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Can acoustic design accommodate aural diversity? (2023)
Journal Article
Davies, W. (2023). Can acoustic design accommodate aural diversity?. NOISE-CON proceedings, 8, 5064-5071. https://doi.org/10.3397/IN_2022_0732

Up to now, the acoustic design of almost everything has assumed a typical listener with "normal" hearing. This includes the physical environment (homes, workplaces, public space), products that make sound (transport, appliances, loudspeakers), and sy... Read More about Can acoustic design accommodate aural diversity?.

Environmental noise levels in hospital settings : a rapid review of measurement techniques and implementation in hospital settings (2020)
Journal Article
Wallis, R., Harris, E., Lee, H., Davies, W., & Astin, F. (2020). Environmental noise levels in hospital settings : a rapid review of measurement techniques and implementation in hospital settings. Noise and Health, 21(102), 200-216

Background: Hospitals provide treatment to improve patient health and well-being but the characteristics of the care environment receive little attention. Excessive noise at night has a negative impact on in-patient health through disturbed sleep. To... Read More about Environmental noise levels in hospital settings : a rapid review of measurement techniques and implementation in hospital settings.

Autistic listening (2019)
Presentation / Conference
Davies, W. (2019, November). Autistic listening. Presented at Aural Diversity, Leicester, UK

Autism is a lifelong neurodevelopmental condition diagnosed by differences in social interaction and communication. Most autistic people also experience atypical sensory processing (e.g., a heightened sensitivity to sound or texture). Nearly all auti... Read More about Autistic listening.

Pupil dilation reveals changes in listening effort due to energetic and informational masking (2019)
Presentation / Conference
Woodcock, J., Fazenda, B., Cox, T., & Davies, W. (2019, September). Pupil dilation reveals changes in listening effort due to energetic and informational masking. Presented at ICA 2019, Aachen, Germany

Pupil dilation has previously been shown to be a useful involuntary marker of listening effort. An inverse relationship between pupil diameter and signal to noise ratio has been shown when speech is energetically masked by noise. The work reported he... Read More about Pupil dilation reveals changes in listening effort due to energetic and informational masking.

Influence of visual stimuli on perceptual attributes of spatial audio (2019)
Journal Article
Woodcock, J., Davies, W., & Cox, T. (2019). Influence of visual stimuli on perceptual attributes of spatial audio. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 67(7/8), 557-567. https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2019.0019

Reproduced audio is often accompanied with visuals (i.e. television, virtual reality, gaming, and cinema). However, the audio technology for these systems is often researched and evaluated in isolation from the visual component. Previous research ind... Read More about Influence of visual stimuli on perceptual attributes of spatial audio.

Testing spatial aspects of auditory salience (2019)
Presentation / Conference
Podwinska, Z., Fazenda, B., & Davies, W. (2019, June). Testing spatial aspects of auditory salience. Presented at The 25th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2019), Northumbria University, UK

Auditory salience describes the extent to which sounds attract the listener’s attention. So far, there have not been any published studies testing if the location of sound relative to the listener influences its salience. In fact, not many experiment... Read More about Testing spatial aspects of auditory salience.

Generalisation in environmental sound classification : the ‘making sense of sounds’ data set and challenge (2019)
Presentation / Conference
Kroos, C., Bones, O., Cao, Y., Harris, L., Jackson, P., Davies, W., …Plumbley, M. (2019, May). Generalisation in environmental sound classification : the ‘making sense of sounds’ data set and challenge. Presented at 44th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2019), Brighton, UK

Humans are able to identify a large number of environmental sounds and categorise them according to high-level semantic categories, e.g. urban sounds or music. They are also capable of generalising from past experience to new sounds when applying the... Read More about Generalisation in environmental sound classification : the ‘making sense of sounds’ data set and challenge.

Sound categories : category formation and evidence-based taxonomies (2018)
Journal Article
Bones, O., Cox, T., & Davies, W. (2018). Sound categories : category formation and evidence-based taxonomies. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, #1277. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01277

Five evidence-based taxonomies of everyday sounds frequently reported in the soundscape literature have been generated. An online sorting and category-labelling method that elicits rather than prescribes descriptive words was used. A total of N=242 p... Read More about Sound categories : category formation and evidence-based taxonomies.

Qualitative evaluation of media device orchestration for immersive spatial audio reproduction (2018)
Journal Article
Francombe, J., Woodcock, J., Hughes, R., Mason, R., Franck, A., Pike, C., …Hilton, A. (2018). Qualitative evaluation of media device orchestration for immersive spatial audio reproduction. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 66(6), 414-429. https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2018.0027

The challenge of installing and setting up dedicated spatial audio systems can make it difficult to deliver immersive listening experiences to the general public. However, the proliferation of smart mobile devices and the rise of the Internet of Thin... Read More about Qualitative evaluation of media device orchestration for immersive spatial audio reproduction.

Elicitation of expert knowledge to inform object-based audio rendering to different systems (2018)
Journal Article
rendering to different systems. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 66(1/2), 44-59. https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2018.0001

Object-based audio presents the opportunity to optimise audio reproduction for different listening scenarios. Vector base amplitude panning (VBAP) is typically used to render object-based scenes. Optimizing this process based on knowledge of the perc... Read More about Elicitation of expert knowledge to inform object-based audio rendering to different systems.

Big pictures and small screens; how television sound research can work with, and for, hard of hearing viewers (2017)
Presentation / Conference
Ward, L., Shirley, B., & Davies, W. (2017, November). Big pictures and small screens; how television sound research can work with, and for, hard of hearing viewers. Presented at Reproduced Sound 2017, Nottingham, UK

Hearing loss affects one in six people in the United Kingdom and, given an ageing population, this figure is increasing.1 Numerous studies highlight that improvements in the intelligibility of television sound are required to increase television’s... Read More about Big pictures and small screens; how television sound research can work with, and for, hard of hearing viewers.

Turning up the background noise; The effects of salient non-speech audio elements on dialogue intelligibility in complex acoustic scenes (2017)
Presentation / Conference
Ward, L., Shirley, B., & Davies, W. (2017, November). Turning up the background noise; The effects of salient non-speech audio elements on dialogue intelligibility in complex acoustic scenes. Presented at Reproduced Sound, Southampton, UK

As an acoustic scene becomes more complex listeners increasingly rely on complementary intelligibility cues, such as context and language structure, to understand speech. Despite the role salient non-speech audio elements, like sound effects, play in... Read More about Turning up the background noise; The effects of salient non-speech audio elements on dialogue intelligibility in complex acoustic scenes.

Soundscape simulator as a tool to predict the perception of acoustic environment (2017)
Presentation / Conference
Sudarsono, A., Lam, Y., & Davies, W. (2017, August). Soundscape simulator as a tool to predict the perception of acoustic environment. Presented at INTER-NOISE 2017, Hong Kong

Previous studies have shown relationships between sound objects by grouping general sound objects according to how people perceive them (i.e. positively or negatively), but not according to how specific sound objects and their interaction affect so... Read More about Soundscape simulator as a tool to predict the perception of acoustic environment.

An evidence-based soundscape taxonomy (2017)
Presentation / Conference
Bones, O., Cox, T., & Davies, W. (2017, July). An evidence-based soundscape taxonomy. Presented at 24th International Congress on Sound and Vibration ICSV24, London, UK

In an attempt to cultivate standardization in soundscape reporting Brown, Kang and Gjestland offered an influential schema by which the acoustic environment is divided initially into indoor and outdoor environments, and within each into further cate... Read More about An evidence-based soundscape taxonomy.

Quiet technologies for deliveries in urban environments (2017)
Presentation / Conference
Tansey, N., Waddington, D., & Davies, W. (2017, July). Quiet technologies for deliveries in urban environments. Presented at 24th International Congress on Sound and Vibration ICSV24, London

The aim of this paper is to review current research on materials and methods that can be incorporated within local environment and building design concepts to mitigate noise due to deliveries. The use of innovative materials, design and master planni... Read More about Quiet technologies for deliveries in urban environments.

Clang, chitter, crunch : perceptual organisation of onomatopoeia (2017)
Journal Article
Bones, O., Davies, W., & Cox, T. (2017). Clang, chitter, crunch : perceptual organisation of onomatopoeia. ˜The œJournal of the Acoustical Society of America (Online), 141(5), 3694-3694. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4988048

A method has been developed that utilizes a sound-sorting and labeling procedure, with correspondence analysis of participant-generated descriptive terms, to elicit perceptual categories of sound. Unlike many other methods for identifying perceptual... Read More about Clang, chitter, crunch : perceptual organisation of onomatopoeia.

Differences in sound perception are reflected by individual auditory fingerprints in musicians (2017)
Journal Article
Benner, J., Reinhardt, J., Hofmann, E., Stippich, C., Schneider, P., Blatow, M., & Davies, W. (2017). Differences in sound perception are reflected by individual auditory fingerprints in musicians. ˜The œJournal of the Acoustical Society of America (Online), 141(5), 3818-3818. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4988456

Musicians have been reported to show significant inter-Individual differences in elementary hearing functions, sound perception mode, musical instrument preference, performance style, as well as more complex musical abilities like absolute- and relat... Read More about Differences in sound perception are reflected by individual auditory fingerprints in musicians.

A user-centered taxonomy of factors contributing to the listener experience of reproduced audio (2017)
Journal Article
Woodcock, J., Davies, W., & Cox, T. (2017). A user-centered taxonomy of factors contributing to the listener experience of reproduced audio. ˜The œJournal of the Acoustical Society of America (Online), 141(5), 3464-3464. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4987193

The traditional paradigm for the assessment of audio quality is that of a listener positioned in the geometric center of a standardized loudspeaker setup, fully attending to the reproduced sound scene. However, this is not how listeners generally int... Read More about A user-centered taxonomy of factors contributing to the listener experience of reproduced audio.

A cognitive framework for the categorisation of auditory objects in urban soundscapes (2017)
Journal Article
Woodcock, J., Davies, W., & Cox, T. (2017). A cognitive framework for the categorisation of auditory objects in urban soundscapes. Applied Acoustics, 121, 56-64. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.apacoust.2017.01.027

Categorisation is a fundamental cognitive process that plays a central role in everyday behaviour and action. Whereas previous studies have investigated the categorisation of isolated everyday sounds, this paper presents an experiment to investiga... Read More about A cognitive framework for the categorisation of auditory objects in urban soundscapes.