On the study of the effects of sea views, greenery views and personal characteristics on noise annoyance perception at homes

Noise annoyance has caused significant adverse impacts on human beings and numerous efforts have been spent on mitigating annoyance problems. Natural greenery has been shown to be able to moderate annoyance problems at home but this conclusion was drawn without properly controlling the potential confounding factors. Furthermore, few have explored the moderation effect of a sea view. Accordingly, this study formulated a multivariate model to examine the impacts of natural views as well as personal characteristics on annoyance perception. A housing estate was selected in Hong Kong as the survey site for which some of the residents were exposed to greenery views, sea views, or both from their homes. Eight hundred and sixty-one responses were collected via questionnaire surveys and analyzed using an ordered logit model. The results suggest that both a greenery view and a sea view can moderate annoyance responses. Several individual’s personal characteristics are found to affect individuals’ annoyance perception. The duration of time spent daily at home is shown to have an influence on the moderation impact exerted by a greenery view, while the age of an individual is shown to have an influence on noise moderation effect exerted by a sea view.Department of Building Services Engineerin

The impact of the sonification of a vocal server on its usability and its user-friendliness

Presented at the 8th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Kyoto, Japan, July 2-5, 2002.This paper deals with the evaluation of the impact of the addition of eight sounds in a vocal server on its usability and user-friendliness. Thirty-two subjects tested two versions of a voicemail service through eight scenarios, with and without sounds. Three types of data were collected: behavioral data, declarative data (answers to questionnaires), and galvanic skin responses. The main results show a learning effect from one version to another that is not dependent on the versions tested. No effect of the sonification on the usability and on the perceived user-friendliness of this voicemail server was found

Modelling the emotional quality of speech in a telecommunication context

Presented at the 8th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD), Kyoto, Japan, July 2-5, 2002.This paper presents a study of the perception, the analysis, and the modelling of the emotional quality of speech. Speech emotional quality is defined as the qualities of speech samples in terms of the emotional content that describe the listeners' global impressions as elicited by their audition. For this study, twenty professional female speakers recorded a welcome prompt of a vocal server in five elocution styles. The sound corpus was submitted to psychoacoustic tests and to signal analysis. From the psychoacoustic tests, twenty subjective criteria could be extracted that characterize the perceived emotional quality. These criteria can be used to draw perceptive portraits of the speech samples. Linear models connecting the perceptive portraits to physical data derived from signal analysis were developed

Prosodic Parameters of Perceived Emotions in Vocal Server Voices

This paper investigates the relationship between perceptive and acoustic spaces describing a group of voices. The aim is to study possible correlations between prosodic parameters and the perceived quality of voices. Experiments are based on a set of 100 sentences recorded by 20 professional female speakers. A perceptual experiment aims at defining a set of relevant adjectives (or “attributes”) for voice quality description (20 attributes are retained). Acoustic prosodic analysis is performed on the same corpus (23 parameters are used; mainly based on pitch, durations and energy). Then correlations between acoustic parameters and perceived attributes are computed. The results show that for some attributes, one can find a strong correlation with prosodic acoustic parameters (for about 13 attributes out of 20). However, for some attributes, these correlations are rather low, and more detailed investigations seem necessary in order to characterize perceived attributes in terms of acoustic parameters