Sounding New Mediaexamines the long-neglected role of sound and audio in the development of new media theory and practice, including new technologies and performance art events, with particular ...emphasis on sound, embodiment, art, and technological interactions. Frances Dyson takes an historical approach, focusing on technologies that became available in the mid-twentieth century-electronics, imaging, and digital and computer processing-and analyzing the work of such artists as John Cage, Edgard Varèse, Antonin Artaud, and Char Davies. She utilizes sound's intangibility to study ideas about embodiment (or its lack) in art and technology as well as fears about technology and the so-called "post-human." Dyson argues that the concept of "immersion" has become a path leading away from aesthetic questions about meaning and toward questions about embodiment and the physical. The result is an insightful journey through the new technologies derived from electronics, imaging, and digital and computer processing, toward the creation of an aesthetic and philosophical framework for considering the least material element of an artwork, sound.
This paper summarizes the cinematic demixing (CDX) track of the Sound Demixing Challenge 2023 (SDX’23). We provide a comprehensive summary of the challenge setup, detailing the structure of the ...competition and the datasets used. Especially, we detail CDXDB23, a new hidden dataset constructed from real movies that was used to rank the submissions. The paper also offers insights into the most successful approaches employed by participants. Compared to the cocktail-fork baseline, the best-performing system trained exclusively on the simulated Divide and Remaster (DnR) dataset achieved an improvement of 1.8 dB in SDR, whereas the top-performing system on the open leaderboard, where any data could be used for training, saw a significant improvement of 5.7 dB. A major source of this improvement was making the simulated data better match real cinematic audio, which we further investigate in detail.
We have proposed a novel concept of a digital watermarking technique for music data that focuses on the use of sound synthesis and sound effect techniques. This paper describes the details of our ...proposed technique that employs the distortion effect, one of the most common sound effects frequently utilized especially for guitar and bass instruments. This paper describes the experimental results of evaluating the resistance of the proposed technique against some basic malicious attacks utilizing MP3 coding, tempo alteration, pitch alteration, and high-pass filtering. It is demonstrated that the proposed technique potentially has appropriate resistance against such attacks except for the high-pass filtering attack. A technique for increasing the resistance against the high-pass filtering attack is also supplementarily discussed.
Irrelevant background speech causes dissatisfaction and impairs cognitive performance in open‐plan offices. The model of Hongisto (2005, Indoor Air, 15, 458‐468) predicts the relation between ...cognitive performance and the intelligibility of speech described with an objectively measured quantity, the Speech Transmission Index (STI). The model has impacted research in psychology and room acoustics as well as the acoustic design guidelines of offices. However, the model was based on scarce empirical data. The aim of this study was to revise the model based on a systematic literature review, focusing on laboratory experiments manipulating the STI of speech by wide‐band steady‐state noise. Fourteen studies reporting altogether 34 tests of the STI‐performance relation were included. According to Model 1 that includes all tests, performance begins to decrease approximately above STI = 0.21 while the maximum decrease is reached at STI = 0.44. Verbal short‐term memory tasks were most strongly and very consistently affected by the STI of speech. The model for these tasks showed a deterioration in performance between STI 0.12 and 0.51. Some evidence of an STI‐performance relation was found in verbal working memory tasks and limited evidence in complex verbal tasks. Further research is warranted, particularly concerning task‐specific effects.
Irrelevant speech impairs cognitive performance, especially in tasks requiring verbal short-term memory. Working on these tasks during irrelevant speech can also cause a physiological stress ...reaction. The aim of this study was to examine heart rate variability (HRV) as a non-invasive and easy-to-use stress measure in an irrelevant speech paradigm. Thirty participants performed cognitive tasks (n-back and serial recall) during two sound conditions: irrelevant speech (50 dB) and quiet (33 dB steady-state noise). The influence of conditions as well as presentation orders of conditions were examined on performance, subjective experience, and physiological stress. Working during irrelevant speech compared to working during quiet reduced performance, namely accuracy, in the serial recall task. It was more annoying, heightened the perceived workload, and lowered acoustic satisfaction. It was related to higher physiological stress by causing faster heart rate and changes in HRV frequency-domain analysis (LF, HF and LF/HF). The order of conditions showed some additional effects. When speech was the first condition, 3-back performance was less accurate, and serial recall response times were longer, heart rate was faster, and successive heart beats had less variability (lower RMSSD) during speech than during quiet. When quiet was the first condition, heart rate was faster and reaction times in 3-back were slower during quiet than during speech. The negative effect of irrelevant speech was clear in experience, performance, and physiological stress. The study shows that HRV can be used as a physiological stress measure in irrelevant speech studies.
•Does task irrelevant speech cause stress visible in heart rate variability?•The effects of working during speech were compared to working during quiet.•Heart rate variability indicated higher stress during speech than during quiet.•If speech was the first condition, some transient additional effects were visible.
•Digital modelling of a historical theatre sound effect (acoustic wind machine).•Perceptual study of the acoustic wind machine and its digital model show that the acoustic effect is perceptually ...close to a natural wind sound.•The sound of wind may not have an innate affordance that suggests an action of rotation to a listener.•The mechanical properties of the acoustic wind machine may play a role in the enactive potential of its sound.
This paper reports on the procedure and results of a preliminary experiment to evaluate participants’ perceptual experiences of a mechanical theatre sound effect and its digital counterpart. The theatre sound effect chosen - an acoustic wind machine - affords a simple rotational gesture; turning its crank handle at varying speeds produces a convincing wind-like sound. A prototype digital model of a working acoustic wind machine was programmed. The mechanical interface of the acoustic wind machine drove both the digital model and its own acoustic sound in performance, therefore preserving the same tactile and kinaesthetic feedback across the two continuous sonic interactions. Participants were presented with two listening tests to examine the perceived similarity of these wind-like sounds and the perceived connection between the speed of the crank handle and the resulting sound. Participants’ performances of both the acoustic and digital systems were then elicited with sound stimuli produced from simple gestural performances of the wind-like sounds. The results of this study show that, while the sound of the prototype digital model requires further calibration to bring the experience of its performance closer to that of its acoustic counterpart, the acoustic wind machine is significantly easier to play, and the mechanism of its interface may play a role in perceptually guiding performance gestures.
The study investigated the influence of the language of background music with lyrics (Chinese and English) on Chinese reading comprehension after controlling for English listening proficiency. A ...total of 38 Chinese English learners from a university were enrolled in a within-subject design experiment. All participants were exposed to three background conditions: silence, English background music with lyrics (EL-BGM), and Chinese background music with lyrics (CL-BGM). The results showed that participants’ Chinese reading performance was negatively influenced by EL-BGM, with significantly lower reading efficiency and reading rate. Participants with better English listening ability had higher Chinese reading efficiency under the EL-BGM condition. Possible explanations for these findings in terms of the interference-by-process hypothesis, the attentional capture account, and the duplex-mechanism account are discussed.
The duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction has been extended to predict that people should have metacognitive awareness of the disruptive effect of auditory deviants on cognitive ...performance but little to no such awareness of the disruptive effect of changing-state relative to steady-state auditory distractors. To test this prediction, we assessed different types of metacognitive judgments about the disruptive effects of auditory-deviant, changing-state, and steady-state distractor sequences on serial recall. In a questionnaire, participants read about an irrelevant-speech experiment and were asked to provide metacognitive beliefs about how serial-recall performance would be affected by the different types of distractors. Another sample of participants heard the auditory distractors before predicting how their own serial-recall performance would suffer or benefit from the distractors. After participants had experienced the disruptive effects of the distractor sequences first hand, they were asked to make episodic retrospective judgments about how they thought the distractor sequences had affected their performance. The results consistently show that people are, on average, well aware of the greater disruptive effect of deviant and changing-state relative to steady-state distractors. Irrespective of condition, prospective and retrospective judgments of distraction were poor predictors of the individual susceptibility to distraction. These findings suggest that phenomena of auditory distraction cannot be categorized in two separate classes based on metacognitive awareness.
On tests of verbal short-term memory, performance declines as a function of auditory distraction. The negative impact of to-be-ignored sound on serial recall is known as the irrelevant sound effect. ...It can occur with speech, sine tones, and music. Moreover, sound that changes acoustically from one token to the next (i.e., changing-state sound) is more disruptive to serial recall than repetitive, steady-state sound. We tested manipulations that resulted in changes in (higher levels of) perceptual organization for more complex tonal stimuli. Within a trial, the first two bars of a well-known melody were repeated (a) in the exact same manner, (b) with variations only in tempo, (c) with variations only in mode (e.g., Dorian or Phrygian), or (d) with variations in both tempo and mode. Participants serially recalled digits in each of the irrelevant sound conditions as well as in a silent control condition. In Experiment 1a, we tested non-music students and, to investigate whether musical expertise affected the findings, additionally tested students majoring in music in Experiment 1b. Across both samples, recall in the irrelevant sound conditions was significantly poorer than in the silent control condition, but only the tempo variation caused an additional harmful effect. The mode variation did not affect recall performance, in either music or non-music students. These findings indicate that, at least with music, changes are a matter of degree and not every additional variation impairs recall performance.
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