Listener's Perspective Research Articles

『남천일록』의 문학적 고찰

Shim No-sung's Namcheonilrok , the subject of this study, is a vast amount of diary literature written every day for five years from the day of his exile as Gijang. However, beyond the general categories that the diary genre can handle, multiple historical, geographical, philosophical, and literary materials are intertwined vertically and horizontally. This study analyzed the stories that independently existed in the diary (i.e., stories within stories) as literary works created by Shim No-sung, and revealed the characteristics and identity of the stories. The stories that Simnosung witnessed, heard, processed, and completed in Gijang were similar to classical literary genres such as folk tales, virtuous women's tales, fairy tales, and fairy tales. Since what he heard and recorded from the listener's perspective was processed and completed using literary techniques, it can be considered a work that reflects his author's intention. The birth of this kind of narrative literature was due to his exile life, where he found comfort in listening to stories, and his writerly temperament to process and complete them in a literary way. Sim No-sung produced portraits, or character stories, of people who had a direct or indirect influence on his life in exile. Some characters are mentioned several times, and when the references are collected and combined, a single character story is completed, which is the case in Heungsam's portrait painting. The portrait of Heungsam that the reader drew at the first meeting is reversed into a completely opposite portrait at the last meeting. The ability to consistently and persistently record a person in such detail comes from the writer's temperament to explore humanity. Parakho Kim Saeng's character story is a story that strangely combines the scene where the story is made and the nature of the fun of storytelling. Delicious food is prepared with care and enjoyed, while at the same time listening to Kim Saeng's story about his difficult life. The story was made even more vivid by the real-time nature of the gathering, where the people gathered at the event also joined in, asked questions, joked, and had fun. This shares its characteristics with well-processed folk tales.

The Taxonomy of Denial as a Speech Act

This paper presents a critical examination of the classification of Denial within Speech Act Theory, advocating for its redefinition from an assertive to a directive speech act. Drawing upon the foundational principles established by J.L. Austin (1962) and further developed by John Searle (1969, 1979), the study applies Searle's twelve dimensions of illocutionary acts to Denial. Through this analytical framework, the paper demonstrates that Denial transcends the mere negation of propositions, actively engaging in modifying the hearer's beliefs or actions, a characteristic inherent to directive acts. The analysis highlights the dual nature of Denial, which not only contests a given proposition but also, and more importantly, endeavours to influence the listener's perspective or behaviour. This re-evaluation challenges traditional views and enriches the discourse on linguistic pragmatics by advocating for a more nuanced and context-sensitive approach to speech act classification. By reclassifying Denial as a directive, this study contributes to a deeper understanding of communicative practices, emphasising the strategic use of language in social interactions and the complex dynamics of speech acts in communication. This reassessment calls for a broader reconsideration of speech act classifications, marking a step towards a more comprehensive representation of language functions within linguistic pragmatics and opening avenues for future research.

If You Build It, Will They Understand? Considerations for Creating Shared Understanding Through Design Artifacts

Abstract Design representations play a pivotal role in the design process. In particular, design representations enable the formation of a shared understanding between team members, enhancing team performance. This paper explores the relationship between design representation modality (low-fidelity prototypes and sketches) and shared understanding among designers during communicative acts between design dyads. A mixed-methods study with 44 participants was conducted to investigate if representation modality affects shared understanding and identifies the factors that shape shared understanding during communication. Quantitative results suggest that low-fidelity prototypes and sketches did not significantly differ in terms of the shared understanding they facilitated within dyads. Qualitative analysis identified four factors at the representation- and actor-level that influence how shared understanding is built between individuals during design communication. This research extends our understanding of the utility of design representations given the needs of communicative contexts; specifically, this work demonstrates that designers must understand the perspectives of listeners during communication to create representations that accurately represent the information that a listener seeks to gain.

Effectiveness of Multilingual Broadcasting: A Case Study of Radio Nepal

Radio Nepal, as the pioneering radio broadcaster of the country, has played a crucial role in serving its listeners for over seven decades. In the earlier years, it was the sole medium of information, education, and entertainment, particularly for rural communities, before the advent of television and FM radios. As a national broadcaster, Radio Nepal has assumed significant national duties and responsibilities that set it apart from other media outlets. In response to the evolving socio-political landscape, Radio Nepal has bolstered its multilingual or inclusive broadcasting by incorporating more native languages into its programming. Currently, it broadcasts news and programs in 21 different languages, in addition to Nepali, aiming to address the linguistic diversity of the nation. This research aims to fill this knowledge gap and assess the impact of Radio Nepal's inclusive broadcasting from the listener's perspective. To measure the effectiveness, the research conducted a survey based on Radio Nepal's initiative to evaluate its inclusive broadcasting. The findings reveal that Radio Nepal's inclusive broadcasting has been highly effective. Listeners from diverse linguistic communities have shown a growing interest in news and programs broadcast in their native languages. Moreover, broadcasting has successfully transcended linguistic boundaries, reaching beyond specific communities, thereby contributing to the conservation and respect of different languages by the state and society.

Perspective-taking in deriving implicatures: The listener's perspective is important too

Theories of meaning propose that listeners understand a speaker's implicit meaning thanks to mutually assumed norms of conversation that take into account what the speaker has said, as well as contextual factors, including what the speaker knows. Emerging psycholinguistic research shows that listeners derive a particular kind of implicit meaning, quantity implicatures, when their speaker is knowledgeable about the situation but tend to not derive it otherwise. In this article we focus on if and how listeners use the knowledge that is available only to themselves, i.e., the listener's perspective, while deriving implicatures. To do so, we explore the derivation of ad hoc quantity implicature in situations where the speaker does or does not have full knowledge, while, in the latter case, the listener has two types of privileged knowledge. Two versions of a study with neurotypical English-speaking adults show that listeners are influenced by their own perspective while deriving implicatures, depending on the type of knowledge available to them. We discuss the implications of these findings for models of pragmatic interpretative strategies.

Perspective changes in human listeners are aligned with the contextual transformation of the word embedding space.

Word embedding representations have been shown to be effective in predicting human neural responses to lingual stimuli. While these representations are sensitive to the textual context, they lack the extratextual sources of context such as prior knowledge, thoughts, and beliefs, all of which constitute the listener's perspective. In this study, we propose conceptualizing the listeners' perspective as a source that induces changes in the embedding space. We relied on functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected by Yeshurun Y, Swanson S, Simony E, Chen J, Lazaridi C, Honey CJ, Hasson U. Same story, different story: the neural representation of interpretive frameworks. Psychol Sci. 2017:28(3):307-319, in which two groups of human listeners (n= 40) were listening to the same story but with different perspectives. Using a dedicated fine-tuning process, we created two modified versions of a word embedding space, corresponding to the two groups of listeners. We found that each transformed space was better fitted with neural responses of the corresponding group, and that the spatial distances between these spaces reflect both interpretational differences between the perspectives and the group-level neural differences. Together, our results demonstrate how aligning a continuous embedding space to a specific context can provide a novel way of modeling listeners' intrinsic perspectives.

Perceptual effects of interpolated Austrian and German standard varieties

This article focuses on the perception of standard varieties produced by Austrian and German TV newscasters from the perspective of listeners from both countries, Germany and Austria. Thus, the paper's sociolinguistic scope is located in the pluricentric realm. It assesses (the perception of) standard language variation on fine phonetic levels. In addition to naturally produced stimuli (read sentences), “intermediate” samples were generated by means of a two-step interpolation procedure: First, the symbolic phone sequences were aligned with a Levenshtein-distance algorithm. Second, a phone-level Dynamic-Time-Warping (DTW) algorithm was applied to align the two utterances on a frame level, taking phoneme boundaries into account. Additionally, the spectrum and the fundamental frequency (F0) contour of the utterances was manipulated to be either interpolated or fixed to a given speaker. This procedure allowed for assessing these features’ contribution to listeners’ judgments of whether a given utterance sounds as if spoken by a speaker from (rather) Germany or (rather) Austria. Results of the judgment task showed that the interpolated samples were perceived in a continuous fashion, similarly by both groups, and with overall greater reliance on spectral than F0 information. These findings suggest that even fine phonetic differences between Standard German from Germany and Austria are recognized and evaluated by listeners from both countries. An overall bias towards perceiving all speech samples as closer to the listeners’ own national standard points to a factor of familiarity with one's own and uncertainty towards the ‘foreign’ standard. The similar degree of this bias indicates that both groups have similar levels of familiarity with their own and uncertainty about the other standard variety.

The Heart and Mind of a Radio Station: Audience Perceptions of Radio Station Brand Personality

The focus of this research was to explore consumer brand responses to the brand personality of a South African classical music radio station, Classic 1027. This study investigated how key brand responses are influenced by brand personality. A structured electronic survey was used to collect data from a qualified online panel that reflected the demographic characteristics of typical Classic 1027 listeners. The attitudes and behavioural intentions of listeners were examined, and the findings show positive attitudes and intentions. The “enthusiasm” brand personality dimension was shown to have a significant effect on behavioural responses. This research contributes by measuring brand personality during an actual repositioning campaign, rather than just as an isolated academic study. By considering radio station brand personality from a listener's perspective, it also contributes to theory development and offers some guidelines for media practitioners.

Islamophobia and Media Framing in West Media

The focus of this article is to explain the lousy illustration of Islam and Muslims in international media. The media worldwide is considered the most influential medium that’s formed the views of human beings related to each phase of societies. The media carry out a massive position in building the listener perspective and mindset related to any problem that emerges within the whole globe. In this context, the audiences take delivery as genuine. They expect from media to symbolize a clean photo relate to any affair which is taking place at each countrywide and international floor. In western media, Muslims are represented as an “other alien” on a global level. After September 11, Muslims and Islam have recognized as backward and violent traditions and faith. Muslim communities and their households are generally sufferers and focused via non-Muslims, victimization of a veiled Muslim girl and religious guys in public locations, as victims and targeted against the law. In gift days, Islam and Muslims are represented as a terrorist, illiterate, extremist and backward in global media. Although the framing of Muslims and Islam, mainly after the 7/7 bombing, September 11 terrorist assault, and Paris assault, a massive number of look at and research installation, that the world over the inclination of media reporting is exceedingly located negativity in the direction of Islam and Muslims, through affiliating it with extremism and terrorism.

A machine learning perspective on the emotional content of Parkinsonian speech

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) have distinctive voice patterns, often perceived as expressing sad emotion. While this characteristic of Parkinsonian speech has been supported through the perspective of listeners, where both PD and healthy control (HC) subjects repeat the same speaking tasks, it has never been explored through a machine learning modelling approach. Our work provides an objective evaluation of this characteristic of the PD speech, by building a transfer learning system to assess how the PD pathology affects the sadness perception. To do so we introduce a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture for speech emotion recognition designed to be transferable across datasets. Firstly, by relying on publicly available emotional speech corpora, we train the MoE model and then we use it to quantify perceived sadness in never seen before PD and matched HC speech recordings. To build our models (experts), we extracted spectral features of the voicing parts of speech and we trained a gradient boosting decision trees model in each corpus to predict happiness vs. sadness. MoE predictions are created by weighting each expert's prediction according to the distance between the new sample and the expert-specific training samples. The MoE approach systematically infers more negative emotional characteristics in PD speech than in HC. Crucially, these judgments are related to the disease severity and the severity of speech impairment in the PD patients: the more impairment, the more likely the speech is to be judged as sad. Our findings pave the way towards a better understanding of the characteristics of PD speech and show how publicly available datasets can be used to train models that provide interesting insights on clinical data.

Can I trust you? Children's perceptions of friends and classmates who gossip

AbstractThis study examined children and adolescents' perceptions of trustworthiness about peers who shared gossip. Participants (N = 134, ages 8–16 years) completed vignettes from the gossip listener's perspective and evaluated how trustworthy the sharer was. The main findings revealed that a classmate gossiping negatively about the listener's friend was considered less trustworthy than the other relationship type conditions. Furthermore, in negative gossip scenarios, the sharer was rated more trustworthy when gossiping about the target's behavior that affected another person compared to an action only affecting themselves. Finally, compared to children, adolescents rated their friend who gossiped about another friend more trustworthy. This study helps in understanding to what extent children and adolescents trust individuals to provide them with important social information.

Co-regulated timing in music ensembles: A Bayesian listener perspective

Co-regulated timing in a music ensemble rests on the human capacity to coordinate actions in time. Here we explore the hypothesis that humans predict timing constancy in coordinated actions, in view of timing their own actions in line with the others. An algorithm (BListener) is presented that predicts timing constancy, using Bayesian inference about incoming timing data from the music ensemble. The algorithm is then applied to a timing analysis of real data, first, to a choir consisting of four singers, then, to a dataset containing performances of duet singers. Global features of timing constancy, such as fluctuation and stability, correlate with human subjective estimates of the music ensembles’ quality and associated experienced agency. In future work, BListener could serve as component in an artificial musician that plays along with human musicians in a music ensemble.

Particle-filter tracking of sounds for frequency-independent 3D audio rendering from distributed B-format recordings

Six-Degree-of-Freedom (6DoF) audio rendering interactively synthesizes spatial audio signals for a variable listener perspective based on surround recordings taken at multiple perspectives distributed across the listening area in the acoustic scene. Methods that rely on recording-implicit directional information and interpolate the listener perspective without the attempt of localizing and extracting sounds often yield high audio quality, but are limited in spatial definition. Methods that perform sound localization, extraction, and rendering typically operate in the time-frequency domain and risk introducing artifacts such as musical noise. We propose to take advantage of the rich spatial information recorded in the broadband time-domain signals of the multitude of distributed first-order (B-format) recording perspectives. Broadband time-variant signal extraction retrieving direct signals and leaving residuals to approximate diffuse and spacious sounds is less of a quality risk, and likewise is the broadband re-encoding to enhance spatial definition of both signal types. To detect and track direct sound objects in this process, we combine the directional data recorded at the single perspectives into a volumetric multi-perspective activity map for particle-filter tracking. Our technical and perceptual evaluation confirms that this kind of processing enhances the otherwise limited spatial definition of direct-sound objects of other broadband but signal-independent virtual loudspeaker object (VLO) or Vector-Based Intensity Panning (VBIP) interpolation approaches.

When is gossiping wrong? The influence of valence and relationships on children's moral evaluations of gossip.

Gossip is a common social activity that children admit to engaging in. Although children disapprove of negative gossip (Kuttler, Parker, & La Greca, 2002, Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 48, 105), less is known about how it is perceived morally compared to positive gossip and how this changes developmentally as children enter adolescence. Interestingly, misbehaviours are evaluated differently depending on who commits the act and whom it targets (Slomkowski & Killen, 1992, International Journal of Behavioral Development, 15, 247), but this has not been examined in the context of gossip. This study examined children's moral evaluations of negative and positive valence gossip and how this changed depending on the listener's relationship to the sharer and target. Children (N=134, ages 8-16) completed vignettes, evaluating the sharer's action from the listener's perspective, a 2 (valence: negative/positive) × 4 (relationship type: friend/unfamiliar classmate of the sharer and target) design. Additionally, the gossip topic was about the target's behaviour with consequences for him/herself or another (target behaviour type: individual/relational vignettes). The main findings revealed that negative gossip in the sharer-classmate, target-friend condition was rated most negatively. Furthermore, in the individual vignettes condition, positive gossip in the sharer-friend, target-friend condition was rated more negatively than the sharer-classmate, target-friend condition. Girls rated negative gossip more negatively than boys, and adolescents rated gossip more positively than children. Overall, this research allows us to better understand when gossip is viewed as acceptable or unacceptable during an important developmental period. Statement of contribution What is already known on this subject? Children gossip about others negatively but disapprove of negative gossip. Children and adolescents evaluate negative and positive behaviour differently. Children evaluate transgressions differently depending on who commits them and whom the target is. What does this study add? Adolescents believe that positive gossip is more socially acceptable compared to children. Gossip shared by a classmate that targets a friend is rated negatively. Girls view negative gossip as less acceptable compared toboys.

Auralization based on multi-perspective ambisonic room impulse responses

Most often, virtual acoustic rendering employs real-time updated room acoustic simulations to accomplish auralization for a variable listener perspective. As an alternative, we propose and test a technique to interpolate room impulse responses, specifically Ambisonic room impulse responses (ARIRs) available at a grid of spatially distributed receiver perspectives, measured or simulated in a desired acoustic environment. In particular, we extrapolate a triplet of neighboring ARIRs to the variable listener perspective, preceding their linear interpolation. The extrapolation is achieved by decomposing each ARIR into localized sound events and re-assigning their direction, time, and level to what could be observed at the listener perspective, with as much temporal, directional, and perspective context as possible. We propose to undertake this decomposition in two levels: Peaks in the early ARIRs are decomposed into jointly localized sound events, based on time differences of arrival observed in either an ARIR triplet, or all ARIRs observing the direct sound. Sound events that could not be jointly localized are treated as residuals whose less precise localization utilizes direction-of-arrival detection and the estimated time of arrival. For the interpolated rendering, suitable parameter settings are found by evaluating the proposed method in a listening experiment, using both measured and simulated ARIR data sets, under static and time-varying conditions.

The Graph Music of Morton Feldman by David Cline

Reviewed by: The Graph Music of Morton Feldman by David Cline Tim Sullivan The Graph Music of Morton Feldman. By David Cline. (Music Since 1900.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. [xiii, 390 p. ISBN 9781107109230 (hardcover), $120; 9781316566572 (e-book), $96.] Music examples, facsimiles, bibliography, index. Published analytical studies of Morton Feldman's music have been conspicuously sparse for decades. Outside of a handful of journal articles, for nearly two decades the main source was a collection of essays edited by Thomas DeLio (The Music of Morton Feldman [Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996]). After a long wait, it seems that the proverbial dam is breaking, as David Cline's book follows closely on the heels of Alistair Noble's recent study, Composing Ambiguity: The Early Music of Morton Feldman (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013). As the title indicates, Cline's book focuses almost entirely on Feldman's graph compositions, which have received little attention in the literature on Feldman's music. In the introduction, Cline makes a compelling case for a thorough study of Feldman's graphs. Though they were not the first indeterminate works in the history of music, they were the first to explore pitch indeterminacy, and Feldman's innovations clearly influenced other composers in America and Europe. Most importantly, Cline makes the point that the graphs "represent approximately one-quarter of Feldman's published output from the 1950s and 1960s and one-eighth of his entire catalogue, meaning that an understanding of his music as a whole is impossible without recourse to them" (p. 1). Cline's book represents the first overview of Feldman's graph music, covering all seventeen published graphs and two unpublished graphs. In terms of structure, Feldman's graphs are approached "from several thematic perspectives," rather than covering each work individually (p. 4). One of the main aims of the book "is to reconstruct Feldman's own ideas about these works. … Feldman's own words—from published and unpublished sources—are therefore centre stage in what follows" (p. 6). Following the introduction, Cline provides a chronological overview in two parts ("Early graphs, 1950–1953" and "Later graphs, 1958–1967"). In the first chapter, Cline effortlessly jumps between various published and unpublished accounts of Feldman's graph works, exploring a wide range of possible influences that may have inspired Feldman's notational innovations. The early graphs are comprised of the series of works titled Projections and Intersections, which are discussed in relation to the activities of Feldman's circle of composer friends (John Cage, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff) as well as concurrent trends in Abstract Expressionism. Each graph is also described from a listener's perspective, and Cline effectively uses his aural observations to make connections with other musical and artistic trends of the time. This is [End Page 435] an excellent chapter and the first of many that include reproductions of Feldman's unpublished sketches. In the second chapter, Cline addresses the absence of graphs in Feldman's music from 1953–58. Among several possible reasons Cline explores, the most intriguing is also the most mundane: Feldman may have resumed graph composition as a career move due to the "growing interest in indeterminacy and graphic notation in his circle and elsewhere" (p. 48). An excellent overview of the late graphs (1958–67) follows, with sections on Ixion (a work Feldman composed for Merce Cunningham's Summerspace) and Atlantis standing out as particularly exemplary. Cline concludes the chapter with an exploration of Feldman's late graphs that include some elements of conventional notation. Unfortunately, following the extraordinary quality of the chronological overview, the chapter on "Notation" is tedious and overwrought. Cline was obliged to address this topic at some point in the book, given that Feldman did not always fully explain the alternative notation in his graphs. Some of the massive amount of information included in this chapter will certainly be useful for performers and conductors of Feldman's graph music. However, if this was Cline's intention, the material could have been condensed for easier use. More than anything, this chapter seems to break the flow of the book and perhaps would have been better suited as an appendix. Thankfully, with the fourth chapter...

Presenting and processing information in background noise: A combined speaker-listener perspective.

Transferring information orally in background noise is challenging, for both speaker and listener. Successful transfer depends on complex interaction between characteristics related to listener, speaker, task, background noise, and context. To fully assess the underlying real-life mechanisms, experimental design has to mimic this complex reality. In the current study, the effects of different types of background noise have been studied in an ecologically valid test design. Documentary-style information had to be presented by the speaker and simultaneously acquired by the listener in four conditions: quiet, unintelligible multitalker babble, fluctuating city street noise, and little varying highway noise. For both speaker and listener, the primary task was to focus on the content that had to be transferred. In addition, for the speakers, the occurrence of hesitation phenomena was assessed. The listener had to perform an additional secondary task to address listening effort. For the listener the condition with the most eventful background noise, i.e., fluctuating city street noise, appeared to be the most difficult with markedly longer duration of the secondary task. In the same fluctuating background noise, speech appeared to be less disfluent, suggesting a higher level of concentration from the speaker's side.

Listener evaluations of new and Old Italian violins

Old Italian violins are routinely credited with playing qualities supposedly unobtainable in new instruments. These qualities include the ability to project their sound more effectively in a concert hall-despite seeming relatively quiet under the ear of the player-compared with new violins. Although researchers have long tried to explain the "mystery" of Stradivari's sound, it is only recently that studies have addressed the fundamental assumption of tonal superiority. Results from two studies show that, under blind conditions, experienced violinists tend to prefer playing new violins over Old Italians. Moreover, they are unable to tell new from old at better than chance levels. This study explores the relative merits of Stradivari and new violins from the perspective of listeners in a hall. Projection and preference are taken as the two broadest criteria by which listeners might meaningfully compare violins. Which violins are heard better, and which are preferred? In two separate experiments, three new violins were compared with three by Stradivari. Projection was tested both with and without orchestral accompaniment. Projection and preference were judged simultaneously by dividing listeners into two groups. Results are unambiguous. The new violins projected better than the Stradivaris whether tested with orchestra or without, the new violins were generally preferred by the listeners, and the listeners could not reliably distinguish new from old. The single best-projecting violin was considered the loudest under the ear by players, and on average, violins that were quieter under the ear were found to project less well.

Replies to My Critics

I would like to thank the Editors of the British Journal of Aesthetics for organizing this symposium and the participants for their thoughtful comments. It is gratifying to see that my book has elicited such a wide range of responses. Hannah Ginsborg makes an important point that is rarely articulated or articulated so well: that music’s capacity to tell stories or express complex emotions is entirely consistent with its capacity for integration with words (a sung text, as in song or opera) and gesture (as in ballet or opera). Her argument suggests that historical debates about the essence of music were hindered by the search for a lowest common denominator within the sounding work itself. Ginsborg’s approach favours the perspective of listeners, who are free to hear music in ways that may vary widely. This offers a satisfying alternative to the either/or frameworks adopted by Wagner and Hanslick, who were intent on distinguishing between what music by itself can and cannot do.

Referential choice in a second language: evidence for a listener-oriented approach

ABSTRACTOne central question in research on spoken language communication concerns how speakers decide how explicit to make a referential expression. In the present paper, we address the debate between a discourse-based approach and a listener-based approach to the choice of referring expressions by testing second language (L2) learners of English on the production of English referential expressions, and comparing their performance to a group of monolingual speakers of English. In two experiments, we found that when native speakers of English use full noun phrases, the L2 speakers tend to choose a pronoun, even when the use of a pronoun leads to ambiguity. Our results show that the pattern observed is not the result of cross-linguistic interference from the L1. Furthermore, a clear dissociation is found between calculating the discourse information and taking the listener's perspective into account, supporting a listener's based approach to the choice of referring expressions.