The ongoing studies on interrelations of virtual acoustics and hearing research we conducted over the past decade [1-8] led us through some pitfalls and avoidable drawbacks before we had established a laboratory that integrates our procedural experiences on the subject. The laboratory now provides the user in an acoustically versatile environment with an integrated and cross-linked infrastructu...

Blind signal separation can easily find its position in audio applications where mutually independent sources need to be separated from their microphone mixtures while both room acoustics and sources are unknown. However, the conventional separation algorithms can hardly be implemented in real time due to the high computational complexity. The computational load is mainly caused by either direc...

Balloon pops are convenient for probing the acoustics of a space, as they generate relatively uniform radiation patterns and consistent “N-wave” waveforms. However, the N-wave spectrum contains nulls which impart an undesired comb-filter-like quality when the recorded balloon pop is convolved with audio. Here, a method for converting recorded balloon pops into full audio bandwidth impulse respo...

Environmental monitoring has become increasingly important due to the significant impact of human activities and climate change on biodiversity. Environmental sound sources such as rain and insect vocalizations are a rich and underexploited source of information in environmental audio recordings. This paper is concerned with the classification of rain within acoustic sensor recordings. We prese...

PURPOSE Differences in vocal tract morphology have the potential to explain interspeaker variability in speech production. The potential acoustic impact of hard palate shape was examined in simulation, in addition to the interplay among morphology, articulation, and acoustics in real vowel production data. METHOD High-front vowel production from 5 speakers of American English was examined usi...

Three experiments addressed the hypothesis that production factors constrain phonotactic learning in adult English speakers, and that this constraint gives rise to a markedness effect on learning. In Experiment 1, an acoustic measure was used to assess consonant-consonant coarticulation in naturally produced nonwords, which were then used as stimuli in a phonotactic learning experiment. Results...

New Caledonia is a Pacific island with a unique biodiversity showing an extreme microendemism. Many species distributions observed on this island are extremely restricted, localized to mountains or rivers making biodiversity evaluation and conservation a difficult task. A rapid biodiversity assessment method based on acoustics was recently proposed. This method could help to document the unique...

The present study examined the effects of spatial sound-source density and reverberation on the spatiotemporal window for audio-visual motion coherence. Three different acoustic stimuli were generated in Virtual Auditory Space: two acoustically "dry" stimuli via the measurement of anechoic head-related impulse responses recorded at either 1° or 5° spatial intervals (Experiment 1), and a reverbe...

Long before audio technologists have been researching the acoustic reproduction of entire sound fields using loudspeaker arrays, numerical acousticians began to study the solution of boundary integral equations. This is particularly interesting because the fundamental question of uniqueness also appeared in numerical acoustics much earlier than it recently did in the theory of sound field synth...