Sound Design Research Articles

Sound absorption design and characteristics of variable-section perforated double-porosity multiscale aerogel

A constant-section perforated double-porosity multiscale porous material (CDMPM) introduces periodically distributed straight mesoperforations in an appropriately selected traditional single-porosity substrate. In this work, the effects of mesopore radius ([Formula: see text]) and mesopore height ([Formula: see text]) on the sound absorption performance are numerically investigated using graphene-polyvinyl alcohol aerogel (GPA-1) as a microporous substrate. The findings indicate that adjusting mesopore parameters enables to tune the frequency band and thereby enhancing sound absorption performance. However, CDMPM exhibits insufficient performance in broadband and low-frequency application scenarios. To address this issue, a variable-section perforated double-porosity multiscale porous material (VDMPM) with stepped mesopore profile is proposed via the combination of CDMPMs with different perforation parameters. The influence of multiscale design parameters on the sound absorption characteristics of VDMPM is studied, and the key parameters are adjusted based on CDMPM. The optimized design demonstrates global acoustic characteristics, with absorption peaks at low frequencies and efficient broadband absorption in the mid-to-high frequency range. The stepped mesopore profile of VDMPM induces a sophisticated pressure diffusion effect and expands the energy dissipation region. Finally, the applicability of the proposed perforation strategy is examined using rockwool and melamine foam as alternative microporous substrates. The findings of this research provide practical principles to guide the multiscale structural design of double-porosity materials and to ensure effective enhancement of sound absorption performance of traditional porous materials.

Breakwaters In A Living Environment

Breakwaters protecting harbors and coastal areas are key to the economic and social development of many countries, but they are also infrastructures which may result in relevant environmental and social impacts. The construction of new breakwaters in developing countries, together with the dismantling, rehabilitation or repair of old breakwaters in developed countries, should be adapted to the principles of sustainability to produce efficient and resilient systems. Global mean temperatures and sea levels are rising due to climate change, and many environmental variables and numerous ecosystems are evolving. The hypothesis of stationarity, widely assumed in the last century when estimating the wave climate for the design of maritime structures, is now questionable, and new methodologies are required to design breakwaters in this changing environment. Marine life and ecosystems are affected by construction processes and structures, but the interactions are not well known; marine growth and enhanced biodiversity are usually considered positive environmental impacts of most breakwaters but materials, carbon footprint and energy consumption are negative impacts. The two main challenges in breakwater design are (1) to develop sound design methods valid in a changing wave climate and with rising sea levels, and (2) to adapt design guidelines to build-up, to repair and to dismantle breakwaters in a living environment.

The Aural Eye

Human aural experience can be equally considered along spatial and temporal continuums. We hear at all times of the day and night, and within all places and spaces: built, natural, public, private and virtual. The territory – both physical and philosophical – between music composition for interior listening and traditional sound based research within environmental acoustics is gradually being occupied by the listener-centred approach of soundscape studies. Soundscape design is emerging as an interdisciplinary field within design education, and one that not only challenges the ocular-centric nature of most design education, but one that could provide a useful mode through which to investigate the coincidences between different design disciplines. This paper draws on the author’s own practice as a sound designer in a variety of spatial sound projects in built and virtual contexts to discuss ideas of landscape, interiority, space and place as experienced through listening. This will include aspects of Canopies: chimerical acoustic environments for the Southgate soundscape system, Ecstasis: human presence in digital environments for an interactive VR system and stereoscopic projections, and The Occupation of Space: Soundsites project with the Melbourne blind community.2 The ideas and technologies underpinning these projects also form the basis of a new pedagogy of sound and listening housed in the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory’s (SIAL) Sound Studios at RMIT University. The place and role of the Sound Studio’s program in providing an aural perspective that compliments the visual methodologies of co-located design disciplines is discussed.

"Audio, Empathy and Neurodiversity". An Interview with Professor Jeremy Strong

Jeremy Strong talks audio, empathy, and neurodiversity with LSFMD colleague and Senior Lecturer in Radio & Sound Design, Sue Bowerman, winner of UWL’s 2023 Teaching Excellence Awards for Best Lecturer & Inclusive Education – Academic Staff.

Research on Soundscape Design Strategies for Public Spaces in Dong Village, Dali

Soundscape reflects the ecological, cultural and social characteristics of regions and ethnic groups and is an important part of the public environment. Because in the past environmental design, the breadth and depth of the design that considers the human settlement environment system as a large framework should be included and involved. Therefore, this article analyzes the existing public space and landscape nodes of the public environment of Dali Dong Village, and uses the knowledge of environmental science, sociology, landscape science and other related disciplines to explore the Dong village public environment as the design practice object. It hopes to provide a useful reference for the research on sound landscape design of traditional ethnic minority settlements in my country.

Analysis of film audio design in the post-modern context of “Light Chaser”

The postmodernism cultural trend of thought has a profound impact on the global animation industry. In this context, Chinese cartoons and animated films have been constantly changing to adapt to the market aesthetic needs. This research focuses on the audio design in Light Chaser films, especially the use of music audio effects and dialogues. By analyzing early and later works of Light Chaser, this paper probes into the changes of audio design concepts and techniques. Results show that musical sound effects play a critical role in creating atmosphere and promoting plot development, while dialogues can effectively shape characters and convey emotions. By comparing the previous and later works, this paper reveals the innovation and adjustment of Light Chaser in adapting to the postmodern aesthetic trend, and provides theoretical and practical reference for the audio design of animated films.

An Aesthetic Exploration of Sound Illusion in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive

Mulholland Drive is the masterpiece of American independent director David Lynch; whose unique sound design constructs an illusory yet real soundscape. Transcendental meditation, polysemous themes, open text, uncontrolled narrative, and disorienting imagery are the keywords to understand the aesthetic characteristics of Lynch's films. However, so far there are few comprehensive and in-depth interpretations of this movie from the perspective of cinematic sound. Therefore, this study analyzes the film from the perspective of sound design and concludes that the unique sound effects in Mulholland Drive can suggest danger and subtly manipulate the audience's emotions. In addition, the human voice in Mulholland Drive has the characteristics of mixing and breaking, and the human voice can establish a new relationship between sound and picture through the audio intervention, and it can also make the character's identity "out of focus" and other artistic effects. Finally, the jazz music in Mulholland Drive can foretell the unknown and create a strong contrast with the narrative of the movie, and other styles of soundtracks in the movie can create a dreamy and perverse ambient space.

PENGEMBANGAN MEDIA AUDIO VISUAL MATERI NARRATIVE TEKS UNTUK PEMBELAJARAN BAHASA INGGRIS DI SMA

This research study is aimed to: (1) produce media audio visual english instructional for Senior High School, (2) study of process developing audio visual media of narrative text learning english for SMA, (3) provide audio visual media as instructional alternative for teachers in teaching learning process. This study was developmental research. The data collected in this research included instruments validation for the expert of english education and the expert of instructional media, and questionnaire sheet for the one-to-one try out, the small group try-out, and the field try-out. The data were analyzed by using descriptive analysis. The findings of the study are: (1) the development of audio visual media learning english for senior high school proceeded in six steps, namely, analyzing, designing, producing, validating, revising, and trying-out, (2) the quality of developed media viewed from the aspect of content and instructional are good, (3) he aspect of attractiveness shows thar developed instructional media was interesting, in the one-to-one try out, of the three students observed, two students indicated that the product attraction was interesting, and one student indicated that the product attraction was very interesting, sis students for the small group try-out indicated that the product was interesting, and in the field group try out from fifteen students indicated 87% stated that product was interesting, (4) based on the observation showed that audio visual media can be used as alternative instructional media. Audio visual media products needed in creating a variety of learning and motivate students in learning the material in accordance with the demands of the curriculum. It is expected a further study on this development, in order to develop better products Kata kunci: audio visual media, narrative text

Effect of Emotionalizing Sounds on the Estimation and Evaluation of Displayed Safety Distances

Musicological and traffic psychology research shows that emotions can be changed by certain tone combinations or sound characteristics and that emotions, in turn, influence our driving behavior. Nevertheless, there are no studies on how a dynamic active sound design could influence driving behavior via changing the emotional state of drivers in certain driving situations. Based on a previous study, emotionalizing sounds, characterized by their capacity to evoke specific emotional responses in individuals, were created and used to investigate their effect on the perception of safety distances in an online study. To test this, participants made statements on the safety distance shown in videos of cars following scenarios combined with emotionalizing sounds. The results show a significant difference in the estimated safety distance for videos combined with sounds invoking positive emotions like light-heartedness vs. sounds invoking negative emotions like feeling threatened. The odds of the safety distance being evaluated as too small compared with appropriate were two to three times higher for some threatening sounds vs. the positive sounds. The results further suggest that threatening sounds influenced participants’ wishes to increase the depicted safety distances. The results show that emotionalizing sounds had effects on the participants, though not all were statistically significant.

Will automated vehicles encourage more jaywalking? Results from a stated preference survey

When interacting with driverless cars, pedestrians might be emboldened to jaywalk knowing the vehicles will slow down for them automatically. Increased jaywalking might disrupt traffic flow and pose challenges for traffic law enforcement. Few studies examined pedestrians’ attitudes toward driverless cars’ safety implication, management strategies for the interactions between pedestrians and driverless cars, and how pedestrians would expect their street crossing behavior to change in the presence of driverless cars. We conducted an online stated preference survey of 1,000 residents in the Philadelphia and the Seattle metropolitan areas to investigate respondents’ attitudes toward driverless cars and their preferences of jaywalking under different driverless car saturation levels. Through descriptive data analysis and multilevel binomial logit analysis, we found that overall pedestrians felt less safe with driverless cars on the road. Pedestrians preferred limiting the speeds of driverless cars or disabling driverless functions in areas with heavy pedestrian traffic to increasing enforcement for jaywalking laws. Multilevel binomial logit analysis showed pedestrians were more likely to jaywalk in the presence of driverless cars in high visibility and low traffic volume, and were deterred by bigger, faster streets. Respondents’ current crossing behavior might serve as an indicator of their crossing behavior in the presence of driverless cars. Our findings remind cities that sound street design strategies could help to ensure safer interactions between pedestrians and driverless cars and greater acceptance of driverless cars on urban streets.

Nigeria's Untold Stories at a Moment of Change: An interview with audio storyteller FayFay

Odudu Efe, known as FayFay, is a Lagos-based audio producer and sound designer and also the founder of NaijaPod Hub, a network dedicated to supporting audio producers and promoting high quality audio storytelling in Nigeria. This interview with FayFay shows how her career in many ways reflects the challenges and promise of Nigerian audio storytelling at this moment in time. Like many freelancers, she takes on branding and imaging, tidies up sound and produces studio-based talk podcasts. But increasingly she’s being commissioned to work on complex historical documentaries and documentary-dramas. And this for FayFay is key, because like others in her field, she now wants to tell Nigerian stories that have too long gone untold – or too long been told by outsiders – and she wants to tell them in creative and absorbing ways that ‘chatcasts’ cannot satisfy. FayFay’s work draws on globally recognisable documentary conventions but also incorporates Nigerian TV and film sound tropes, in what might prove to be an emerging Nigerian audio-documentary style. She remains frustrated by the tendency for so many in the media to hide away in studios, when a roving microphone in the hands of a greater range of people might better capture the richness of lived experience in this hyper-diverse country.

Features of criminal characteristics of crimes in the sphere of intellectual property

The article is devoted to the peculiarities of the forensic characteristics of crimes in the field of intellectual property. It is noted that the Constitution of our country guarantees every citizen the right to the results of his intellectual and creative activity; no one can use or distribute them without his consent, with exceptions established by law. However, criminals violate this right and commit corresponding criminal offenses, the responsibility for which is provided for by Articles 176, 177, 203-1, 229 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine. At the same time, the formulation of the forensic characteristics of any criminal offense is an important stage of its proof, as it allows not only to determine the circumstances that need to be established, but also to draw up a further investigation plan and tactics for conducting investigative (search) actions.
 It was concluded that the forensic characteristics of criminal offenses in the field of intellectual property include: the method of committing the crime, the object of the criminal offense, the identity of the criminal and typical traces of the crime.
 The criminal’s choice of the subject of the criminal offense is determined, first of all, by the level of his education, the presence of certain professional skills and knowledge necessary for the implementation of the plan, and the technical side of the issue. All this is especially true for crimes related to copyright infringement in the field of distribution of audio and video products and computer information. Because a person who does not have certain special skills and education is not able to develop a crime plan and implement it. In addition, the criminal must first have access to the object of criminal trespass, and therefore know the technical features of its carrier and the organization of the work of the relevant enterprises, corporations, companies, firms and the like, in whose custody a certain desired work is located.
 It has been established that the typical traces of these crimes are characterized by certain features in the process of trace creation, namely: their commission is mostly disguised as ordinary economic transactions; the tools used to commit them are significantly different from those used to commit other crimes; traces usually remain in various accounting, management or technological documents; the very objects of the criminal offense can be used within the framework of legitimate economic transactions.

Audio

Audio

From Niche Narrative to Audio Blockbusters

From Niche Narrative to Audio Blockbusters

Auditory Learner

Auditory Learner

Punching shear tests in flat slabs supported on re-entrant corner columns

The punching strength and deformation capacity of slab-column connections is governing for design at ultimate limit state of flat slabs. This phenomenon has been investigated since decades with experimental programmes in an effort to derive empirical or mechanical design approaches. Such efforts, due to the complexity of the phenomena, have mostly been addressed to axisymmetric inner slab-column connections, which correspond to the simplest academic case and are not directly covering a large variety of practical situations. Although some tests are also available for other configurations, such as edge or corner connections, no experimental evidence is found on relevant cases for practice such as re-entrant corner columns. The lack of experimental data in this latter case raises questions on the design of such connections, as extrapolating results from other cases is not a simple task due to the complexity of the phenomena implied (such as redistributions in the shear field and moment transfer between slab and column). In order to advance the knowledge on the response of re-entrant connections and to provide a sound design approach for them, this paper presents the results of an investigation specifically addressed at this case. To that aim, seven specimens were tested under different conditions, varying the load eccentricity, flexural reinforcement and shear reinforcement arrangement at the edges. The tests were instrumented with refined measurements, allowing to understand in a detailed manner the response of the slabs during testing in the shear-critical region. The experimental results are later compared to current design codes, leading to a number of conclusions with practical relevance. Finally, on the basis of the knowledge acquired from the tests, a mechanical approach is proposed based on the Critical Shear Crack Theory to assess the punching response. This approach is shown to lead to accurate and reliable predictions of the punching strength, improving those of current design codes.

Collection Development and Acquisitions of Video Game Music at the University of North Texas

This contribution discusses collection development initiatives and acquisition of video game music resources at the University of North Texas (UNT) Music Library. The UNT Music Library has begun developing a collection of resources that support the study of video game music and sound design, and in the process, has tackled challenges including issues with various formats, questions of availability, and the feasibility of acquiring materials. The content of this contribution would be beneficial to anyone interested in starting a collection of these materials or the process of such development.

Accuracy and sensitivity of soil erosion estimation using 137Cs technology: A statistical perspective

Random spatial variation of the 137Cs inventory is the principal contributor to uncertainty in soil erosion estimation using 137Cs technology. A statistically sound sampling design is imperative for obtaining reliable soil erosion estimations. The objectives of this study are to: 1) characterize the effect of sample size on the estimates of mean inventories; 2) evaluate the sensitivity of the estimated soil redistribution to sample size using a new 137Cs model; 3) compare erosion detection limits among five conversion models; and 4) assess three spatial interpolation methods. Two small watersheds were sampled in an irregular grid design, and 30 samples were taken on a reference site. A moving window scheme was used to compute the 7-point and 11-point means of 137Cs inventories. The Welch’s modified t-test was used to test the mean estimates and to compute the detection limits for the replicated samples. Five models were selected to convert 137Cs inventories to soil redistribution rates. Since most single samples without replication yielded insignificant test results, the 137Cs technique cannot be used to estimate soil erosion at a single point due to random spatial variation. With 30 reference samples, 7 replicate samples on the sampling site provided reliable estimations of 137Cs inventories and soil redistribution. The spatial patterns of the estimated 137Cs inventories and soil redistribution became more regular and systematic as sample size increased, which agreed increasingly well with topography and surface hydrology. Replicate samples can be taken from each landform element or slope position where the erosion rate is expected to be uniform. Alternatively, a systematic grid sampling scheme can be used, and the nearest neighbors can be treated as replicates to calculate moving averages. The Type I and II errors with replicated samples showed that all sampling positions should be included in calculating watershed or area mean erosion rates even though the Type I errors indicated insignificant redistribution rates for some samples. Due to the lack of spatial autocorrelation, spline and inverse distance weighting methods performed better than kriging for interpolation. Detection limits and magnitudes of soil redistribution varied substantially with conversion models, depending on their sensitivities to changes in 137Cs inventories.

Research Progress on Thin-Walled Sound Insulation Metamaterial Structures

Acoustic metamaterials (AMs) composed of periodic artificial structures have extraordinary sound wave manipulation capabilities compared with traditional acoustic materials, and they have attracted widespread research attention. The sound insulation performance of thin-walled structures commonly used in engineering applications with restricted space, for example, vehicles’ body structures, and the latest studies on the sound insulation of thin-walled metamaterial structures, are comprehensively discussed in this paper. First, the definition and math law of sound insulation are introduced, alongside the primary methods of sound insulation testing of specimens. Secondly, the main sound insulation acoustic metamaterial structures are summarized and classified, including membrane-type, plate-type, and smart-material-type sound insulation metamaterials, boundaries, and temperature effects, as well as the sound insulation research on composite structures combined with metamaterial structures. Finally, the research status, challenges, and trends of sound insulation metamaterial structures are summarized. It was found that combining the advantages of metamaterial and various composite panel structures with optimization methods considering lightweight and proper wide frequency band single evaluator has the potential to improve the sound insulation performance of composite metamaterials in the full frequency range. Relative review results provide a comprehensive reference for the sound insulation metamaterial design and application.

Sonic branding: A narrative review at the intersection of art and science

AbstractThe field of sonic branding/marketing has grown rapidly in recent years, as has commercial interest in more science‐based approaches to the practice, particularly as more brands and agencies look for qualitative and quantitative evidence to support the efficacy of sonic branding. In this research note, we explore the ways in which the design and execution (i.e., the “art”) of sonic branding initiatives can be informed by overlapping approaches and techniques drawn from the sciences, namely psychoacoustics, semiotics, music/auditory cognition, and crossmodal research. We explore whether the rapid growth of generative AI may represent the next major evolution in the design, creation, and assessment of sonic assets, where science and art are used to train AI tools that could one day augment (and potentially disrupt) the work of human sound designers and composers. These developments notwithstanding, it is argued that sonic branding will likely remain as much an art as a science, though basing one's approach on the emerging scientific literature ought to at least tilt the odds of success in the creative's favor.