Showing papers by "AG Armin Kohlrausch published in 2020"

Auditory Gestalt Rules and Their Application

Abstract: The formation of auditory objects is of high interest for both the understanding of human hearing as well as for computer-based analysis of sound signals. Breaking down an acoustic scene into meaningful units facilitates the segregation and recognition of sound-sources from a mixture. These are abilities that are particularly challenging for machine listening as well as for hearing-impaired listeners. An early approach to explaining object perception in the visual domain was made by the Gestalt psychologists. They aimed at setting up specific rules according to which sensory input is grouped into either one coherent or multiple separate objects. Inspired by these Gestalt Rules and by exploiting physical and perceptual properties of sounds, different algorithms have been designed to segregate sound mixtures into auditory objects. This chapter reviews some literature on such algorithms and the underlying principles of auditory object formation with a special focus on the connection between perceptual findings and their technical implementation.

Perceptual similarity between piano notes: Simulations with a template-based perception model

Abstract: In this paper the auditory model developed by Dau et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 102, 2892-2905 (1997)] was used to simulate the perceptual similarity between complex sounds. For this purpose, a central processor stage was developed and attached as a back-end module to the auditory model. As complex sounds, a set of recordings of one note played on seven different pianos was used, whose similarity has been recently measured by Osses et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 146, 1024-1035 (2019)] using a 3-AFC discrimination task in noise. The auditory model has several processing stages that are to a greater or lesser extent inspired by physiological aspects of the human normal-hearing system. A set of configurable parameters in each stage affects directly the sound (internal) representations that are further processed in the developed central processor. Therefore, a comprehensive review of the model parameters is given, indicating the configuration we chose. This includes an in-depth description of the auditory adaptation stage, the adaptation loops. Simulations of the similarity task were compared with (1) existing experimental data, where they had a moderate to high correlation, and with (2) simulations using an alternative but similar background noise to that of the experiments, which were used to obtain further information about how the participants' responses were weighted as a function of frequency.