JASA express letters最新文献

Understanding the fundamental frequency and harmonic content of audio signals is crucial for many applications in music analysis, including music transcription, audio synthesis, and genre identification. This study formulates a signal processing approach combining Linear Prediction (LP) analysis and the Cent scale to accurately characterize the pitch and harmonic structure of the audio signals. Pitch tracking on the LP spectrum in the Cent scale provides more accurate and reliable pitch estimation, especially in the presence of noise or overlapping harmonics. The Cent scale aligns the harmonics of different notes more closely, making it easier to discern the correct pitch.

The weakening/loss of the stop coda in checked tone syllables (also known as "Ru syllable opening") may lead to a subsequent merger of tonal contrasts in Chinese. This study examined the role of acoustic cues in checked-unchecked tone merging in the Qixian Jin dialect by comparing three age groups. Results showed that duration served as a robust cue for the tonal contrast regardless of age, whereas glottalization did not. The F0 contour signaled the tone merging process with variations across age groups. The findings have implications for modeling complex F0 (falling-rising) contours to enable further cross-dialect comparisons from a phonetic perspective.

Nonlinguistic auditory abilities (e.g., stream segregation, musical perceptual abilities) are thought to contribute to speech perception in noise. How their development interacts with that of speech perception in noise remains unknown. Here, we aimed to (i) investigate the development of speech perception in noise and stream segregation and (ii) explore the relationship between musical abilities, stream segregation, and speech perception in noise throughout development. Our results confirmed the protracted developmental trajectory of both stream segregation and speech perception in noise. Importantly, they suggest that musical perceptual abilities indirectly contribute to speech perception in noise by means of improved stream segregation.

The Iowa Test of Consonant Perception is a single-word closed-set speech-in-noise test with well-balanced phonetic features. The current study aimed to establish a U.K. version of the test (ITCP-B) based on the Southern Standard British English. We conducted a validity test in two sessions with 46 participants. The ITCP-B demonstrated excellent test-retest reliability, cross-talker validity, and good convergent validity. These findings suggest that ITCP-B is a reliable measure of speech-in-noise perception. The test can be used to facilitate comparative or combined studies in the U.S. and U.K. All materials (application and scripts) to run the ITCP-B/ITCP are freely available online.

We study inter-speaker acoustic differences during sustained vowel utterances at varied severities of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis-induced dysarthria. Among source attributes, jitter and standard deviation of fundamental frequency exhibit enhanced inter-speaker differences among patients than healthy controls (HCs) at all severity levels. Though inter-speaker differences in vocal tract filter attributes at most severity levels are higher than those among HCs for close vowels /i/ and /u/, these are comparable with or lower than those among HCs for the relatively more open vowels /a/ and /o/. The differences typically increase with severity except for a few parameters for /a/ and /i/.

The present study investigated the effects of language dominance on the cross-linguistic influence in the first and second languages (L1 and L2) of lexical tone production by Mandarin-Cantonese late bilinguals. Although the participants were unable to retain their L1 tonal system or to fully acquire the L2 tonal system after long-term exposure to their L2, certain correlations emerged between language dominance and tone production in L1 and L2. These findings add to the existing literature on language dominance and support the general assumption that bilinguals' two languages interfere with each other.

This study builds on Dahl, Bonnel, and Dall'Osto [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 155(5), 3291-3301 (2024)] by empirically demonstrating the equivalence between peak kinematic values (acoustic displacement, velocity, acceleration) and peak dynamic values (pressure). Methods for estimating peak levels from pressure are developed and tested on signals from impulsive sources used in the Seabed Characterization Experiment (2022) and a towed narrow band sonar source from the Target and Reverberation Experiment (2013). The comparison between peak kinematic levels and peak pressure falls within the calibration uncertainty of the vector sensor. The analysis shows that, for typical monitoring scenarios, peak pressure measurements are sufficient to monitor peak kinematic dosages.

It is difficult to separate and estimate the intersected group velocity dispersion curves for different normal modes when the frequency is lower than the cutoff frequency of water column. To address this issue, an estimation method based on the joint processing of sound pressure (P) and vertical particle velocity (Vz) is proposed in this paper. Theoretical analysis shows that the amplitudes of P and Vz corresponding to the nth normal mode exhibit a complementary relationship in the certain frequency band, providing a theoretical basis for the method. The feasibility of the method was verified using sea trial data.

Damage and fouling to a marine propeller can alter underwater noise levels through numerous mechanisms, but there are very few studies where clean propellers are compared to those with realistic levels of damage or fouling. This study presents acoustic data combined with underwater camera footage for a vessel fitted with three propellers: clean, damaged, and fouled. The results show that the fouled propeller is quieter than the clean one due to it reducing the levels of tip vortex cavitation. This work highlights the need for further research into the role of fouling and damage on noise from marine vessels.

This Letter investigates the influence of source motion on the performance of the ray-based blind deconvolution algorithm (RBD). RBD is used to estimate channel impulse responses and source signals from opportunistic sources such as shipping vessels but was derived under a stationary source assumption. A theoretical correction for Doppler from a simplified moving source model is used to quantify the biases in estimated arrival angles and travel times from RBD. This correction is numerically validated using environmental data from the SBCeX16 experiment in the Santa Barbara Channel. Implications for source localization and potential passive acoustic tomography using RBD are discussed.