Using scale modelling to assess the prehistoric acoustics of stonehenge (2020)
Journal Article
Cox, T., Fazenda, B., & Greaney, S. (2020). Using scale modelling to assess the prehistoric acoustics of stonehenge. Journal of Archaeological Science, 122, 105218. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2020.105218

With social rituals usually involving sound, an archaeological understanding of a site requires the acoustics to be assessed. This paper demonstrates how this can be done with acoustic scale models. Scale modelling is an established method in archite... Read More about Using scale modelling to assess the prehistoric acoustics of stonehenge.

On performance and perceived effort in trail runners using sensor control to generate biosynchronous music (2020)
Journal Article
Williams, D., Fazenda, B., Williamson, V., & Fazekas, G. (2020). On performance and perceived effort in trail runners using sensor control to generate biosynchronous music. Sensors, 20(16), e4528. https://doi.org/10.3390/s20164528

Music has been shown to be capable of improving runners’ performance in treadmill and laboratory-based experiments. This paper evaluates a generative music system, namely HEARTBEATS, designed to create biosignal synchronous music in real-time accordi... Read More about On performance and perceived effort in trail runners using sensor control to generate biosynchronous music.

Personality and cognitive factors in the assessment of multimodal stimuli in immersive virtual environments (2019)
Thesis
Bailey, J. Personality and cognitive factors in the assessment of multimodal stimuli in immersive virtual environments. (Thesis). University of Salford

Literature in the study of human response to immersive virtual reality systems often deals with the phenomenon of presence. It can be shown that audio and imagery with spatial information can interact to affect presence in users of immersive virtual... Read More about Personality and cognitive factors in the assessment of multimodal stimuli in immersive virtual environments.

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.

Adding the room to the mix : perceptual aspects of modal resonance in live audio (2019)
Presentation / Conference
Fazenda, B., Bolla, C., & Palladini, A. (2019, September). Adding the room to the mix : perceptual aspects of modal resonance in live audio. Presented at 5th Workshop on Intelligent Music Production, Birmingham, UK

The problem of room acoustics correction in live sound is still an open one. In particular, the audible artefacts caused by low frequency resonances are still a major factor in determining the perceived quality of a live show. Despite many years of... Read More about Adding the room to the mix : perceptual aspects of modal resonance in live audio.

User-guided rendering of audio objects using an interactive genetic algorithm (2019)
Journal Article
Wilson, A., & Fazenda, B. (2019). User-guided rendering of audio objects using an interactive genetic algorithm. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 67(7/8), 522-530. https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2019.0035

Object-based audio allows for personalisation of content, perhaps to improve accessibility or to increase quality of experience more generally. This paper describes the design and evaluation of an interactive audio renderer, which is used to optimi... Read More about User-guided rendering of audio objects using an interactive genetic algorithm.

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.

Background adaptation for improved listening experience in broadcasting (2019)
Presentation / Conference
Tang, Y., Cox, T., Fazenda, B., Liu, Q., & Wang, W. (2019, May). Background adaptation for improved listening experience in broadcasting. Presented at 44th International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing, ICASSP 2019, Brighton, UK

The intelligibility of speech in noise can be improved by modifying the speech. But with object-based audio, there is the possibility of altering the background sound while leaving the speech unaltered. This may prove a less intrusive approach, affor... Read More about Background adaptation for improved listening experience in broadcasting.

A hybrid intelligent agent for notification of users distracted by mobile phones in an urban environment (2019)
Presentation / Conference
Gelaim, T., Langer, G., Santos, E., Silveira, R., O'Hare, J., Kendrick, P., & Fazenda, B. (2019, February). A hybrid intelligent agent for notification of users distracted by mobile phones in an urban environment. Presented at 11th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence (ICAART), Prague, Czech Republic

Mobile devices are now ubiquitous in daily life and the number of activities that can be performed using them is continually growing. This implies increased attention being placed on the device and diverted away from events taking place in the surr... Read More about A hybrid intelligent agent for notification of users distracted by mobile phones in an urban environment.

Speech-to-screen : spatial separation of dialogue from noise towards improved speech intelligibility for the small screen (2018)
Presentation / Conference
Demonte, P., Tang, Y., Hughes, R., Cox, T., Fazenda, B., & Shirley, B. (2018, May). Speech-to-screen : spatial separation of dialogue from noise towards improved speech intelligibility for the small screen. Presented at 144th International Pro Audio Convention (AES Milan 2018), Milan, Italy

Can externalizing dialogue when in the presence of stereo background noise improve speech intelligibility? This has been investigated for audio over headphones using head-tracking in order to explore potential future developments for small-screen dev... Read More about Speech-to-screen : spatial separation of dialogue from noise towards improved speech intelligibility for the small screen.

Automatic speech-to-background ratio selection to maintain speech intelligibility in broadcasts using an objective intelligibility metric (2018)
Journal Article
Tang, Y., Fazenda, B., & Cox, T. (2018). Automatic speech-to-background ratio selection to maintain speech intelligibility in broadcasts using an objective intelligibility metric. Applied Sciences, 8(1), 59. https://doi.org/10.3390/app8010059

While mixing, sound producers and audio professionals empirically set the speech-to-background ratio (SBR) based on rules of thumb and their own perception of sounds. There is no guarantee that the speech content will be intelligible for the general... Read More about Automatic speech-to-background ratio selection to maintain speech intelligibility in broadcasts using an objective intelligibility metric.

Populating the mix space : parametric methods for generating multitrack audio mixtures (2017)
Journal Article
generating multitrack audio mixtures. Applied Sciences, 7(12), 1329. https://doi.org/10.3390/app7121329

The creation of multitrack mixes by audio engineers is a time-consuming activity and creating high-quality mixes requires a great deal of knowledge and experience. Previous studies on the perception of music mixes have been limited by the relatively... Read More about Populating the mix space : parametric methods for generating multitrack audio mixtures.

Towards bio-responsive control for music (2017)
Presentation / Conference
Williams, D., Murphy, D., & Fazenda, B. (2017, December). Towards bio-responsive control for music. Presented at DMRN+12 : Digital Music Research Network, Queen Mary University London

Music and audio applications are well suited to tactile control. In sound and music computing there can be a disconnect between design of human-computer interfacing and application congruent design. A categorical approach is proposed, considering act... Read More about Towards bio-responsive control for music.

On the suitability of evolutionary computing to developing tools for intelligent music production (2017)
Presentation / Conference
Wilson, A., Loughran, R., & Fazenda, B. (2017, September). On the suitability of evolutionary computing to developing tools for intelligent music production. Presented at 3rd Workshop on Intelligent Music Production (WIMP 2017), Salford, UK

Intelligent music production tools aim to assist the user by automating music production tasks. Many previous systems sought to create the best possible mix based on technical parameters but rarely has subjectivity been directly incorporated. This pa... Read More about On the suitability of evolutionary computing to developing tools for intelligent music production.

Cave acoustics in prehistory : exploring the association of Palaeolithic visual motifs and acoustic response (2017)
Journal Article
Fazenda, B., Scarre, C., Till, R., Pasalodos, R., Guerra, M., Tejedor, C., …Foulds, F. (2017). Cave acoustics in prehistory : exploring the association of Palaeolithic visual motifs and acoustic response. ˜The œJournal of the Acoustical Society of America (Online), 142(3), 1332-1349. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.4998721

During the 1980s, acoustic studies of Upper Palaeolithic imagery in French caves—using the technology then available—suggested a relationship between acoustic response and the location of visual motifs. This paper presents an investigation, using mod... Read More about Cave acoustics in prehistory : exploring the association of Palaeolithic visual motifs and acoustic response.

An evolutionary computation approach to intelligent music production informed by experimentally gathered domain knowledge (2016)
Presentation / Conference
Wilson, A., & Fazenda, B. (2016, September). An evolutionary computation approach to intelligent music production informed by experimentally gathered domain knowledge. Presented at 2nd AES Workshop on Intelligent Music Production (WIMP), London, UK

A novel methodology for intelligent music production has been developed using evolutionary computation. Mixes are generated by exploration of a “mix-space”, which consists of a series of inter-channel volume ratios, allowing efficient generation of r... Read More about An evolutionary computation approach to intelligent music production informed by experimentally gathered domain knowledge.

Variation in multitrack mixes : analysis of low-level audio signal features (2016)
Journal Article
Wilson, A., & Fazenda, B. (2016). Variation in multitrack mixes : analysis of low-level audio signal features. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 64(7/8), 466-473. https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2016.0029

To further the development of intelligent music production tools, towards generating mixes that would realistically be created by a human mix-engineer, it is important to understand what kind of mixes can be created, and are typically created, by h... Read More about Variation in multitrack mixes : analysis of low-level audio signal features.

Perception and automated assessment of audio quality in user generated content (2016)
Conference Proceeding
quality in user generated content. In Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX), 2016 Eighth International Conference on 6-8 June 2016. https://doi.org/10.1109/QoMEX.2016.7498974

Technology to record sound, available in personal devices such as smartphones or video recording devices, is now ubiquitous. However, the production quality of the sound on this user-generated content is often very poor: distorted, noisy, with garble... Read More about Perception and automated assessment of audio quality in user generated content.

Relationship between hedonic preference and audio quality in tests of music production quality (2016)
Book Chapter
Wilson, A., & Fazenda, B. (2016). Relationship between hedonic preference and audio quality in tests of music production quality. In 2016 Eighth International Conference on Quality of Multimedia Experience (QoMEX) (1-6). IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/QoMEX.2016.7498937

In many subjective listening tests, audio is evaluated on either "quality" or "preference". These terms are often conflated. Little evidence has been gathered which explains the subtle differences between these terms in audio perception --- we may no... Read More about Relationship between hedonic preference and audio quality in tests of music production quality.

Evaluating a distortion-weighted glimpsing metric for predicting binaural speech intelligibility in rooms (2016)
Journal Article
Tang, Y., Hughes, R., Fazenda, B., & Cox, T. (2016). Evaluating a distortion-weighted glimpsing metric for predicting binaural speech intelligibility in rooms. Speech Communication, 82, 26-37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.specom.2016.04.003

A distortion-weighted glimpse proportion metric (BiDWGP) for predicting binaural speech intelligibility were evaluated in simulated anechoic and reverberant conditions, with and without a noise masker. The predictive performance of BiDWGP was compare... Read More about Evaluating a distortion-weighted glimpsing metric for predicting binaural speech intelligibility in rooms.