encodings. However, pursuit rotor performance showed a complex set of interactions. For example, participants performed better on the pursuit rotor task for unpredictable sentences than predictable sentences, but only for the cell phone speech not for natural or synthetic speech. The findings suggest that the perception of cell phone speech does not degrade the same way that natural or synthetic speech does.
Effect of level of presentation on scaled speech intelligibility of speakers with dysarthriafurther data.
Authors: Kim Yunjung , Weismer Gary , Kent Raymond , Duffy Joseph
Published: October 2013

This study seeks to examine the effect of level of presentation on scaling of speech intelligibility of speakers with dysarthria. Previous data [Kim et al. (2007)] reported the somewhat surprising result that different presentation levels do not cause a significant change in speech intelligibility scores of speakers with dysarthria, but do for healthy speakers. The current study reports further data using the same speech stimuli, however, with a main focus on the across-conditions effect of presentation level, since the previous data were limited to within-conditions effects. Four conditions of level of presentation were generated by varying absolute level of presentation (high and low) and normalizing each utterance for peak vowel intensity (adjusted and nonadjusted). In this presentation, we will report how scaled speech intelligibility is affected by the level of presentation of speech samples produced by speakers with various types and severity of dysarthria and by healthy speakers. The results of this study will be helpful to understand the rationale of speech therapy for dysarthria, especially considering the frequent use of speech intelligibility and speech therapy techniques designed based on intensity variation of speech. [Work supported by NIH DC00319 and internal fund from Louisiana State University.]
Alternative data analysis techniques when using the eye-tracking paradigm to investigate spoken word recognition.
Authors: McLennan Conor T.
Published: October 2013

Researchers have been using the eye-tracking paradigm as a tool for investigating the representations and processes involved in listeners’ perception of spoken words for over a decade now (thanks in large part to the work by Tanenhaus and colleagues). Moreover, this paradigm is becoming increasingly widespread, with the number eye-tracking researchers, laboratories and publications increasing rather substantially over the past few years. Although the eye-tracking paradigm has been used to investigate a number of different issues related to spoken word recognition, including lexical competition, parallel activation in bilinguals, and ambiguity resolution, most (if not all) of these studies use participants’ eye fixations as the unit of measurement when performing statistical analyses (e.g., fixations on a picture that corresponds to the spoken word heard during a trial). Fixations are a perfectly fine source of data; indeed we have learned a lot about spoken word recognition from studies performing analyses of fixation data. However, there are different ways to use fixations, as well as various alternative data analysis techniques, that researchers using the eye-tracking paradigm to investigate spoken word recognition may wish to consider. [Work was supported in part by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health (Grant No. 5 R03 DC 7316-4).]
Effects of noise, cognitive demand and lexical characteristics on word recognition by normal hearing native listeners.
Authors: Doty Astrid Zerla , Rogers Catherine L. , Bryant Judith Becker
Published: October 2013

Although listeners can adapt to many challenging listening conditions, the combined effects of multiple co-occurring challenges on speech understanding are less well known. The present study examines the combined effects of background noise, cognitive demand, and lexical characteristics on isolated word recognition. Young normal-hearing native English speakers heard six lists of 24 words, each composed of 12 lexically “easy” and 12 lexically “hard” target words in an open-set word identification task. Easy words had high target word frequency, few phonological neighbors, and low-neighborhood frequency; conversely, hard words had low frequency, many neighbors, and high-neighborhood frequency. Word lists were presented in quiet, in a moderate degree of background noise, and with or without a competing digit recall task. In the digit recall task, listeners saw three or six digits on the monitor prior to presentation of the word list and were asked to recall the digits at the end of the word recognition task. Word recognition scores and the size of the “easy” word benefit will be compared in quiet, in noise, and with and without the digit recall task. The accuracy of digit recall will also be compared across conditions of background noise and number of digits presented.
Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies: Sound isolation of unique curtain wall design.
Authors: Frangetto Polyana
Published: October 2013

The case study describes the challenges encountered in designing and building the curtain wall window system of the new Spertus Institute—ten-story building in Chicago, IL, designed by Krueck + Sexton Architects, opened in November 2007. The multifaceted glass facade, overlooking Michigan Avenue into Grant Park and Lake Michigan, is formed by complex folds in three dimensions and supported by a customized structural system. Noise isolation to the urban environment and between diverse program spaces along the building’s glass front such as exhibition galleries, library, administrative offices, multimedia classrooms, museum, children’s center, board room, space for community events and celebrations, and café is a high priority. Innovative design details were developed to preserve the vertical sound isolation from floor to floor along the jagged slab edges and to address the horizontal sound isolation between the sloped panes of glass. This paper presents in detail the program functions, design considerations, options explored, and test results of the final solution.
Studying white whale hearing and sound production at depth: Sam H. Ridgway acoustic research in the open sea.
Authors: Carder Donald A.
Published: October 2013

When cetacean hearing sensitivity at depth versus surface arose among anthropogenic ocean sound issues, Sam Ridgway advanced an approach using the first hearing tests of trained cetaceans in the open sea to provide an answer. Two trained white whales, Delphinapterus leucas, made 885 voluntary dives to a platform at depths from 5 to 300 m, stationing up to 12 min at a time to test the effects of depth on hearing and sound production. As depth increased, hearing sensitivity did not diminish, as in the aerial ears of humans and other terrestrial mammals tested in pressurized chambers. As whale hearing is unchanged by depth to at least 300 m, zones of influence on them are unaffected by depth. The whales were also trained to emit a pulse train, and then whistle to the presence of a small target. Echolocation pulses did not vary statistically in amplitude or frequency at depths between 5 and 300 m. However, the peak frequencies at the open ocean test site were at 4–40 kHz, where in San Diego Bay there were usually dual peaks at 30–80 and 100–120 kHz. Response whistles decreased in amplitude, and frequency emphasis shifted higher with a depth from 5 to 300 m.