Auditory Roughness Research Articles

Evidence for a universal association of auditory roughness with musical stability.

We provide evidence that the roughness of chords-a psychoacoustic property resulting from unresolved frequency components-is associated with perceived musical stability (operationalized as finishedness) in participants with differing levels and types of exposure to Western or Western-like music. Three groups of participants were tested in a remote cloud forest region of Papua New Guinea (PNG), and two groups in Sydney, Australia (musicians and non-musicians). Unlike prominent prior studies of consonance/dissonance across cultures, we framed the concept of consonance as stability rather than as pleasantness. We find a negative relationship between roughness and musical stability in every group including the PNG community with minimal experience of musical harmony. The effect of roughness is stronger for the Sydney participants, particularly musicians. We find an effect of harmonicity-a psychoacoustic property resulting from chords having a spectral structure resembling a single pitched tone (such as produced by human vowel sounds)-only in the Sydney musician group, which indicates this feature's effect is mediated via a culture-dependent mechanism. In sum, these results underline the importance of both universal and cultural mechanisms in music cognition, and they suggest powerful implications for understanding the origin of pitch structures in Western tonal music as well as on possibilities for new musical forms that align with humans' perceptual and cognitive biases. They also highlight the importance of how consonance/dissonance is operationalized and explained to participants-particularly those with minimal prior exposure to musical harmony.

Tactile perception of auditory roughness.

Auditory roughness resulting from fast temporal beatings is often studied by summing two pure tones with close frequencies. Interestingly, the tactile counterpart of auditory roughness can be provided through touch with vibrotactile actuators. However, whether auditory roughness could also be perceived through touch and whether it exhibits similar characteristics are unclear. Here, auditory roughness perception and its tactile counterpart were evaluated using pairs of pure tone stimuli. Results revealed similar roughness curves in both modalities, suggesting similar sensory processing. This study attests to the relevance of such a paradigm for investigating auditory and tactile roughness in a multisensory fashion.

Consonance and dissonance perception. A critical review of the historical sources, multidisciplinary findings, and main hypotheses.

Revealed more than two millennia ago by Pythagoras, consonance and dissonance (C/D) are foundational concepts in music theory, perception, and aesthetics. The search for the biological, acoustical, and cultural factors that affect C/D perception has resulted in descriptive accounts inspired by arithmetic, musicological, psychoacoustical or neurobiological frameworks without reaching a consensus. Here, we review the key historical sources and modern multidisciplinary findings on C/D and integrate them into three main hypotheses: the vocal similarity hypothesis (VSH), the psychocultural hypothesis (PH), and the sensorimotor hypothesis (SH). By illustrating the hypotheses-related findings, we highlight their major conceptual, methodological, and terminological shortcomings. Trying to provide a unitary framework for C/D understanding, we put together multidisciplinary research on human and animal vocalizations, which converges to suggest that auditory roughness is associated with distress/danger and, therefore, elicits defensive behavioral reactions and neural responses that indicate aversion. We therefore stress the primacy of vocality and roughness as key factors in the explanation of C/D phenomenon, and we explore the (neuro)biological underpinnings of the attraction-aversion mechanisms that are triggered by C/D stimuli. Based on the reviewed evidence, while the aversive nature of dissonance appears as solidly rooted in the multidisciplinary findings, the attractive nature of consonance remains a somewhat speculative claim that needs further investigation. Finally, we outline future directions for empirical research in C/D, especially regarding cross-modal and cross-cultural approaches.

Was Mesopotamian Tuning Diatonic? A Parsimonious Answer

On the basis of assumptions and conclusions first advanced in 1968 concerning tuning instructions that were originally written down ca. 1800 BCE, Assyriologists have agreed that Mesopotamian tuning was diatonic. Nonetheless, Sam Mirelman (2013) has recently suggested that this consensus view is “uncomfortably familiar and Eurocentric.” As a follow-up to Mirelman’s misgiving, the present report begins by identifying flaws in the reasoning concerning Mesopotamian tuning that was disseminated more than half a century ago and have remained uncontested. The starting point of the present study is information directly recorded in Mesopotamian documents, as opposed to concepts dating from Greek Antiquity and beyond. This information includes the spatial ordering of strings and the relative fundamental frequencies of two pairs of strings on thesammû, a harp or lyre that is explicitly identified in cuneiform tablets, as well as the tuning instructions’ recursive and symmetrical patterning of prescriptions concerning the alterations of this instrument’s strings. At each step, this patterning involves loosening or tightening a string that is three or four strings away from the string that had just been tightened or loosened. Added to these observations are acoustical features of the harmonics produced by plucked strings, and the auditory roughness and smoothness produced by pairs of plucked strings that psychoacoustical studies have established as universally audible. On these bases, one can conclude that Mesopotamian tuning can be interpreted as diatonic in structure without assuming such notions as octave identity, scale degrees, and consonance, all concepts for which there is no known testimony until much later in the history of music theory.

Metacognition and Crossmodal Correspondences Between Auditory Attributes and Saltiness in aLargeSample Study.

Mounting evidence demonstrates that people make surprisingly consistent associations between auditory attributes and a number of the commonly-agreed basic tastes. However, the sonic representation of (association with) saltiness has remained rather elusive. In the present study, a crowd-sourced online study ( n = 1819 participants) was conducted to determine the acoustical/musical attributes that best match saltiness, as well as participants' confidence levels in their choices. Based on previous literature on crossmodal correspondences involving saltiness, thirteen attributes were selected to cover a variety of temporal, tactile, and emotional associations. The results revealed that saltiness was associated most strongly with a long decay time, high auditory roughness, and a regular rhythm. In terms of emotional associations, saltiness was matched with negative valence, high arousal, and minor mode. Moreover, significantly higher average confidence ratings were observed for those saltiness-matching choices for which there was majority agreement, suggesting that individuals were more confident about their own judgments when it matched with the group response, therefore providing support for the so-called 'consensuality principle'. Taken together, these results help to uncover the complex interplay of mechanisms behind seemingly surprising crossmodal correspondences between sound attributes and taste.

Local minima of dissonance functions

When the same sound is produced simultaneously with two different fundamental frequencies, auditory roughness is observed. If the first sound is fixed and the fundamental frequency of the second is varied continuously, auditory roughness also varies continuously. A vowel sound is distinguished by its spectral envelope – which is independent of the fundamental frequency. This is a motivation to define the metric space of timbres. Each timbre is associated with a dissonance function which has local minima at certain intervals of local consonance related to the timbre. This is related to the music-theoretical notion of consonant intervals and scales. For the subspace consisting of all timbres with an interval of local consonance at a chosen point β, the main theorem describes certain points on the boundary by the vanishing of one-sided derivatives of dissonance functions at β.

Auditory roughness elicits defense reactions

Auditory roughness elicits aversion, and higher activation in cerebral areas involved in threat processing, but its link with defensive behavior is unknown. Defensive behaviors are triggered by intrusions into the space immediately surrounding the body, called peripersonal space (PPS). Integrating multisensory information in PPS is crucial to assure the protection of the body. Here, we assessed the behavioral effects of roughness on auditory-tactile integration, which reflects the monitoring of this multisensory region of space. Healthy human participants had to detect as fast as possible a tactile stimulation delivered on their hand while an irrelevant sound was approaching them from the rear hemifield. The sound was either a simple harmonic sound or a rough sound, processed through binaural rendering so that the virtual sound source was looming towards participants. The rough sound speeded tactile reaction times at a farther distance from the body than the non-rough sound. This indicates that PPS, as estimated here via auditory-tactile integration, is sensitive to auditory roughness. Auditory roughness modifies the behavioral relevance of simple auditory events in relation to the body. Even without emotional or social contextual information, auditory roughness constitutes an innate threat cue that elicits defensive responses.

Interaction between time-varying tone inharmonicity, fundamental frequency and spectral shape affects felt tension and timbral semantics

Musically induced tension has been the subject of thorough study in the music cognition literature but its relationship with timbre is still poorly investigated. This study examines how the dynamic variation of a tone’s inharmonicity may affect a number of auditory qualities, namely brightness, roughness and mass along with felt tension under different acoustical conditions (i.e., F0, spectral shape and type of inharmonicity). Fifty-six musically trained participants gave real-time continuous ratings on eight time-varying stimuli upon the aforementioned qualities. Static ratings over the initial purely harmonic parts of the stimuli were also obtained by a subgroup of the listening panel. The fundamental frequency exhibits the strongest influence on the responses of the four qualities, followed by the type of inharmonicity and the spectral shape to a lesser degree. The profile patterns of mass and brightness proved to be strong predictors for tension profile patterns while the roughness profile magnitudes show a significant main effect on the magnitude of tension profiles. Overall, these results demonstrate that time-varying inharmonicity affects continuous responses on both timbral semantics and tension, while indicating that felt tension may be influenced by underlying timbral qualities in a dynamic context.

Spontaneous Mouse Behavior in Presence of Dissonance and Acoustic Roughness.

According to a novel hypothesis (Arnal et al., 2015, Current Biology 25:2051–2056), auditory roughness, or temporal envelope modulations between 30 and 150 Hz, are present in both natural and artificial human alarm signals, which boosts the detection of these alarms in various tasks. These results also shed new light on the unpleasantness of dissonant sounds to humans, which builds upon the high level of roughness present in such sounds. However, it is not clear whether this hypothesis also applies to other species, such as rodents. In particular, whether consonant/dissonant chords, and particularly whether auditory roughness, can trigger unpleasant sensations in mice remains unknown. Using an autonomous behavioral system, which allows the monitoring of mouse behavior over a period of weeks, we observed that C57Bl6J mice did not show any preference for consonant chords. In addition, we found that mice showed a preference for rough sounds over sounds having amplitude modulations in their temporal envelope outside the “rough” range. These results suggest that some emotional features carried by the acoustic temporal envelope are likely to be species-specific.

The Hearing-Aid Speech Perception Index (HASPI) Version 2

This paper presents a revised version of the Hearing-Aid Speech Perception Index (HASPI). The index is based on a model of the auditory periphery that incorporates changes due to hearing loss and is valid for both normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. It is an intrusive metric that compares the time-frequency envelope and temporal fine structure (TFS) of a degraded signal to an unprocessed reference. The first modification to HASPI is an extension to the range of envelope modulation rates considered in the metric. HASPI applies a lowpass filter to the time-frequency envelope modulation, and in the new version this single filter is replaced by a modulation filterbank. The temporal fine structure (TFS) analysis in the original version of HASPI is replaced by the filterbank outputs at higher modulation rates that represent auditory roughness and periodicity. The second modification is replacing the parametric model combining envelope and TFS measurements used in the original version with an ensemble of neural networks. The improved version of HASPI is compared to the original version for datasets from five experiments that encompass noise and nonlinear distortion, frequency compression, ideal binary mask noise suppression, speech modified using a noise vocoder, and speech in reverberation. The new version of HASPI is shown to have a statistically-significant reduction in RMS error compared to the original version for most of the data considered, and to be significantly more accurate for speech in reverberation.

Cross-Modal Perception of Noise-in-Music: Audiences Generate Spiky Shapes in Response to Auditory Roughness in a Novel Electroacoustic Concert Setting.

Noise has become integral to electroacoustic music aesthetics. In this paper, we define noise as sound that is high in auditory roughness, and examine its effect on cross-modal mapping between sound and visual shape in participants. In order to preserve the ecological validity of contemporary music aesthetics, we developed Rama, a novel interface, for presenting experimentally controlled blocks of electronically generated sounds that varied systematically in roughness, and actively collected data from audience interaction. These sounds were then embedded as musical drones within the overall sound design of a multimedia performance with live musicians, Audience members listened to these sounds, and collectively voted to create the shape of a visual graphic, presented as part of the audio–visual performance. The results of the concert setting were replicated in a controlled laboratory environment to corroborate the findings. Results show a consistent effect of auditory roughness on shape design, with rougher sounds corresponding to spikier shapes. We discuss the implications, as well as evaluate the audience interface.

Effects of Material Touch-Sounds on Perceived Quality of Surfaces

Materials for the vehicle interior are of specific interest to the customer. They are not only needed to fulfil technical functions, but are in direct focus of the customer’s perception. The perceived quality is a function of all sensory data collected by the human perceptual system: Surfaces express design intent and craftsmanship by their visual appearance. Haptic features supervene when materials are touched. And even smell has an influence on the perception of ambience. Although sound is generated nearly every time when fingers slide across the surface, touch sounds have been disregarded so far. In order to address this issue, a method has been developed for standardized generation of touch sounds. It includes simulation of realistic finger force, touch area and sliding velocity. Sounds generated on typical flat specimen of steering wheel materials have been recorded. Sounds were played back to participants under exclusive auditory conditions. The influence of psycho-physical parameters and iconic sound features on perceived quality has been investigated. Furthermore, the interaction of sound sensation with visual and haptic features could be studied. Results demonstrate that the sound excited by fingers sliding across a surface contains essential information about the nature and the quality of materials applied. As an example, the auditory roughness can modify the perceived haptic roughness of a surface. A consequent consideration of surface touch sounds enables choice of materials with maximized multi-sensory harmony.

GS16 音響計測による気液二相流動様式の判定についての研究

Identification method of flow pattern was studied by using sound data which were taken and analyzed to flow through pipe. Sound data of two-phase flow were taken on flow through vertical pipe. Five kinds of flow pattern were made for sound data and analyzed. Frequency spectrums could show the features in each flow, almost these features existed below 250Hz. By using auditory roughness which is one of the methods of psychoacoustic sound quality evaluation, we found specific feature on containing large amount gas flow.

A multi-harmonic amplitude and relative-phase controller for active sound quality control

Current active sound quality control systems aim at dealing with the amplitude level of the primary disturbance, e.g. sound pressure, forces, velocities and/or accelerations, which implicitly leads to Loudness control, regardless of the spectral structure of the disturbance. As far as multi-harmonic disturbances are concerned, auditory Roughness, arguably the most related psychoacoustic metric with rumbling perception in passenger cars, can be tackled not merely by dealing with magnitudes but also with the relative-phase of the narrowband components. This paper presents an adaptive control scheme conceived for dealing with multi-harmonic disturbances, which features the independent amplitude and/or relative-phase control of the input periodic components and an improved robustness to impulsive events. The adaptive control scheme is based on a frequency-domain delayless implementation of the complex-domain, least mean squares algorithm, whereof its convergence process is improved by using a forgetting factor. The control capabilities are evaluated numerically for single- and multiple-harmonic disturbances, including realistic internal combustion engine sound contaminated with noise and by impulsive events. By using long transfer paths obtained from a real vehicle mock-up, sound pressure level reductions of 39 dBSPL and the ability to displacing the relative-phase of a number of narrowband components between [−π,π] are accomplished by the proposed control scheme. The assessment of the results by using Zwicker-Loudness and auditory Roughness models shows that the proposed adaptive algorithm is able to accomplish and stably preserve various sound quality targets, after completion of the robust convergence procedure, regardless of impulsive events that can occur during the system operation.

The Ethiopian lyre Bagana. An ethno-acoustical study

The Ethiopian lyre bagana is usually finger-plucked and monodic, with a skin soundboard and ten gut strings tuned to low-frequency pitches (ca 50-150 Hz). Its most important sonorous characteristic is its buzzing sounds, produced thanks to leather pieces placed between each string and the wide bridge. This study is based on a corpus of sounds produced by eight different instruments played by a virtuoso master and recorded in situ with and without the leather pieces. The sounds have been analyzed through calculation of several timbre descriptors based on time-domain, sinusoidal harmonic model and short-time Fourier transform representations. These results have been compared with ethnomusicological analyses of the repertoire and the socio-cultural aspects of the bagana, in order to understand how the sound qualities are dealt with by the players. These joint analyses show that the very distinctive buzzing quality of the bagana sounds can be linked with auditory roughness and inharmonicity descriptors (indicating that it is not due to noise but rather to quasi-harmonic components) while the significant timbre variation between sounds is mostly due to differences in string quality, location of the leather pieces on the bridge and musicians' need to produce the longest possible duration.

Differences in instrument construction and performance practices among musical traditions reveal and guide different aesthetic attitudes towards timbre

Musical aesthetic judgments reflect how each musical tradition chooses to interpret and value contextual, functional, performance, formal, and sonic aspects of musical pieces. Elaborate instrument construction techniques and performance practices devoted to the exploration of timbre (sound color) variations across musical traditions indicate that timbre is a sonic aspect on which musical aesthetic judgments are often based. Intercultural differences and intra-cultural consistency of timbre interpretation illustrate the cultural bases of understanding and evaluating sound color. Close examination of musical instrument construction and performance practices, accompanied by acoustical analyses of the relevant sound signals, can reveal the types of musical timbres and timbre variation degrees a given tradition is after, providing insights on the relationship between timbre and a tradition's musical aesthetic values. The sophisticated ways devised to produce and manipulate auditory roughness within the musical contexts addressed in this presentation (Indian tambura accompaniments; Middle Eastern mijwiz improvisations; Bosnian ganga songs) will be contrasted to the limited opportunities for such explorations afforded within western art musical contexts, paralleled by equally contrasting aesthetic attitudes towards auditory roughness's meaning and value.

Auditory roughness profiles and musical tension/release patterns in a Bosnian ganga song.

Within western musical tradition, auditory roughness constitutes one of the perceptual correlates of dissonance. In a previous study [P. N. Vassilakis (2006), “The worlds of music: Culture-dependent emotional reactions to an improvisation on the mijwiz,” Proceedings of the 51stSEM:, University of Hawaii, Manoa, HI, pp. 197– (2006) an application that calculates roughness profiles of musical pieces [P. N. Vassilakis, “SRA: An online tool for spectral and roughness analysis of sound signals,” J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 120, 3677 (2006)], based on a previously published roughness calculation model [P. N. Vassilakis, “Auditory roughness as means of musical expression,” Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology 12, 119–144 (2005)], was used to examine if and how tension/release patterns within a stylized improvisation on the Middle Eastern mijwiz relate to auditory roughness changes. An extension of that study, the present experiment, examines the relationship between roughness and tension/release patterns in a Bosnian ganga song. Patterns were obtained by a Bosnian ganga singer/scholar and by American-raised musicians in a perceptual experiment. Similarly to the mijwiz study, cultural background differences were associated with tension/release judgment differences as well as with differences between tension/release patterns and auditory roughness time profiles. The results provide further evidence that the concepts of musical tension and release and their relationship to auditory roughness are culture-specific.

Perception of roughness by listeners with sensorineural hearing loss

The perception of auditory roughness presumably results from imperfect spectral or temporal resolution. Sensorineural hearing loss, by affecting spectral resolution, may therefore alter roughness perception. In this study, normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners estimated the roughness of amplitude-modulated tones varying in carrier frequency, modulation rate, and modulation depth. Their judgments were expected to reflect effects of impaired spectral resolution. Instead, their judgments were similar, in most respects, to those of normally-hearing listeners, except at very slow modulation rates. Results suggest that mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss increases the roughness of slowly fluctuating signals.

Cross-Modality Between Haptic and Auditory Roughness with a Force Feedback Device

Haptic roughness is basic to accurately identifying the texture of an object. When we manipulate everyday objects, their surfaces emit sound. Cross-modal effects between haptic and auditory roughness must thus be considered in realizing a multimodal human-computer interface. We conducted two experiments to accumulate basic data for the cross-modality using a force feedback device. In one experiment, we studied the cross-modal effect of auditory roughness on haptic roughness. We studied the effect of haptic roughness on auditory roughness in the other experiment. Results showed that cross-modal effects were mutually enhancing when their single-modal roughness was relatively high.

Perception of roughness by people with normal hearing and sensorineural hearing loss

Anecdotal and laboratory evidence indicates that many people with sensorineural hearing loss have difficulty perceiving music clearly, even when the musical sounds are loud enough to be audible, or are amplified through hearing aids. A better understanding of the music perception difficulties faced by hearing-impaired people is required in order to improve assistive listening technology for music listening, performance, and appreciation. One important aspect of music appreciation is the perception of dissonance between combinations of tones (e.g., the tritone). A recent study [J. B. Tufts, M. R. Molis, and M. R. Leek, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 118, 955–967 (2005)] showed that people with sensorineural hearing loss perceive differences in musical dissonance to be less salient than do normal-hearing people. Various acoustic and perceptual factors contribute to musical dissonance, but one of the most important is auditory roughness. In the present study, roughness regions for amplitude-modulated tones at several carrier frequencies, two different modulation depths, and several presentation levels were established using magnitude estimation techniques in normal-hearing and hearing-impaired listeners. Differences in the perception of roughness between the listener groups will be discussed with regard to implications for music perception in people with sensorineural hearing loss.