The Physio-Emotional Effects of Audio in the Global Christian Church

Audio, specifically as researched by the film industry specialists, has physical and emotional effects on those exposed to it. These effects follow from manipulation of sound’s characteristics in specific and measurable ways. The responsibility of the Christian is to share the gospel with others and support the kingdom of God with his or her skills. In light of these truths, Christian audio specialists should have a thorough knowledge of the physio-emotional effects of audio. Further, they should not shy away from applying strategies from secular audio research to benefit local churches across the globe

Effects of feedback, mobility and index of difficulty on deictic spatial audio target acquisition in the horizontal plane

We present the results of an empirical study investigating the effect of feedback, mobility and index of difficulty on a deictic spatial audio target acquisition task in the horizontal plane in front of a user. With audio feedback, spatial audio display elements are found to enable usable deictic interac-tion that can be described using Fitts law. Feedback does not affect perceived workload or preferred walking speed compared to interaction without feedback. Mobility is found to degrade interaction speed and accuracy by 20%. Participants were able to perform deictic spatial audio target acquisition when mobile while walking at 73% of their pre-ferred walking speed. The proposed feedback design is ex-amined in detail and the effects of variable target widths are quantified. Deictic interaction with a spatial audio display is found to be a feasible solution for future interface designs

A Feature Learning Siamese Model for Intelligent Control of the Dynamic Range Compressor

In this paper, a siamese DNN model is proposed to learn the characteristics of the audio dynamic range compressor (DRC). This facilitates an intelligent control system that uses audio examples to configure the DRC, a widely used non-linear audio signal conditioning technique in the areas of music production, speech communication and broadcasting. Several alternative siamese DNN architectures are proposed to learn feature embeddings that can characterise subtle effects due to dynamic range compression. These models are compared with each other as well as handcrafted features proposed in previous work. The evaluation of the relations between the hyperparameters of DNN and DRC parameters are also provided. The best model is able to produce a universal feature embedding that is capable of predicting multiple DRC parameters simultaneously, which is a significant improvement from our previous research. The feature embedding shows better performance than handcrafted audio features when predicting DRC parameters for both mono-instrument audio loops and polyphonic music pieces.Comment: 8 pages, accepted in IJCNN 201

Automated Audio Captioning with Recurrent Neural Networks

We present the first approach to automated audio captioning. We employ an encoder-decoder scheme with an alignment model in between. The input to the encoder is a sequence of log mel-band energies calculated from an audio file, while the output is a sequence of words, i.e. a caption. The encoder is a multi-layered, bi-directional gated recurrent unit (GRU) and the decoder a multi-layered GRU with a classification layer connected to the last GRU of the decoder. The classification layer and the alignment model are fully connected layers with shared weights between timesteps. The proposed method is evaluated using data drawn from a commercial sound effects library, ProSound Effects. The resulting captions were rated through metrics utilized in machine translation and image captioning fields. Results from metrics show that the proposed method can predict words appearing in the original caption, but not always correctly ordered.Comment: Presented at the 11th IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics (WASPAA), 201

Fractionally-addressed delay lines

While traditional implementations of variable-length digital delay lines are based on a circular buffer accessed by two pointers, we propose an implementation where a single fractional pointer is used both for read and write operations. On modern general-purpose architectures, the proposed method is nearly as efficient as the popularinterpolated circular buffer, and it behaves well for delay-length modulations commonly found in digital audio effects. The physical interpretation of the new implementation shows that it is suitable for simulating tension or density modulations in wave-propagating media.Comment: 11 pages, 19 figures, to be published in IEEE Transactions on Speech and Audio Processing Corrected ACM-clas