Acoustical and behavioral heuristics for fast interactive sound design.

During their creative process, designers routinely seek the feedback of end users. Yet, the collection of perceptual judgments is costly and time-consuming, since it involves repeated exposure to the designed object under elementary variations. Thus, considering the practical limits of working with human subjects, randomized protocols in interactive sound design face the risk of inefficiency, in the sense of collecting mostly uninformative judgments.

Towards a Better Use of Antimicrobials on Farms: Insights from a Participatory Approach in the French Pig and Poultry Sectors.

Despite the strong decrease in antimicrobial use in the French poultry and pig sectors over the last decade, room for improvement remains. A participatory approach was set up in France, involving representatives of veterinarians, the pig and poultry industries, technical institutes, the French Ministry of Agriculture, and researchers, to further improve how antimicrobials are used on farms. By successively defining a shared, long-term vision of future antimicrobial use on farms, identifying lock-in mechanisms impeding this future vision from being realized, and articulating practical questions on how to move in the desired direction, the group rapidly reached a consensus.

Polyphonic training set synthesis improves self-supervised urban sound classification.

Machine listening systems for environmental acoustic monitoring face a shortage of expert annotations to be used as training data. To circumvent this issue, the emerging paradigm of self-supervised learning proposes to pre-train audio classifiers on a task whose ground truth is trivially available. Alternatively, training set synthesis consists in annotating a small corpus of acoustic events of interest, which are then automatically mixed at random to form a larger corpus of polyphonic scenes.

Sound simulation-based design optimization of brass wind instruments.

A method for optimizing the inner shape of brass instruments using sound simulations is presented. This study considers different objective functions and constraints (representative of both the intonation and the spectrum of the instrument) for a relatively large number of design variables. A complete physics-based model, taking into account the instrument and the musician's embouchure, is used to simulate steady regimes of sounds by means of the harmonic balance technique, the instrument being represented by its input impedance.

Investigating the perception of soundscapes through acoustic scene simulation.

This paper introduces a new experimental protocol for studying mental representations of urban soundscapes through a simulation process. Subjects are asked to create a full soundscape by means of a dedicated software tool, coupled with a structured sound data set. This paradigm is used to characterize urban sound environment representations by analyzing the sound classes that were used to simulate the auditory scenes.