Sound at the Edge of Perception

Sound at the Edge of Perception
Author: Seán Street
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2018-07-16
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811316139

This book is about the tiny sounds of the world, and listening to them, the minute signals that are clues to who and where we are. A very small sound, given the context of its history, becomes hugely significant, and even an imagined sound in a picture becomes almost a voice. By speaking a name, we give a person back to the world, and a breath, a sigh, a laugh or a cry need no language. A phoneme is the start of all stories, and were we able to tune ourselves to the subtleties of the natural world, we might share the super-sensitivity of members of the bird and animal kingdom to sense the message in the apparent silence. Mind hears sound when it perceives an image; the book will appeal to sonic and radio practitioners, students of sound, those working in the visual arts, and creative writers.

Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Musical Sounds

Analysis, Synthesis, and Perception of Musical Sounds
Author: James Beauchamp
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 348
Release: 2007-08-30
Genre: Science
ISBN: 038732576X

This book contains a complete and accurate mathematical treatment of the sounds of music with an emphasis on musical timbre. The book spans the range from tutorial introduction to advanced research and application to speculative assessment of its various techniques. All the contributors use a generalized additive sine wave model for describing musical timbre which gives a conceptual unity, but is of sufficient utility to be adapted to many different tasks.

What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?

What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive?
Author: Reuven Tsur
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 196
Release: 1992
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780822311706

Poets, academics, and those who simply speak a language are subject to mysterious intuitions about the perceptual qualities and emotional symbolism of the sounds of speech. Such intuitions are Reuven Tsur's point of departure in this investigation into the expressive effect of sound patterns, addressing questions of great concern for literary theorists and critics as well as for linguists and psychologists. Research in recent decades has established two distinct types of aural perception: a nonspeech mode, in which the acoustic signals are received in the manner of musical sounds or natural noises; and a speech mode, in which acoustic signals are excluded from awareness and only an abstract phonetic category is perceived. Here, Tsur proposes a third type of speech perception, a poetic mode in which some part of the acoustic signal becomes accessible, however faintly, to consciousness. Using Roman Jakobson's model of childhood acquisition of the phonological system, Tsur shows how the nonreferential babbling sounds made by infants form a basis for aesthetic valuation of language. He tests the intersubjective and intercultural validity of various spatial and tactile metaphors for certain sounds. Illustrating his insights with reference to particular literary texts, Tsur considers the relative merits of cognitive and psychoanalytic approaches to the emotional symbolism of speech sounds.

The Perceptual Structure of Sound

The Perceptual Structure of Sound
Author: Dik J. Hermes
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 840
Release: 2023-06-10
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 3031255666

This book presents a comprehensive review of how acoustic waves are processed by the auditory system into structured sounds such as musical melodies, speech utterances, or environmental sounds. After an introduction, an overview is given of how the ears distribute acoustic information over a large array of frequency channels that contain the auditory information used by the central nervous system to generate a mental image of what is happening around the listener. This process, called auditory scene analysis, consists of two stages. In the first stage, auditory units are formed such as musical tones and speech syllables. Each auditory unit is perceived at a well-defined moment in time, the beat location of that auditory unit. Moreover, from this process of auditory-unit formation, the auditory attributes of these auditory units emerge, such as their timbre, their pitch, their loudness, and their perceived location. Each of these attributes is discussed in the corresponding chapter. In the second stage of auditory scene analysis, auditory-stream formation, the successive auditory units are integrated into auditory streams, i.e., temporally structured sequences of auditory units that are perceived as emanating from one and the same sound source. Examples of such auditory streams are musical melodies and the utterances of one speaker. The temporal structure of an auditory stream, its rhythm, is determined by the beat locations of its auditory units. The role played by the auditory attributes of the consecutive auditory units is discussed. The melodies of musical streams and the intonation contours of spoken utterances emerge from this process. In music, the beats of parallel streams generally fit into a metric pattern, and, depending on harmony, simultaneous tones can be perceived as consonant or dissonant. Finally, the book contains many sound examples including the MATLAB scripts with which they are generated.

The Sound of a Room

The Sound of a Room
Author: Seán Street
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 100019793X

What does a place sound like – and how does the sound of place affect our perceptions, experiences, and memories? The Sound of a Room takes a poetic and philosophical approach to exploring these questions, providing a thoughtful investigation of the sonic aesthetics of our lived environments. Moving through a series of location-based case studies, the author uses his own field recordings as the jumping-off point to consider the underlying questions of how sonic environments interact with our ideas of self, sense of creativity, and memories. Advocating an awareness born of deep listening, this book offers practical and poetic insights for researchers, practitioners, and students of sound.

William Stanley Jevons and the Cutting Edge of Economics

William Stanley Jevons and the Cutting Edge of Economics
Author: Bert Mosselmans
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 159
Release: 2013-03-07
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1134450001

The impressive young scholar Bert Mosselmans, analyzing the theory and policy of Jevons, a major figure in the field of the history of economics, has put together a volume with broad international appeal, particularly in Europe, North America and Japan, that offers a synthetic approach to Jevons’ economic theory, applied economics and economic policy. Adopting a relativist approach to his subject, Mosselmans focuses on all aspects of Jevons’ theory, tying the different strands together where appropriate and discriminating where necessary. Examining the relation between theory and practise he situates Jevons within the history of economic thought and in relation to his logic, ethics, religion and aesthetics. Ideal for scholars working in the fields of philosophy and history as well as economics, this ambitious and insightful work offers a comprehensive analysis of one of the founding fathers of modern economic thought, whose work marked a new chapter in its history, bridging the gap between classical and neo-classical economics.

The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue

The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue
Author: Steven H. Knoblauch
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2013-06-17
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1134900694

Such nuances and shifts in the music of a patient's voice have long been familiar to clinicians. Indeed, as Steven Knoblauch observes, the music of psychotherapy has been acknowledged across a variety of theoretical orientations, from Freudian to self-psychological to interpersonal and relational perspectives. In The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue, Knoblauch provides a model of "resonant minding" in which the musical elements of speech become a major source of information about unconscious communication and action. More specifically, resonant minding, by distinguishing between discrete and continuous levels of communication, between the verbal and the musical, offers a way of accessing and affecting levels of unconscious interactive process by attending to the musical edge of dialogue -- provided only that we can hear it. Drawing on detailed clinical vignettes, he explores shifts in embodied dimensions of musical expression including rhythm, tone, pauses and accents across a sequence of patient-therapist interactions in order to show how the dyadic logic of mutual improvisation operates at the periphery to guide the continuous flow of unconscious communication and mutual regulation. In so doing, Knoblauch provides a vivid sense of how the shifting movement of the patient's "solo performance" can be facilitated and enriched by the creative "accompaniment" of the therapist. Ultimately, Knoblauch argues, the music of therapy is not only another road to the unconscious, but one uniquely able to convey emergent meanings in a variety of domains, from conflicting cultural identifications to the experience of the body to the emergence of desire. His vision of mutual immersion in a shared "performance" aimed at fostering growth coalesces into a major contribution - at once evocative and clinically consequential - to the current movement to grasp nonverbal behavior and processes of mutual regulation as they enter into all effective psychotherapy.

The relationship between music and language

The relationship between music and language
Author: Lutz Jäncke
Publisher: Frontiers E-books
Total Pages: 219
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 2889190544

Traditionally, music and language have been treated as different psychological faculties. This duality is reflected in older theories about the lateralization of speech and music in that speech functions were thought to be localized on the left and music functions on the right hemisphere. But with the advent of modern brain imaging techniques and the improvement of neurophysiological measures to investigate brain functions an entirely new view on the neural and psychological underpinnings of music and speech has evolved. The main point of convergence in the findings of these new studies is that music and speech functions have many aspects in common and that several neural modules are similarly involved in speech and music. There is also emerging evidence that speech functions can benefit from music functions and vice versa. This new research field has accumulated a lot of new information and it is therefore timely to bring together the work of those researchers who have been most visible, productive, and inspiring in this field and to ask them to present their new work or provide a summary of their laboratory's work.

Speech and Audio Signal Processing

Speech and Audio Signal Processing
Author: Ben Gold
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 684
Release: 2011-08-23
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 0470195363

When Speech and Audio Signal Processing published in 1999, it stood out from its competition in its breadth of coverage and its accessible, intutiont-based style. This book was aimed at individual students and engineers excited about the broad span of audio processing and curious to understand the available techniques. Since then, with the advent of the iPod in 2001, the field of digital audio and music has exploded, leading to a much greater interest in the technical aspects of audio processing. This Second Edition will update and revise the original book to augment it with new material describing both the enabling technologies of digital music distribution (most significantly the MP3) and a range of exciting new research areas in automatic music content processing (such as automatic transcription, music similarity, etc.) that have emerged in the past five years, driven by the digital music revolution. New chapter topics include: Psychoacoustic Audio Coding, describing MP3 and related audio coding schemes based on psychoacoustic masking of quantization noise Music Transcription, including automatically deriving notes, beats, and chords from music signals. Music Information Retrieval, primarily focusing on audio-based genre classification, artist/style identification, and similarity estimation. Audio Source Separation, including multi-microphone beamforming, blind source separation, and the perception-inspired techniques usually referred to as Computational Auditory Scene Analysis (CASA).

The Psychophysics of Speech Perception

The Psychophysics of Speech Perception
Author: M.E. Schouten
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 491
Release: 2012-12-06
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 940093629X

The following is a passage from our application for NATO sponsorship: "In the main, the participants in this workshop on the Psychophysics of Speech Perception come from two areas of research: - one area is that of speech perception researc,h, in which the perception of speech sounds is investigated; - the other area is that of psychoacoustics, or auditory psychophysics, in which the perception of simple non-speech sounds, such as pure tones or noise bursts, is investigated, in order to determine the properties of the hearing mechanism. Al though there is widespread agreement among both speech researchers and auditory psychophysicists that there should be a great deal of co-operation between them, the two areas have, generally speaking, remained separate, each with its own research questions, paradigms, and above all, traditions. Psychoacousticians have, so far, continued to investigate the peripheral hearing organ by means of simple sounds, regarding the preoccupations of speech researchers as too many near-empty theories in need of a more solid factual base. Speech perception researchers, on the other hand, have continued to investigate the way human listeners classify vowels and consonants, claiming that psychoacoustics is not concerned with normal, everyday, human perception.