MAT 595M Seminar Series
Overview of sound perception and cognition
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Abstract:
Overview of sound perception and cognition. - if you want to work with sound, given the way human hearing functions, what exactly do you have to work with? Another way of thinking about it: if you wanted to "sonify" some data, what parameters of sound are available for your mapping? I'm inspired by Tufte's amazing books on how to present information visually and wish there were something analogous for the sound domain. So I propose to speed through a huge amount of material going for coverage rather than depth, but with some demos to keep things grounded, hopefully with lots of questions and interactivity. Topics could include:
- Acoustic vs. perceptual domains (amplitude vs. loudness, fundamental
frequency vs. pitch...)
- Frequency and amplitude limits of human hearing
- Fletcher-Munson equal-loudness contours (and the phone/sone loudness
scales)
- Cause, mechanism, and prevention of noise-induced hearing loss
- Masking
- Harmonic series (The "paradox" of the missing fundamental)
- Timbre and its many dimensions
- Shepard tones / Risset's endless glissandi
- Perception of pulse and meter. "Subjective rhythmicization"
- Auditory scene analysis: how do we cognitively organize our 2- channel sound input so as to infer the presence of multiple independent sound sources and sound events?
- Attacks, onsets...
- Spatial hearing: interaural amplitude and time differences, "law" of the first wavefront, speed of sound.
- Physiology of the ear
As part of the informality of this talk, I'm open to adjusting the
content to be more interesting for y'all. Please email me back if
you want to hear more or less about any of the above topics on Friday
(or if you would rather hear me present something completely
different...)
Matt Wright
CREATE Research Director
PhD, Stanford/CCRMA, B.A. UC Berkeley/CNMAT, Post-Doc UVic/MISTIC
Dr. Wright's dissertation "The Shape of an Instant: Measuring and
Modeling Perceptual Attack Time with Probability Density Functions"
concerned models of musical rhythm, including onsets, repetition,
pulsation, meter, and phrasing, with particular emphasis on the
question of when exactly we perceive musical events to occur. His
interests are both theoretical and practical, aimed towards computer
simulation of perceptual aspects of listening to musical rhythm for the
construction of "automatic listeners". He worked for 15 years as the
Musical Systems Designer at UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and
Audio Technology (CNMAT), conducting research in topics including
intimate musical control of computers, sound analysis and resynthesis,
and rhythm; at CNMAT he helped to develop and propagate the now well
established and much appreciated SDIF (Sound Description Interchange
Format) and OSC (Open Sound Control) standards. His post-doctoral
fellowship at the University of Victoria was devoted to the emerging
field of computational ethnomusicology, and he is now the Research
Director at UC Santa Barbara's Center for Research in Electronic Art
Technology (CREATE). He is also an accomplished musician, focusing for
the last many years on musics of non-Western cultures, with a special
interest in Afro-Brazilian percussion and on the musics of India,
Afghanistan, the Middle East, and North Africa.
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