Instrument Identification Research Articles

The music quality feeling and music perception of adult cochlear implant recipients

Objective:To assess the music quality feeling and music perception abilities of adults with cochlear implants and to probe the correlation between the two. Method:Forty adult cochlear implant recipients recruited from the Bejing Tongren Hosipital(27 males, 13 females, average ages at 36.13±13.33) and 40 normal-hearing subjects(21 males, 19females, average ages at 26.53±6.94) participated in this study. Musical Sounds In Cochlear Implant were used to assess the pitch, melody and timbre perception for both normal-hearing subjects and adult cochlear implant recipients. To assess the self-reported music quality feeling of normal-hearing subjects and adult cochlear implant recipients from three aspects of listening music quality(Naturalness, comfort, and clarity). Using some questions about musical background and listening habits of the Munich Music questionnaire(MUMU) to assess the musical experience scores of all subjects.Result:For cochlear implant recipients, the pitch discrimination thresholds at A4 and C4 and the correction rate of melody discrimination and instrument identification test were significantly different from those for normalhearing subjects(P<0.05). The average music quality feeling scores of the cochlear implant recipients and normal-hearing subjects were 4.75±2.76 and 8.33±1.47, respectively. The differences between the two groups were significant(P<0.05). Type of CI had no significant influence on the results of musical quality feeling(P>0.05). The scores of music quality feeling was significantly related with the pitch discrimination thresholds at A4 and C4(P<0.05), but had no significant correlation with the correlation rate of melody discrimination test and instrument identification test(P>0.05).Conclusion:For adult cochlear implant recipients, the music quality feeling and the music perception ability are weaker than normal-hearing subjects. The music quality feeling is related to the pitch perception, but had no relationship with the melody and timbre perception ability.

OCJENA DOBROVOLJNE POREZNE USKLAĐENOSTI U SLOVENIJI: IZ PERSPEKTIVE POREZNIH VLASTI

Since 2015, certain taxpayers may apply for the special status in order to promote voluntary compliance at the Tax Authority of Republic of Slovenia (FURS), after the horizontal monitoring pilot project was successfully finished in 2010. The theoretical background of the status is based on the idea of co-operative compliance, which can be described as the monitoring, predicting and preventing problems in the tax authority and taxpayers relationship. The purpose of the section is to analyse the instrument, which should establish cooperation based on transparency, understanding and mutual trust between taxpayers and tax authority. The research methodology was focused on survey among tax experts participated in drafting the legislation implementing cooperative relationship as well as experts empowered for monitoring the institute. The main objectives of the study have focused on the current activities identification, the assessment of expectations, the gaps, constraints and potential changes of the instrument identification and the evaluation of the long-term effects of the institute.

Trends in Retention and Decay of Basic Surgical Skills: Evidence from Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia: A Prospective Case-Control Cohort Study.

While prior studies have evaluated surgical skills simulation and retention in highly resourced environments, there is paucity of data on the retention of surgical skills taught in simulation laboratory to undergraduate students, and virtually none from low-resource settings. We aimed to evaluate the trends in retention/decay of surgical skills among medical students in Ethiopia and determine whether regular intervention in the form of intermittent skills testing can aid retention. Forty-four final year medical students were randomly divided into two cohorts of 22 students each. All 44 were trained in surgical instrument identification, simple interrupted suturing and one-handed knot tying. A previously validated, standardized assessment was performed before training, immediately after training, and then at 6weeks, 3months, 6months and 1year for cohort 1, and before training, immediately after training, and at 6months and 1year for cohort 2. All areas learned were tested for general decay. The baseline mean scores of surgical skills were 3.8/30 for instrument identification, 3.3/15 for one-handed knot tying, and 1.35/15 for suturing. At the end of the training, mean scores improved to 26.6/30, 11.2/15 and 11.1/15 (instrument identification +599% and +772%, knot tying +447% and +417%, suturing +237% and +260%, respectively, for Cohort I and II). At 6months and 1year, there was a significant drop in all the three areas tested, especially in knot tying and suturing. There was no statistically significant difference between the two cohorts. While our surgical skills course is an effective means to teach surgical skills to medical students, there is significant decay in abilities after 6months. Conducting regular assessments does not appear to have any effect in helping students retain these skills. We recommend such surgical skills training be conducted at appropriate intervals, such as just before internship, to prepare student for active surgical practice.

Examination of Prosody and Timbre Perception in Adults With Cochlear Implants Comparing Different Fine Structure Coding Strategies.

This study aimed to investigate whether adults with cochlear implants benefit from a change of fine structure (FS) coding strategies regarding the discrimination of prosodic speech cues, timbre cues, and the identification of natural instruments. The FS processing (FSP) coding strategy was compared to 2 settings of the FS4 strategy. A longitudinal crossover, double-blinded study was conducted. This study consisted of 2 parts, with 14 participants in the first part and 12 participants in the second part. Each part lasted 3 months, in which participants were alternately fitted with either the established FSP strategy or 1 of the 2 newly developed FS4 settings. Participants had to complete an intonation identification test; a timbre discrimination test in which 1 of 2 isolated cues changed, either the spectral centroid or the spectral irregularity; and an instrument identification test. A significant effect was seen in the discrimination of spectral irregularity with 1 of the 2 FS4 settings. The improvement was seen in the FS4 setting in which the upper envelope channels had a low stimulation rate. This improvement was not seen with the FS4 setting that had a higher stimulation rate on the envelope channels. In general, the FSP strategy and the 2 settings of the FS4 strategy provided similar levels in the perception of prosody and timbre cues, as well as in the identification of instruments.

Results of a Surgical Simulation Course Designed to Improve Surgery Clerkship Performance

During the 2015-2016 academic year, Rocky Vista University College of Osteopathic Medicine (RVUCOM) conducted a required 1-week surgical simulation course as the first week of students' 8-week surgical clerkship. This course was adapted from a pilot RVUCOM surgical simulation course and other surgical simulation courses identified in the literature. The objectives of this course were to teach surgical skills and clinical knowledge, aid students in adjusting to the stress of a surgical clerkship, and improve students' confidence and abilities during the clerkship. In all, 148 students participated in the surgical simulation course. Subjective assessment of this course included each student completing a daily standardized stress survey and student feedback surveys at the end of the course and at the end of the surgical clerkship. Objective assessment of this course compared precourse and postcourse tests of surgical knowledge and instrument identification, as well as comparison of NBME Surgery Subject Assessment percentile ranks of this class with 3 prior classes. Daily stress surveys indicated decreased stress on day 5 compared to day 1 (p < 0.01). Students' confidence level increased significantly on day 5 compared to day 1 (p < 0.01). Student feedback surveys demonstrated students' perception that surgical skills and clinical skills had been learned during the course and that the course improved their performance during the surgical clerkship. NBME Surgery Subject Assessment percentile rank improved significantly (p < 0.01) from a mean percentile rank of 36.94 for 3 previous classes to a mean percentile rank of 43.82 for the class who completed the simulation course. Surgical knowledge improved significantly (p < 0.001) from a pretest mean score of 47.02% to a posttest mean score of 55.14%. Surgical instrument identification improved significantly (p < 0.001) from a pretest mean of 13.81% to a posttest mean of 95.28%. The RVUCOM surgery simulation course significantly improved student performance academically and helped students acclimate to stress, increase their confidence level, and acquire surgical skills needed during the third-year surgery clerkship.

P.102 Simulation-based training for surgical instrument recognition

Background: Surgical simulation training offers trainees the opportunity to practice surgical skills before entering the operating room. The objectives of this study were to determine the effect of simulation for learning instruments for burr hole surgery and whether this learning is translated to real instrument recognition with retention. Methods: Randomized trials of PGY1 neurosurgery residents and perioperative nurses were conducted, using PeriopSim™ for instrument recognition, as well as real instruments. Group A performed simulation tasks using PeriopSim™ prior to identifying real instruments, whereas Group B identified real instruments prior to performing simulation tasks. Nurses’ recall was assessed at seven days. Results: Sixteen residents and 100 nurses were recruited. All participants showed significant overall improvement in their scores for simulated tasks. Group A demonstrated enhanced accuracy and speed of identifying real instruments compared with Group B (p&lt;0.001). Furthermore, knowledge recall testing at one week demonstrated retained learning, shown by 97% accuracy in instrument identification. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that recognition of surgical instruments improves with repeated use of the PeriopSim™ platform. Instrument knowledge acquired through simulation training results in improved identification and retained recognition of real instruments.

Perceptually Salient Regions of the Modulation Power Spectrum for Musical Instrument Identification.

The ability of a listener to recognize sound sources, and in particular musical instruments from the sounds they produce, raises the question of determining the acoustical information used to achieve such a task. It is now well known that the shapes of the temporal and spectral envelopes are crucial to the recognition of a musical instrument. More recently, Modulation Power Spectra (MPS) have been shown to be a representation that potentially explains the perception of musical instrument sounds. Nevertheless, the question of which specific regions of this representation characterize a musical instrument is still open. An identification task was applied to two subsets of musical instruments: tuba, trombone, cello, saxophone, and clarinet on the one hand, and marimba, vibraphone, guitar, harp, and viola pizzicato on the other. The sounds were processed with filtered spectrotemporal modulations with 2D Gaussian windows. The most relevant regions of this representation for instrument identification were determined for each instrument and reveal the regions essential for their identification. The method used here is based on a “molecular approach,” the so-called bubbles method. Globally, the instruments were correctly identified and the lower values of spectrotemporal modulations are the most important regions of the MPS for recognizing instruments. Interestingly, instruments that were confused with each other led to non-overlapping regions and were confused when they were filtered in the most salient region of the other instrument. These results suggest that musical instrument timbres are characterized by specific spectrotemporal modulations, information which could contribute to music information retrieval tasks such as automatic source recognition.

Profil Miskonsepsi Siswa Kelas X Smkn 4 Mataram pada Materi Pokok Suhu, Kalor, dan Perpindahan Kalor

This research aimed to describe the students misconception profile for grade X SMKN 4 Mataram on the subject matter of Temperature, Heat, and Heat Transfer. This research is descriptive with case study design. The population in this research were all students of grade X SMK 4 Mataram which amounts to 424 people. The sampling technique used was purposive sampling, so that the sample in this research were all students of grade X SMK 4 Mataram except for class X of Office Administration 1 (X APK 1) and X of Office Administration 2 (X APK 2) which amounts to 333 people, because only both of this grade that do not get science subjects. Data were obtained from the test instrument identification shaped misconceptions reasoning multiple choice with an open reasoning and the analyzed using descriptive statistics which have previously been validated by one person subject teacher Science grade X and two person physical education lecturer. Based on this research, it was found that the students of grade X SMK 4 Mataram academic year 2014/2015 have misconceptions identified by the average percentage of misconceptions on the concept of temperatures by 11.53%, on the concept of heat by 16.44%, on the concept of expansion by 8.61%, and on the concept of heat transfer by 15.22%, so it can be concluded that the misconceptions experienced by the students of grade X SMK 4 Mataram in Akademic Year 2014/2015.

Which Monetary Shocks Matter in Small Open Economies? Evidence from SVARs

This paper investigates the nature of monetary policy transmission in four small open economies — Australia, Canada, South Korea, and the U.K. — and the U.S. (the benchmark) by estimating structural vector autoregressive models using the external instrument identification method. Differing from related studies on U.S. monetary policy, which mostly employ high-frequency futures data on monetary policy operating instruments (federal fund futures rates) to identify monetary policy shocks, we propose and test alternative sets of external instruments for the four focal open economies that do not yet have well-established futures markets in monetary policy instruments. The empirical results obtained by applying this data-oriented method yield important messages from both the econometric and macroeconomic perspectives. First, U.S. monetary policy plays an important role in monetary transmission in SOEs, presumably hampering the effectiveness of domestic monetary policy. In particular, the effect of domestic monetary policy shocks on medium- and long-term interest rates is quite weak and short-lived, while U.S. monetary innovation significantly and persistently influences domestic financial variables. Second, the paper provides some evidence that foreign exchange rates in this process respond to monetary shocks as Dornbusch (1976)’s overshooting hypothesis.

The Effects of US Monetary Policy Shocks: Applying External Instrument Identification to a Dynamic Factor Model

Dynamic factor models and external instrument identification are two recent advances in the empirical macroeconomic literature. This paper combines the two approaches in order to study the effects of monetary policy shocks. I use this novel framework to re-examine the effects found by Forni and Gambetti (2010, JME) in a recursively-identified DFM. Considering the fundamental differences between the identifying assumptions, the results are overall strikingly similar. Importantly, this finding stands in stark contrast to traditional VAR models, which yield decisively different results in the two identification schemes. This highlights the importance of using extended information sets to properly identify monetary policy shocks.

Perceptually salient spectrotemporal modulations for recognition of sustained musical instruments.

Modulation Power Spectra include dimensions of spectral and temporal modulation that contribute significantly to the perception of musical instrument timbres. Nevertheless, it remains unknown whether each instrument's identity is characterized by specific regions in this representation. A recognition task was applied to tuba, trombone, cello, saxophone, and clarinet sounds resynthesized with filtered spectrotemporal modulations. The most relevant parts of this representation for instrument identification were determined for each instrument. In addition, instruments that were confused with each other led to non-overlapping spectrotemporal modulation regions, suggesting that musical instrument timbres are characterized by specific spectrotemporal modulations.

A cross cultural analysis of musical timbre perception:comparison between Chinese and Western culture

Objective:To assess the musical timbre perception ability of normal hearing subjects with different cultural background, and to analyze the correlation between cultural differences and timbre perception.Method: Forty Chinese normal hearing adults(CNH) and 40 normal hearing adults from other countries(FNH) participated in this study.The Mu.S.I.C test was applied for the assessment.The correct rate of musical instrument recognition and numbers of instrument identification of each participant were recorded. Instrument Identification Test was performed with tenor，soprano ,and 5 representative musical instruments from different families of musical instruments ,and the Instrument Detection Test was performed with mixing sounds of musical instruments.Result:The correct rate of musical instrument recognition in FNH and CNH was（95.58±8.90）% and（89.40±13.13）%（P<0.05）, respectively.The correct rate of numbers of instrument detection in FNH and CNH was （80.50±16.32）% and（73.25±21.17）%（P>0.05）,respectively. The correct rate of CNH was lower than those of FNH for the trumpet, the oboe and the xylophone. Participants in both 2 groups were more easily failed to recognize the oboe and the trumpet compared the other musical instruments, especially in CNH group.Conclusion:Subjects with Western culture performed better than Chinese subjects on timbre perception. Cultural differences have a significant impact on musical timbre perception.

Performance differences between electroacoustic and electric alone cochlear stimulation using complex tests in noise. A pilot study

Objectives: Hybrid cochlear implants enable very interesting performances in bisyllabic words recognition, mainly in noisy conditions. In this paper, we studied patients with implants performing some very difficult timbric tasks in quiet and noisy conditions.Methods: We studied three adult patients with hybrid implants (group A-hybrid implants) and three adult patients with traditional ones (group B-traditional implants). We made the following tests (in quiet and noise): bisyllabic words recognition; voice kind recognition; common melodies identification and recognition; musical instrument identification and recognition.Results: Mean results in quiet: test 1: 35% A, 47% B; test 2: 92% A, 42% B; test 3: identification scores 88% A, 100% B, recognition scores: 37.5% A, 50% B; test 4 identification scores 50% A, 20% B, recognition scores 30% A, 20% B. As for tests in noise: test 1: 28% A, 46% B; test 2: 75% A, 25% B; test 3: identification 81% A, 87.5% B and recognition 56% A, 50% B; test 4: identification 60% A, 30% B and recognition 50% A, 20% B.Conclusion: Patients with hybrid implants seem to have better results, mainly in noisy timbric tasks. This could be explained by the better quality of low frequency stimulation and could be an encouragement for further studies and a larger diffusion of this kind of implant in the future.

Temporal and spectral contributions to musical instrument identification and discrimination among cochlear implant users

ObjectiveTo investigate the contributions of envelope and fine-structure to the perception of timbre by cochlear implant (CI) users as compared to normal hearing (NH) listeners.MethodsThis was a prospective cohort comparison study. Normal hearing and cochlear implant patients were tested. Three experiments were performed in sound field using musical notes altered to affect the characteristic pitch of an instrument and the acoustic envelope. Experiment 1 assessed the ability to identify the instrument playing each note, while experiments 2 and 3 assessed the ability to discriminate the different stimuli.ResultsNormal hearing subjects performed better than CI subjects in all instrument identification tasks, reaching statistical significance for 4 of 5 stimulus conditions. Within the CI population, acoustic envelope modifications did not significantly affect instrument identification or discrimination. With envelope and pitch cues removed, fine structure discrimination performance was similar between normal hearing and CI users for the majority of conditions, but some specific instrument comparisons were significantly more challenging for CI users.ConclusionsCochlear implant users perform significantly worse than normal hearing listeners on tasks of instrument identification. However, cochlear implant listeners can discriminate differences in envelope and some fine structure components of musical instrument sounds as well as normal hearing listeners. The results indicated that certain fine structure cues are important for cochlear implant users to make discrimination judgments, and therefore may affect interpretation toward associating with a specific instrument for identification.

Musical instrument identification in simulated electric acoustic hearing and in cochlear implant users with contralateral hearing aids.

While cochlear implant (CI) users achieve high levels of speech perception in quiet conditions, music perception is a challenging task. Gfeller et al. (2000) found that CI users rated music as second most important acoustic stimulus in their lives next to speech. Music is considered to be a central part of human experience, and many CI users can only dream of one day being able to appreciate music as they had before losing their hearing. For those with congenital deafness, music remains a distant hope, something experienced only through reactions of others, as indicated by poor performance of prelingually deaf children with CIs on measures of music perception (Stabej et al., 2012). Some recent work in CI field has focused on improving quality of music perception, and in doing so, improving overall quality of life for implant users (Limb & Roy, 2014; Limb & Rubinstein, 2012; Petersen, Mortensen, Hansen, & Vuust, 2012). This has posed a great challenge to researchers, as CI devices have a long history of design principles solely focused on delivering aspects of acoustic signal that lead to improved speech communication without much consideration of music perception (Loizou, 1998, 2006).A number of factors may limit music perception for CI users (McDermott, 2004). The substantial reduction in spectral resolution, limited dynamic range, and channel interactions between neighboring electrodes may render most music noisy and unpleasant to CI users (Limb & Rubinstein, 2012). Although CI users' rhythm perception is comparable with normal-hearing (NH) listeners (Gfeller & Lansing, 1991; Gfeller, Woodworth, Robin, Witt, & Knutson, 1997; Phillips-Silver et al., 2015), melody and timbre perception remain quite poor. Implant users rely heavily on rhythmic cues in identification of melodies, performing better when recognizing melodies with a distinctive rhythm than recognizing melodies with less rhythmic structure (Kong, Cruz, Jones, & Zeng, 2004; Schulz & Kerber, 1994). Their increased reliance on temporal cues may be a consequence of reduction in spectral resolution owing to a limited number of stimulating electrodes. Pitch perception has been found to vary greatly across CI users. Some listeners can discriminate a difference in pitch of one semitone reliably, whereas others require interval differences as large as two octaves for reliable judgments (Drennan & Rubinstein, 2008; Ping, Yuan, & Feng, 2012). Timbre, defined as the attribute of auditory sensation which enables a listener to judge that two nonidentical sounds, similarly presented and having same loudness and pitch, are dissimilar (ASA 111-1994) has also been found to be problematic for CI users. An important dimension of musical expressivity, timbre is primarily defined through temporal envelope and spectral shape of a sound (Dowling & Harwood, 1986; Handel, 1995), which enable identification and tracking of a musical sound source over time (McAdams & Giordano, 2016). While temporal envelopes are encoded fairly well by CIs, spectral shape is degraded (Drennan & Rubinstein, 2008). Two major limitations include less spectral resolving power (typically Timbre is an essential element in enjoying musical sound. Composers use timbre in form of different musical instruments. …

Sparse feature learning for instrument identification: Effects of sampling and pooling methods.

Feature learning for music applications has recently received considerable attention from many researchers. This paper reports on the sparse feature learning algorithm for musical instrument identification, and in particular, focuses on the effects of the frame sampling techniques for dictionary learning and the pooling methods for feature aggregation. To this end, two frame sampling techniques are examined that are fixed and proportional random sampling. Furthermore, the effect of using onset frame was analyzed for both of proposed sampling methods. Regarding summarization of the feature activation, a standard deviation pooling method is used and compared with the commonly used max- and average-pooling techniques. Using more than 47 000 recordings of 24 instruments from various performers, playing styles, and dynamics, a number of tuning parameters are experimented including the analysis frame size, the dictionary size, and the type of frequency scaling as well as the different sampling and pooling methods. The results show that the combination of proportional sampling and standard deviation pooling achieve the best overall performance of 95.62% while the optimal parameter set varies among the instrument classes.

Instrument identification and blending in vinyl records during the transition period from jazz to rock music

Arnold Schering and others have partitioned music genres into traditions where the identification of individual instruments (Spaltklang) is the goal and others where instruments are blended to a homogeneous sound (Verschmelzung). Baroque music is often cited to emphasize the identifiability of individual instruments, whereas the fusion of orchestral instruments became one of the major goals in the romantic period. Historical vinyl record releases were used to investigate the extent to which the theory of identification and blending can be applied to 20th century popular music based on the fundamental principles of Auditory Scene Analysis. The identifiability of instruments was one of the major concerns for jazz combos, for example, in the Miles Davis sextet of the late fifties. Blending became more important in many types of rock music to create a huge sound, for example, in Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound of the 1960s. Artificial reverberation, dynamic range compression, and other effects were now used to c...

The Effects of Training on Music Perception and Appreciation for Cochlear Implant Recipients

The aim of this study was to compare the effectiveness of a music appreciation training program (MATP) to that of focused music listening (FML) for improving music and/or speech in noise perception for postlingually deafened cochlear implant (CI) recipients. It was hypothesized that the MATP would show greater improvements than FML. Ten CI recipients were randomly divided into two groups: one undertaking the MATP and the other undertaking FML. Participants completed four 30-minute sessions per week for 8 weeks, with tests of music and speech-in-noise perception being administered four times per participant: before and after a control period, immediately after the intervention, and 4–8 weeks after intervention. There was a significant pre- to posttraining difference for the MATP group on the instrument identification test, as well as for half of the quality rating assessments. Although no statistically significant improvements were obtained for the FML group, there was a trend of higher scores postintervention for the instrument and ensemble identification tests, and compliance was substantially better than for the MATP group. While the results showed that only the music training significantly improved music perception, the potential of FML to benefit some CI recipients for some tasks was also observed.

Indian Musical Instruments Recognition Using LPC and LPI

Most Significant Music Industry is today widely supported by Research in the area of Musical information Processing. In the past decade the growth of Digital Music over internet and our day-to-day life has forced researcher to explorethe diverse area of Musical Instrument Identification, Retrieval, Classification and Recognition of large sets of music. In our paper we have explored the ignored area of Indian Musical Instrument Recognition (IMIR) and attempted to build the database for the same. An innovative technique to classify the IMIR using the Modified Linear Predictor Coefficient (LPC) features and Log-Power-Intensity (LPI) is discussed. The proposed method has been tested with experimental results and technique has an accuracy of 96.11% for instrument and 92.45 for individual sound.

The role of initial attack and performer expertise on instrument identification

The purpose of this study was to examine the role initial attack and expertise play in the identification of instrumental tones. A stimulus CD was made of 32 excerpts of instrumental tones. Sixteen possible combinations of the variables of initial attack (present or absent), expertise (beginner versus professional), and timbre (flute, clarinet, alto sax, trumpet) were recorded twice, once on B-flat4 and once on F4. After listening to the excerpts, music major ( n = 100) and non-major participants ( n = 112) identified the instrument that was performed in the excerpt and the expertise level of the performer of the excerpt. A list of possible instruments was provided that included the four stimulus instruments as well as four distractor instruments. Data analysis revealed initial attack presence had a significant main effect on instrument identification, especially for music majors’ identification of performer expertise. Results suggest presence and possibly quality of the initial attack affect timbre identification and tone quality assessment.