The creation of convincing auditory perspective is an important element of computer music; it makes the sound lively and expressive. Many factors contribute to the impression of space and the location of sound sources, including appropriate reverberation, and balance of loudness and timbres of the sounds used in the composition. Some of the parameters which provide cues to distance of the sound sources are correlated in a natural reverberant environment. A typical example is direct-to-reverberant sound energy ratio and intensity, which change reciprocally along the physical distance between the sound source and the listener.
However, the percepts arising from the physical cues do not always follow the same relationship. This is easy to show in the visual world, in the case of size constancy. In visual perspective, to preserve the impression of size constancy of an object, the physical size of the object has in fact to be diminished in proportion to the provided perspective. Is this also the case in auditory perspective? Existing evidence seems to confirm this thesis.
Since the beginning of this century researchers are aware that changes in loudness and changes in distance may sometimes form equivalent concepts for the listeners (Gamble 1909). As a part of his ``physical correlate theory," Warren noticed that loudness judgements of his stimuli (speech) depended on the degree of reverberation (Warren 1973). Recently Chowning (Chowning 1990) observed that loudness constancy takes place in room environment in a way analogous to the size constancy in vision. An experiment being carried out investigates this postulate with regard to computer music.
Dry percussive sounds have been produced by using the physical model of a hammer (Van Duyne 1994), simulating varying effort of the player. Next the sounds have been next reverberated at a level corresponding to changing distance in a room. In the test, subjects match dry prototypes to each of the reverberated sounds. They are also being given an auditory perspective of the room before each trial. Care has been taken to eliminate possible influence of the spectral bandwidth on the loudness match. The test will reveal if distant sounds played with greater effort are perceived as louder, as if the loudness were estimated at the sound source.
References
Since 1960, computer control of fundamental pitch has opened the door to musical experiments with arbitrary intonation systems. Researchers like M. Mathews and J. R. Pierce have investigated the psychoacoustical and musical implications of some possible synthetic intonation systems. In my book, Expanded Tunings In Contemporary Music, the class of all equally-tempered intonation systems is examined from several points of view (mathematical, psychoacoustical, compositional, etc.).
It was found that among the infinitely many possible intonation systems, there is one especially interesting subclass case designated as ``expanded tunings.'' Expanded tunings are equal systems where the prime interval of the tuning, corresponding to its exponential base, is an interval of the harmonic series other than the unison or the octave and its multiples (intervals termed by J.R. Pierce as ``Superconsonant Ratios'').
It was also found that the perceptual and cognitive coherence of a tuning system depends on the perception of octave similarity, or pitch class abstraction, and that expanded tunings, being based not on octaves but on other superconsonant ratios, could not be perceptually coherent. These would be purely theoretical entities unless the human perceptual/cognitive apparatus could perceive or be trained to perceive prime interval similarity, or pitch class abstraction, in a way similar to that which is obtained by octaves in octave-based tunings.
It was finally found that current explanations for octave similarity support the theoretical possibility that other superconsonant ratios could elicit similar responses of similarity perception under certain special structural and musical circumstances, and provided with a meaningful musical context.
This conclusion pointed to the next step of this research by establishing the need for carefully acquired experimental evidence that will help musicians and music researchers to understand the problem of whether the human mind is capable of expanding its perceptual and cognitive abilities in finding pitch-class similarity beyond the octave.
This research examines both theoretical and empirical backgrounds to the problem, and provides an original theoretical model (based on R. Shepard's cognitive models) in order to establish an appropriate framework for conclusions. A series of cognitive experiments, their methodology, assumptions and expected interpretations as well as the techniques used to obtain results are being presently researched.
This research will contribute towards a renewed awareness of the relation between tuning schemata and music cognition, and in particular to the cognitive coherence of theoretical tuning systems in a real musical context. The proposed new model will hopefully provide an improved way to understand these relationships. Finally, it is expected that the proposed set of experiments will provide answers that contribute to our understanding of the main issue of this research, i.e., whether human cognitive mechanisms can be expected to perceive or trained to perceive, under restricted musical circumstances, similarities other than the octave with the same cognitive effects as those elicited by the octave.
References
The development of multimedia works in recent years has gone hand in hand with the development of technology. It has become easier to create such works using not only computer workstations but PCs as well. As the number of TV channels increases, as well as other media such as film, video, PC-Game, and CD-ROM, more materials are needed.
Multimedia works consist of pictures and sound/music. But they often have been treated as the secondary to pictures. The pictures exist first and then composers write music to fit to them. Music and sound in multimedia works have a great effect on their expression. They add more meanings than the picture itself and/or even change the stream of story compared to that without sound.
Two experiments explored audiovisual interactions when perceiving 3 patterns of matching. For the mismatched excerpts, the original relation between the audio and visual tracks was altered with respect to time or content. For the higher level factor, comparison of the results for matched and mismatched conditions implied an intention of balancing audio and visual meaning. Besides, audio meaning had a direct influence on visual meaning, but only for matched stimuli. For the lower level factor, the influence was independent of degree of matching but feeling of time. The study of factor analysis revealed several kinds and levels of audiovisual interaction.
I focused on the progression of both pictures and music. Music used in audiovisual context has an emotional curve that is related to motion and colors of pictures when it is composed as BGM. Audio and visual context will make stream hand in hand to complete the whole works. Using the software ``humdrum'' on UNIX to analyze the melody pattern, music, sound and action of pictures are arranged in the same time table. Then there I find the relation between audio and visual materials.
The writer was invited to give a talk for "Fletcher Day" (2 June 1995) at the Washington D.C. meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, 30 May - 3 June, 1995. After examining Fletcher's publications, he chose to talk on Fletcher's discoveries concerning pitch. This topic finds no place in Fletcher's book Speech and Hearing in Communication (1953), recently republished by the Acoustical Society of America, and seems little known. The talk will be published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.
Summarizing briefly, in papers in the Physical Review in 1924, ``The Physical Criterion for Determining the Pitch of a Tone,'' Phys. Rev. 23(3), 427-437, and in ``Some Further Experiments on the Pitch of Musical Tones,'' Phys. Rev. 23, 117-118, Fletcher showed that actual musical tones and synthesized tones can have the pitch of the fundamental in absence of any component of the fundamental frequency. Further, Fletcher found that pitch in the absence of the fundamental occurs only when three successive harmonics are present.
The discovery of pitch in the absence of the fundamental is sometimes attributed to J.F. Schouten, ``The Residue, a New Component of Subjective Sound Analysis,'' K. Ned. Akad. Wet, Proc. 43, 356-465, 1940. Schouten's work and those following him treats pitch in the absence of the fundamental as a separate phenomenon, rather than a common characteristic of pitchiness. Fletcher's work on pitch was completed by the time Schouten published.
Fletcher's papers on pitch have led to changes in the parts of the treatment of pitch in a book being prepared for publication by Perry Cook, based on lectures given as a part of Music 151, Psychophysics and Cognitive Psychology for Musicians.
Further consideration of Fletcher and pitch continues.
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