Michael J. Newton

Michael J. Newton
The University of Edinburgh | UoE · Reid School of Music

PhD

About

29
Publications
7,095
Reads
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289
Citations
Additional affiliations
February 2012 - September 2016
The University of Edinburgh
Position
  • Lecturer
January 2012 - September 2016
The University of Edinburgh
Position
  • Lecturer
January 2010 - January 2012
University of Stirling
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (29)
Article
Full-text available
A graphene/poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) closed cavity resonator with a resonant frequency at around 160 kHz has been fabricated. A six-layer graphene structure with a 450 nm PMMA laminated layer has been dry-transferred onto the closed cavity with an air gap of 105 μm. The resonator has been actuated in an atmosphere and at room temperature by...
Preprint
Full-text available
A graphene/poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) closed cavity resonator for low-frequency ultrasound (less than 200 kHz) detection has been fabricated. The 6-layer graphene with 450 nm PMMA laminated layer has been dry transferred onto the closed cavity with the air gap of 105 μm. The resonator has been actuated in atmosphere and room temperature by m...
Article
Full-text available
We report the realization of an acoustic capacitive microphone formed by graphene/poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA). It is the first time that the ultra-large graphene/PMMA membrane suspended fully over the cavity has been fabricated by releasing the silicon dioxide sacrificial layer underneath the membrane. The novelty in the fabrication method is...
Article
Full-text available
Large area graphene-poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) closed cavity resonator has been fabricated. The resonator has been formed by transferring an ultra-large graphene-PMMA membrane over 3.5 mm diameter circular closed cavity with 220 μm depth. The graphene-PMMA membrane includes 6-layer graphene and 450 nm PMMA film. A modified graphene-PMMA dry...
Article
Full-text available
We fabricate a MEMS microphone that incorporates a graphene-based membrane that vibrates in response to acoustic forcing. We employ a novel fabrication process, where a graphene/PMMA bilayer membrane is transferred over a cavity on a separate chip before being affixed to the surface of another chip containing an electrode, resulting in the fabricat...
Conference Paper
The Spherical Transfer Function (STF) has previously been used in structural HRTF modelling as an analytical approximation to the human head. Versions based on both spherical and spheroidal solid bodies have been incorporated into a range of systems, such as the well known Brown and Duda [1] structural model. STF-based models provide a way to simul...
Article
Full-text available
Bilayer polymer/metal suspended membranes made of poly (methyl methacrylate)(PMMA) and aluminium (Al) have been fabricated using a wet transfer technique where a polyelectrolyte (polydiallyldimethylammonium chloride-PDAC) has been employed as sacrificial layer to facilitate the detachment of the thin PMMA/Al layers from the substrate holders. I...
Article
Full-text available
This letter reports an experimental study of an electrothermal actuator made from an ultra-large graphene-based bilayer thin film with a diameter to thickness aspect ratio of ∼10 000. Suspended thin films consisting of multilayer graphene and 350–500 nm-thick Poly(methyl methacrylate) have been transferred over circular cavities with a diameter of...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Many studies have explored bowed string control, first in theory, and later through experiments and simulations. Bowing control is most commonly described in terms of 3 parameters: downward bow force, bow position, and transverse bow velocity. The correlation between these parameters and the production of a note is generally referred to as the play...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
One of the characteristic features of the sound of a brass instrument is the way in which the timbre becomes brighter during a crescendo. The spectrum of a quiet note on any brass instrument is dominated by the lowest three or four harmonic components; as the loudness is increased upper harmonics become relatively more significant. In instruments w...
Article
Full-text available
The carnyx was a metal wind instrument used by Celtic peoples around two thousand years ago. It was approximately two meters long with a bell in the shape of an animal head. In 2004, an excavation at Tintignac in the Corrèze district of France uncovered a horde of bronze instruments, including parts of several carnyxes. It proved possible to assemb...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The frequency of a note played on a brass wind musical instrument is usually close to the frequency of one of the peaks in the input impedance curve of the instrument. The exact playing frequency also depends on factors, including lip tension and vocal tract shape, which allow an experienced player to modify the pitch and timbre of a note without c...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Since the discovery nearly twenty years ago that nonlinear propagation of the internal sound wave in a trombone was primarily responsible for the "brassy" timbre in fortissimo playing, it has become increasingly clear that nonlinear distortion even at moderate sound levels can contribute significantly to the tonal character of a brass instrument. P...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
The linear behaviour of drum membranes has been extensively studied and is now well understood. Particular attention has been devoted to modal analyses of circular drum heads, and good agreement has been found between experiment and theory. Up to now, however, there has been relatively little investigation into the relevance and nature of nonlinear...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
Collisions play an important role in musical acoustics. Extensive study has already been performed on this subject for a number of systems, with notable examples being the hammer-string collision in the piano, and the mallet-membrane collision relevant in drums. This paper uses experiments and modelling to investigate collisions in the snare drum....
Article
Full-text available
Most theoretical descriptions of the brass instrument lip-reed consider the acoustical condition at the lips to be a closed, rigid termination, corresponding to a unitary reflectance. This assumption is carried through to many computational models as well. In reality, the protrusion of the player's lips into the mouthpiece causes a periodic shorten...
Article
Most theoretical descriptions of the brass instrument lip-reed consider the acoustical condition at the lips to be a closed, rigid termination, corresponding to a unitary reflectance. This assumption is carried through to many computational models as well. In reality, the protrusion of the player's lips into the mouthpiece causes a periodic shorten...
Article
Full-text available
Bimaterial planarized micromechanical beams have been designed, simulated, and fabricated with lengths in the range 800–5800 μm and distance to substrate 0.8–4.0 μm. The beams are to be used as vertical-mode resonant gates on p-type field-effect transistors for implementing an adaptable MEMS acoustic sensor inspired by the human ear. A process for...
Article
Full-text available
Physiological evidence suggests that sound onset detection in the auditory system may be performed by specialized neurons as early as the cochlear nucleus. Psychoacoustic evidence shows that the sound onset can be important for the recognition of musical sounds. Here the sound onset is used in isolation to form tone descriptors for a musical instru...
Conference Paper
This paper proposes a low-noise MEMS interface circuit which has very small parasitic capacitance at the input node. The circuit presented is suitable for the MEMS cochlea-mimicking acoustic sensors which are highly parasitic-sensitive due to their low intrinsic sensing capacitance. In order to reduce the electronic noise of the interface circuit,...
Article
Full-text available
The integration of p-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor transistors and tantalum bridge structures for the fabrication of resonant gate transistors (RGTs) that operate in the audible frequency range has been developed. Resonant gate transistors with channel length of 15 μm and clamped-clamped tantalum bridges of 0.5 mm to 1.6 mm in length have been...
Article
Full-text available
A biologically-inspired neural coding scheme for the early auditory system is outlined. The cochlea response is simulated with a passive gammatone filterbank. The output of each bandpass filter is spike-encoded using a zero-crossing based method over a range of sensitivity levels. The scheme is inspired by the highly parallellised nature of the aud...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This paper presents the design of a spike event coded resonant gate transistor microphone system for neuromorphic auditory applications. The microphone system employs an array of resonant gate transistors (RGT) to transduce acoustic input directly into bandpass filtered analog outputs. The bandpass filtered analog outputs are encoded as spike time...
Article
Physiological evidence suggests that specific neurons within the cochlear nucleus specialize in sound onset detection. These are innervated by type 1 spiral ganglion fibers covering a relatively wide spectrum. Sudden increases in sound energy (e.g., during the initial portion of a sound) result in an increased firing rate in a downstream onset neur...
Article
Full-text available
An etch release process capable of releasing long resonant gate transistor bridges from a sacrificial layer has been studied as a step towards developing a system to mimic the cochlear mechanism inside the human ear. The developed etch release process involves the use of a gentle etch tool that is capable of a clean and damage-free etch release. Th...
Article
Full-text available
Optimization methods based on input impedance target functions have been proposed for the design of brass musical instruments. Criteria for target functions in trombone bore optimization are discussed, drawing on experimental input impedance data from a variety of high-quality trombones of differing sizes. An "inharmonicity plot" is introduced and...
Article
Full-text available
Mechanical frequency responses of human and artificial lips in brass instrument playing have been measured using a high-speed digital video technique, in an attempt to classify the true nature of the "lip-reed." Four semiprofessional human players were used, and three notes played on a trombone were studied. All measurements revealed a strong mecha...

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