Hiroko Terasawa

University of Tsukuba · College of Media Arts, Science and Technology

Synthesizers are essential in modern music production. However, their complex timbre parameters, often filled with technical terms, require expertise. This research introduces a method of timbre control in wavetable synthesis that is intuitive and sensible and utilizes semantic labels. Using a conditional variational autoencoder (CVAE), users can s...

Professional vocalists modulate their voice timbre or pitch to make their vocal performance more expressive. Such fluctuations are called singing techniques. Automatic detection of singing techniques from audio tracks can be beneficial to understand how each singer expresses the performance, yet it can also be difficult due to the wide variety of t...

In this paper, we focus on singing techniques within the scope of music information retrieval research. We investigate how singers use singing techniques using real-world recordings of famous solo singers in Japanese popular music songs (J-POP). First, we built a new dataset of singing techniques. The dataset consists of 168 commercial J-POP songs,...

In this paper, we focus on singing techniques within the scope of music information retrieval research. We investigate how singers use singing techniques using real-world recordings of famous solo singers in Japanese popular music songs (J-POP). First, we built a new dataset of singing techniques. The dataset consists of 168 commercial J-POP songs,...

This study presents a Japanese translation of the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index (Gold-MSI). The index consists of 38 self-report questions and provides a general sophistication score as well as subscale scores for Active Engagement, Perceptual Abilities, Musical Training, Singing Abilities, and Emotions. The validation of the translation...

Singing techniques are used for expressive vocal performances by employing temporal fluctuations of the timbre, the pitch, and other components of the voice. Their classification is a challenging task, because of mainly two factors: 1) the fluctuations in singing techniques have a wide variety and are affected by many factors and 2) existing datase...

Music is not only the art of organized sound but also a compound of social interaction among people, built upon social and environmental foundations. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, containment measures such as shelter-in-place, lockdown, social distancing, and self-quarantine have severely impacted the foundation of human society, re...

In order to realize effective countermeasures for congestion, it is required to detect signs leading to congestion and prevent them. However, although there are many research cases that tried to detect a sign of congestion, its accuracy is not high. This paper examines whether traffic flow analysis by sonification is a new method leading to high co...

Background: Although auditory biofeedback (ABF) has proved to be effective in stroke rehabilitation, there are a variety of means by which to present information through sound. Objectives: To examine if ABF sound design influences the motor performance of patients with stroke. Methods: A total of four people with chronic stroke participated . They...

This study examined differences in auditory electromyographic biofeedback (AEB) effects between participants who were sighted and blind. Past research makes clear that AEB is effective for people who are blind, particularly because of their reported superiority in auditory processing, but no study has directly compared AEB efficacy between particip...

The function of modern libraries is transforming from a quiet reading space to an active, social, and interactive learning place for old and young people including children. We investigate the room acoustics of modern libraries in order to examine if they can accommodate both needs of silence and bustling communication. We measured impulse response...

We report that people with hearing impairment (HI) can better discriminate environmental sounds than identifying the same sounds. In order to investigate the perception/recognition of environmental sounds by people with HI, researchers often choose identification task as a measurement tool. However, since identification ability is developed upon di...

Breath control and lip vibration are crucial for a stable performance while playing the trumpet. We analyzed the differences in abdominal and orofacial muscle activity in acoustic features such as pitch (B♭2, F3, B♭3, F4, B♭4), intensity (pp, mf, ff), and duration (0.75, 6 s) during the preparation and sustain periods using surface electromyography...

In this paper, a real-time interactive system for smile detection and sonification using surface Electromyography (sEMG) signals is proposed. When a user smiles, a sound is played. The surface EMG signal is mapped to pitch using a conventional scale. The timbre of the sound is a synthetic sound that mimics bubbles. In a user testing of smiling task...

GaitEcho, a wearable auditory biofeedback device using an instrumented ankle-foot orthosis for gait rehabilitation, was developed. Its feasibility for rehabilitating sighted and blind individuals was investigated employing a reference-tracking task for an ankle-joint exercise. Experimental results suggested that GaitEcho offers similarly adequate f...

GaitEcho is a wearable auditory biofeedback device that uses an instrumented ankle-foot orthosis for gait rehabilitation. The authors investigated its feasibility for rehabilitating sighted and blind individuals by employing a reference-tracking task for an ankle-joint exercise. Experimental results suggest that GaitEcho offers similarly adequate f...

This paper describes an experiment on the rhythm perception by hearing-impaired people using three musical contents: Vocal-based songs, vocal-only songs, and instrumental music. The real world consists of many kinds of sounds, not only human speech but also music, songs, and environmental noises. Although typical listening ability exercises these d...

Technical ear training aims to improve the listening of sound engineers so they can skillfully modify and edit the structure of sound. Despite recent increasing interest in listening ability and subjective evaluation in the field of audio- and acoustic-related fields and the subsequent appearance of various technical ear-training methods, the subje...

This paper presents a quantitative metric to describe the multidimensionality of spectral envelope perception, that is, the perception specifically related to the spectral element of timbre. Mel-cepstrum (Mel-frequency cepstral coefficients or MFCCs) is chosen as a hypothetical metric for spectral envelope perception due to its desirable properties...

The spectro-temporal structure of a sound determines its timbre, and carries musically interesting information such as instrument type and performance expressions. Using timbre in data sonification can be viewed as an inverse transform of this process: Expressing data with timbre is equivalent to designing the spectro-temporal structure of a sound....

This paper describes an application of a multichan- nel EEG sonification approach. We present results obtained with a multichannel-sonification method tested with steady-state EEG responses. We elucidate brain synchrony patterns in an auditory domain with utilization of the EEG coherence measure. The transitions in the synchrony patterns are repres...

Biofeedback is currently considered as an effective method for medical rehabilitation. It aims to increase the awareness and recognition of the body's motion by feeding back the physiological information to the patients in real time. Our goal is to create an auditory biofeedback that aids understanding of the dynamic motion involving multiple muscu...

This paper describes an application of a multichannel EEG sonification approach. We present results obtained with a multichannel-sonification method tested with steady-state EEG responses. We elucidate brain synchrony patterns in an auditory domain with utilization of the EEG coherence measure. The transitions in the synchrony patterns are represen...

In this paper, we introduce an effective scheme for browsing and sharing personal voice memos using three-dimensional (3D) auditory space. We proposed an intuitive framework to record and browse numerous personal voice memos using the user's head directions to post voice memos in user-relative auditory directions for each utterance. The user can de...

We introduce a new musical performance system based on the brain-computer interface (BCI) technology which trans- forms the brain-wave patterns of musical-chords-imagina- tion into structures of music, and presumably, of musical emotion. `it's almost a song...' is a live performance piece demonstrating this new instrument. Much previous brain-wave...

We introduce our video-data sonification of Caenorhab-ditis elegans (C. elegans), a small nematode worm that has been extensively used as a model organism in molecular biology. C. elegans exhibits various kinds of movements, which may be altered by genetic manipula-tions. In pursuit of potential applications of data sonifica-tion in molecular biolo...

Technical ear training aims to improve the listening of sound engineers so that they can skillfully modify and edit the structure of sound. To provide non-professionals such as amateur sound engineers and students with this technical ear training, we have developed a simple yet personalized ear training program. The most distinct fea-ture of this s...

The paper introduces a novel auditory BCI/BMI paradigm based on combined sound timbre and horizontal plane spatial locations as informative cues. The presented concept is based on responses to eight-directional audio stimuli with various tonal and environmental sound stimuli. The approach is based on a monitoring of brain electrical activity by mea...

Timbre is a fundamental attribute of sound. It is important in differentiating between musical sounds, speech utterances, and characterizing everyday sounds in our environment as well as novel synthetic sounds. A hybrid model of timbre perception, which integrates the concepts of color and texture of sound, is proposed. The color of sound is descri...

A series of psychoacoustic experiments were carried out to explore the relationship between an objective measure of reverberation echo density, called the normalized echo density (NED), and subjective perception of the time-domain texture of reverberation. In one experiment, 25 subjects evaluated the dissimilarity of signals having static echo dens...

This report presents the design and construction of Rage in Conjunction with the Machine, a simple but novel pairing of musical interface and sound sculpture. The authors discuss the design and creation of this instrument, focusing on the unique aspects of it, including the use of physical systems, large gestural input, scale, and the electronic co...

We describe a perceptual space for timbre, define an objective metric that takes into account perceptual orthogonality and measure the quality of timbre interpolation. We discuss three timbre representations and measure perceptual judgments. We determine that a timbre space based on mel-frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) is a good model for a p...

We describe a perceptual space for timbre, define an objective metricthat takes intoaccount perceptual orthogonality and mea- sure the quality of timbre interpolation. We discuss two timbre representations and measure perceptual judgments. We deter- mine that a timbre space based on Mel-frequency cepstral coef- ficients (MFCC) is a good model for p...

Manual adjustment of control parameters for physical modeling synthesis suffers from practical limita-tions of time-intensive and sometimes arbitrary and haphazard parameter tweaking. An efficient approach to automatic parameter estimation, the goal of this study, would potentially eliminate much of the hit or miss nature of parameter tuning by fin...

We describe a perceptual space for timbre, define an objective met-ric that takes into account perceptual orthogonality and measure the quality of timbre interpolation. We discuss two timbre rep-resentations and measure perceptual judgments on an equivalent range of timbre variety. We determine that a timbre space based on Mel-frequency cepstral co...

We describe a perceptual space for timbre, define an objec-tive metric that takes into account perceptual orthogonality and measure the quality of timbre interpolation. We discuss two timbre representations and using these two representa-tions, measure perceived relationships between pairs of sounds on a equivalent range of timbre variety. We deter...

This paper describes a perceptual space for timbre, defines an ob-jective metric that takes into account perceptual orthogonality and measures the quality of timbre interpolation. We discuss two tim-bre representations and measure perceptual judgment. We deter-mined that a timbre space based on mel-frequency cepstral coeffi-cients (MFCC) is a good...