Search results for "Psychoacoustic"

Theoretical Proposals on How Vertical Harmony May Convey Nostalgia and Longing in Music

2015

<p>Music is often associated with the emotions of nostalgia and longing. According to previous survey studies both nostalgia and longing are among the most commonly evoked emotions by music (Juslin, 2011). Despite nostalgia’s significance as a musical emotion, research on the specific properties of music that might contribute to this particular emotion has been scarce. A recent empirical experiment by Lahdelma and Eerola (2014) sought to explore whether single chords could be effective at conveying musical emotions to listeners, which spanned complex emotions such as nostalgia. According to the results single chords such as the minor triad, the minor seventh and the major se…

Mild Dissonance Preferred Over Consonance in Single Chord Perception

2016

Previous research on harmony perception has mainly been concerned with horizontal aspects of harmony, turning less attention to how listeners perceive psychoacoustic qualities and emotions in single isolated chords. A recent study found mild dissonances to be more preferred than consonances in single chord perception, although the authors did not systematically vary register and consonance in their study; these omissions were explored here. An online empirical experiment was conducted where participants ( N = 410) evaluated chords on the dimensions of Valence, Tension, Energy, Consonance, and Preference; 15 different chords were played with piano timbre across two octaves. The results sugg…

2014

Nonsimultaneous maskers can strongly impair performance in an auditory intensity discrimination task. Using methods of molecular psychophysics, we quantified the extent to which (1) a masker-induced impairment of the representation of target intensity (i.e., increase in internal noise) and (2) a systematic influence of the masker intensities on the decision variable contribute to these effects. In a two-interval intensity discrimination procedure, targets were presented in quiet, and combined with forward maskers. The lateralization of the maskers relative to the targets was varied via the interaural time difference. Intensity difference limens (DLs) were strongly elevated under forward mas…

Auditory cortical and hippocampal local-field potentials to frequency deviant tones in urethane-anesthetized rats: An unexpected role of the sound fr…

2015

Abstract The human brain can automatically detect auditory changes, as indexed by the mismatch negativity of event-related potentials. The mechanisms that underlie this response are poorly understood. We recorded primary auditory cortical and hippocampal (dentate gyrus, CA1) local-field potentials to serial tones in urethane-anesthetized rats. In an oddball condition, a rare (deviant) tone ( p  = 0.11) randomly replaced a repeated (standard) tone. The deviant tone was either lower (2200, 2700, 3200, 3700 Hz) or higher (4300, 4800, 5300, 5800 Hz) in frequency than the standard tone (4000 Hz). In an equiprobability control condition, all nine tones were presented at random ( p  = 0.11). Diffe…

How Important is the Reproduction Technique for the Perception of Spaciousness in Music?

2016

Sound fields are preferred when spaciousness is perceived. “Spaciousness means that auditory events, in a characteristic way, are themselves perceived as being spread out in an extended region of space”. The author’s former study (2012) investigated the perception of spaciousness of five musical genres. Participants evaluated spaciousness while listening to music with loudspeakers. Resulting, these genres allowed classifications of spatial features such as “big”, “wide” and “open”. A new idea of conducting listening tests has arisen using wave field synthesis instead of headphones. Firstly, this study aims to reveal the perceptional characteristics of spaciousness in music itself with headp…

At the interface between sensation and emotion : perceived qualities of single chords

2017

The focus of this dissertation is to investigate the perception of single chords, both in terms of perceived emotions and psychoacoustic qualities. Previous empirical research on harmony perception has mainly been concerned with horizontal aspects of harmony: studies focusing on vertical harmony perception have been rare. The current work aims to fill some of the still evident gaps between musicology, music psychology, and psychoacoustics with regard to single chord perception by combining both empirical and theoretical approaches. The work comprises three publications, based on two large-scale empirical experiments conducted with the aim of drawing the attention of both expert and inexpert…

Soundscape design through evolutionary engines

2008

Abstract Two implementations of an Evolutionary Sound Synthesis method using the Interaural Time Difference (ITD) and psychoacoustic descriptors are presented here as a way to develop criteria for fitness evaluation. We also explore a relationship between adaptive sound evolution and three soundscape characteristics: keysounds, key-signals and sound-marks. Sonic Localization Field is defined using a sound attenuation factor and ITD azimuth angle, respectively (Ii, Li). These pairs are used to build Spatial Sound Genotypes (SSG) and they are extracted from a waveform population set. An explanation on how our model was initially written in MATLAB is followed by a recent Pure Data (Pd) impleme…

A Psychoacoustic Model of Harmonic Cadences - A Preliminary Report

2009

This report presents a psychoacoustically derived computational model of the perceived distance between any two major or minor triads, the degree of activity created by any given pair of triads, and the cadential effectiveness of three-triad progressions. It also provides statistical analyses of the ratings given by thirty-five participants for the ?similarity? and ?fit? of triads in a pair, and the ?cadential effectiveness? of three-triad progressions. Multiple regressions show that the model provides highly significant predictions of the experimentally obtained ratings. Finally, it is argued that because the model is based upon psychoacoustic axioms, it is likely the regression equations …

Using Temporal Expectation to Assess Auditory Streaming in Mice

2018

Auditory streaming is the process by which environmental sound is segregated into discrete perceptual objects. The auditory system has a remarkable capability in this regard as revealed in psychophysical experiments in humans and other primates. However, little is known about the underlying neuronal mechanisms, in part because of the lack of suitable behavioural paradigms in non-primate species. The mouse is an increasingly popular model for studying the neural mechanisms of perception and action because of the range of molecular tools enabling precise manipulation of neural circuitry. Here we present a novel behavioural task that can be used to assess perceptual aspects of auditory streami…