Download Virtual Auditory Myography of Timpani-playing Avatars Music performance is highly related to instrumentalists’ movements and one of the biggest challenges is the identification and understanding of gesture strategies according to the plethora of musical nuances (dynamics, tempo, etc..) available to performers. During these past few years, a novel approach has been elaborated, consisting in studying movement strategies through auditory rendering. In this paper, we focus on the auditory analysis of timpani (percussion) gestures. We present a novel interface combining movement simulation and sonification as a means of enhancing the auditory analysis of timpani gestures. We further report the results from an evaluation of this interface, where we study the contributions of sonification to the multimodal display.
Download SpeakBySinging: Converting Singing Voices to Speaking Voices While Retaining Voice Timbre This paper describes a singing-to-speaking synthesis system called “SpeakBySinging” that can synthesize a speaking voice from an input singing voice and the song lyrics. The system controls three acoustic features that determine the difference between speaking and singing voices: the fundamental frequency (F0), phoneme duration, and power (volume). By changing these features of a singing voice, the system synthesizes a speaking voice while retaining the timbre of the singing voice. The system first analyzes the singing voice to extract the F0 contour, the duration of each phoneme of the lyrics, and the power. These features are then converted to target values that are obtained by feeding the lyrics into a traditional text-to-speech (TTS) system. The system finally generates a speaking voice that preserves the timbre of the singing voice but has speech-like features. Experimental results show that SpeakBySinging can convert singing voices into speaking voices whose timbre is almost the same as the original singing voices.
Download Soundscape and Sound Design - Tuning the New Ecology using the Expertise of People’s Mind The Soundscape concept was introduced as a scope to rethink the evaluation of "noise" and its effects. The challenge was to consider the limits of acoustic measurements and to account for its cultural dimension introduced by Schafer’s neologism and research. Soundscape suggests exploring noise in its complexity and its ambivalence and its approach towards sound to consider the conditions and purposes of its production, perception, and evaluation, to understand evaluation of noise/ sound as an holistic approach. To discuss the contribution of Soundscape research means to focus on the meaning of sounds and its implicit assessments to contribute to the understanding that the evaluation through perceptual effects is a key issue. Analysis will place sound in context, with noise and sound linked to activity at realistic study sites. Besides the acoustical setting the listener sensational reality depends on the sociocultural background and the psychological dimension. The acoustical socialization (acoustical biography) and action frame of reference of the people concerned will influence environmental noise evaluation as well. Tools for the exploration of the Soundscape, microscopic as well as macroscopic, are needed. Beside the involvement of different disciplines it important to define areas that should built the platform in further development as economics, noise policy-standards, combined effects, common protocols, cross cultural studies, education about Soundscape, combined measurement procedures, qualitative and quantitative parameters, including the character of sounds and cross cultural questionnaires, and also the importance of survey site selection has to be emphasized.
Download Physics-Based and Spike-Guided Tools for Sound Design In this paper we present graphical tools and parameters search algorithms for the timbre space exploration and design of complex sounds generated by physical modeling synthesis. The tools are built around a sparse representation of sounds based on Gammatone functions and provide the designer with both a graphical and an auditory insight. The auditory representation of a number of reference sounds, located as landmarks in a 2D sound design space, provides the designer with an effective aid to direct his search for new sounds. The sonic landmarks can either be synthetic sounds chosen by the user or be automatically derived by using clever parameter search and clustering algorithms. The proposed probabilistic method in this paper makes use of the sparse representations to model the distance between sparsely represented sounds. A subsequent optimization model minimizes those distances to estimate the optimal parameters, which generate the landmark sounds on the given auditory landscape.
Download Physically Based Sound Synthesis and Control of Footsteps Sounds We describe a system to synthesize in real-time footsteps sounds. The sound engine is based on physical models and physically inspired models reproducing the act of walking on several surfaces. To control the real-time engine, three solutions are proposed. The first two solutions are based on floor microphones, while the third one is based on shoes enhanced with sensors. The different solutions proposed are discussed in the paper.
Download Do You Hear a Bump or a Hole? An Experiment on Temporal Aspects in Footsteps Recognition In this paper, we present a preliminary experiment whose goal is to assess the role of temporal aspects in sonically simulating the act of walking on a bump or a hole. In particular, we investigate whether the timing between heel and toe and the timing between footsteps affects the perception of walking on unflat surfaces. Results show that it is possible to simulate a bump or a hole by only using temporal information in the auditory modality.
Download Frequency Shifting For Howling Suppression Acoustic feedback is capable of driving an electroacoustic amplification system unstable. Inserting a frequency shifter into the feedback loop can increase the maximum stable gain before instability. In this paper, we explain how frequency shifting can effectively smooth out the feedback loop magnitude response and how this relates to the system stability. Then we describe measurements on real acoustic systems that we employ to study the practical performance. Although useful for stabilizing systems in reverberant environments, reasonably small amounts of frequency shifting do not provide a significant benefit for hearing aids. It can be helpful to employ a microphone with a focused directivity pattern, and we describe how the directivity pattern may affect the efficacy of frequency shifting.
Download Investigation of Factors Influencing Acoutsic Characteristics in Geometric Acoustics Based Auralization Most room acoustics simulations and auralization techniques are based on geometric acoustic algorithms, commonly combining image-source and ray-tracing methods for impulse response calculation. This paper investigates the acoustics of a medieval English church and compares a geometric acoustic computer based auralization with measurements obtained from the actual space. More specifically, it focuses on the determination of the influence of different aspects and factors on typical objective room acoustic characteristics. These results are presented and then discussed in terms of how they can be improved and optimized when compared with the measured results.
Download MOSPALOSEP: A Platform for the Binaural Localization and Separation of Spatial Sounds using Models of Interaural Cues and Mixture Models In this paper, we present the MOSPALOSEP platform for the localization and separation of binaural signals. Our methods use short-time spectra of the recorded binaural signals. Based on a parametric model of the binaural mix, we exploit the joint evaluation of interaural cues to derive the location of each time-frequency bin. Then we describe different approaches to establish localization: some based on an energy-weighted histogram in azimuth space, and others based on an unsupervised number of sources identification of Gaussian mixture model combined with the Minimum Description Length. In this way, we use the revealed Gaussian Mixture Model structure to identify the particular region dominated by each source in a multi-source mix. A bank of spatial masks allows the extraction of each source according to the posterior probability or to the Maximum Likelihood binary masks. An important condition is the Windowed-Disjoint Orthogonality of the sources in the time-frequency domain. We assess the source separation algorithms specifically on instruments mix, where this fundamental condition is not satisfied.
Download Exploring Phase Information in Sound Source Separation Applications Separation of instrument sounds from polyphonic music recordings is a desirable signal processing function with a wide variety of applications in music production, video games and information retrieval. In general, sound source separation algorithms attempt to exploit those characteristics of audio signals that differentiate one from the other. Many algorithms have studied spectral magnitude as a means for separation tasks. Here we propose the exploration of phase information of musical instrument signals as an alternative dimension in discriminating sound signals originating from different sources. Three cases are presented: (1) Phase contours of musical instruments notes as potential separation features. (2) Resolving overlapping harmonics using phase coupling properties of musical instruments. (3) Harmonic percussive decomposition using calculated radian ranges for each frequency bin.