Acoustic Analysis Method Research Articles

An Acoustic Investigation of the Production of Interdental Fricatives by Cameroonian ESL Learners

This study investigates the production of /θ/ and /ð/ at initial, medial and final positions by Cameroonian ESL (CamESL) students using the acoustic analysis method. The words theme, something, mouth, them, without and with were put on a list and read by 26 undergraduate CamESL learners from the University of Maroua. Their productions were recorded and analysed using PRAAT version 6.3.11 of 17 July 2023. The analysis revealed that at initial and medial positions, the majority of learners were able to accurately render the sounds while at the final position, both /θ/ and /ð/ were systematically substituted with /f/ and the unreleased stops /t ̚/ and /d ̚ /. It was also discovered that the choice of substituting phonemes depends on the linguistic environment sounds since unreleased stops never occurred at initial and medial word positions, and the normal stops /t/ and /d/ also rarely occurred at the final position. It can be concluded that success and deviation in the production of interdental fricatives by CamESL learners depend on the location of the sound.

Introduction of Voice Type Component (VTC) as an Effective Acoustic Voice Analysis Method in Tele-evaluation

Telepractice in voice healthcare and evaluation services has attracted much attention in recent years. Multiple studies have proven the effectiveness of voice therapy with telepractice. However, voice evaluations are still mostly conducted in person due to the lack of sensitive acoustic analysis methods. This study examined various acoustic analysis methods for voice evaluation in telepractice. Eighteen female elementary school teachers with self-reported voice disorders volunteered to participate in the study. Speech samples were collected before and after the interventions using two voice sampling methods concurrently. One set of data was collected using the traditional voice sample collection method by the therapist in person. The second set of data was collected on the same speech samples using the clients' own smartphones, and the collected voice samples were later sent to the researcher for further acoustic analysis. The voice type component (VTC) measurement represented the proportion of different VTCs in a voice by measuring the chaos and intrinsic dimension. Voice analyses were conducted on both sets of data, and the correlation between the two sampling procedures was analyzed. It appears that the VTC could be a more reliable method for producing acoustic analysis results with voice samples collected from smartphones compared to other objective voice assessment procedures. This reliability has been demonstrated via statistical analysis, including correlation coefficient, pairwise t test, d-prime,and area under the curve. The results of this study highlighted the VTC as an effective and accurate acoustic analysis method in tele-evaluation. This feasible voice sampling method, which utilizes participants' own smartphones, will reduce barriers to accessing limited voice specialists due to distance and will decrease the cost of care by minimizing expenses associated with travel and additional equipment for voice sampling. Ultimately, this approach will enhance the effectiveness of voice care delivered through telepractice to patients in remote and underserved areas.

The Acoustic Cues of Fear: Investigation of Acoustic Parameters of Speech Containing Fear

Speech emotion recognition is an important part of human-machine interaction studies. The acoustic analysis method is used for emotion recognition through speech. An emotion does not cause changes on all acoustic parameters. Rather, the acoustic parameters affected by emotion vary depending on the emotion type. In this context, the emotion-based variability of acoustic parameters is still a current field of study. The purpose of this study is to investigate the acoustic parameters that fear affects and the extent of their influence. For this purpose, various acoustic parameters were obtained from speech records containing fear and neutral emotions. The change according to the emotional states of these parameters was analyzed using statistical methods, and the parameters and the degree of influence that the fear emotion affected were determined. According to the results obtained, the majority of acoustic parameters that fear affects vary according to the used data. However, it has been demonstrated that formant frequencies, mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, and jitter parameters can define the fear emotion independent of the data used.

Acoustic Analysis of Voluntary Coughs, Throat Clearings, and Induced Reflexive Coughs in a Healthy Population.

Cough efficacy is considered a reliable predictor of the aspiration risk in head and neck cancer patients with radiation-associated dysphagia. Currently, coughing is assessed perceptually or aerodynamically. The goal of our research is to develop methods of acoustic cough analysis. In this study, we examined in a healthy population the acoustical differences between three protective maneuvers: voluntary cough, voluntary throat clearing, and induced reflexive cough. Forty healthy participants were included in this study. Voluntary cough, voluntary throat clearing, and reflexive cough samples were recorded and analyzed acoustically.Temporal acoustic features were the following: the slope and curvature of the amplitude contour, as well as the average, slope, and curvature of the sample entropy and kurtosis contours of the recorded signal. Spectral features were the relative energy in the frequency bands (0-400Hz, 400-800Hz, 800-1600Hz, 1600Hz-3200Hz, > 3200Hz) as well as the weighted spectral energy. Results showed that, compared to a voluntary cough, a throat clearing starts with a weaker onset pulse and involves oscillations from the onset to the offset (concave curvature of the amplitude contour, p < 0.05), lower average (p < 0.05), and slope (p < 0.05) as well as lower convex curvature (p < 0.05) of the kurtosis contour. An induced reflexive cough starts with a higher and briefer onset burst and includes higher frication noise (larger convexity of the curvature of the amplitude and kurtosis contours (p < 0.05)) compared to a voluntary cough. The conclusion is that voluntary coughs are acoustically significantly different from voluntary throat clearings and induced reflexive coughs.

Viability of COMSOL within the silencer selection process

Silencer selection has long been a burdensome, and occasionally iterative process. It is typically done based on tested sound attenuation values obtained using large facilities and costly equipment - making the process time-consuming and unsustainable. Fortunately, Finite Element Analysis (FEA) continues to become a more viable intermediary step between design and construction. COMSOL Multiphysics(r) is an FEA solver and simulation software. COMSOL's acoustics module can determine full octave decibel values of Transmission Loss.This paper goes through parameters and model setup in the COMSOL environment as well as the practicality and convenience of using such a software. It also investigates the reliability of such methods of acoustic analysis compared to empirical data, where it may fall short, and identifies areas in need of more analysis.

Passive acoustic monitoring in terrestrial vertebrates: a review

ABSTRACT Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has become increasingly popular in ecological studies, but its efficacy for assessing overall terrestrial vertebrate biodiversity is unclear. To quantify this, its performance for species detection must be directly compared to that obtained using traditional observer-based monitoring (OBM). Here, we review such comparisons across all major terrestrial vertebrate classes and identify factors impacting PAM performance. From 41 studies, we found that while PAM-OBM comparisons have been made for all major terrestrial vertebrate classes, most comparisons have focused on birds (65%) in North America (52%). PAM performed equally well or better (61%) compared to OBM in general. We found no statistical difference between the methods for total number of species detected across all vertebrate classes (excluding reptiles); however, recording period and region of study influenced the relative performance of PAM, while acoustic analysis method and which method sampled for longer overall showed no impact. Further studies comparing PAM performance in non-avian vertebrates using standardised methods are needed to investigate in more detail the factors that may influence PAM performance. While PAM is a valuable tool for vertebrate surveys, a combined approach with targeted OBM for non-vocal species should achieve the most comprehensive assessment of terrestrial vertebrate communities.

The phonematic principle of the Kazakh script based on Latin graphics

The article is aimed at demonstrating the phonematic principle of the Kazakh language in accordance with the transference to Latin graphics. The phonematic principle is considered predominant in writing, and it implies that one grapheme must be used to denote one phoneme. The research of writing principles is reviewed, and the advantages of transferring the language into Latin graphics are demonstrated with a variety of examples. The transformation of Kazakh sounds in the flow of speech is examined in detail. It is revealed that such transformations occur due to the influence of neighboring sounds. Despite various alterations in speech, the new writing system encodes the main (or dominant) variants of phonemes with correspondent graphemes. This corresponds to the law of economy which is widespread in contemporary alphabets of the world. The research is carried out with the help of the methods of auditory and acoustic analysis, and theoretical analysis along with the experimental-phonetic method.

성덕대왕신종(聖德大王神鍾)의 음향학적 에뮬레이션 연구

The purpose of this study is to analyze the possibility of using the “Sacred Bell of Great King Seongdeok” which is designated as National Treasure No. 29, as a musical resource through acoustic analysis and sound synthesis method. Based on the acoustically analyzed data of the Bell, it was tried to synthesized with frequency and fluctuation of partial sound, the beat cycle and envelop application by the additive synthesis among the method of sound synthesis The spatial sounds were modelled by an artificial neural network to estimate the exact reverberation of the source. The final result was produced with Native Instruments Reactor6, which can be easily used not only by sound designers and multimedia artists but also by many musicians, to preserve the history and identity of Sacred Bell of Great King Seongdeok, and to confirm its potential as a medium to be fused to new media.

Multi-Source Ensemble Learning With Acoustic Spectrum Analysis for Fault Perception of Direct-Buried Transformer Substations

The tremendous growth of electrical loads results in the capacity increase and underground installation of power distribution infrastructures due to the shortage of urban land resources. However, the closed and narrow underground space of direct-buried transformer substation (DBTS) brings great challenges to its fault perception. This article proposes an adaptive acoustic spectrum analysis method with refined composite multiscale dispersion entropy to extract informative fault-related time-frequency vocal features using the singular-value thresholded variable mode decomposition for facilitating fault diagnosis of DBTS. Then, a time-series generative adversarial network based fault data augmentation model is presented to enrich the training dataset while preserving temporal dynamics of the original fault data for boosting the generalization ability of DBTS fault perception. Furthermore, a multi-source ensemble learning strategy is developed to integrate heterogeneous sub-classifiers based on the dynamic weighted fusion of electrical monitoring data and acoustic signals for promoting fault diagnosis accuracy of DBTS. Comparative studies have been investigated to demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed multi-source ensemble learning strategy in improving the fault diagnosis accuracy of DBTS.

Strength Damage and Acoustic Emission Characteristics of Water-Bearing Coal Pillar Dam Samples from Shangwan Mine, China

Long-term erosion and repeated scouring of water significantly affect the technical properties of coals, which are the essential elements that must be considered in evaluating an underground reservoir coal column dam’s standing sustainability. In the paper, the coal pillar dam body of the 22 layers of coal in the Shangwan Coal Mine is studied (22 represents No. 2 coal seam), and the water content of this coal pillar dam body is simplified into two types of different water content and dry–wet cycle. Through acoustic emission detection technology and energy dissipation analysis method, the internal failure mechanism of coal water action is analyzed. This study revealed three findings. (1) The crest pressure, strain, and resilient modulus in the coal sample were inversely related to the water content along with the dry–wet cycle number, while the drying–wetting cycle process had a certain time effect on the failure to the sample. (2) As the moisture content and the dry–wet cycle times incremented, three features were shown: first, the breakage pattern is the mainly stretching fracture for the coal specimen; second, the number and absolute value of acoustic emission count peaks decrease; third, the RA-AF probability density plot (RA is the ratio of AE Risetime and Amplitude, and AF is the ratio of AE Count and Duration) corresponds more closely to the large-scale destruction characteristics for the coal samples. (3) A higher quantity of wet and dry cycles results in a smoother energy dissipation curve in the compacted and flexible phases of the crack, indicating that this energy is released earlier. The research results can be applied to the long-term sustainability assessment of the dams of coal columns for underground reservoirs and can also serve as valuable content to the excogitation of water-bearing coal column dams under similar engineering conditions.

Enhanced 3D (three dimensional) acoustic scene analysis based on sound arrival direction for automatic airport noise monitoring.

To deepen our understanding of the spatial and temporal distribution of various sound sources of environmental noise, which is observed by unattended aircraft noise monitors, we have been developing a method of acoustic scene analysis based on information on the 3D sound arrival direction. In the congress of INTERNOISE 2021 last year, we reported the basic idea of this method and some examples of the analysis. The method of acoustic scene analysis, named static mode and dynamic mode, is based on the information of the direction of arrival and sound pressure level of the sound in three dimensions from time to time. Since the moving path was limited to the one satisfying the specified preconditions, there were restrictions on the sound sources moving in the sky to be applied. Therefore, we decided to improve the versatility of the dynamic mode acoustic scene analysis method by adding a sensor that observes the direction of sound arrival. In this paper, we report the results of our experiments and analysis.

A CURIOUS CASE OF /t/ and /d/ SPIRANTIZATION IN SERBIAN-ENGLISH INTERPHONOLOGY

The paper explores a subtype of the phonological process of lenition, more precisely, the phe- nomenon of spirantization in the Serbian-English interlanguage system. During the process of spirantization, plosive sounds transform into fricatives and the factors causing altered realiza- tions may stem from various sources, the most prominent being mother tongue interference. For example, due to the specific pronunciation of alveolar stops and fricatives in L1, Spanish learners of English as a foreign language tend to transfer the feature into their L2, causing thus all voiced plosives, regardless of the place of articulation, to transform into fricatives (Zampini 2008). However, the phonological system of Serbian is not characterized by the same processes, hence, the occasional spirantization in the interlanguage system, we argue, cannot be derived from mother tongue interference, yet may be the result of other factors, such as, qualitative hypercorrection. The analyzed corpus was obtained from the recordings of a spontaneous speech by 15 Serbian English-major students at the tertiary level of education. We investigated the instances of spirantization using the methods of acoustic analysis and spectrographic illustra- tions via Praat, version 6.2.04. The findings indicated that only alveolar plosives (both voiced and voiceless) were spirantized, most frequently in accented position. Regarding the phonetic environment, the word-initial pre-vocalic position, as well as the word-final post-vocalic and post-consonantal position, triggered the highest frequency of spirantization occurrence. Acous- tic measurements confirm the initial assumptions regarding the specific nature of spirantized variants [dz], [ts], [ð] and [θ]. The results have important pedagogical implications and provide insights into the complexity of cross-linguistic influence.

Speech Signal Processing and Analysis Based on Mongolian long-tune Folk Songs

This paper mainly analyzes the speech signal of Mongolian long-tune folk songs through the method of speech acoustic analysis. From the perspective of duration, it studies the changes in the length of the passages, sentences and vocabulary of Mongolian long-tune folk songs, discusses the phonetic and acoustic characteristics of Mongolian long-tune folk songs, provides basic data for the protection and digital inheritance of oral culture, and explores the establishment of oral culture database.

An ACA-BM-SBM for 2D acoustic sensitivity analysis

&lt;abstract&gt; &lt;p&gt;In this paper, we present a novel computational approach (named ACA-BM-SBM) for the calculation of 2D acoustic sensitivity by combining the Burton-Miller-type singular boundary method (BM-SBM) with the adaptive cross-approximation (ACA) algorithm. The BM-SBM circumvents the source singularities of the fundamental solutions by introducing the origin intensity factors, and it eliminates the fictitious frequency problem in external acoustic fields by introducing the Burton-Miller formula. As a semi-analysis meshless method, the BM-SBM can accurately solve the external acoustic problem governed by the Helmholtz equation. Nevertheless, the computational inefficiency introduced by the dense coefficient matrix renders this method suboptimal, particularly for large-scale simulations. As the number of nodes increases, the computation time and store memory increase dramatically. ACA is a purely algebraic method based on hierarchical matrices which can be used to partition the coefficient matrix step by step. By employing ACA, the BM-SBM can be effectively accelerated, and this results in less computation time, as well as fewer memory requirements. Numerical experiments, including Dirichlet and Neumann boundary conditions, illustrate that the proposed approach is an accurate, efficient and fast numerical method for acoustic sensitivity analysis.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/abstract&gt;

Diagnosis of Coronary Artery Disease by Acoustic Analysis of Turbulent Murmur Caused by Coronary Artery Stenosis: A Single Center Study from China

Aim: Intracoronary murmur results from turbulent flow due to coronary artery narrowing. This study evaluated the diagnostic performance of a method for acoustic analysis of turbulent murmur caused by coronary artery stenosis in coronary artery disease (CAD) in Chinese populations. Method: Patients admitted to the cardiovascular department of the Sixth Medical Center of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army General Hospital between September 2021 and June 2022 for elective coronary angiography were prospectively enrolled. A digital electronic stethoscope was used to record heart sounds before angiography. Quantitative coronary angiography (QCA) served as the “gold standard” for CAD diagnosis to evaluate the diagnostic performance of the acoustic analysis method for CAD. Results: A total of 452 patients had complete QCA and heart sound data. The final interpretation results of the acoustic analysis method indicated 310 disease cases and 142 normal results. Increasing the cut-off values of coronary artery diameter stenosis from 30% to 50%, 70%, and 90% increased the sensitivity and NPV of the acoustic analysis method; the sensitivity was 75.6%, 81.9%, 83.3%, and 85.7%, respectively; the NPV was 33.1%, 57.0%, 69.7%, and 88.0%, respectively; the specificity and PPV decreased (specificity of 75.8%, 70.4%, 51.0%, and 37.5%, respectively; PPV of 95.2%, 89.0%, 69.4%, and 32.9%, respectively); and the AUC values were 0.757, 0.762, 0.672, and 0.616, respectively. The sensitivity of the acoustic analysis method for one-vessel disease was 86.6% when the cut-off value was 50%. The sensitivity for identifying left anterior descending coronary artery lesions was best, at 90.7%. The sensitivity for identifying isolated coronary artery branch lesions was 66.7%, whereas the sensitivity for identifying three-vessel disease in multi-vessel coronary artery lesions was better, at 82.9%. Conclusion: Acoustic analysis of turbulent murmur caused by coronary artery stenosis for diagnosis of CAD may have favorable performance in the Chinese population. This method has good performance in CAD diagnosis with a cut-off coronary artery diameter for stenosis of 50%.

Сравнительный анализ артикуляционно-акустических характеристик вокализма современных английского и русского языков (на материале биологической терминологии)

The article considers the comparative analysis of the articulation-acoustic characteristics of the vocalism of the modern English and Russian languages (on the examples of the scientific discourse), taking into account combinatorial and positional changes that affect the characteristics of unstressed vocalism, a number of typical modifications in the timbre, temporal, dynamic and tonal characteristics of unstressed languages are identified. Namely: the variability of the timbre features of the vowel depending on the vowel of the Russian language,to which it is assimilated by the speaker; increasing the duration of unstressed vowels; full-sounding pronunciation (absence of elision and haplology processes) of words in a weak position; insufficient degree of the reduction of vowels; variability and expressiveness of the tonal characteristics of unstressed vowels. The theoretical and methodological basis of the study is the scientific works in the fields of phonology, prosody, acoustic theory of speech, experimental phonetics, taking into account the problems of interaction between the components of the interfered phonetic system in the English language of Russian speakers with different (high, medium and low) levels of phonetic competence. The paper uses a complex methodology of the experimental phonetic study of the prosodic features of unstressed vocalism in the English speech of the Russian language speakers. The methodology for conducting experimental phonetic research includes the use of empirical general scientific methods (measurement, experiment); special methods of auditory and acoustic analysis (computer-oscillographic and spectral), the method of quantitative analysis of processing the results of a phonetic experiment and the linguistic interpretation of the results of the study. The paper analyzes the quantitative indicators and the degree of these modifications of English unstressed vocalism in speech, taking into account the level of their phonetic competence and the experience of communicating in English.

Research on pipeline state recognition method based on acoustic signal frame PCA

Accurate buried pipeline state recognition based on acoustic signal is a difficult and important issue. This paper proposes a feature extraction method based on acoustic signal frame and principal component analysis (PCA) for condition monitoring in pipes. This method makes use of the property of nonstationary and multivariate data decomposition scales of pipeline acoustic signal. Signal framing is processed on the collected acoustic signals so that the signal frame series is obtained. Then, the sound pressure level of each frame signal is extracted, and the feature vector of the total sound pressure level is established. The PCA method is applied to optimize the extracted feature vector set for detecting the feature parameters. The acoustic signals related to different operating conditions of a pipeline are identified with the support vector machine. Research on a series of experiments shows that the proposed method for acoustic signal analysis can perform effectively for robust feature extraction and pipeline state identification.

Singular boundary method for 2D and 3D acoustic design sensitivity analysis

In this paper, a novel Burton-Miller-type singular boundary method (BM-SBM) formulation is proposed for the acoustic design sensitivity analysis, with the help of the direct differentiation method. The Burton-Miller formulation is employed to overcome the fictitious frequency problem in the numerical solutions of exterior acoustic problems. The simple empirical formulas are used to estimate the origin intensity factors in the BM-SBM. Compared with the traditional methods, the present scheme is an accurate and semi-analytical approach with the merits of truly meshless, integration-free, mathematical simplicity, and easy-to-program. As a boundary-type method based on the fundamental solution, furthermore, the BM-SBM is straightforward for addressing the exterior Helmholtz problems encountered in the acoustic design sensitivity analysis. Numerical experiments, including 2D and 3D geometries with Neumann boundary conditions, indicate that the proposed methodology is an accurate, stable, and convergent numerical approach for the acoustic design sensitivity analysis.

Performance Identification of a Steam Boiler Burner via Acoustic Analysis

Almost all systems generate acoustic signals when operating or when a process is being performed. These signals contain certain data related to the operating performance of systems. In this study, acoustic data were used to study the performance and to identify the optimum operating points of natural gas burners that are used in steam boilers. The sound recordings of burners obtained under different operating conditions were examined with acoustic analysis methods. The impact of various operating parameters on acoustic values was determined using time series analysis, frequency spectrum data and then power spectral density values. When the excess air coefficient and emission and efficiency values of boilers were compared with the acoustic data, it was determined that the Yule–Walker algorithm contained distinct and explanatory values. The steam boiler and the natural gas burner within were considered a system for the analysis. Measurement results showed that operating parameters and acoustic analysis results were correlated. Moreover, the results were confirmed with the emission measurement results. Finally, it was deduced that the acoustic values can be used for obtaining the optimum operating points in similar systems where inlet and outlet parameters cannot be measured, and the related principles were revealed.

Quasi-static indentation and acoustic emission to analyze failure and damage of bio-composites subjected to low-velocity impact

Bio-composites have intrinsic environmental benefits, compelling reason to investigate their mechanical behaviour. An extensive experimental investigation was performed using bio-based CORAL resins reinforced with flax fibres in this context. Three different stacking sequences were used to produce unidirectional, cross-ply, and quasi-isotropic laminates. Low-velocity impact and quasi-static indentation tests were carried out. As the first test has a short duration, real-time damage monitoring is not always feasible. Based on a good correlation between the material responses for both tests results, the acoustic emission was implemented on the quasi-static indentation test to provide additional information about failure mechanisms. The indentation response was explored by measuring loading force as a function of displacement. Furthermore, the use of the unsupervised k-means clustering method for acoustic emission data analysis enabled the classification of the damage behaviour and identification of the 2D localization of each type of damage.