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July 2009 - present
January 2001 - July 2009
January 1994 - December 2000
Publications
Publications (70)
Actions that produce sounds infuse our daily lives. Some of these sounds are a natural consequence of physical interactions (such as a clang resulting from dropping a pan), but others are artificially designed (such as a beep resulting from a keypress). Although the relationship between actions and sounds has previously been examined, the frame of...
This study examines the role of source identification in the emotional response to everyday sounds. Although it is widely acknowledged that sound identification modulates the unpleasantness of sounds, this assumption is based on sparse evidence on a select few sounds. We gathered more robust evidence by having listeners judge the causal properties...
The organization of our representations within a multi-dimensional acoustic space provides information about the broad relationships and associations between common sound-events; however, less is known about sounds that have acoustic features that situate them between two typical events in feature space. In the present study, we examined the acoust...
When hearing knocking on a door, a listener typically identifies both the action (forceful and repeated impacts) and the object (a thick wooden board) causing the sound. The current work studied the neural bases of sound source identification by switching listeners' attention toward these different aspects of a set of simple sounds during functiona...
We conducted nine experiments to determine why a sound’s pleasantness can be altered by movies, abstract paintings, and words. In Expt. 1, unpleasant sounds, such as the sound of a person sniffing, were paired either with their original video track or with video tracks depicting neutral events that could plausibly have produced the sound, such as p...
Everyday sounds can elicit a range of emotional and physiological responses. For individuals with misophonia, some sounds can produce strong feelings of disgust, annoyance, and anger, often accompanied by increased perspiration and heart rate. Presently, methods of diagnosing misophonia rely on clinical interviews and self‐assessment scales. Coupli...
This paper presents Task 7 at the DCASE 2024 Challenge: sound scene synthesis. Recent advances in sound synthesis and generative models have enabled the creation of realistic and diverse audio content. We introduce a standardized evaluation framework for comparing different sound scene synthesis systems, incorporating both objective and subjective...
We demonstrate that vision language models (VLMs) are capable of recognizing the content in audio recordings when given corresponding spectrogram images. Specifically, we instruct VLMs to perform audio classification tasks in a few-shot setting by prompting them to classify a spectrogram image given example spectrogram images of each class. By care...
Despite significant advancements in neural text-to-audio generation, challenges persist in controllability and evaluation. This paper addresses these issues through the Sound Scene Synthesis challenge held as part of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events 2024. We present an evaluation protocol combining objective metric, na...
Traffic noise can cause significant annoyance. We administered noise annoyance surveys in two Florida facilities located near a highway and a busy road while traffic noise levels were being measured. In Trilogy school, thirty middle & high school students rated the annoyance caused by traffic noise inside the school to be an average of 1.9 (SD 2.0)...
Listeners recognizing environmental sounds must contend with variations in level due to the source level and the environment. Nonetheless, variations in level disrupt short-term sound recognition [Susini, Houix, Seropian, and Lemaitre (2019). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146(2), EL172–EL176] suggesting that loudness is encoded. We asked whether the experime...
Perception of environmental sounds (PES), encompassing informationally and/or aesthetically salient nonspeech, nonmusical sounds, is crucial for safety, independence, and quality-of-life among listeners with hearing loss. The aims of this study were (1) to systematically review methodologies used to assess PES among cochlear implant (CI) users and...
The addition of Foley sound effects during post-production is a common technique used to enhance the perceived acoustic properties of multimedia content. Traditionally, Foley sound has been produced by human Foley artists, which involves manual recording and mixing of sound. However, recent advances in sound synthesis and generative models have gen...
One way to study human sound recognition is to investigate the reasons why sounds are sometimes misheard as coming from the wrong source. Understanding this cognitive process can not only help prevent undesirable sound confusions (e.g., auditory display design) but can also promote useful confusions (e.g., Foley effects, cognitive reappraisal for m...
Performance outcomes for cochlear implant (CI) users traditionally focus on measures of speech perception. However, existing research indicates that environmental sound identification tasks also remain challenging for adult CI users compared to normal-hearing (NH) or hearing-impaired (HI) peers. In contrast, anecdotal reports indicate that environm...
Although the sound level reaching a listener’s ear depends upon the sound source level and the environment, a stable source level can be perceived (McDermott et al., 2021). Nonetheless, variation in sound level can disrupt recognition in a short-term old/new task (Susini et al., 2019). We asked whether there is evidence of long-term memory of the t...
Machine Listening, as usually formalized, attempts to perform a task that is, from our perspective, fundamentally human-performable, and performed by humans. Current automated models of Machine Listening vary from purely data-driven approaches to approaches imitating human systems. In recent years, the most promising approaches have been hybrid in...
Sound effects technicians (“Foley Artists”) have long exploited the fact that two physically different events can produce perceptually similar sounds, such as squeezing a box of cornstarch to imitate footsteps in the snow. Although some sound effects succeed because they produce acoustic waveforms nearly identical to the sounds they are imitating (...
In Psychology, actions are paramount for humans to perceive and separate sound events. In Machine Learning (ML), action recognition achieves high accuracy; however, it has not been asked if identifying actions can benefit Sound Event Classification (SEC), as opposed to mapping the audio directly to a sound event. Therefore, we propose a new Psychol...
Echolocation - the ability to detect objects in space through the perception of echoes from these objects - has been identified as a promising venue to help visually impaired individuals navigate within their environments. The interest is in part because a proof-of-concept exists: certain visually impaired individuals are able to navigate using act...
We investigated whether training sighted individuals to attend to information in echoes could improve their active echolocation ability. We evaluated two training techniques that involved artificially generated sounds. Both artificial techniques were evaluated by their effect on natural echolocation of real objects with self-generated clicks. One g...
How do we integrate modality-specific perceptual information arising from the same physical event into a coherent percept? One possibility is that observers rely on information across perceptual modalities that shares temporal structure and/or semantic associations. To explore the contributions of these two factors in multisensory integration, we m...
Previous research has suggested that autism is associated with abnormalities in sensory and attentional processing. Here, we assessed these processes independently in the visual and auditory domains using a visual contrast-discrimination task and an auditory modulation-depth discrimination task. To evaluate changes in sensory function by attention,...
We report a series of experiments about a little-studied type of compatibility effect between a stimulus and a response: the priming of manual gestures via sounds associated with these gestures. The goal was to investigate the plasticity of the gesture-sound associations mediating this type of priming. Five experiments used a primed choice-reaction...
The Cambridge Handbook of Applied Perception Research covers core areas of research in perception with an emphasis on its application to real-world environments. Topics include multisensory processing of information, time perception, sustained attention, and signal detection, as well as pedagogical issues surrounding the training of applied percept...
Hommel (1996) established that sounds artificially associated with key presses could prime key presses. The goal of the current study was to explore the nature of the link between auditory perception and manual actions by comparing the priming of manual actions by naturally and artificially associated sounds. We report three experiments. The proced...
We searched for evidence that the auditory organization of categories of sounds produced by actions includes a privileged or "basic" level of description. The sound events consisted of single objects (or substances) undergoing simple actions. Performance on sound events was measured in two ways: sounds were directly verified as belonging to a categ...
While many psychoacoustic studies have found that listeners can recover some causal properties of sound-generating objects (such as the material), comparatively little is known about the causal properties of the sound-generating actions and how they are perceived. This article reports on a study comparing the performance of listeners required to id...
We explored a new form of auditory-motor priming. Motor priming exists if an action is performed more rapidly after the presentation of facilitating cues than after the presentation of interfering cues. We hypothesized that environmental sounds could be used as cues to create motor priming. To create facilitation, we devised a congruent priming sou...
Listeners discriminated changes in either interaural time differences (ITDs) or interaural level differences (ILDs) in one noise band (the target) in the presence or absence of an uninformative spectrally-remote second noise band (the interferer). The noise bands had center frequencies of 500 and 4000 Hz and bandwidths of 50 and 400 Hz, respectivel...
Audition and vision both contribute to the perception of an event, and when the auditory stimulus is rich, auditory information can exert a powerful influence on multimodal perception. Previous research (Ecker and Heller, Perception 2005) found that auditory information which indicates rolling surface contact can strongly influence whether or not a...
Events in the world are inherently multimodal. A ball bouncing provides correlated auditory and visual information to the senses. How are such events neurally represented? One possibility is that these distinct sources are integrated into a coherent percept of the event. Alternatively, auditory and visual information may be separably represented, b...
Acoustic analyses were conducted on several groups of sound events. The sound events were derived from a combination of physical analyses and perceptual data. The acoustic analyses utilized both low-level properties, such as spectral centroid, and higher-level properties. The higher-level properties were based on a combination of the physical sourc...
Listeners were asked to indicate the sources of dozens of sound events presented over headphones. The sounds were environmental sounds made by solid objects, liquids, andor air undergoing a variety of actions taken from the website www.auditorylab.org. Each listener gave a series of responses about possible sources for each sound so that a similari...
Audiometric thresholds and otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) were measured in 285 U.S. Marine Corps recruits before and three weeks after exposure to impulse-noise sources from weapons' fire and simulated artillery, and in 32 non-noise-exposed controls. At pre-test, audiometric thresholds for all ears were <or=25 dB HL from 0.5 to 3 kHz and <or=30 dB HL...
Auditory information can exert a strong influence on multimodal perception. In the experiments described here, a video of a ball rolling in depth was paired with the sound of a ball rolling. The speed of the balls’ roll in the video was independently varied from the speed of the balls’ roll in the soundtrack. Total duration was held constant so tha...
In a longitudinal study with 338 volunteers, audiometric thresholds and otoacoustic emissions were measured before and after 6 months of noise exposure on an aircraft carrier. While the average amplitudes of the otoacoustic emissions decreased significantly, the average audiometric thresholds did not change. Furthermore, there were no significant c...
Otoacoustic emissions (OAEs) can potentially be used to identify normal-hearing individuals who are susceptible to imminent noise-induced hearing loss. Until now, there has been no way to monitor an individual's susceptibility dynamically as it varies due to physiological and environmental factors. Although it is known that groups of normal-hearing...
Sonar operators may distinguish the sound of a submarine from the sound of a fishing trawler amidst a background of snapping shrimp. This accomplishment requires integrating auditory sensation and perception with auditory cognition, experience, and the ability to adapt to context. The fundamentals of auditory perception and cognition required for t...
We carried out two experiments to measure the combined perceptual effect of visual and auditory information on the perception of a moving object's trajectory. All visual stimuli consisted of a perspective rendering of a ball moving in a three-dimensional box. Each video was paired with one of three sound conditions: silence, the sound of a ball rol...
Non-linear transient-evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAEs) at 74dB pSPL, distortion-product otoacoustic emissions (DPOAEs) at 65/45dB SPL and pure-tone audiometry were used to detect noise-induced, inner car changes in a longitudinal study. Repeated-measures ANOVAs were made on the Noise (n=69) and Quiet (n=42) groups. The Noise group's hearing thr...
The perceived path of a ball moving in 3D-space is altered solely by the addition of an auditory cue. All visual stimuli consist of a ball moving in a 3-dimensional box. Critically, each video is paired with one of three sound conditions: No sound, Roll sound, or Jump Sound. Dependent on the sound cue, Subjects perceive the ball as either 1) jumpin...
Sound effects technicians (``Foley Artists'') have long exploited the
fact that two physically different events can produce perceptually
similar sounds, such as squeezing a box of cornstarch to imitate
footsteps in the snow. Although some sound effects succeed because they
produce acoustic waveforms nearly identical to the sounds they are
imitating...
Noise-induced hearing loss includes both temporary (TTS) and permanent (PTS) threshold shifts. Although TTS and PTS have many similarities, their underlying mechanisms are different. Both TTS and PTS are seen in hearing-conservation programs, making it important to consider both when making physiological measurements of inner-ear damage in applied...
Limits on temporal resolution in auditory perception range from 25 ms, for the judgment of temporal order, to a lower limit of 3–4 ms for the discrimination of monaural phase. Results are presented on the discrimination of spectral shape for signals concentrated within this lower bound. A wideband, 4‐ms noise was compared with spectrally smoothed v...
Otoacoustic emissions and behavioral hearing thresholds were measured before and after exposure to a 10-min, 105-dB SPL, half-octave band of noise centered at 1.414 kHz. Along a single recovery function, transient-evoked otoacoustic-emission (TEOAE) measurements made with 74-dB pSPL nonlinear click ensembles were alternated with a Bekesy threshold-...
The purpose of the study was to illustrate the effect of negative middle-ear pressure (MEP) on both the stimulus and response of transient-evoked otoacoustic emissions (TEOAEs) and the effect of compensating for negative pressure in the middle ear by pneumatically introducing pressure into the ear canal. Simulation of negative MEP by introducing po...
This investigation addressed four factors affecting transient-evoked otoacoustic emission (TEOAE) reliability: 1) The effect of evoking-stimulus level, 2) the effect of analyzing bandwidth, 3) the effect of slight-mild hearing loss, and 4) the effect of variability in the stimulus spectrum.
TEOAEs at 80, 74, 68, and 62 dB pSPL evoking-stimulus leve...
Extents of laterality produced by ongoing interaural time delays (ITDs) within high-frequency sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (SAM) target tones were measured in the presence or absence of a second, spectrally remote, diotic, SAM tone. The spectrally remote SAM tones had recently been shown to reduce sensitivity to ITDs conveyed by a 4-kHz SAM ton...
Listeners' ability to discriminate between independent tokens of 800-Hz-wide bands of noise (centered at 1200 Hz) was measured in monaural, diotic, and several dichotic conditions. In a two-cue, two-alternative, temporal forced-choice task, listeners indicated whether the second or third interval contained a token of noise that was different from t...
Sensitivity to interaural time delays (ITDs) within high-frequency sinusoidally amplitude-modulated (SAM) target tones was measured in the presence of a second, spectrally remote diotic SAM tone (termed an interferer). Targets and interferers were 100% modulated at 250 Hz and each was presented at 77 dB SPL for a duration of 250 ms. The modulations...
Listeners? ability to discriminate between independent tokens of 800?Hz?wide (79 dB SPL) bands of noise was measured in a two?cue, two?alternative, temporal forced?choice task where the second or third interval contained a noise that was different from that presented in each of the other three intervals. Discriminability was best in the diotic cond...
By definition, visual image representations are organized around spatial properties. However, we know very little about how these representations use information about location, one of the most important spatial properties. Three experiments explored how location information is incorporated into image representations. All of these experiments used...
Observers centered a target sound in the presence of a simultaneously gated distractor. Observers controlled either the interaural time difference (ITD) or interaural level difference (ILD) of a 50‐Hz‐wide target band of noise that had a center frequency of either 500 or 2000 Hz. The distractor was a 50‐Hz wide band of noise with a center frequency...
The localization of simultaneously presented sounds was investigated in two experiments by introducing interaural disparities over headphones (lateralization). In the first experiment, interaural time difference (ITDs) and interaural level differences (ILDs) were informative in one band of noise (the target), but not in a spectrally remote second b...
In an effort to determine whether cues related to changes in energy contribute to the detection of a tone added to a narrow band of noise, we examined the effect of level variation on detection thresholds. In the first experiment, the level of each waveform was randomly varied on each presentation. Level variation had only marginal effects on perfo...
Lateralization thresholds were obtained in a 21FC task using 200‐ms noise bands presented with either an interaural time or level difference. The elevation in lateralization threshold (interference) caused by a simultaneously presented noise band was measured. When the ITD was applied to a 50‐Hz‐wide noise band centered at 500 Hz, there was minimal...
The relationship between across?frequency and across?ear (binaural) information was varied in an effort to determine the relative locus of the two processes. Interference effects might be expected if the output from one system influences the input to the other. In the first experiment, observers indicated whether the envelopes of 200?ms, 100?Hz?wid...
An overwhelming majority of auditory graphs employ a representational design that maps changes in a variable to changes in a "low-level" acoustic dimension such as frequency, intensity, or spectrum. However, there are several potential drawbacks to this type of auditory graph design. First, the perceptual correlates of these dimensions (pitch, loud...
