Effects of errorless learning on the acquisition of velopharyngeal movement control

Session 1pSC - Speech Communication: Cross-Linguistic Studies of Speech Sound Learning of the Languages of Hong Kong (Poster Session)The implicit motor learning literature suggests a benefit for learning if errors are minimized during practice. This study investigated whether the same principle holds for learning velopharyngeal movement control. Normal speaking participants learned to produce hypernasal speech in either an errorless learning condition (in which the possibility for errors was limited) or an errorful learning condition (in which the possibility for errors was not limited). Nasality level of the participants’ speech was measured by nasometer and reflected by nasalance scores (in %). Errorless learners practiced producing hypernasal speech with a threshold nasalance score of 10% at the beginning, which gradually increased to a threshold of 50% at the end. The same set of threshold targets were presented to errorful learners but in a reversed order. Errors were defined by the proportion of speech with a nasalance score below the threshold. The results showed that, relative to errorful learners, errorless learners displayed fewer errors (50.7% vs. 17.7%) and a higher mean nasalance score (31.3% vs. 46.7%) during the acquisition phase. Furthermore, errorless learners outperformed errorful learners in both retention and novel transfer tests. Acknowledgment: Supported by The University of Hong Kong Strategic Research Theme for Sciences of Learning © 2012 Acoustical Society of Americapublished_or_final_versio

Designing Sound for Social Robots: Advancing Professional Practice through Design Principles

Sound is one of the core modalities social robots can use to communicate with the humans around them in rich, engaging, and effective ways. While a robot's auditory communication happens predominantly through speech, a growing body of work demonstrates the various ways non-verbal robot sound can affect humans, and researchers have begun to formulate design recommendations that encourage using the medium to its full potential. However, formal strategies for successful robot sound design have so far not emerged, current frameworks and principles are largely untested and no effort has been made to survey creative robot sound design practice. In this dissertation, I combine creative practice, expert interviews, and human-robot interaction studies to advance our understanding of how designers can best ideate, create, and implement robot sound. In a first step, I map out a design space that combines established sound design frameworks with insights from interviews with robot sound design experts. I then systematically traverse this space across three robot sound design explorations, investigating (i) the effect of artificial movement sound on how robots are perceived, (ii) the benefits of applying compositional theory to robot sound design, and (iii) the role and potential of spatially distributed robot sound. Finally, I implement the designs from prior chapters into humanoid robot Diamandini, and deploy it as a case study. Based on a synthesis of the data collection and design practice conducted across the thesis, I argue that the creation of robot sound is best guided by four design perspectives: fiction (sound as a means to convey a narrative), composition (sound as its own separate listening experience), plasticity (sound as something that can vary and adapt over time), and space (spatial distribution of sound as a separate communication channel). The conclusion of the thesis presents these four perspectives and proposes eleven design principles across them which are supported by detailed examples. This work contributes an extensive body of design principles, process models, and techniques providing researchers and designers with new tools to enrich the way robots communicate with humans

Audio for Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Realities: Proceedings of ICSA 2019 ; 5th International Conference on Spatial Audio ; September 26th to 28th, 2019, Ilmenau, Germany

The ICSA 2019 focuses on a multidisciplinary bringing together of developers, scientists, users, and content creators of and for spatial audio systems and services. A special focus is on audio for so-called virtual, augmented, and mixed realities. The fields of ICSA 2019 are: - Development and scientific investigation of technical systems and services for spatial audio recording, processing and reproduction / - Creation of content for reproduction via spatial audio systems and services / - Use and application of spatial audio systems and content presentation services / - Media impact of content and spatial audio systems and services from the point of view of media science. The ICSA 2019 is organized by VDT and TU Ilmenau with support of Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology IDMT

AXMEDIS 2008

The AXMEDIS International Conference series aims to explore all subjects and topics related to cross-media and digital-media content production, processing, management, standards, representation, sharing, protection and rights management, to address the latest developments and future trends of the technologies and their applications, impacts and exploitation. The AXMEDIS events offer venues for exchanging concepts, requirements, prototypes, research ideas, and findings which could contribute to academic research and also benefit business and industrial communities. In the Internet as well as in the digital era, cross-media production and distribution represent key developments and innovations that are fostered by emergent technologies to ensure better value for money while optimising productivity and market coverage

Spatial Multizone Soundfield Reproduction Design

It is desirable for people sharing a physical space to access different multimedia information streams simultaneously. For a good user experience, the interference of the different streams should be held to a minimum. This is straightforward for the video component but currently difficult for the audio sound component. Spatial multizone soundfield reproduction, which aims to provide an individual sound environment to each of a set of listeners without the use of physical isolation or headphones, has drawn significant attention of researchers in recent years. The realization of multizone soundfield reproduction is a conceptually challenging problem as currently most of the soundfield reproduction techniques concentrate on a single zone. This thesis considers the theory and design of a multizone soundfield reproduction system using arrays of loudspeakers in given complex environments. We first introduce a novel method for spatial multizone soundfield reproduction based on describing the desired multizone soundfield as an orthogonal expansion of formulated basis functions over the desired reproduction region. This provides the theoretical basis of both 2-D (height invariant) and 3-D soundfield reproduction for this work. We then extend the reproduction of the multizone soundfield over the desired region to reverberant environments, which is based on the identification of the acoustic transfer function (ATF) from the loudspeaker over the desired reproduction region using sparse methods. The simulation results confirm that the method leads to a significantly reduced number of required microphones for an accurate multizone sound reproduction compared with the state of the art, while it also facilitates the reproduction over a wide frequency range. In addition, we focus on the improvements of the proposed multizone reproduction system with regard to practical implementation. The so-called 2.5D multizone oundfield reproduction is considered to accurately reproduce the desired multizone soundfield over a selected 2-D plane at the height approximately level with the listener’s ears using a single array of loudspeakers with 3-D reverberant settings. Then, we propose an adaptive reverberation cancelation method for the multizone soundfield reproduction within the desired region and simplify the prior soundfield measurement process. Simulation results suggest that the proposed method provides a faster convergence rate than the comparative approaches under the same hardware provision. Finally, we conduct the real-world implementation based on the proposed theoretical work. The experimental results show that we can achieve a very noticeable acoustic energy contrast between the signals recorded in the bright zone and the quiet zone, especially for the system implementation with reverberation equalization

Evaluating the Perceived Quality of Binaural Technology

This thesis studies binaural sound reproduction from both a technical and a perceptual perspective, with the aim of improving the headphone listening experience for entertainment media audiences. A detailed review is presented of the relevant binaural technology and of the concepts and methods for evaluating perceived quality. A pilot study assesses the application of state-of-the-art binaural rendering systems to existing broadcast programmes, finding no substantial improvements in quality over conventional stereo signals. A second study gives evidence that realistic binaural simulation can be achieved without personalised acoustic calibration, showing promise for the application of binaural technology. Flexible technical apparatus is presented to allow further investigation of rendering techniques and content production processes. Two web-based studies show that appropriate combination of techniques can lead to improved experience for typical audience members, compared to stereo signals, even without personalised rendering or listener head-tracking. Recent developments in spatial audio applications are then discussed. These have made dynamic client-side binaural rendering with listener head-tracking feasible for mass audiences, but also present technical constraints. To limit distribution bandwidth and computational complexity during rendering, loudspeaker virtualisation is widely used. The effects on perceived quality of these techniques are studied in depth for the first time. A descriptive analysis experiment demonstrates that loudspeaker virtualisation during binaural rendering causes degradations to a range of perceptual characteristics and that these vary across other system conditions. A final experiment makes novel use of the check-all-that-apply method to efficiently characterise the quality of seven spatial audio representations and associated dynamic binaural rendering techniques, using single sound sources and complex dramatic scenes. The perceived quality of these different representations varies significantly across a wide range of characteristics and with programme material. These methods and findings can be used to improve the quality of current binaural technology applications

Theory and Design of Spatial Active Noise Control Systems

The concept of spatial active noise control is to use a number of loudspeakers to generate anti-noise sound waves, which would cancel the undesired acoustic noise over a spatial region. The acoustic noise hazards that exist in a variety of situations provide many potential applications for spatial ANC. However, using existing ANC techniques, it is difficult to achieve satisfying noise reduction for a spatial area, especially using a practical hardware setup. Therefore, this thesis explores various aspects of spatial ANC, and seeks to develop algorithms and techniques to promote the performance and feasibility of spatial ANC in real-life applications. We use the spherical harmonic analysis technique as the basis for our research in this work. This technique provides an accurate representation of the spatial noise field, and enables in-depth analysis of the characteristics of the noise field. Incorporating this technique into the design of spatial ANC systems, we developed a series of algorithms and methods that optimizes the spatial ANC systems, towards both improving noise reduction performance and reducing system complexity. Several contributions of this work are: (i) design of compact planar microphone array structures capable of recording 3D spatial sound fields, so that the noise field can be monitored with minimum physical intrusion to the quiet zone, (ii) derivation of a Direct-to-Reverberant Energy Ratio (DRR) estimation algorithm which can be used for evaluating reverberant characteristics of a noisy environment, (iii) propose a few methods to estimate and optimize spatial noise reduction of an ANC system, including a new metric for measuring spatial noise energy level, and (iv) design of an adaptive spatial ANC algorithm incorporating the spherical harmonic analysis technique. The combination of these contributions enables the design of compact, high performing spatial ANC systems for various applications

Communicating through sound in museum exhibitions: unravelling a field of practice

The twentieth century was the stage for several phenomena which have paved the way for museums to start exhibiting sound and to nurture a vivid and increasing interest in its potentialities. The burgeoning of sound recording technologies stands as a milestone in this respect. These have allowed sound to become a physical object and, hence, new understandings and conceptualizations to emerge. In the wake of these developments, the ways in which museum curators look at sound has gone into a huge reconfiguration. The fact that both new museology and museum practice have been turning their attention to and focus on the visitor has similarly accelerated the curators’ interest in sound as a means to build museum exhibitions. One of the latest and most striking instances in this process has been the role of ethnomusicology and sound studies in demonstrating the cultural, social, political, economic and ethical significance of sound thereby stimulating museum’s interest in dealing with sound as a mode to build both individual subjectivities and communities in museum settings. The development of audio technologies and digital and multisensorial technologies (Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality) also plays a part in this process. These have the merit to provide ways to deal with the elusiveness of sound when exhibited in museum galleries and to facilitate interactions underpinned by rationales such as experience, embodiment, and emplacement. During at least the last ten years, there has been a boost in the development of sound-based multimodal museum practices. These practices, nonetheless, have yet to be mapped, and their representational and experiential (emotional and sensorial) opportunities to be closely analysed. My thesis strives to start closing this gap by taking two analytical steps. Based on the analysis of 69 sound-based multimodal museum exhibitions staged in Europe and in the United States of America, I provide a five-use framework categorizing sound-based multimodal museum practices into sound as a “lecturing” mode, sound as an artefact, sound as “ambiance”/soundtrack, sound as art, and sound as a mode for crowd-curation. The case-study of sound art The Visitors, it unravels the communicative potential of sound for museums. In detail, the analysis stresses how sound and space comingle to articulate individual subjectivities and a sense of “togetherness.” The scope of the thesis is clearly multidisciplinary, encompassing ethnomusicology, sound studies, museum studies, and social semiotics. Overall, I seek to contribute towards the development of the study of sound in museums to develop and establish as a cohesive research field. I moreover seek to foster a sensory formation shift from a visual epistemology to one that merges the visual and the auditory.O século XX foi palco de vários fenómenos que conduziram a que os museus começassem a expor o som e a demonstrar um interesse crescente pelas suas potencialidades comunicativas. O aparecimento das tecnologias de gravação sonora constitui-se como um momento fundamental neste processo. Ao permitirem que o som se estabeleça enquanto objeto físico, vieram potenciar o aparecimento de novos entendimentos e conceptualizações sobre o som. Na sequência destes acontecimentos, a forma como os curadores de exposições começaram a olhar para o som sofreu grandes alterações. Simultaneamente, o facto de tanto os estudos museológicos como a prática museológica estarem cada vez mais preocupados com o visitante veio também acelerar o interesse dos curadores pelo som como meio para construir exposições museológicas. Os estudos musicais, em particular a etnomusicologia e os estudos de som, tiveram igualmente um papel preponderante: ao demonstrarem o valor cultural, social, político, económico e ético do som vieram claramente estimular o interesse dos curadores em usar o som como material para trabalhar noções de identidade, subjectividade e “comunhão.” É ainda de destacar o papel que o desenvolvimento de tecnologias áudio, digitais e multisensoriais (Realidade Virtual, Realidade Aumentada e Realidade Mista) têm no processo. Ao proporcionarem formas de lidar com a imaterialidade do som quando exposto em galerias, vieram também fomentar interações museológicas sustentadas pela experiência. Nos últimos dez anos, os museus têm, pois, assistido ao incrementar das práticas museológicas multimodais baseadas no som. O mapeamento e a categorização destas práticas, bem como o estudo das suas potencialidades narrativas e experienciais (emocionais e sensoriais), no entanto, está claramente por determinar. A minha tese visa dar início ao colmatar desta lacuna através de dois passos: providenciar uma estrutura classificativa das práticas multimodais baseadas em som com base na análise de 69 exposições que tiveram lugar nos últimos dez anos na Europa e nos Estados Unidos da América. A estrutura compreende as seguintes categorias: som como um modo "discursivo," som como artefacto, som como "ambiance"/banda sonora, som como arte, e som como curadoria partilhada. Simultaneamente, dar início ao desvendar do potencial comunicativo do som para exposições museológicas através do estudo de caso de arte sonora The Visitors. A análise deste estudo de caso veio demonstrar que som, em articulação com o espaço permitem trabalhar noções de identidade, subjetividade, e ainda de “comunhão.” O âmbito da tese é claramente multidisciplinar e engloba a etnomusicologia, os estudos de som, os estudos museológicos e a semiótica social. De uma forma geral, com a minha dissertação procuro contribuir para o desenvolvimento e o estabelecimento do estudo do uso do som nos museus como um campo de investigação multidisciplinar e coeso. Procuro ainda potenciar uma mudança de formação sensorial nos museus, em particular, estimular a passagem de uma epistemologia visual para uma epistemologia simultaneamente visual e auditiva

Extended Abstracts

Presented at the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2015), July 6-10, 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria.Mark Ballora “Two examples of sonification for viewer engagement: Hurricanes and squirrel hibernation cycles” / Stephen Barrass, “ Diagnostic Singing Bowls” / Natasha Barrett, Kristian Nymoen. “Investigations in coarticulated performance gestures using interactive parameter-mapping 3D sonification” / Lapo Boschi, Arthur Paté, Benjamin Holtzman, Jean-Loïc le Carrou. “Can auditory display help us categorize seismic signals?” / Cédric Camier, François-Xavier Féron, Julien Boissinot, Catherine Guastavino. “Tracking moving sounds: Perception of spatial figures” / Coralie Diatkine, Stéphanie Bertet, Miguel Ortiz. “Towards the holistic spatialization of multiple sound sources in 3D, implementation using ambisonics to binaural technique” / S. Maryam FakhrHosseini, Paul Kirby, Myounghoon Jeon. “Regulating Drivers’ Aggressiveness by Sonifying Emotional Data” / Wolfgang Hauer, Katharina Vogt. “Sonification of a streaming-server logfile” / Thomas Hermann, Tobias Hildebrandt, Patrick Langeslag, Stefanie Rinderle-Ma. “Optimizing aesthetics and precision in sonification for peripheral process-monitoring” / Minna Huotilainen, Matti Gröhn, Iikka Yli-Kyyny, Jussi Virkkala, Tiina Paunio. “Sleep Enhancement by Sound Stimulation” / Steven Landry, Jayde Croschere, Myounghoon Jeon. “Subjective Assessment of In-Vehicle Auditory Warnings for Rail Grade Crossings” / Rick McIlraith, Paul Walton, Jude Brereton. “The Spatialised Sonification of Drug-Enzyme Interactions” / George Mihalas, Minodora Andor, Sorin Paralescu, Anca Tudor, Adrian Neagu, Lucian Popescu, Antoanela Naaji. “Adding Sound to Medical Data Representation” / Rainer Mittmannsgruber, Katharina Vogt. “Auditory assistance for timing presentations” / Joseph W. Newbold, Andy Hunt, Jude Brereton. “Chemical Spectral Analysis through Sonification” / S. Camille Peres, Daniel Verona, Paul Ritchey. “The Effects of Various Parameter Combinations in Parameter-Mapping Sonifications: A Pilot Study” / Eva Sjuve. “Metopia: Experiencing Complex Environmental Data Through Sound” / Benjamin Stahl, Katharina Vogt. “The Effect of Audiovisual Congruency on Short-Term Memory of Serial Spatial Stimuli: A Pilot Test” / David Worrall. “Realtime sonification and visualisation of network metadata (The NetSon Project)” / Bernhard Zeller, Katharina Vogt. “Auditory graph evolution by the example of spurious correlations” /The compiled collection of extended abstracts included in the ICAD 2015 Proceedings. Extended abstracts include, but are not limited to, late-breaking results, works in early stages of progress, novel methodologies, unique or controversial theoretical positions, and discussions of unsuccessful research or null findings