Capitalizing on Information Organization and Information Visualization for a New-Generation Catalogue

Subject searching is difficult with traditional text-based online public access library catalogues (OPACs), and the next-generation discovery layers are keyword searching and result filtering tools that offer little support for subject browsing. Next-generation OPACs ignore the rich network of relations offered by controlled subject vocabulary, which can facilitate subject browsing. A new generation of OPACs could leverage existing information-organization investments and offer online searchers a novel browsing and searching environment. This is a case study of the design and development of a virtual reality subject browsing and information retrieval tool. The functional prototype shows that the Library of Congress subject headings (LCSH) can be shaped into a useful and usable tree structure serving as a visual metaphor that contains a real world collection from the domain of science and engineering. Formative tests show that users can effectively browse the LCSH tree and carve it up based on their keyword search queries. This study uses a complex information-organization structure as a defining characteristic of an OPAC that goes beyond the standard keyword search model, toward the cutting edge of online search tools.published or submitted for publicatio

Exploring the Validity of the Perceived Restorativeness Soundscape Scale: A Psycholinguistic Approach

Soundscapes affect people's health and well-being and contribute to the perception of environments as restorative. This paper continues the validation process of a previously developed Perceived Restorativeness Soundscape Scale (PRSS). The study takes a novel methodological approach to explore the PRSS face and construct validity by examining the qualitative reasons for participants' numerical responses to the PRSS items. The structure and framing of items are first examined, to produce 44 items which are assessed on a seven-point Likert agreement scale, followed by a free format justification. Ten English speaking participants completed the PRSS interpretation questionnaire in two cafes in Montréal, Canada. Interpretation of participant free format responses led to six themes, which related to either the individual (personal attributes, personal outcomes), the environment (physical environment attributes, soundscape design) or an interaction of the two (behavior setting, normality, and typicality). The themes are discussed in relation to each Attention Restoration Theory (ART) component, namely Fascination, Being-Away, Compatibility, and Extent. The paper concludes by discussing the face and construct validity of the PRSS, as well as the wider methodological and theoretical implications for soundscape and attention restoration research, including the terminology importance in items measuring ART components and the value of all four components in assessing perceived restorativeness

Perception of Rhythmic Similarity in Flamenco Music: Comparing Musicians and Non-Musicians.

Background in Music Psychology. Previous research on rhythmic perception has highlighted differences between novice listeners and musicians in their ability to label perceived differences as well as strategies for representing musical structures. Novice listeners tend to focus on “surface” features while musicians tend to focus on the underlying rhythmic structure and develop a specific vocabulary. Furthermore, there is evidence that changes in tempo affect novices’ perception of rhythm

Spatial Audio Quality Evaluation: Comparing Transaural, Ambisonics and Stereo

Two experiments were conducted to investigate perceptual differences between three sound recording and reproduction techniques, namely transaural, ambisonics and stereophony, in terms of spatial quality (Exp.1) and localization (Exp. 2) on a variety of sound material. Results indicate a strong contrast between ambisonics and the other two techniques. Specifically, ambisonics provides a good sense of immersion and envelopment but a poor localization and readability of the scene, while stereophony and transaural provide a precise localization and a good readability but lack immersion and envelopment. These results suggest that a trade-off between immersion and precision may be difficult to achieve using these techniques

Review of contemporary sound installation practices in Québec

Continuing a trend of publications investigating sound art within a specific geographical context, this paper proposes an original view of the sound installation practice in Que´bec. This study is part of a research project aiming at building new theoretical and practical tools for the documentation of such artworks. In this paper we present the outcomes of the first phase and its connection with the bigger picture of the project, which is the questioning of the relevance of spatial audio recordings with six degrees of freedom (6DoF) for mediating the capture of knowledge relating to the sensory experience of a work. During the first phase, we developed a conceptual descriptive framework based on a mixed-methods approach, top-down and bottom-up, consisting in a systematic review of literature paralleled with a categorization of contemporary sound art production in Que´bec based on publicly available documentation. This process led to a formal and quantitative depiction of the Que´bec scene, which aims to guide both the selection of case studies for the next phases but also to be part of the conceptual tools for investigating the sensory experience of these works. This quantitative depiction of the scene will thus foster a qualitative investigation of the sensory experience of sound art installations and the knowledge that may be lost in standard written documentation practice with an original methodological framework

Soundscape assessment : towards a validated translation of perceptual attributes in different languages

The recently published ISO/TS 12913-2:2018 standard aims to provide researchers and practitioners around the world with a reliable questionnaire for soundscape characterization. The ISO Technical Specifications report protocols and attributes grounded in the soundscape literature, but only includes an English version. The applicability and reliability of these attributes in non-English speaking regions remains an open question, as research investigating translations of soundscape attributes is limited. To address this gap, an international collaboration was initiated with soundscape researchers from all over the world. Translation into 15 different languages, obtained through focus groups and panels of experts in soundscape studies, are proposed. The main challenges and outcomes of this preliminary exercise are discussed. The long-term objective is to validate the proposed translations using standardized listening experiments in different languages and geographical regions as a way to promote a widespread use of the soundscape attributes, both in academia and practice, across locations, populations and languages

Audio-Visual Renderings for Multimedia Navigation

Presented at the 16th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2010) on June 9-15, 2010 in Washington, DC.Our study focuses on multimodal information access to audiovisual databases, and evaluates the effect of combining the visual modality with audio information. To do so, we have developed two new exploration tools, which extend two information visualization techniques, namely Fisheye Lens (FL) and Pan&Zoom (PZ), to the auditory modality. The FL technique combined coherent distortion of graphics, sound space and volume. The PZ technique was designed without visual distortion but with low audio volume distortion. Both techniques were evaluated perceptually using a target finding task with both visual-only and audio-visual renderings. We did not find significant differences between audio-visual and visual-only conditions in terms of completion times. However we did find significant differences in participant’s qualitative evaluations of difficulty and efficiency. In addition, 63% of participants preferred the multimodal interface. For FL, the majority of participants judged the visual-only rendering as less efficient and appreciated the benefit of the audio rendering. But for PZ, they were satisfied with the visual-only rendering and evaluated the audio rendering as distracting. We conclude with future design specifications