Consonance of Vibrotactile Chords

This paper is concerned with the perception of complex vibrotactile stimuli in which a few sinusoidal vibrations with different frequencies are superimposed. We begin with an observation that such vibrotactile signals are analogous to musical chords in which multiple notes are played simultaneously. A set of so-called "vibrotactile chords" are designed on the basis of musical chords, and their degrees of consonance (harmony) that participants perceive are evaluated through a perceptual experiment. Experimental results indicate that participants can reliably rate the degrees of consonance of vibrotactile chords and establish a well-defined function that relates the degree of consonance to the base and chordal frequency of a vibrotactile chord. These findings have direct implications for the design of complex vibrotactile signals that can be produced by current wideband actuators such as voice-coil, piezoelectric, and electroactive polymer actuators.X111111Ysciescopu

An exploration on whole-body and foot-based vibrotactile sensitivity to melodic consonance

Consonance is a distinctive attribute of musical sounds, for which a psychophysical explanation has been found leading to the critical band perceptual model. Recently this model has been hypothesized to play a role also during tactile perception. In this paper the sensitivity to vibrotactile consonance was subjectively tested in musicians and non-musicians. Before the test, both such groups listened to twelve melodic intervals played with a bass guitar. After being acoustically isolated, participants were exposed to the same intervals in the form of either a whole-body or foot-based vibrotactile stimulus. On each trial they had to identify whether an interval was ascending, descending or unison. Musicians were additionally asked to label every interval using standard musical nomenclature. The intervals identification as well as their labeling was above chance, but became progressively more uncertain for decreasing consonance and when the stimuli were presented underfoot. Musicians\u2019 labeling of the stimuli was incorrect when dissonant vibrotactile intervals were presented underfoot. Compared to existing literature on auditory, tactile and multisensory perception, our results reinforce the idea that vibrotactile musical consonance plays a perceptual role in both musicians and non-musicians. Might this role be the result of a process occurring at central and/or peripheral level, involving or not activation of the auditory cortex, concurrent reception from selective somatosensory channels, correlation with residual auditory information reaching the basilar membrane through bone conduction, is a question our preliminary exploration leaves open to further research work

16th Sound and Music Computing Conference SMC 2019 (28–31 May 2019, Malaga, Spain)

The 16th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC 2019) took place in Malaga, Spain, 28-31 May 2019 and it was organized by the Application of Information and Communication Technologies Research group (ATIC) of the University of Malaga (UMA). The SMC 2019 associated Summer School took place 25-28 May 2019. The First International Day of Women in Inclusive Engineering, Sound and Music Computing Research (WiSMC 2019) took place on 28 May 2019. The SMC 2019 TOPICS OF INTEREST included a wide selection of topics related to acoustics, psychoacoustics, music, technology for music, audio analysis, musicology, sonification, music games, machine learning, serious games, immersive audio, sound synthesis, etc

Los caminos compartidos del tacto y el sonido hacia la emoción: Evidencias neurocientíficas actuales

The most representative characteristic of music is its capacity to generate emotion. But why does music excite you? In this article, we review the current knowledge from music theory and neuroscience that attempts to explain the relationship between music and emotion. First, we consider how the different musical parameters contribute to the generation of emotions from the perspective of the musical structures of our western world. Secondly, it reviews current knowledge about the processing of musical sounds in the brain and possible explanations for the evolutionary origin of music. Finally, the tactile channel is considered a viable channel of transmission of musical emotion analogous to the auditory channel but with more limitations in frequency discrimination. This approach is based on the deep fascination with music and all the enigmas surrounding it.La característica más representativa de la música es su capacidad de generar emoción. Pero ¿por qué la música emociona? En este artículo mostramos los conocimientos actuales de la teoría musical y la neurociencia que intentan explicar las relaciones que existen entre la música y las emociones. En primer lugar, se repasan los conocimientos actuales sobre el procesamiento de los sonidos musicales a nivel cerebral y las posibles explicaciones del origen de la emoción musical, así como la contribución de los distintos parámetros musicales a la generación de emociones, considerando estructuras musicales de nuestro mundo occidental. En segundo lugar, se presenta el canal táctil como un posible canal de transmisión de la emoción musical análogo al canal auditivo, pero con más limitaciones en la discriminación de frecuencias. Este acercamiento se produce desde la profunda fascinación que ejerce la música, con la esperanza de encontrar vías para explicar la transmisión de la emoción musical desde un canal alternativo

Discriminability of simple and complex haptic vibrations in single-cell computational and human psychophysical settings

University of Minnesota M.S. thesis.July 2017. Major: Biomedical Engineering. Advisor: Victor Barocas. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 79 pages.A multiscale, multiphysics model of the Pacinian Corpuscle (PC) was used to study the neurophysiological response to haptic vibrations in the 100-200Hz range. The computational results were compared to human psychophysical experiments, emulating the pairing of psychophysics with in vivo electrophysiology in PC research. A first assessment of this approach was made by examining the discriminability (dꞌ) of pairs of vibrotactile stimuli. The discrimination task was performed psychophysically and in silico for both one- and two-frequency stimuli. Both firing rate and inter-spike interval neural decoding schemes were used to calculate dꞌ from simulation data. Human subjects discriminated between frequencies with two components (complex stimuli) more effectively than isolated frequencies (simple stimuli), possibly due to the presence of beat frequencies in dissonant stimuli. Over a given stimulus set, in silico dꞌ values correlated well with the psychophysical data (R2 > 0.6), but when the simple and complex data were combined the model did not match the experiment (R2 < 0.1). Firing rate resulted in better predictions than inter-spike interval, and was more robust to noise. Results suggest that a single simulated PC can capture some but not all of the observed psychophysical response to a vibrotactile stimulus

Infrasonority: exploration of sound energy below 20Hz in music

A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Music (MMus in Composition), 2017This thesis investigates an underdeveloped and little explored area of music and the arts: the use of infrasound (frequencies below 20Hz) as musical material in creative composition. Discussions, research and experiments conducted toward the prospect of exposing infrasonic characteristics were fundamental to the composition and recital that informed the thesis. The infrasonic material from which the composition was created contained synthesized wave forms, recordings of elephant vocalisation and thunderstorms. The infrasonic reproduction for the concert required explicit attention and enquiry regarding physical properties of the sonic phenomenon, equipment infrastructure and limitations in human perception.XL201

Vibrotactile perception of musical pitch

Previous vibrotactile research has provided little or no definitive results on the discrimination and identification of important pitch aspects for musical performance such as relative and absolute pitch. In this thesis, psychophysical experiments using participants with and without hearing impairments have been carried out to determine vibrotactile detection thresholds on the fingertip and foot, as well as assess the perception of relative and absolute vibrotactile musical pitch. These experiments have investigated the possibilities and limitations of the vibrotactile mode for musical performance. Over the range of notes between C1 (32.7Hz) and C6 (1046.5Hz), no significant difference was found between the mean vibrotactile detection thresholds in terms of displacement for the fingertip of participants with normal hearing and with severe/profound hearing impairments. These thresholds have been used to identify an optimum dynamic range in terms of frequency-weighted acceleration to safely present vibrotactile music. Assuming a practical level of stimulation ≈10dB above the mean threshold, the dynamic range was found to vary between 12 and 27dB over the three-octave range from C2 to C5. Results on the fingertip indicated that temporal cues such as the transient and continuous parts of notes are important when considering the perception of vibrotactile pitch at suprathreshold levels. No significant difference was found between participants with normal hearing and with severe/profound hearing impairments in the discrimination of vibrotactile relative pitch from C3 to C5 using the fingertip without training. For participants with normal hearing, the mean percentage of correct responses in the post-training test was greater than 70% for intervals between four and twelve semitones using the fingertip and three to twelve semitones using the forefoot. Training improved the correct responses for larger intervals on fingertips and smaller intervals on forefeet. However, relative pitch discrimination for a single semitone was difficult, particularly with the fingertip. After training, participants with normal hearing significantly improved in the discrimination of relative pitch with the fingertip and forefoot. However, identifying relative and absolute pitch was considerably more demanding and the training sessions that were used had no significant effect

Music in Research and Rehabilitation of Disorders of Consciousness: Psychological and Neurophysiological Foundations

According to a prevailing view, the visual system works by dissecting stimuli into primitives, whereas the auditory system processes simple and complex stimuli with their corresponding features in parallel. This makes musical stimulation particularly suitable for patients with disorders of consciousness (DoC), because the processing pathways related to complex stimulus features can be preserved even when those related to simple features are no longer available. An additional factor speaking in favor of musical stimulation in DoC is the low efficiency of visual stimulation due to prevalent maladies of vision or gaze fixation in DoC patients. Hearing disorders, in contrast, are much less frequent in DoC, which allows us to use auditory stimulation at various levels of complexity. The current paper overviews empirical data concerning the four main domains of brain functioning in DoC patients that musical stimulation can address: perception (e.g., pitch, timbre, and harmony), cognition (e.g., musical syntax and meaning), emotions, and motor functions. Music can approach basic levels of patients’ self-consciousness, which may even exist when all higher-level cognitions are lost, whereas music induced emotions and rhythmic stimulation can affect the dopaminergic reward-system and activity in the motor system respectively, thus serving as a starting point for rehabilitation