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Sound, devoid of meaning, would not matter to us. It is the information sound conveys that helps the brain to understand its environment. Sound and its underlying meaning are always associated with time and space. There is no sound without spatial properties, and the brain always organizes this information within a temporal–spatial framework. This book is devoted to understanding the importance of meaning for spatial and related further aspects of hearing, including cross-modal inference. People, when exposed to acoustic stimuli, do not react directly to what they hear but rather to what they hear means to them. This semiotic maxim may not always apply, for instance, when the reactions are...
This book reviews research towards perceptual quality dimensions of synthetic speech, compares these findings with the state of the art, and derives a set of five universal perceptual quality dimensions for TTS signals. They are: (i) naturalness of voice, (ii) prosodic quality, (iii) fluency and intelligibility, (iv) absence of disturbances, and (v) calmness. Moreover, a test protocol for the efficient indentification of those dimensions in a listening test is introduced. Furthermore, several factors influencing these dimensions are examined. In addition, different techniques for the instrumental quality assessment of TTS signals are introduced, reviewed and tested. Finally, the requirements for the integration of an instrumental quality measure into a concatenative TTS system are examined.
This book offers new data on the acquisition of functional categories in early child speech. Based on longitudinal corpora of five children acquiring Modern Greek as their first language, it describes the development of single DPs consisting of definite and indefinite articles, complex DPs that require the use of multiple definite articles possessive constructions, appositive constructions and Determiner Spreading, a form of adjectival modification and number and case marking in nouns and definite articles. Detailed quantitative and qualitative analyses show an incremental development of the DP. The findings address the debate concerning maturation versus continuity. Incremental acquisition of the DP argues in favour of a weak continuity approach to language acquisition. Whilst gradual acquisition of the DP remains unexplained within the Principles and Parameters Theory, it is fully compatible within Minimalism, as it is argued to result from the gradual acquisition of the features associated with the Greek DP.
This book presents (1) an exhaustive and empirically validated taxonomy of quality aspects of multimodal interaction as well as respective measurement methods, (2) a validated questionnaire specifically tailored to the evaluation of multimodal systems and covering most of the taxonomy‘s quality aspects, (3) insights on how the quality perceptions of multimodal systems relate to the quality perceptions of its individual components, (4) a set of empirically tested factors which influence modality choice, and (5) models regarding the relationship of the perceived quality of a modality and the actual usage of a modality.
This book presents a new diagnostic information methodology to assess the quality of conversational telephone speech. For this, a conversation is separated into three individual conversational phases (listening, speaking, and interaction), and for each phase corresponding perceptual dimensions are identified. A new analytic test method allows gathering dimension ratings from non-expert test subjects in a direct way. The identification of the perceptual dimensions and the new test method are validated in two sophisticated conversational experiments. The dimension scores gathered with the new test method are used to determine the quality of each conversational phase, and the qualities of the three phases, in turn, are combined for overall conversational quality modeling. The conducted fundamental research forms the basis for the development of a preliminary new instrumental diagnostic conversational quality model. This multidimensional analysis of conversational telephone speech is a major landmark towards deeply analyzing conversational speech quality for diagnosis and optimization of telecommunication systems.
In this book, speech transmission quality is modeled on the basis of perceptual dimensions. The author identifies those dimensions that are relevant for today's public-switched and packet-based telecommunication systems, regarding the complete transmission path from the mouth of the speaker to the ear of the listener. Both narrowband (300-3400 Hz) as well as wideband (50-7000 Hz) speech transmission is taken into account. A new analytical assessment method is presented that allows the dimensions to be rated by non-expert listeners in a direct way. Due to the efficiency of the test method, a relatively large number of stimuli can be assessed in auditory tests. The test method is applied in tw...
This work deals with the instrumental measurement methods for the perceived quality of transmitted speech. These measures simulate the speech perception process employed by human subjects during auditory experiments. The measure standardized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), called “Wideband-Perceptual Speech Quality Evaluation (WB-PESQ)”, is not able to quantify all these perceived characteristics on a unidimensional quality scale, the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) scale. Recent experimental studies showed that subjects make use of several perceptual dimensions to judge about the quality of speech signals. In order to represent the signal at a higher stage of perception, a new model, called “Diagnostic Instrumental Assessment of Listening quality (DIAL)”, has been developed. It includes a perceptual and a cognitive model which simulate the whole quality judgment process. Except for strong discontinuities, DIAL predicts very well speech quality of different speech processing and transmission systems, and it outperforms the WB-PESQ.
This fourth volume, edited and authored by world leading experts, gives a review of the principles, methods and techniques of important and emerging research topics and technologies in Image, Video Processing and Analysis, Hardware, Audio, Acoustic and Speech Processing. With this reference source you will: - Quickly grasp a new area of research - Understand the underlying principles of a topic and its application - Ascertain how a topic relates to other areas and learn of the research issues yet to be resolved - Quick tutorial reviews of important and emerging topics of research in Image, Video Processing and Analysis, Hardware, Audio, Acoustic and Speech Processing - Presents core principles and shows their application - Reference content on core principles, technologies, algorithms and applications - Comprehensive references to journal articles and other literature on which to build further, more specific and detailed knowledge - Edited by leading people in the field who, through their reputation, have been able to commission experts to write on a particular topic
This book interconnects two essential disciplines to study the perception of speech: Neuroscience and Quality of Experience, which to date have rarely been used together for the purposes of research on speech quality perception. In five key experiments, the book demonstrates the application of standard clinical methods in neurophysiology on the one hand and of methods used in fields of research concerned with speech quality perception on the other. Using this combination, the book shows that speech stimuli with different lengths and different quality impairments are accompanied by physiological reactions related to quality variations, e.g., a positive peak in an event-related potential. Furthermore, it demonstrates that – in most cases – quality impairment intensity has an impact on the intensity of physiological reactions.
Spatial sound is an enhanced and immersive set of audio techniques which provides sound in three-dimensional virtual space. This comprehensive handbook sets out the basic principles and methods with a representative group of applications: sound field and spatial hearing; principles and analytic methods of various spatial sound systems, including two-channel stereophonic sound, and multichannel horizontal and spatial surround sound; ambisonics; wavefield synthesis; binaural playback and virtual auditory display; recording and synthesis, and storage and transmission of spatial sound signals; and objective and subjective evaluation. Applications range from cinemas to small mobile devices. The only book to review spatial sound principles and applications extensively Covers the whole field of spatial sound The book suits researchers, graduate students, and specialist engineers in acoustics, audio, and signal processing.