A Signal-Processing-Based Simulation System for High-End Stereo Headsets.

In recent years, headphones have become increasingly popular worldwide. There are numerous models on the market today, varying in technical characteristics and offering different listening experiences. This article presents an application for simulating the sound response of specific headphone models by physically wearing others. In the future, for example, this application could help to guide people who already own a pair of headphones during the decision-making process of purchasing a new headphone model. However, the potential fields of application are much broader. An in-depth study of digital signal processing was carried out with the implementation of a computational model. Prior to this, an analysis was performed on impulse response measurements of specific headphones, which allowed for a better understanding of the behavior of each set of headphones. Finally, an evaluation of the entire system was conducted through a listening test. The analysis of the results showed that the software works reasonably well in replicating the target headphones. We hope that this work will stimulate further efforts in the same direction.

The Magnetic Urtext: Restoration as Music Interpretation.

This paper discusses historical-critical thought to address the problems of restoration and preservation of tape music, proposing viable solutions to the matter of digitizing the historically valuable data that exists on and is represented by magnetic tapes. A detailed program of research and restoration and some software for helping in creation of critical editions of the musical works are proposed. We also present some of the issues and controversies that must be considered and approaches we have applied in the preservation of tape music, highlighting how these interpretations can impact later performances (playback) of these tape documents. Fundamentally, we argue that the act of tape music restoration has a parallel with the interpretation of the "Urtext score" in the performance of music from the Common Practice Era.

Gesture, Music and Computer: The Centro di Sonologia Computazionale at Padova University, a 50-Year History.

With the advent of digital technologies, the computer has become a generalized tool for music production. Music can be seen as a creative form of human-human communication via a computer, and therefore, research on human-computer and computer-human interfaces is very important. This paper, for the Sensors Special Issue on 800 Years of Research at Padova University, presents a review of the research in the field of music technologies at Padova University by the Centro di Sonologia Computazionale (CSC), focusing on scientific, technological and musical aspects of interaction between musician and computer and between computer and audience. We discuss input devices for detecting information from gestures or audio signals and rendering systems for audience and user engagement. Moreover, we discuss a multilevel conceptual framework, which allows multimodal expressive content processing and coordination, which is important in art and music. Several paradigmatic musical works that stated new lines of both musical and scientific research are then presented in detail. The preservation of this heritage presents problems very different from those posed by traditional artworks. CSC is actively engaged in proposing new paradigms for the preservation of digital art.

Illuminating Music: Impact of Color Hue for Background Lighting on Emotional Arousal in Piano Performance Videos.

This study sought to determine if hues overlayed on a video recording of a piano performance would systematically influence perception of its emotional arousal level. The hues were artificially added to a series of four short video excerpts of different performances using video editing software. Over two experiments 106 participants were sorted into 4 conditions, with each viewing different combinations of musical excerpts (two excerpts with nominally high arousal and two excerpts with nominally low arousal) and hue (red or blue) combinations. Participants rated the emotional arousal depicted by each excerpt. Results indicated that the overall arousal ratings were consistent with the nominal arousal of the selected excerpts. However, hues added to video produced no significant effect on arousal ratings, contrary to predictions. This could be due to the domination of the combined effects of other channels of information (e.g., the music and player movement) over the emotional effects of the hypothesized influence of hue on perceived performance (red expected to enhance and blue to reduce arousal of the performance). To our knowledge this is the first study to investigate the impact of these hues upon perceived arousal of music performance, and has implications for musical performers and stage lighting. Further research that investigates reactions during live performance and manipulation of a wider range of lighting hues, saturation and brightness levels, and editing techniques, is recommended to further scrutinize the veracity of the findings.

Incident signal power comparison for localization of concurrent multiple acoustic sources.

In this paper, a method to solve the localization of concurrent multiple acoustic sources in large open spaces is presented. The problem of the multisource localization in far-field conditions is to correctly associate the direction of arrival (DOA) estimated by a network array system to the same source. The use of systems implementing a Bayesian filter is a traditional approach to address the problem of localization in multisource acoustic scenario. However, in a real noisy open space the acoustic sources are often discontinuous with numerous short-duration events and thus the filtering methods may have difficulty to track the multiple sources. Incident signal power comparison (ISPC) is proposed to compute DOAs association. ISPC is based on identifying the incident signal power (ISP) of the sources on a microphone array using beamforming methods and comparing the ISP between different arrays using spectral distance (SD) measurement techniques. This method solves the ambiguities, due to the presence of simultaneous sources, by identifying sounds through a minimization of an error criterion on SD measures of DOA combinations. The experimental results were conducted in an outdoor real noisy environment and the ISPC performance is reported using different beamforming techniques and SD functions.