Determinants of International Sound Recording Piracy

Examines the relative strength and significance of a range of institutional and economic variables thought to influence cross-country variations in sound recording piracy market share. Sound recording piracy imposes significant costs on copyright owners, including record companies, music publishers, recording artists and songwriters. The contribution of this paper is the central role allocated to the affordability index (the ratio of legitimate price to average hourly earnings) and to the balance of trade in sound recording product. The estimated regression model identifies a positive and significant relationship between sound recording PMS and the price-earnings (PE) ratio.

Blood pressure measuring system for separating and separately recording dc signal and an ac signal Patent

Blood pressure measuring system for separately recording dc and ac pressure signals of Korotkoff sound

A joint separation-classification model for sound event detection of weakly labelled data

Source separation (SS) aims to separate individual sources from an audio recording. Sound event detection (SED) aims to detect sound events from an audio recording. We propose a joint separation-classification (JSC) model trained only on weakly labelled audio data, that is, only the tags of an audio recording are known but the time of the events are unknown. First, we propose a separation mapping from the time-frequency (T-F) representation of an audio to the T-F segmentation masks of the audio events. Second, a classification mapping is built from each T-F segmentation mask to the presence probability of each audio event. In the source separation stage, sources of audio events and time of sound events can be obtained from the T-F segmentation masks. The proposed method achieves an equal error rate (EER) of 0.14 in SED, outperforming deep neural network baseline of 0.29. Source separation SDR of 8.08 dB is obtained by using global weighted rank pooling (GWRP) as probability mapping, outperforming the global max pooling (GMP) based probability mapping giving SDR at 0.03 dB. Source code of our work is published.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 201

Nonparametric estimation of the dynamic range of music signals

The dynamic range is an important parameter which measures the spread of sound power, and for music signals it is a measure of recording quality. There are various descriptive measures of sound power, none of which has strong statistical foundations. We start from a nonparametric model for sound waves where an additive stochastic term has the role to catch transient energy. This component is recovered by a simple rate-optimal kernel estimator that requires a single data-driven tuning. The distribution of its variance is approximated by a consistent random subsampling method that is able to cope with the massive size of the typical dataset. Based on the latter, we propose a statistic, and an estimation method that is able to represent the dynamic range concept consistently. The behavior of the statistic is assessed based on a large numerical experiment where we simulate dynamic compression on a selection of real music signals. Application of the method to real data also shows how the proposed method can predict subjective experts' opinions about the hifi quality of a recording

Ars Informatica -- Ars Electronica: Improving Sonification Aesthetics

In this paper we discuss æsthetic issues of sonifications. We posit that many sonifications have suffered from poor acoustic ecology which makes listening more difficult, thereby resulting in poorer data extraction and inference on the part of the listener. Lessons are drawn from the electro acoustic music community as we argue that it is not instructive to distinguish between sonifications and music/sound art. Edgar Var`ese defined music as organised sound and sonifications organise sound to reflect some aspect of the thing being sonified. Therefore, we propose that sonification designers can improve the communicative ability of their auditory displays by paying attention to the æsthetic issues that are well known to composers, orchestrators, sound designers & artists, and recording engineers

"Set phasors to stun": an algorithm to improve phase coherence on transients in multi-microphone recordings

Ever since the advent of multi-microphone recording, sound engineers have wrestled with the colouration of sound by phasing issues. For some this was an anathema; for others this colouration was a crucial ingredient of the finished product. Traditionally, delicate microphone placement was essential, with subtle movements and tilts allowing the producer/engineer to determine when a sound was “in phase” based on perception alone. More recently, DAW’s have allowed us to view multiple waveforms and manually nudge them into coherence with visual feedback now supporting the aural, although still a manual process. This paper will present an algorithm that allows automatic correction of phase via a unique Max/MSP patch operating on multiple audio components simultaneously. With a single button push, the producer can now hear a stereo recording with maximum coherence and thus make an artistic judgment as to whether the “ideal” is ideal, or better to pursue naturally occurring phase colouration in preference. In addition, the patch allows zoning in to spatially separated sound sources, eg tuning drum kit overheads to phase lock with the snare drum or hi-hat microphone. Audio examples will be played and the patch demonstrated in action. Limiting factors, contexts and applications will also be discussed

Natural sounds : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Philosophy at Massey University

Natural sounds, as one of the most important resources of nature, have attracted attention from many researchers. Although, psychological approaches, acoustical approaches and psychoacoustical approaches have been employed on the research of natural sounds, not many analytical investigations have been conducted on specific natural sounds except for the biological natural sounds. The aim of this study is to present the properties and reveal the generation mechanisms of the selected natural sounds. This thesis concentrated on studying the characteristics of various specific natural sounds by acoustical approach. Field recording has been mainly adopted for the collection of sound samples. For the selected samples, computational analyses were conducted to investigate the attributes of the sounds. Sound signatures including waveform, frequency spectrum and sonogram were displayed to visualize the analyzed signals. The generation mechanisms were reviewed and discussed to reveal the variables that contribute to the sound characteristics. Sound samples including cavity wind sound, aeolian sound, wind sound through vegetation, thunder clap, thunder rumble, thunder crack, plunging breaker sound, spilling breaker sound, rock wave sound, boiling mud pot sound, geyser eruption sound, fumaroles eruption sound and different bubble sounds were selected and analyzed to reveal their properties