In music production, reverbs are one of the most important sound processing tools that allow the timbre signature of indoor spaces to be created and added to the existing signal flow. Reverbs are ...frequently used in different stages of the creation of musical works, whether by professionals or novices, from recording to releasing. In recording technologies, acoustic (echo chambers-echo chambers) and electro-mechanical (spring reverb, plate reverb) reflection insertion methods were used in music production and even radio broadcasting before the 1950s. In the 1950s, tape technology, which allowed multi-channel sound recording, took its place in the studios of major record companies. Towards the 1970s, tape recorders became widespread due to the increase in the number of channels, their portability, and their cheapness. However, the increase in the number of channels made it inevitable to add room ambiance to the recordings. With the digital reverbs developed in the 1970s, more suitable reverb units began to be used in the music industry compared to the echo chambers in large studios, which are very costly to build. Over the years, reverberation algorithms and related hardware have been developed and today it has taken the form of an audio plug-in format used in computer-aided recording programs. Since reverbs make the sound much larger and more appealing than other sound processing tools such as equalizers, compressors, and delays, reverbs are misused by novices. Therefore, the correct use of reverb is important for musicians interested in recording technologies. For this purpose, in this study, from the perspective of music production, the use of reverbs in multi-track recordings is described and explained through two basic scenarios where two and three reverbs are included in the signal flow.
In recent years, substantial progress has been made in the field of reverberant speech signal processing, including both single- and multichannel dereverberation techniques and automatic speech ...recognition (ASR) techniques that are robust to reverberation. In this paper, we describe the REVERB challenge, which is an evaluation campaign that was designed to evaluate such speech enhancement (SE) and ASR techniques to reveal the state-of-the-art techniques and obtain new insights regarding potential future research directions. Even though most existing benchmark tasks and challenges for distant speech processing focus on the noise robustness issue and sometimes only on a single-channel scenario, a particular novelty of the REVERB challenge is that it is carefully designed to test robustness against
reverberation
, based on
both real, single-channel, and multichannel recordings
. This challenge attracted 27 papers, which represent 25 systems specifically designed for SE purposes and 49 systems specifically designed for ASR purposes. This paper describes the problems dealt within the challenge, provides an overview of the submitted systems, and scrutinizes them to clarify what current processing strategies appear effective in reverberant speech processing.
Pulmonary inflammatory responses lie under circadian control; however, the importance of circadian mechanisms in the underlying fibrotic phenotype is not understood. Here, we identify a striking ...change to these mechanisms resulting in a gain of amplitude and lack of synchrony within pulmonary fibrotic tissue. These changes result from an infiltration of mesenchymal cells, an important cell type in the pathogenesis of pulmonary fibrosis. Mutation of the core clock protein REVERBα in these cells exacerbated the development of bleomycin-induced fibrosis, whereas mutation of REVERBα in club or myeloid cells had no effect on the bleomycin phenotype. Knockdown of REVERBα revealed regulation of the little-understood transcription factor TBPL1. Both REVERBα and TBPL1 altered integrinβ1 focal-adhesion formation, resulting in increased myofibroblast activation. The translational importance of our findings was established through analysis of 2 human cohorts. In the UK Biobank, circadian strain markers (sleep length, chronotype, and shift work) are associated with pulmonary fibrosis, making them risk factors. In a separate cohort, REVERBα expression was increased in human idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) lung tissue. Pharmacological targeting of REVERBα inhibited myofibroblast activation in IPF fibroblasts and collagen secretion in organotypic cultures from IPF patients, thus suggesting that targeting of REVERBα could be a viable therapeutic approach.
The molecular mechanisms underlying the events through which alterations in diurnal activities impinge on peripheral circadian clocks (PCCs), and reciprocally how the PCCs affect metabolism, thereby ...generating pathologies, are still poorly understood. Here, we deciphered how switching the diurnal feeding from the active to the rest phase, i.e., restricted feeding (RF), immediately creates a hypoinsulinemia during the active phase,which initiates ametabolic reprogramming by increasing FFA and glucagon levels. In turn, peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor alpha (PPARα) activation by free fatty acid (FFA), and cAMP response element-binding protein (CREB) activation by glucagon, lead to further metabolic alterations during the circadian active phase, as well as to aberrant activation of expression of the PCC components nuclear receptor subfamily 1, group D, member 1 (Nr1d1/RevErbα), Period (Per1andPer2). Moreover, hypoinsulinemia leads to an increase in glycogen synthase kinase 3β (GSK3β) activity that, through phosphorylation, stabilizes and increases the level of the RevErbα protein during the active phase. This increase then leads to an untimely repression of expression of the genes containing a RORE DNA binding sequence (DBS), including theBmal1gene, thereby initiating in RF mice a 12-h PCC shift to which the CREB-mediated activation ofPer1, Per2by glucagon modestly contributes. We also show that the reported corticosterone extraproduction during the RF active phase reflects an adrenal aberrant activation of CREB signaling, which selectively delays the activation of the PPARα–RevErbα axis in muscle and heart and accounts for the retarded shift of their PCCs.
This paper presents a system aiming at joint dereverberation and noise reduction by applying a combination of a beamformer with a single-channel spectral enhancement scheme. First, a minimum variance ...distortionless response beamformer with an online estimated noise coherence matrix is used to suppress noise and reverberation. The output of this beamformer is then processed by a single-channel spectral enhancement scheme, based on statistical room acoustics, minimum statistics, and temporal cepstrum smoothing, to suppress residual noise and reverberation. The evaluation is conducted using the REVERB challenge corpus, designed to evaluate speech enhancement algorithms in the presence of both reverberation and noise. The proposed system is evaluated using instrumental speech quality measures, the performance of an automatic speech recognition system, and a subjective evaluation of the speech quality based on a MUSHRA test. The performance achieved by beamforming, single-channel spectral enhancement, and their combination are compared, and experimental results show that the proposed system is effective in suppressing both reverberation and noise while improving the speech quality. The achieved improvements are particularly significant in conditions with high reverberation times.
Reflections on sonic digital unreality Pinheiro, Sara; Šenkyřík, Matěj; Rouš, Jiří ...
Digital creativity (Exeter),
20/7/3/, Volume:
30, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
This paper explores the possibility of constructing an unreal environment through sound, particularly through the use of contemporary digital tools. The idea of the unreal is approached as a not ...being-in-the-world experience. That is, an experience which expands the natural embodied physicality. And yet, sound propagation through a physical space, which led to the study of reverberation and spatialization as the main subjects of interest. Consequently, reverb became the main tool to explore the subject in practice. Due to the project's multidisciplinarity, the subject had different approaches: from the possibility of reverb as a tool for fiction-making, to listener's comprehensibility and readability of the events; exploring spatialization techniques and multichannel reproduction systems to finally conclude with the idea that, in the end, sound relies on the listener's actual physical experience of the space.
Reverberation and noise are known to severely affect the automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance of speech recorded by distant microphones. Therefore, we must deal with reverberation if we are ...to realize high-performance hands-free speech recognition. In this paper, we review a recognition system that we developed at our laboratory to deal with reverberant speech. The system consists of a speech enhancement (SE) front-end that employs long-term linear prediction-based dereverberation followed by noise reduction. We combine our SE front-end with an ASR back-end that uses neural networks for acoustic and language modeling. The proposed system achieved top scores on the ASR task of the REVERB challenge. This paper describes the different technologies used in our system and presents detailed experimental results that justify our implementation choices and may provide hints for designing distant ASR systems.
We introduce a Virtual Studio Technology (VST) 2 audio effect plugin that performs convolution reverb using synthetic Room Impulse Responses (RIRs) generated via a Genetic Algorithm (GA). The ...parameters of the plugin include some of those defined under the ISO 3382-1 standard (e.g., reverberation time, early decay time, and clarity), which are used to determine the fitness values of potential RIRs so that the user has some control over the shape of the resulting RIRs. In the GA, these RIRs are initially generated via a custom Gaussian noise method, and then evolve via truncation selection, random weighted average crossover, and mutation via Gaussian multiplication in order to produce RIRs that resemble real-world, recorded ones. Binaural Room Impulse Responses (BRIRs) can also be generated by assigning two different RIRs to the left and right stereo channels. With the proposed audio effect, new RIRs that represent virtual rooms, some of which may even be impossible to replicate in the physical world, can be generated and stored. Objective evaluation of the GA shows that contradictory combinations of parameter values will produce RIRs with low fitness. Additionally, through subjective evaluation, it was determined that RIRs generated by the GA were still perceptually distinguishable from similar real-world RIRs, but the perceptual differences were reduced when longer execution times were used for generating the RIRs or the unprocessed audio signals were comprised of only speech.
This article considers the impact of time-based signal processors on the ‘shape’ of alternative rock recordings. The concept of musical ‘shape’ is considered here as both textural and gestural. In ...this instance, texture pertains to the interactions between the component parts of a multi track recording and gesture relates to applications of processing by the recordist. Drawing on examples by The Jesus and Mary Chain, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Mazzy Star and My Bloody Valentine, the impact of time-based signal processors on the ‘shape’ of the recordings is elucidated.
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