The Dog Soundscape: Recurrence, Emotional Impact, Acoustics, and Implications for Dog Observations and Dog-Human Interactions.

While numerous dog behavioral studies use environmental sounds, the dog soundscape remains undescribed. We proposed a list of 79 sounds classified into six categories: Dog, Dog accessories, Human, city and vehicles, Garden, countryside and weather, and Household. In a survey, 620 dog owners scored the frequency of their dog's exposure to, and thus, the recurrence of, each of the 79 sounds, from never to daily.

Are dogs with congenital hearing and/or vision impairments so different from sensory normal dogs? A survey of demographics, morphology, health, behaviour, communication, and activities.

The births of domestic dogs with pigment deletion and associated congenital hearing and/or vision impairments are increasing, as a result of mutations of certain genes expressing popular coat colour patterns (Merle, piebald, Irish spotting). The future of these dogs is often pessimistic (early euthanasia or placement in rescues/fosters, lack of interactions and activities for adults). These pessimistic scenarios result from popular assumptions predicting that dogs with congenital hearing/vision impairments exhibit severe Merle-related health troubles (cardiac, skeletal, neurological), impairment-related behavioural troubles (aggressiveness, anxiety), and poor capacities to communicate, to be trained, and to be engaged in leisure or work activities.

Auditory Time-Frequency Masking for Spectrally and Temporally Maximally-Compact Stimuli.

Many audio applications perform perception-based time-frequency (TF) analysis by decomposing sounds into a set of functions with good TF localization (i.e. with a small essential support in the TF domain) using TF transforms and applying psychoacoustic models of auditory masking to the transform coefficients.

Corrigendum: Perceptual factors contribute more than acoustical factors to sound localization abilities with virtual sources.

[This corrects the article on p. 451 in vol. 8, PMID: 25688182.

Perceptual factors contribute more than acoustical factors to sound localization abilities with virtual sources.

Human sound localization abilities rely on binaural and spectral cues. Spectral cues arise from interactions between the sound wave and the listener's body (head-related transfer function, HRTF). Large individual differences were reported in localization abilities, even in young normal-hearing adults.

Auditory azimuthal localization performance in water as a function of prior exposure.

Objective: We report two psychoacoustical experiments that assessed the relationship between auditory azimuthal localization performance in water and duration of prior exposure to the milieu.

Background: The adaptability of spatial hearing abilities has been demonstrated in air for both active and passive exposures to altered localization cues. Adaptability occurred faster and was more complete for elevation perception than for azimuth perception.

Simultaneous masking additivity for short Gaussian-shaped tones: spectral effects.

Laback et al. [(2011). J.

Auditory efferents facilitate sound localization in noise in humans.

The mammalian auditory system contains descending neural pathways, some of which project onto the cochlea via the medial olivocochlear (MOC) system. The function of this efferent auditory system is not entirely clear. Behavioral studies in animals with olivocochlear (OC) lesions suggest that the MOC serves to facilitate sound localization in noise.

Additivity of nonsimultaneous masking for short Gaussian-shaped sinusoids.

The additivity of nonsimultaneous masking was studied using Gaussian-shaped tone pulses (referred to as Gaussians) as masker and target stimuli. Combinations of up to four temporally separated Gaussian maskers with an equivalent rectangular bandwidth of 600 Hz and an equivalent rectangular duration of 1.7 ms were tested.

Individual differences and left/right asymmetries in auditory space perception. I. Localization of low-frequency sounds in free field.

The number of subjects in studies on human spatial hearing is generally small. Therefore, individual differences and the factors underlying variability are unknown. In this study, we investigated across-listener variability in auditory localization abilities in a group of 50 naïve adults with normal hearing.

Temporal effects in simultaneous masking with on- and off-frequency noise maskers: effects of signal frequency and masker level.

Temporal effects in simultaneous masking were measured as a function of masker level for an on-frequency broadband masker and an off-frequency narrow-band masker for signal frequencies of 750, 1730, and 4000 Hz. The on-frequency masker was 10 equivalent rectangular bandwidths (ERBs) wide and centered at the signal frequency; the off-frequency masker was 500 Hz wide and its lower frequency edge was 1.038 ERBs higher in frequency than the signal.

Effectiveness of narrow-band versus tonal off-frequency maskers.

The present study was a follow-up to a pilot study in which it was found that a 500-Hz-wide narrow-band noise (NBN) masker produced more masking than a tonal (T) masker for signal frequencies both above and below the masker frequency. The aim of the present study was to determine to what extent these results were influenced by an interaction of the relatively rapid temporal envelope fluctuations of the NBN and the short (10-ms) duration of the signal. In the first experiment, the masking produced by a regular NBN, a low-noise noise (LNN), and a T was compared.

The neuroanatomical substrate of sound duration discrimination.

We investigated the neuroanatomical substrate of sound duration discrimination, using the same experimental design as in a previous study on sound intensity discrimination [J. Neurosci. 18 (16) (1998) 6388].