FORUM:Remote testing for psychological and physiological acoustics

Acoustics research involving human participants typically takes place in specialized laboratory settings. Listening studies, for example, may present controlled sounds using calibrated transducers in sound-attenuating or anechoic chambers. In contrast, remote testing takes place outside of the laboratory in everyday settings (e.g., participants' homes). Remote testing could provide greater access to participants, larger sample sizes, and opportunities to characterize performance in typical listening environments at the cost of reduced control of environmental conditions, less precise calibration, and inconsistency in attentional state and/or response behaviors from relatively smaller sample sizes and unintuitive experimental tasks. The Acoustical Society of America Technical Committee on Psychological and Physiological Acoustics launched the Task Force on Remote Testing (https://tcppasa.org/remotetesting/) in May 2020 with goals of surveying approaches and platforms available to support remote testing and identifying challenges and considerations for prospective investigators. The results of this task force survey were made available online in the form of a set of Wiki pages and summarized in this report. This report outlines the state-of-the-art of remote testing in auditory-related research as of August 2021, which is based on the Wiki and a literature search of papers published in this area since 2020, and provides three case studies to demonstrate feasibility during practice

Disparity in performance on tone-scramble tasks: generalizability and relevance to music

Music has a remarkable power to arouse the feelings of those who listen to it. What features of music imbue it with such emotional resonance? A prevailing notion in music theory is that musical scale has a central role in giving meaning to music. Indeed, many studies find that, according to listeners' average ratings, music of the major scale sounds happy, and music of the minor scale sounds sad. However, recent discoveries involving “tone-scramble” stimuli complicate our understanding of these results and suggest that sensitivity to scale is not universal. This thesis details a series of experiments designed to investigate (1) the generalizability of the findings of laboratory-based tone-scramble experiments and (2) the musical nature of a latent cognitive resource that is theorized to underlie performance in tone-scramble tasks. Chapter 1 reports that the same bimodal distribution in performance repeatedly observed in laboratory-based tone-scramble experiments is observed in a large, linguistically diverse web-based sample. Chapter 2 considers whether low-performing listeners are limited by some of the non-musical qualities inherent to tone-scrambles; data are provided to show that changes in presentation rate, frequency height, and timbre that yield tone-scrambles akin to actual music do not provide low-performing listeners any advantage over ordinary tone-scrambles. In Chapter 3, the latent cognitive resource theorized to underlie performance on tone-scramble tasks is shown to operate on musical scale and not individual frequencies, drawing a clear relationship between performance in tone-scramble tasks and sensitivity to musical scale

Disparity in performance on tone-scramble tasks: generalizability and relevance to music

Music has a remarkable power to arouse the feelings of those who listen to it. What features of music imbue it with such emotional resonance? A prevailing notion in music theory is that musical scale has a central role in giving meaning to music. Indeed, many studies find that, according to listeners' average ratings, music of the major scale sounds happy, and music of the minor scale sounds sad. However, recent discoveries involving “tone-scramble” stimuli complicate our understanding of these results and suggest that sensitivity to scale is not universal. This thesis details a series of experiments designed to investigate (1) the generalizability of the findings of laboratory-based tone-scramble experiments and (2) the musical nature of a latent cognitive resource that is theorized to underlie performance in tone-scramble tasks. Chapter 1 reports that the same bimodal distribution in performance repeatedly observed in laboratory-based tone-scramble experiments is observed in a large, linguistically diverse web-based sample. Chapter 2 considers whether low-performing listeners are limited by some of the non-musical qualities inherent to tone-scrambles; data are provided to show that changes in presentation rate, frequency height, and timbre that yield tone-scrambles akin to actual music do not provide low-performing listeners any advantage over ordinary tone-scrambles. In Chapter 3, the latent cognitive resource theorized to underlie performance on tone-scramble tasks is shown to operate on musical scale and not individual frequencies, drawing a clear relationship between performance in tone-scramble tasks and sensitivity to musical scale

Remote testing for psychological and physiological acoustics: Initial report of the P&P Task Force on Remote Testing

Acoustics research involving human participants typically takes place in specialized laboratory settings. Lis-tening studies, for example, may present controlled sounds using calibrated transducers in sound-attenuating or anechoic chambers. In contrast, remote testing takes place away from the lab, in natural settings or in participants’ homes. Remote testing could provide greater access to participants, larger sample sizes, and enhanced ecological validity, at the cost of reduced acoustical control, less precise calibration, and incon-sistency of participant experiences. The ASA Technical Committee on Psychological and Physiological Acoustics (P&P) launched the Task Force on Remote Testing in May 2020, with goals of (1) surveying ap-proaches and platforms available to support remote testing by ASA members, (2) identifying challenges and considerations for prospective investigators, and (3) communicating this information via online resources, papers, and presentations. Longer-term goals include identifying best practices and providing resources for evaluating outcomes of remote testing, e.g. via peer review

Remote testing for psychological and physiological acoustics: Initial report of the ASA P&P Task Force on Remote Testing

Acoustics research involving human participants typically takes place in specialized laboratory settings. Listening studies, for example, may present controlled sounds using calibrated transducers in sound-attenuating or anechoic chambers. In contrast, remote testing takes place away from the lab, in natural settings or in participants' homes. Remote testing can potentially provide greater access to participants, larger sample sizes, and enhanced ecological validity, at the cost of reduced acoustical control, standardization, calibration, and consistency of participant experiences. Emerging technologies can ameliorate some drawbacks, and potentially support new forms of robust research via remote testing. The ASA Technical Committee on Psychological and Physiological Acoustics (P&P) launched the Task Force on Remote Testing in May 2020, with goals of (1) surveying approaches and platforms available to support remote testing by ASA members, (2) identifying challenges and considerations for prospective investigators, and (3) communicating this information via online resources, papers, and presentations. Longer-term goals include identifying best practices and providing resources for evaluating outcomes of remote testing to facilitate via peer review. This presentation will describe the activities of the P&P Task Force on Remote Testing, online resources identified and/or developed by Task Force members, and additional opportunities for ASA members to contribute