Onset Event Decoding Exploiting the Rhythmic Structure of Polyphonic Music

(c)2011 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works. Published version: IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing 5(6): 1228-1239, Oct 2011. DOI:10.1109/JSTSP.2011.214622

SONEX: An Evaluation Exchange Framework for Reproducible Sonification

Degara N, Nagel F, Hermann T. SONEX: An Evaluation Exchange Framework for Reproducible Sonification. In: Strumiłło P, Bujacz M, Popielata M, eds. Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Auditory Displays. Lodz, Poland: Lodz University of Technology Press; 2013: 167-174.After 18 ICAD conferences, Auditory Display has become a mature research community. However, a robust evaluation and scientific comparison of sonification methods is often neglected by auditory display researchers. In the last ICAD 2012 conference, only one paper out of 53 makes a statistical comparison of several sonification methods and still no comparison with other state-of-the-art algorithms is provided. In this paper, we review profitable standards in other communities and transfer them to derive recommendations and best practices for auditory display research. We describe SonEX (Sonification Evaluation eXchange), a community-based framework for the formal evaluation of sonification methods. The goals, challenges and architecture of this evaluation platform are discussed. In addition, a simple example of a task definition according to the guidelines of SonEX is also introduced. This paper aims at starting a vivid discussion towards the establishment of thorough scientific methodologies for auditory display research and the definition of standardized sonification tasks

Reliability-Informed Beat Tracking of Musical Signals

Abstract—A new probabilistic framework for beat tracking of musical audio is presented. The method estimates the time between consecutive beat events and exploits both beat and non-beat information by explicitly modeling non-beat states. In addition to the beat times, a measure of the expected accuracy of the estimated beats is provided. The quality of the observations used for beat tracking is measured and the reliability of the beats is automatically calculated. A k-nearest neighbor regression algorithm is proposed to predict the accuracy of the beat estimates. The performance of the beat tracking system is statistically evaluated using a database of 222 musical signals of various genres. We show that modeling non-beat states leads to a significant increase in performance. In addition, a large experiment where the parameters of the model are automatically learned has been completed. Results show that simple approximations for the parameters of the model can be used. Furthermore, the performance of the system is compared with existing algorithms. Finally, a new perspective for beat tracking evaluation is presented. We show how reliability information can be successfully used to increase the mean performance of the proposed algorithm and discuss how far automatic beat tracking is from human tapping. Index Terms—Beat-tracking, beat quality, beat-tracking reliability, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) regression, music signal processing. I

Virtual reality platform for sonification evaluation

Presented at the 21st International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2015), July 6-10, 2015, Graz, Styria, Austria.In this paper we propose a game-based virtual reality platform for evaluation of sonification techniques. We study the task of localization of stationary objects in virtual reality using auditory cues. We further explore sonification techniques and compare the performance in this task using the proposed platform. The virtual reality environment is developed using Unity3D (game engine) and an Oculus Rift, a head mounted virtual reality display. Parameter mapping sonification techniques are employed to map the position of the object in virtual space to sound. Hence, the framework defined here constitutes an auditory virtual reality environment. This auditory display interface is subjectively evaluated in stationary object localization task. A statistical analysis of the subjective and objective measures of the listening test is performed resulting in a robust and scientific evaluation of the sonification methods

Sonex: An Evaluation Exchange Framework For Reproducible Sonification

Presented at the 19th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2013) on July 6-9, 2013 in Lodz, Poland.After 18 ICAD conferences, Auditory Display has become a mature research community. However, a robust evaluation and scientific comparison of sonification methods is often neglected by auditory display researchers. In the last ICAD 2012 conference, only one paper out of 53 makes a statistical comparison of several sonification methods and still no comparison with other stateof- the-art algorithms is provided. In this paper, we review profitable standards in other communities and transfer them to derive recommendations and best practices for auditory display research. We describe SonEX (Sonification Evaluation eXchange), a community-based framework for the formal evaluation of sonification methods. The goals, challenges and architecture of this evaluation platform are discussed. In addition, a simple example of a task definition according to the guidelines of SonEX is also introduced. This paper aims at starting a vivid discussion towards the establishment of thorough scientific methodologies for auditory display research and the definition of standardized sonification tasks

A Generic Evaluation Model for Auditory Feedback in Complex Visual Searches

Presented at the 20th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD2014), June 22-25, 2014, New York, NY.This paper proposes a method of evaluating the effect of auditory display techniques on a complex visual search task. The approach uses a pre-existing visual search task (conjunction search) to create a standardized model for audio, and non-audio assisted visual search tasks. A pre-existing auditory display technique is evaluated to test the system. Using randomly generated images, participants were asked to undertake a series of visual search tasks of set complexities, with and without audio. It was shown that using the auditory feedback improved the participant’s visual search times considerably, with statistically significant results. Additionally, it was shown that there was a larger difference between audio and non-audio when the complexity of the images was increased. The same auditory display techniques were then applied to an example of a real complex visual search task, the results of which imply a significant improvement in visual search efficiency when using auditory feedback

Interactive Sonification [Guest editors' introduction]

Degara N, Hunt A, Hermann T. Interactive Sonification [Guest editors' introduction]. IEEE MultiMedia. 2015;22(1):20-23.Today's computing technology is radically different from that of 10 years ago. Devices such as smartphones, tablets, and even wearable devices are found wherever we are. Researchers and developers can take advantage of this new era by knowing that the public has personal access to highly interactive multimedia devices. Interfaces involving sound are already in the hands of millions of people. For information display, sound promises an alternative to squeezing information through small screens that then force us to attend to them, thus making us lose awareness of our immediate environment. This special issue looks at some of the upcoming research on how such interaction with sound can be used in a variety of areas and applications

Interactive Sonification

Degara N, Hunt A, Hermann T, eds. Interactive Sonification. IEEE Multimedia. 2015;22(1: Special Issue)