All Outputs (43)

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.

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.

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.

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.

The effect of situation-specific non-speech acoustic cues on the intelligibility of speech in noise (2017)
Presentation / Conference
Ward, L., Shirley, B., Tang, Y., & Davies, W. (2017, August). The effect of situation-specific non-speech acoustic cues on the intelligibility of speech in noise. Presented at INTERSPEECH 2017, 18th Annual Conference of the International Speech Communication Association, Stockholm, Sweden

In everyday life, speech is often accompanied by a situation-specific acoustic cue; a hungry bark as you ask ‘Has anyone fed the dog?’. This paper investigates the effect such cues have on speech intelligibility in noise and evaluates their interactio... Read More about The effect of situation-specific non-speech acoustic cues on the intelligibility of speech in noise.

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.

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.

Snap, crackle and pop : how sound effects help, and hinder, hearing in broadcast audio (2017)
Presentation / Conference
Ward, L., Shirley, B., & Davies, W. (2017, June). Snap, crackle and pop : how sound effects help, and hinder, hearing in broadcast audio. Presented at SPARC 2017 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference, University of Salford, UK

Complaints about the intelligibility of television speech have become increasingly common, both for normal hearing and hard of hearing listeners alike. The debate these complaints have sparked have stretched from angry viewers on Twitter right up t... Read More about Snap, crackle and pop : how sound effects help, and hinder, hearing in broadcast audio.

Soundscape perception analysis using soundscape simulator (2016)
Presentation / Conference
Sudarsono, A., Lam, Y., & Davies, W. (2016, August). Soundscape perception analysis using soundscape simulator. Presented at Internoise 2016, Hamburg, Germany

Soundscape perception based on soundscape dimensions was investigated using a soundscape simulator. A soundscape simulator is a system to design a soundscape by controlling the parameters of sound objects (both background and event sound), allowing t... Read More about Soundscape perception analysis using soundscape simulator.

Cognition of soundscapes and other complex acoustic scenes (2015)
Presentation / Conference
Davies, W. (2015, August). Cognition of soundscapes and other complex acoustic scenes. Presented at Internoise 2015, San Francisco

The fields of soundscapes, music cognition and audio quality have many similarities. Researchers in these areas are all dealing with perception and cognition of complex acoustic scenes. To date, there has been little cross-fertilisation between them.... Read More about Cognition of soundscapes and other complex acoustic scenes.

Investigation into the impact of 3D surround systems on envelopment (2014)
Presentation / Conference
Power, P., Davies, W., & Hirst, J. (2014, October). Investigation into the impact of 3D surround systems on envelopment. Presented at 137th Audio Engineering Society Convention 2014, Los Angeles

This investigation assessed a number of 2D and 3D surround systems focusing on the attribute „envelopment‟ to determine if surround systems with height significantly enhance the perception of envelopment over current 2D systems. To assess each of the... Read More about Investigation into the impact of 3D surround systems on envelopment.

Investigation into the impact of 3D surround systems on spatial audio quality (2013)
Presentation / Conference
Power, P., Davies, W., Hirst, J., & Dunn, C. (2013, November). Investigation into the impact of 3D surround systems on spatial audio quality. Presented at Reproduced Sound, Manchester

Current 2D surround systems have benefitted from years of research which has helped identify attributes related to listener preference. Now with high definition visuals, 3D cinema, there is a need to further develop spatial audio systems. One method... Read More about Investigation into the impact of 3D surround systems on spatial audio quality.

Localisation of elevated virtual sources in higher order ambisonic sound fields (2012)
Presentation / Conference
Power, P., Davies, W., Hirst, J., & Dunn, C. (2012, November). Localisation of elevated virtual sources in higher order ambisonic sound fields. Presented at Reproduced Sound, Brighton

Ambisonics allows the reproduction of 3D sound-fields. Higher-order Ambisonics provides improved resolution, and the promise of enhanced localisation at the expense of higher channel counts, and increased broadcast bandwidth, and storage requirements... Read More about Localisation of elevated virtual sources in higher order ambisonic sound fields.

Reproducibility of soundscape dimensions (2012)
Presentation / Conference
Davies, W., & Murphy, J. (2012, August). Reproducibility of soundscape dimensions. Presented at Internoise 2012, New York

The aim of this work was to investigate the validity of laboratory soundscape reproduction and the robustness of soundscape dimensional analysis. The soundscapes in four urban locations in Manchester (UK) were recorded with a soundfield microphone. T... Read More about Reproducibility of soundscape dimensions.