Search results for "loudness"

Temporal weights in the perception of sound intensity: Effects of sound duration and number of temporal segments

2018

Loudness is a fundamental aspect of auditory perception that is closely related to the physical level of the sound. However, it has been demonstrated that, in contrast to a sound level meter, human listeners do not weight all temporal segments of a sound equally. Instead, the beginning of a sound is more important for loudness estimation than later temporal portions. The present study investigates the mechanism underlying this primacy effect by varying the number of equal-duration temporal segments (5 and 20) and the total duration of the sound (1.0 to 10.0 s) in a factorial design. Pronounced primacy effects were observed for all 20-segment sounds. The temporal weights for the five-segment…

Changes in Speech Range Profile Are Associated with Cognitive Impairment

2021

Background and Purpose The aim of this study was to describe the variations in the speech range profile (SRP) of patients affected by cognitive decline. Methods We collected the data of patients managed for suspected voice and speech disorders, and suspected cognitive impairment. Patients underwent an Ear Nose and Throat evaluation and Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE). To obtain SRP, we asked the patients to read 18 sentences twice, at their most comfortable pitch and loudness as they would do in daily conversation, and recorded their voice on to computer software. Results The study included 61 patients. The relationship between the MMSE score and SRP parameters was established. Increas…

Exploring relationships between audio features and emotion in music

2009

In this paper, we present an analysis of the associations between emotion categories and audio features automatically extracted from raw audio data. This work is based on 110 excerpts from film soundtracks evaluated by 116 listeners. This data is annotated with 5 basic emotions (fear, anger, happiness, sadness, tenderness) on a 7 points scale. Exploiting state-of-the-art Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques, we extract audio features of different kind: timbral, rhythmic and tonal. Among others we also compute estimations of dissonance, mode, onset rate and loudness. We study statistical relations between audio descriptors and emotion categories confirming results from psychological …

A Wireless Acoustic Array System for Binaural Loudness Evaluation in Cities

2017

Networks of acoustic sensors are being deployed in smart cities to continuously monitor noise levels. In this paper, a novel acoustic sensor device is designed for binaural loudness evaluation, in a standalone platform. The audio is acquired from an array of microphones and a binaural signal is synthesized by a direction-of-arrival algorithm and a head-related transfer function. Hardware setup and software algorithms are presented and the results are discussed. Finally, the tests conducted in an early deployment show the feasibility of using the device to carry out large temporal and spatial sampling for the evaluation of binaural loudness.

2021

Previous work showed that the beginning of a sound is more important for the perception of loudness than later parts. When a short silent gap of sufficient duration is inserted into a sound, this primacy effect reoccurs in the second sound part after the gap. The present study investigates whether this temporal weighting occurs independently for different frequency bands. Sounds consisting of two bandpass noises were presented in four different conditions: (1) a simultaneous gap in both bands, (2) a gap in only the lower frequency band, (3) a gap in only the higher frequency band, or (4) no gap. In all conditions, the temporal loudness weights showed a primacy effect at sound onset. For the…

The association of noise sensitivity with music listening, training, and aptitude

2015

After intensive, long-term musical training, the auditory system of a musician is specifically tuned to perceive musical sounds. We wished to find out whether a musician's auditory system also develops increased sensitivity to any sound of everyday life, experiencing them as noise. For this purpose, an online survey, including questionnaires on noise sensitivity, musical background, and listening tests for assessing musical aptitude, was administered to 197 participants in Finland and Italy. Subjective noise sensitivity (assessed with the Weinstein's Noise Sensitivity Scale) was analyzed for associations with musicianship, musical aptitude, weekly time spent listening to music, and the impo…

Acceptance of Tinnitus: Validation of the Tinnitus Acceptance Questionnaire

2013

The concept of acceptance has recently received growing attention within tinnitus research due to the fact that tinnitus acceptance is one of the major targets of psychotherapeutic treatments. Accordingly, acceptance-based treatments will most likely be increasingly offered to tinnitus patients and assessments of acceptance-related behaviours will thus be needed. The current study investigated the factorial structure of the Tinnitus Acceptance Questionnaire (TAQ) and the role of tinnitus acceptance as mediating link between sound perception (i.e. subjective loudness of tinnitus) and tinnitus distress. In total, 424 patients with chronic tinnitus completed the TAQ and validated measures of t…

The decision process in forward-masked intensity discrimination: evidence from molecular analyses.

2009

In a two-interval forced-choice intensity discrimination task presenting a fixed increment, the level of the forward masker in interval 1 and interval 2 was sampled independently from the same normal distribution on each trial. Mean and standard deviation of the distribution were varied. Correlational analyses of the trial-by-trial data revealed different decision strategies depending on the relation between mean masker level and standard level. If the two levels were identical, listeners tended to select the interval containing the higher-level masker, behaving like an energy detector at the output of a temporal window of integration. For mean masker level higher than the standard level, m…

Spectro-Temporal Weighting of Loudness

2012

Real-world sounds like speech or traffic noise typically exhibit spectro-temporal variability because the energy in different spectral regions evolves differently as a sound unfolds in time. However, it is currently not well understood how the energy in different spectral and temporal portions contributes to loudness. This study investigated how listeners weight different temporal and spectral components of a sound when judging its overall loudness. Spectral weights were measured for the combination of three loudness-matched narrowband noises with different center frequencies. To measure temporal weights, 1,020-ms stimuli were presented, which randomly changed in level every 100 ms. Tempora…

Temporal weights in loudness: Investigation of the effects of background noise and sound level

2019

Previous research has consistently shown that for sounds varying in intensity over time, the beginning of the sound is of higher importance for the perception of loudness than later parts (primacy effect). However, in all previous studies, the target sounds were presented in quiet, and at a fixed average sound level. In the present study, temporal loudness weights for a time-varying narrowband noise were investigated in the presence of a continuous bandpass-filtered background noise and the average sound levels of the target stimuli were varied across a range of 60 dB. Pronounced primacy effects were observed in all conditions and there were no significant differences between the temporal w…