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.

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.

Study of the brightness of trumpet tones.

This study focuses on a particular attribute of trumpet tones, the brightness, and on the physical characteristics of the instrument thought to govern its magnitude. On the one hand, an objective study was carried out with input impedance measurements, and, on the other hand, a subjective study with hearing tests and a panel of subjects. To create a set of different trumpets a variable depth mouthpiece was developed whose depth can be easily and continuously adjusted from "deep" to "shallow.