Virtual Speaker Research Articles

COMPLICATED SENTENCE AS AN INDICATOR OF A VIRTUAL SPEAKER’S INTELLECTUAL LEVEL

The paper looks at the problem of correlation of cognitive processes taking place in the person’s cognition with the syntactic organization of their speech. The speech of any individuum mirrors their thinking, and this is one of the ways they come to know their environment, acquire cognitive experience for building up their own picture of the world. In the process and due to communication, a human is shaped as an individual with a certain intellectual level of mind. The presented work is focused on syntactic peculiarities of the English-language verbal message, produced depending on the intellectual level of the virtual speaker. The topicality of the conducted scientific research consists in lingual and gnoseological need to penetrate into the cognitive-communicative essence of the processes of generating messages, and is motivated by the lack of serious scientific research of this problem. The objective of this paper consists in singling out a scientifically valid criterion for determining the intellectual level of a virtual speaker in the aspect of syntactic construction of sentences inherent to him. The starting point of this research was an assumption that there are certain typologically different structural sentence models, preferred by representatives of a certain psychological group of individuals. In our previous studies, it was established that in dialogue communication, simple sentences prevail among other structural types, while complex sentences take the third place in terms of use frequency with almost all speakers, regardless of their education level, social status, and cognitive abilities. According to our observations, a striking contrast can be seen in the native speakers’ use of complicated sentences, the grammatical status of which is not fully specified in grammar. The carried-out research specifies the concept of “complicated sentence”, and by means of comparative analysis of speech samples provided by the protagonists’ of three English novels captured at different stages of their lives, this type of sentence is determined as an indicator of the speakers’ cognitive peculiarities at the level of syntax. It is suggested that, in contrast to the surface representation, deep structures of human speech organization correlate with deep structures of human thought activity. Hence, a high intelligence level of an individuum is reflected not only at the level of adequacy of information perception, but also in the form of message representation and generation, namely, mainly in the constructions with a hidden deep structure of predication.

Spontaneous perspective-taking in real-time language comprehension: evidence from eye-movements and grain of coordination

Linguistic communication requires interlocutors to consider differences in each other’s knowledge (perspective-taking). However, perspective-taking might either be spontaneous or strategic. We monitored listeners’ eye movements in a referential communication task. A virtual speaker gave temporally ambiguous instructions with scalar adjectives (“big” in “big cubic block”). Scalar adjectives assume a contrasting object (a small cubic block). We manipulated whether the contrasting object (a small triangle) for a competitor object (a big triangle) was in common ground (visible to both speaker and listener) or was occluded so it was in the listener’s privileged ground, in which case perspective-taking would allow earlier reference-resolution. We used a complex visual context with multiple objects, making strategic perspective-taking unlikely when all objects are in the listener’s referential domain. A turn-taking, puzzle-solving task manipulated whether participants could anticipate a more restricted referential domain. Pieces were either confined to a small area (requiring fine-grained coordination) or distributed across spatially distinct regions (requiring only coarse-grained coordination). Results strongly supported spontaneous perspective-taking: Although comprehension was less time-locked in the coarse-grained condition, participants in both conditions used perspective information to identify the target referent earlier when the competitor contrast was in privileged ground, even when participants believed instructions were computer-generated.

Marcadores discursivos com funções modais

The modal functions performed by some discourse markers have been the subject of analysis for several languages. This paper analyzes the different values conveyed by the Portuguese discourse marker claro, and takes a contrastive perspective with French, based on monolingual and parallel, written and spoken, corpora, in order to identify discourse markers that are functional equivalents of claro in different contexts. Contexts of claro and its French equivalents in corpora show a meaning of agreement and shared knowledge, as well as the elimination of alterity (bien sûr), factuality (de fait, c'est un fait), opposition and even irony (bien entendu) and the insertion in argumentative structures preceding contrastive or concessive segments (certes). Even in contexts in which claro does not responds to or comments on the discourse of a direct interlocutor, it establishes a relationship between the speaker's discourse and another discourse, either the discourse of an epistemic community that includes the speaker or the implicit discourse of a real or virtual speaker.

The effect of listener head orientation on front-to-rear speech intelligibility in an automotive cabin

The listener head orientation significantly affects speech intelligibility (SI) in the small acoustic space of an automobile, owing to near-field binaural listening and special acoustic conditions such as early reflections and seat-back occlusions. However, situations involving a back-row listener and a front-row speaker (i.e., front-to-rear scenarios) have not yet been studied. Such scenarios are dominated by non-uniform early reflections rather than direct sounds, making them distinct from cases considered in previous studies. This study investigates the effect of listener head orientation on SI in front-to-rear scenarios in an automobile, using both the speech transmission index (STI) and subjective experiments. A virtual speaker (i.e., a loudspeaker) is located in the driver’s seat and faces forward. Binaural room impulse responses are measured on a dummy head in the three rear-row seats with different head orientations. Using the binaural room impulse responses, the corresponding STIs are calculated, and the Chinese SI scores are measured virtually via headphones. The results show that the SI variation range for various listener head orientations in front-to-rear scenarios is greatly reduced compared with that in the rear-to-front scenarios considered in previous studies. Overall, the effect of listener head orientation on SI is mostly negligible when a listener in the rear row listens to a speaker in the front, with variations in the SI score of no more than 5%. The present study provides a supplement to previous studies and helps to deepen understanding of the effect of multiple factors on SI in an automotive cabin.

Auralisation of combined mitigation measures in railway pass-by noise

To reduce noise exposure along railway lines various combinations of noise mitigation measures can be considered. However, predicting and assessing their effects is non-trivial and the potential need for multiple measures is difficult to communicate to stakeholders. Auralisation is a promising tool that can help to support communication and decision-making, and enable psychoacoustic evaluations. This paper presents developments of a physics-based auralisation model for train pass-bys that allows various mitigation measures to be included. The work is conducted within the European research project SILVARSTAR. The proposed model includes contribution from rolling noise, impact noise, traction, auxiliary systems, and aerodynamic noise. It is physically based and allows a direct assessment of pass-by parameters such as speed, roughness, wheel flats and track design. Based on the TWINS model, five structural transfer paths for rolling noise are considered to integrate mitigation measures such as wheel and rail dampers. Shielding by noise barriers is simulated with analytical models. Reflection at different ground types is considered and can account for track embankments. The results can be coupled to an immersive Virtual Reality environment, by first panning the synthesised sounds to a small virtual speaker array and subsequently dynamic binaural rendering for headphones.

Assessing the benefits of virtual speaker lateralization for binaural speech intelligibility over the Internet

Binaural speech intelligibility tests using headphones were conducted remotely through the Internet using virtual speaker lateralization at azimuth angles around the front within ±45 degrees, combined with babble noise with signal to noise ratios (SNR) from -12 to -4 dB. Monophonic speech recordings, selected from the publicly available Mozilla Common Voice speech corpus in Spanish, were binaurally processed using a database of generic Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTF) to produce virtual speaker lateralization. A common signal of babble noise was mixed to both the left and right binaural signals, with different SNR. Speech intelligibility tests were conducted through a Google Forms questionnaire containing Internet links to YouTube videos embedding the corresponding test audio files. Symbolic text difference metrics: Levenshtein distance, and word error rate (WER), commonly used in the field of automatic speech recognition (ASR), were used to automatically calculate estimations of speech intelligibility scores, more conventionally used for (human) speech intelligibility research at the word level, together with microscopic speech intelligibility scores at the phonetic symbol level. Speech reception thresholds (SRT), and intelligibility slopes were determined, showing that the known beneficial effect of spatial release from masking (SRM) in improving speech intelligibility when the speaker is oriented at lateral azimuth angles relative to the listener, is preserved when using virtual speaker lateralization, and by the use of Internet transmitted audio using headphones. Results show that for azimuth angles of 20 and 30 degrees, left or right, speech intelligibility improves with an average unmasking benefit of 3.7±0.7 dB SRM, and an average intelligibility slope of 5.6±0.8%/dB, while also maintaining at these angles, a desirable impression of a virtual speaker with a reasonably frontal orientation. This provides a useful technique for improved Internet speech delivery.

Programmatic approaches to achieving equity for women in anesthesiology.

Programmatic approaches to achieving equity for women in anesthesiology.

Effect of listener head orientation on speech reception threshold in an automotive environment

The head orientation of the listener significantly affects speech intelligibility (SI) in automobiles due to the effect of binaural listening and special acoustic conditions such as early reflections and seat-back occlusions. However, this issue has not been studied with subjective tests yet. This study investigates SI with various head orientations of a listener in automobiles with an subjective experiment. The sentence speech reception thresholds (SRT) in Mandarin Chinese are measured via headphones virtually in an automobile environment, and compared with results in a weak-reflective listening room. A virtual speaker is located in the front-passenger seat, the right-back seat and the left-back seat in sequence, by convolving the target speech with corresponding binaural room impulse responses measured on a dummy head in the driver’s seat with five head orientations. Result shows that the SRT variations caused by head orientations are up to 5 dB in automobile, lower than that of 9 dB in listening room. Under various head orientations, the SRT in automobile decreases as the virtual speaker moves closer to the front lateral direction, which is similar to the change rule in listening room that is mainly determined by the effect of binaural listening. Overall, a lower SRT in automobile can be obtained when the listener in the driver seat turns their head inward, i.e., towards the right. In comparison with the result in listening room, early reflections improve SI in automobile by an SRT decrease of up to 3.5 dB, while seat-back occlusions reduce SI by an SRT increase of up to 5.3 dB. The early reflections play a more significant role when the listener is in an adverse position, e.g., for the head orientations and speaker locations making direct sounds difficult to reach the listener’s ears. Comparison between the SRTs based on speech transmission index (STI) and STI-SI models and the SRTs measured by subjective experiment indicates that the STI-based objective method only partially expresses the variation in SI obtained from subjective experiment, and the difference between the subjective results and the objective results is mainly caused by the inapplicability of the STI-SI models derived from the traditional room in the automotive environment. The present work is relevant to understanding the combined effect of various factors on SI under such a special acoustic condition in automobile.

Development of an electromechanical test system and acoustical metrics to predict impacts of hearing protection devices on sound localization

Hearing protection devices (HPDs) such as earplugs and earmuffs can protect users from dangerously high acoustical pressures but also distort cues important for the spatial localization of sounds, likely through spectral distortions associated with occlusion of the pinnae. Evaluation of the degree to which an HPD distorts localization cues is essential for critical situations where users must be protected from high pressures but maintain spatial awareness. Automated testing offers several prospective advantages over human subject testing including cost, speed, and repeatability. In this paper, we describe an electromechanical system using a rotating manikin test fixture and a speaker on a track to simulate a hemispheric speaker array. The sound source localization impact of an HPD is estimated by comparing test signals recorded by the manikin with and without an HPD in place. Test results, as a function of sound source azimuth and elevation in the virtual speaker array, and as an average across locations, are shown for a variety of HPDs. Results are compared to an initial set of parallel measurements of sound localization during HPD use in human subjects.

Psycholinguistic peculiarities of speech of the classic heroines of the feminine novel

This work presents comparative analysis of the main characters’ speech parts belonging to Elizabeth and Bridget as given in the famous English novels “Pride and Precedence” by Jane Austen and “Bridget Jones’s Diary ” by Helen Fielding, both written in the same language and genre, but separated in time by almost two centuries. The topicality of this study follows from the profound linguo-gnoseological importance of the problems of inner mechanisms between the human cognition and its reflection in their speech. The work looks at communicative organization of the dialogue in the speech parts of Elizabeth Bennett and Bridget Jones. The main objective of this work is to establish regularities in the use of semantically different types of dialogue preferred by the main female characters of these typically feminine novels. The paper considers such problems as concretisation of the concepts of language and speech personality, speech portrait and communicative personality; the cultural and historical basis motivating psychological characteristics of Elizabeth and Bridget; and poly functionality of the dialogue parts of the both heroines studied in the aspect of the communicative techniques used by the both girls. Conceptually the analysis undertaken rests on the presumption that it is possible to penetrate into the depths of person’s cognition and emotional state through his/her speech, on the other hand, we note that a person’s speech does not always reflect his/her real thoughts and emotions, but can hide true feelings and motives due to the implicative character of the speech communication. Hence, a speech portrait, as a forming component of the speech personality, is not a functional model of it, but a functional implementation of this model from the point of view of reconstruction of a speech personality. Therefore, a comprehensive analysis of the speech portrait of the virtual speaker is aimed at reconstructing his/her lingual cognition. Comparing the communicative varieties of the typical dialogue organisation of the novels under study, in our work we investigate seven communicatively different types of the main characters’ dialogues. The work results in the conclusion about similarity of the psycholinguistic peculiarities of the dialogue parts of the female personages studied.

Literary Characters and their Verbal Mimicry through the Prism of Gestalt Analysis

The paper represents a fragment of a multi-year project focused on everyday speech interaction and, particularly, on verbal mechanisms of granting speech efficiency and effectiveness. The introductory statement of the research is more precise thespeaker organizes his/her message verbally, the easier it is understood by the listener. Special attention is paid to the methodological approach to verbal identification of literary characters’ social strata. The paper also elicits how Gestalt analysis can be successfully applied to different practical linguistic tasks. Hence, the article deals with the advantages of Gestalt, used for unmasking the virtual speaker’s social identity and his social status. Besides, a close study of speech situations has revealed some cases when the speaker tries to play a verbal trick on the audience, thus consciously or unconsciously imposing a false image and hiding his/her true identity. The phenomenon of speech imposters, discovered in literary dialogues termed “speech, or verbal mimicry,” while the speakers who use such verbal masks are called “mimics.” In the presented research, two types of mimicry are distinguished: progressive and regressive speech mimicry. Hence, the characters’ speech was analyzed through the prism of his/her actual or imposed social status, which allowed to single out sufficiently reliable syntactic indicators of the speaker’s real social profile.

Four Steps for Coordinating a Virtual Speaker Series

Special Events GaloreVolume 21, Issue 3 p. 4-4 Speaker and Lecture Events Four Steps for Coordinating a Virtual Speaker Series Thomas Schroeder, Thomas SchroederSearch for more papers by this author Thomas Schroeder, Thomas SchroederSearch for more papers by this author First published: 04 February 2021 https://doi.org/10.1002/speg.31537Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume21, Issue3March 2021Pages 4-4 RelatedInformation

Comparing Spatial Release From Masking Using Traditional Methods and Portable Automated Rapid Testing iPad App.

Purpose The purpose of this study was to compare speech identification abilities of individuals of various ages and hearing abilities using traditional methods and Portable Automated Rapid Testing (PART) iPad app. Method Speech identification data were collected using three techniques: over headphones using a virtual speaker array, using PART iPad app (UCR Brain Game Center, 2018), and using loudspeaker presentation in a sound-attenuated room. For all three techniques, Coordinate Response Measure sentences were used as the stimuli and "Charlie" was used as the call sign. A progressive tracking procedure was used to estimate the speech identification thresholds for listeners with varying hearing thresholds. The target sentence was always presented at 0° azimuth angle, whereas the maskers were colocated (0°) with the target or symmetrically spatially separated by ±15°, ±30°, or ±45°. Results Data analysis revealed similar speech identification thresholds for the iPad and headphone conditions and slightly poorer thresholds for the loudspeaker array condition across participant groups. This was true for all spatial separations between the target and the maskers. Conclusion Strong correlation between the headphone and iPad data presented in this study indicated that the spatial release from masking module in the PART iPad app can be used as a clinical tool to assess spatial processing ability prior to audiologic evaluation in the clinic and can also be used to make recommendations for and to track progress with aural rehabilitation programs over time.

Binaural speech transmission index with spatialized virtual speaker in near field: Distance and direction dependence.

As well as background noise and reverberation, speaker-to-listener relative location affects the binaural speech transmission index (BSTI) considerably, especially in the near field. To highlight how speaker location influences the BSTI, binaural room impulse responses measured in a low-reverberation listening room are used to obtain the BSTI indirectly and analyze its near-field dependence on distance and direction. The results show that the BSTI based on the better-ear rule is higher when the virtual speaker is located laterally rather than in the anterior or posterior. When the distance-dependent intensity factor is introduced, the distance is the dominant factor, not the azimuth.

Audio-visual speech comprehension in noise with real and virtual speakers

This paper presents a study where a 3D motion-capture animated ‘virtual speaker’ is compared to a video of a real speaker with regards to how it facilitates children's speech comprehension of narratives in background multitalker babble noise. As secondary measures, children self-assess the listening- and attentional effort demanded by the task, and associates words describing positive or negative social traits to the speaker. The results show that the virtual speaker, despite being associated with more negative social traits, facilitates speech comprehension in babble noise compared to a voice-only presentation but that the effect requires some adaptation. We also found the virtual speaker to be at least as facilitating as the video. We interpret these results to suggest that audiovisual integration supports speech comprehension independently of children's social perception of the speaker, and discuss virtual speakers’ potential in research and pedagogical applications.

Enhanced Realistic Audio Sound Generation based on Virtual Speaker Layout

In this paper, we proposed a constant power panning (CPP) based realistic binaural sound generation with head related transfer function (HRTF) coefficients in the virtual twelve speakers layout arranged at intervals of 30 degrees for the VR service. In the proposed method, the original multi-channel audio signals are mapped to the virtual playback system using the CPP according to the users’ head movement, and the realistic stereo binaural sound is formed by convolution of the mapped multi-channel audio signals and the HRTF coefficients for the virtual twelve speakers layout. Since the angle difference between the arbitrary adjacent two speakers is fixed as 30 degrees, the azimuthal resolution of the CPP based realistic sound generation is also 30 degrees and we can create the more accurate realistic sound reflecting the users’ head movement. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a similar performance to the HRTF based realistic binaural sound generation even though it only needs about 0.79 Mbytes to be 1/30 of data amount of the HRTF coefficients compared with the HRTF based method.

Comparison of two vibro-acoustic inverse methods to radiate a uniform sound field from a plate

The radiated sound from a conventional panel speaker, often excited by an actuator, is usually distorted due to the multi-modal response of the regular panel. To avoid such an acoustically disadvantageous feature of the conventional panel speakers, an array of actuators can be used for controlling the panel vibration to obtain the desired acoustic response. In this paper, two different control methods by using the actuator array are compared in the viewpoint of the solution stability, the input efficiency, and the acoustic performance, in particular at low frequencies rendered in a hemispherical uniform radiation. The indirect inverse rendering method is to create a vibration pattern composed of a virtual speaker and baffle, and the direct inverse rendering method controls the array actuators to form a spatial distribution of panel vibration to directly produce the uniform radiation field. The actuator positions are confined at the periphery of the plate, which are advantageous in exciting the multiple modes and saving the central zone covered by the plate for other purposes. Numerical simulations are conducted for a thin rectangular plate with simply supported boundary condition in the frequency range below 300 Hz. It is found that both rendering methods can produce the uniform hemispherical sound radiation field, but the rendering error is −20 dB for indirect method and −50 dB for direct method. The singularity problem due to the ill-conditioning of the system appears in the direct method. Effect of applying the regularization technique to obtain a stable solution is studied for the system contaminated with a large amount of noise. It is observed that the result of using the direct method becomes dramatically stable with a reduction of condition number from O (1017) to O (104). Also, the input gains of the actuator are reduced as much as 35 dB for both rendering methods.

Generation of a Virtual Speaker and Baffle on a Thin Plate Controlled by an Actuator Array at the Boundary

The pattern of bending vibration on a thin plate is controlled to create a virtual speaker and baffle set. An actuator array at the plate edges is used to generate the bending wave to form the desired vibration pattern. The speaker zone is rendered to maintain a uniform phase as a speaker, whilst the rest of the plate is kept to be tranquil to serve as a baffle. From the rendering information and the potential positions of the actuators, the actuator gains are determined in an inverse manner. Vibration on a finite plate is modeled by the superposition of Green's functions between the actuators and field points, which depend on the speaker size and location, and the shape and material of plates. Parametric studies are conducted to determine the effect of those functions on the radiated sound characteristics. Simulation results show that the radiated sound spectrum features similar dips at some Helmholtz numbers would cause the deterioration of sound quality and reproducibility. These dips appear because of two typical reasons. The first condition is that the Helmholtz number becomes about 3.8 and 7.0, corresponding to the low-order radial modes of the circular speaker zone having circumferential nodes. The other arises when the distance between the speaker center and the plate edges is an integer multiple of the bending wavelength. The proposed method is tested on the roof panel of a car to compensate for the poor response of the built-in speakers. It is shown that the virtual speaker has a uniform phase in the speaker zone and that the low-frequency performance is reinforced well.

Efficacy of iPad “spatial release” application

Spatial Release from Masking (SRM) is the ability to obtain better speech recognition thresholds when the maskers are spatially separated from the target. Here, we present SRM data collected using three techniques: over headphones using a virtual speaker array, using Spatial Release iPad application (https://bgc.ucr.edu/games/spatialrelease/), and loudspeaker presentation in a sound-attenuated room. For all three techniques, Coordinate Response Measure (CRM) sentences were used as the stimuli, and “Charlie” was the call sign. A progressive tracking procedure was used to estimate the Speech Recognition Thresholds (SRTs) for listeners with varying hearing thresholds. The target sentence was always presentedg at 0 deg azimuth angle whereas the maskers were colocated (0 deg) with the target or symmetrically spatially separated by ±15 deg, ±30 deg, or ±45 de. Initial data analysis revealed similar SRTs for the iPad and headphone conditions and slightly poorer thresholds for the loudspeaker array condition. Thi...

The use of student-copresented virtual guest speakers in entrepreneurial education

Students wishing to be entrepreneurs have a great need for role models to serve as inspiration and help them envision their future organization. Universities often use guest speakers for this purpose. The author introduces a methodology of using a library of audio tapes as a virtual guest speaker series, larger and more diversified than even the most well-connected university could attract. Students copresent with the executives by pairing the taped messages with student-created presentation visuals.