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All Outputs (87)

Associations between urban soundscape perception and emotional states (2024)
Thesis
de Ulhoa Carvalho, M. L. (2024). Associations between urban soundscape perception and emotional states. (Thesis). University of Salford

Urban soundscape design represents a research area still in development, with gaps, such as influences on human response and practical application. Research on natural soundscapes, such as urban parks has demonstrated their benefits to society, howev... Read More about Associations between urban soundscape perception and emotional states.

Habitats: Developments in managing the ecological impacts of noise on wildlife habitats for sustainable development (2023)
Conference Proceeding
Waddington, D., Wood, M., Davies, W., Young, R., & Engel, M. (in press). Habitats: Developments in managing the ecological impacts of noise on wildlife habitats for sustainable development.

The Habitats project integrates research in the fields of ecological impacts and environmental noise to facilitate development of management tools and processes needed for sustainable development. This conference paper summarises the content and outc... Read More about Habitats: Developments in managing the ecological impacts of noise on wildlife habitats for sustainable development.

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?.

Habitats : managing the ecological impacts of noise on wildlife habitats for sustainable development (2022)
Presentation / Conference
Waddington, D., Wood, M., Davies, W., & Young, R. (2022, August). Habitats : managing the ecological impacts of noise on wildlife habitats for sustainable development. Presented at Internoise 2022, Glasgow, Scotland

The objective of the Habitats project is to integrate research in the fields of ecological impacts and of environmental noise, developing management tools and processes to enable sustainable development. Rapid population expansion and economic deve... Read More about Habitats : managing the ecological impacts of noise on wildlife habitats for sustainable development.

Spatial aspects of auditory salience (2020)
Thesis
Podwinska, Z. Spatial aspects of auditory salience. (Thesis). University of Salford

Models of auditory salience aim to predict which sounds attract people’s attention, and their proposed applications range from soundscape design to machine listening systems and object-based broadcasting. A few different types of models have been pro... Read More about Spatial aspects of auditory salience.

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.

Improving broadcast accessibility for hard of hearing individuals : using object-based audio personalisation and narrative importance (2020)
Thesis
Ward, L. Improving broadcast accessibility for hard of hearing individuals : using object-based audio personalisation and narrative importance. (Thesis). University of Salford

Technological advances in broadcasting can be the impetus for advances in accessibility services. For the 11 million individuals in the United Kingdom with some degree of hearing loss, the advent of object-based broadcasting and it’s personalisation... Read More about Improving broadcast accessibility for hard of hearing individuals : using object-based audio personalisation and narrative importance.

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.

Connecting design, emotion, and behaviour in urban soundscape (2019)
Presentation / Conference
Carvalho, M., Davies, W., & Fazenda, B. (2019, July). Connecting design, emotion, and behaviour in urban soundscape. Poster presented at SPARC 2019 Fake News and Home Truths, MediaCity UK, Salford

With the purpose of assisting developments in urban soundscape design, the present research investigates how soundscapes can influence emotions and behaviours in public spaces aiming to find healthy reactions to “exciting” sonic environments. In the... Read More about Connecting design, emotion, and behaviour in urban soundscape.

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.

Acoustic Event Detection from Weakly Labeled Data Using Auditory Salience (2019)
Presentation / Conference
Podwinska, Z., Sobieraj, I., Fazenda, B., Davies, W., & Plumbley, M. (2019, May). Acoustic Event Detection from Weakly Labeled Data Using Auditory Salience. Presented at 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP), Brighton, UK

Acoustic Event Detection (AED) is an important task of machine listening which, in recent years, has been addressed using common machine learning methods like Non-negative Matrix Factorization (NMF) or deep learning. However, most of these approaches... Read More about Acoustic Event Detection from Weakly Labeled Data Using Auditory Salience.

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.

The auditory fingerprint : multidimensional characterization of individual pitch perception in musicians (2018)
Thesis
Benner, J. (in press). The auditory fingerprint : multidimensional characterization of individual pitch perception in musicians. (Dissertation). University of Salford

Musicians have been repeatedly reported to show remarkable inter-individual differences in elementary hearing functions, sound perception mode, musical instrument preference, performance style, as well as musical abilities such as absolute- and relat... Read More about The auditory fingerprint : multidimensional characterization of individual pitch perception in musicians.

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.