With ever-increasing number of car-mounted electric devices and their complexity, audio classification is increasingly important for the automotive industry as a fundamental tool for human-device interactions. Existing approaches for audio classification, however, fall short as the unique and dynamic audio characteristics of in-vehicle environments are not appropriately taken into account. In t...

The purpose of the present paper was to review the literature to develop an understanding of the effects of noise and music on human performance. The second purpose was to study the effects of music on a commonly performed task that is frequently accompanied by background music: driving. Background noise not only affects public health, but it also negatively affects human performance in such ta...

Statistical data on road safety indicates that drivers between ages 16-24 account for a high level of accidents and fatalities; in Israel 25% severe accidents and 5% fatalities occur during the first two years of driving, and young novice drivers are 10-times more likely to be in an accident during their first 500 miles. Ironically, the most common violations for this group are speeding (37%) a...

In this pilot study, the authors employed a basic driving simulator to examine both driving behavior and task performance as subjects performed music retrieval tasks using one of three variants of the ”SpeakPod” voice search prototype. The variants shared speech and manual interface designs but differed in visual output capabilities. Preliminary data indicate that the chosen variant and the pre...

The speech to song illusion is a perceptual phenomenon where listeners perceive the transformation of certain speech clips into song after approximately ten consecutive repetitions of the clips. Both perceptual and acoustic features of the audio clips have been studied in previous experiments. Though the perceptual effects are clear, the features driving the illusion are only known to relate to...