Timbre, Sound Quality, and Sound Design

International audienceSound quality evaluation applies the results of timbre research to the assessment of the sound quality of manufactured products (domestic appliances, transportation, etc.). This chapter first provides an overview of one methodology. A number of acoustic descriptors reflecting perceived timbre dimensions are established and used to predict users' preference judgements. Whereas such a methodology has proven very effective, it also has some limitations. In fact, most studies only consider the pleasantness of the sounds and often overlook other potential roles of sounds in products and interfaces. In the second part, the chapter introduces sound design. Whereas sound quality evaluation merely proposes a diagnostic of the timbre of existing products, sound design aims to create or modify the timbre of product sounds to meet specific intentions. These intentions consider the pleasantness, but also several other aspects of product sounds: functionality, identity, and ecology. All these aspects are interdependent and often closely related to the temporal and timbral characteristics of the sound. The chapter continues with a discussion of the roles and practices of sound designers and introduces a set of tools that foster communication about timbre between the different participants of a sound design process. In particular, the focus is on the necessity for these participants to share a common timbre vocabulary, and the potential impact of education about sounds is considered. Finally, an important functional aspect of product sound is discussed: how to design the timbre of sounds to support user interactions with the product

MindTheGap: integrated detection and assembly of short and long insertions

Voir : http://mindthegap.genouest.orgInternational audienceMotivation: Insertions play an important role in genome evolution. However, such variants are difficult to detect from short read sequencing data, especially when they exceed the paired-end insert size. Many approaches have been proposed to call short insertion variants based on paired-end mapping. However, there remains a lack of practical methods to detect and assemble long variants. Results: We propose here an original method, called MINDTHEGAP, for the integrated detection and assembly of insertion variants from re-sequencing data. Importantly, it is designed to call insertions of any size, whether they are novel or duplicated, homozygous or heterozygous in the donor genome. MINDTHEGAP uses an efficient k-mer based method to detect insertion sites in a reference genome, and subsequently assemble them from the donor reads. MINDTHEGAP showed high recall and precision on simulated datasets of various genome complexities. When applied to real C. elegans and human NA12878 datasets, MINDTHEGAP detected and correctly assembled insertions longer than 1 kb, using at most 14 GB of memory.Availability: http://mindthegap.genouest.or

Is loudness part of a sound recognition process?

International audienceInfluence of loudness on sound recognition was investigated in an explicit memory experiment based on a conscious recollection-test phase-of previously encoded information-study phase. Three encoding conditions were compared: semantic (sounds were sorted in three different categories), sensory (sounds were rated in loudness), and control (participants were solely asked to listen to the sounds). Results revealed a significant study-to-test change effect: loudness change between the study and the test phases affects recognition. The effect was not specific to the encoding condition (semantic vs sensory) suggesting that loudness is an important hint for everyday sounds recognition. [Q-JF] Dat

Sketching sound with voice and gesture

Insights: In product and interaction design, sounds should be included in the early stages of the design process. Voice and gestures are natural sketching tools that we can exploit to communicate sonic interactions

Backscattering suppression in supersonic 1D polariton condensates

We investigate the effects of disorder on the propagation of one-dimensional polariton condensates in semiconductor microcavities. We observe a strong suppression of the backscattering produced by the imperfections of the structure when increasing the condensate density. This suppression occurs in the supersonic regime and is simultaneous to the onset of parametric instabilities which enable the "hopping" of the condensate through the disorder. Our results evidence a new mechanism for the frictionless flow of polaritons at high speeds.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure

The Egocentric Nature of Action-Sound Associations

Actions that produce sounds infuse our daily lives. Some of these sounds are a natural consequence of physical interactions (such as a clang resulting from dropping a pan), but others are artificially designed (such as a beep resulting from a keypress). Although the relationship between actions and sounds has previously been examined, the frame of reference of these associations is still unknown, despite it being a fundamental property of a psychological representation. For example, when an association is created between a keypress and a tone, it is unclear whether the frame of reference is egocentric (gesture-sound association) or exocentric (key-sound association). This question is especially important for artificially created associations, which occur in technology that pairs sounds with actions, such as gestural interfaces, virtual or augmented reality, and simple buttons that produce tones. The frame of reference could directly influence the learnability, the ease of use, the extent of immersion, and many other factors of the interaction. To explore whether action-sound associations are egocentric or exocentric, an experiment was implemented using a computer keyboard’s number pad wherein moving a finger from one key to another produced a sound, thus creating an action-sound association. Half of the participants received egocentric instructions to move their finger with a particular gesture. The other half of the participants received exocentric instructions to move their finger to a particular number on the keypad. All participants were performing the same actions, and only the framing of the action varied between conditions by altering task instructions. Participants in the egocentric condition learned the gesture-sound association, as revealed by a priming paradigm. However, the exocentric condition showed no priming effects. This finding suggests that action-sound associations are egocentric in nature. A second part of the same session further confirmed the egocentric nature of these associations by showing no change in the priming effect after moving to a different starting location. Our findings are consistent with an egocentric representation of action-sound associations, which could have implications for applications that utilize these associations

Prioritizing signals for selective real-time audio processing

Presented at the 11th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2005)This paper studies various priority metrics that can be used to progressively select sub-parts of a number of audio signals for realtime processing. In particular, five level-related metrics were examined: RMS level, A-weighted level, Zwicker and Moore loudness models and a masking threshold-based model. We conducted a pilot subjective evaluation study aimed at evaluating which metric would perform best at reconstructing mixtures of various types (speech, ambient and music) using only a budget amount of original audio data. Our results suggest that A-weighting performs the worst while results obtained with loudness metrics appear to depend on the type of signals. RMS level offers a good compromise for all cases. Our results also show that significant sub-parts of the original audio data can be omitted in most cases, without noticeable degradation in the generated mixtures, which validates the usability of our selective processing approach for real-time applications. In this context, we successfully implemented a prototype 3D audio rendering pipeline using our selective approach

Real-time detection of overlapping sound events with non-negative matrix factorization

International audienceIn this paper, we investigate the problem of real-time detection of overlapping sound events by employing non-negative matrix factorization techniques. We consider a setup where audio streams arrive in real-time to the system and are decomposed onto a dictionary of event templates learned off-line prior to the decomposition. An important drawback of existing approaches in this context is the lack of controls on the decomposition. We propose and compare two provably convergent algorithms that address this issue, by controlling respectively the sparsity of the decomposition and the trade-off of the decomposition between the different frequency components. Sparsity regularization is considered in the framework of convex quadratic programming, while frequency compromise is introduced by employing the beta-divergence as a cost function. The two algorithms are evaluated on the multi-source detection tasks of polyphonic music transcription, drum transcription and environmental sound recognition. The obtained results show how the proposed approaches can improve detection in such applications, while maintaining low computational costs that are suitable for real-time

Synthesis of novel heteroleptic delocalised cationic pyrazole gold complexes as potent HepG2 cytotoxic agents

A new series of cationic gold(I) pyrazole complexes were prepared in excellent yields as their perchlorate salts. Results of cell viability assays show that these novel complexes have good cytotoxic properties against the human HepG2 cancer cell line. These complexes showed promising anti-cancer activities and to our knowledge, pyrazoles have never been tested against this cell line. The regioselectivity of the complexation is also discussed in regards to the substitution pattern of the pyrazoles