Sound pleasantness or annoyance perceived in urban soundscapes is a major concern in environmental acoustics. Binaural psychoacoustic parameters are helpful to describe generic acoustic environments, as it is stated within the ISO 12913 framework. In this paper, the application of a Wireless Acoustic Sensor Network (WASN) to evaluate the spatial distribution and the evolution of urban acoustic ...

Abstract Reciprocity guarantees that in most media, sound transmission is symmetric between two points of space when the location source and receiver are interchanged. This fundamental law can be broken non-linear often at cost detrimental input power levels, large insertion losses, ideally prepared single-frequency signals. Thus, previous observations non-reciprocal have focused on pure tones,...

For enhanced immersion into a virtual scene more than just the visual sense should be addressed by a Virtual Reality system. Additional auditory stimulation appears to have much potential, as it realizes a multisensory system. This is especially useful when the user does not have to wear any additional hardware, e.g., headphones. Creating a virtual sound scene with spatially distributed sources...

One research direction to make computers become more active machines is to use audio input with far-field omni-directional microphones, these being required to face the acoustics problem of the meeting scenario. This topic is not only interesting from an artificial listener point-of-view, but also as one of the hottest topics in searchable media. In this paper two noise suppression methods for ...

WITHOUT DOUBT, THERE IS EMOTIONAL INFORMATION IN ALMOST ANY KIND OF SOUND RECEIVED BY HUMANS EVERY DAY: be it the affective state of a person transmitted by means of speech; the emotion intended by a composer while writing a musical piece, or conveyed by a musician while performing it; or the affective state connected to an acoustic event occurring in the environment, in the soundtrack of a mov...

In this paper we describe a method to search for environmental sounds in unstructured databases with user-submitted material. The goal of the project is to facilitate the design of soundscapes in virtual environments. We analyze the use of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) as a learning algorithm to classify sounds according to a general sound events taxonomy based on ecological acoustics. In our ...

In recent years, particular attention has been devoted to earable acoustic sensing due its numerous applications. However, the lack of a common platform for accessing raw audio samples forced researchers/developers pay great efforts trifles prototyping often irrelevant core functions. Meanwhile, growing popularity active noise cancellation (ANC) endowed earphones with high standard capability y...

Spatial acoustics constitute a major part of our experience of the world. The ability to make sense of our environment depends on spatial awareness and hearing plays a major role in this process. Yet in videogames, the acoustic information available to us is reduced. This cripples our hearing, leaving spatial awareness dependant on vision alone. This thesis examines the problems surrounding the...

The equalization and modeling of audio systems have some particular features that are not present in other science fields, including a frequency range of 10 octaves. Also, the properties of the human auditory system (e.g. logarithmic resolution both in frequency and magnitude) should be taken into account. If the design is done using conventional filter design approaches having linear frequency...