著者
Chia-huei Tseng Ya-Ting Wang Satoshi Shioiri
出版者
ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.41, no.1, pp.2-5, 2020-01-01 (Released:2020-01-06)
参考文献数
9
被引用文献数
1

``Ma'' is a Japanese word that contains very rich meanings. It is used commonly to refer space, time, and things in between by Japanese. The mutual understanding and agreement of such concept by group individuals is a key to sustain social harmonics. In the past, this concept is primarily discussed in literature/humanity fields, and little in scientific and engineering communities. In this presentation, I will try to offer a few examples (e.g. music appreciation of silence, Japanese comic story-telling, Rakugo) to demonstrate that it is possible to use an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the concept of ``Ma'' scientifically. Furthermore, this may provide a starting point for designers and engineers to device into the interpersonal communication on other abstract concepts.
著者
Maria Chait
出版者
ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.41, no.1, pp.48-53, 2020-01-01 (Released:2020-01-06)
参考文献数
25
被引用文献数
11

Sensitivity to patterns is fundamental to sensory processing, in particular in the auditory system, and a major component of the influential `predictive coding' theory of brain function. Supported by growing experimental evidence, the `predictive coding' framework suggests that perception is driven by a mechanism of inference, based on an internal model of the signal source. However, a key element of this theory –- the process through which the brain acquires this model, and its neural underpinnings –- remains poorly understood. Here I review recent brain imaging and behavioural work which focuses on this missing link. Together these emerging results paint a picture of the brain as a regularity seeker, rapidly extracting and maintaining representations of acoustic structure on multiple time scales and even when these are not relevant to behaviour.
著者
Alexei Kochetov
出版者
ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.39, no.2, pp.84-91, 2018-03-01 (Released:2018-03-01)
参考文献数
20
被引用文献数
1

This study employed electropalatography (EPG) to explore place and manner of articulation differences in Japanese consonants. Linguopalatal contact data were collected from 5 native speakers using custom-made artificial palates. The materials included words with 10 word-initial consonants and a word-final moraic nasal. Quantitative analyses of the data revealed some consistent differences among consonants in constriction location and constriction degree, even within the same-place classes. Certain differences among dorsal consonants, as well as among consonants with no active lingual constriction were also observed. The results for Japanese coronal consonants were further compared to previous quantitative findings for English and Spanish with the goal to establish common manner-specific patterns of linguopalatal contact across languages.
著者
Fabin Acquaticci Juan F. Guarracino Sergio N. Gwirc Sergio E. Lew
出版者
ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.40, no.2, pp.116-126, 2019-03-01 (Released:2019-03-01)
参考文献数
24
被引用文献数
6

In this work, we built ultrasonic disc-shaped transducer for targeted neuromodulation with the addition of a solid axicon lens based on a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) interface. We made a numerical and experimental characterization of its acoustic field. The motor cortex of CF-1 mice was stimulated, through the skin and skull into the intact brain, with low-intensity pulsed ultrasound. Evoked muscle responses in different body segments were clearly observed, including hindlimb, forelimb, and tail. Axicon lens affixed on the face of the transducer makes possible a targeted modulation of the motor cortex by pulsed ultrasound, inducing muscle contraction in a specific body segment. In this approach, the lateral and axial spatial resolution is comparable to spherical segment ultrasound transducers, but with a shorter focal length. Thus, ultrasound axicon looks attractive to investigate the functional contributions of fine-grained spatial structures in the brain.
著者
Brian C. J. Moore
出版者
ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.40, no.2, pp.61-83, 2019-03-01 (Released:2019-03-01)
参考文献数
159
被引用文献数
29

Within the cochlea, broadband sounds like speech and music are filtered into a series of narrowband signals, each with a relatively slowly varying envelope (ENV) imposed on a rapidly oscillating carrier (the temporal fine structure, TFS). Information about ENV and TFS is conveyed in the timing and short-term rate of action potentials in the auditory nerve. This paper describes the role of ENV and TFS information in pitch perception, binaural processing, and the perception of speech in the presence of background sounds. The paper also describes the effects of hearing loss and age on the processing of TFS and ENV information. The monaural and binaural processing of TFS information is adversely affected by both hearing loss and increasing age. The monaural processing of ENV information is little affected by hearing loss or by increasing age. The binaural processing of ENV information deteriorates somewhat with increasing age but is not markedly affected by hearing loss. The reduced TFS processing abilities found for older/hearing-impaired subjects may partially account for the difficulties that such subjects experience in complex listening situations.
著者
William F. Katz Sonya Mehta Matthew Wood
出版者
ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.39, no.2, pp.130-137, 2018-03-01 (Released:2018-03-01)
参考文献数
26
被引用文献数
5

In order to investigate the articulatory processes involved in producing Japanese /r/, we obtained speech recordings for native talkers of standard Japanese using an electromagnetic articulography (EMA) system. Each talker produced repetitions of /r/ in a carrier phrase designed to contrast syllable (CV and VCV VCV) and vowel (/a/, /i/, /u/, /e/, and /o/) contexts. Kinematic recordings were made using tongue (tip, TT; dorsum, TD; body, TB; left lateral, TLL; and right lateral, TRL) and lower lip/jaw (LL) sensors. We measured TT vertical displacement, TT duration at maximum position, and tongue blade width for the consonant gestures. In a perceptual experiment, American English listeners decided whether these consonants consisted of `l,' `r,' or `d.' The kinematic results indicate Japanese talkers produced CV consonants with greater stricture and longer closures than consonants in intervocalic positions. CV productions also had narrower tongue blade widths than VCV VCV productions, especially in /i/ and /u/ contexts. The data were modeled with Dirichlet regression in order to determine how strongly tongue width and context (syllable and vowel) factors predict listeners' judgments. The results showed a significant fit for `r' judgments, with the tongue width fit successively increased by the addition of syllable and vowel context information.
著者
Jianwu Dang Aijun Li Donna Erickson Atsuo Suemitsu Masato Akagi Kyoko Sakuraba Nobuaki Minematsu Keikichi Hirose
出版者
ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.31, no.6, pp.394-402, 2010-11-01 (Released:2010-11-01)
参考文献数
16
被引用文献数
1 11

In this study, we conducted a comparative experiment on emotion perception among different cultures. Emotional components were perceived by subjects from Japan, the United States and China, all of whom had no experience living abroad. An emotional speech database without linguistic information was used in this study and evaluated using three- and/or six-emotional dimensions. Principal component analysis (PCA) indicates that the common factors could explain about 60% variance of the data among the three cultures by using a three-emotion description and about 50% variance between Japanese and Chinese cultures by using a six-emotion description. The effects of the emotion categories on perception results were investigated. The emotions of anger, joy and sadness (group 1) have consistent structures in PCA-based spaces when switching from three-emotion categories to six-emotion categories. Disgust, surprise, and fear (group 2) appeared as paired counterparts of anger, joy and sadness, respectively. When investigating the subspaces constructed by these two groups, the similarity between the two emotion groups was found to be fairly high in the two-dimensional space. The similarity becomes lower in 3- or higher dimensional spaces, but not significantly different. The results from this study suggest that a wide range of human emotions might fall into a small subspace of basic emotions.
著者
Noriaki Katagiri Goh Kawai
出版者
ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.34, no.2, pp.94-104, 2013-02-01 (Released:2013-03-01)
参考文献数
29
被引用文献数
1

Within the context of English language taught solely using English language at Japan's secondary schools, no research quantifies the differences between native instructors (first language English, may or may not speak Japanese) and non-native instructors (first language Japanese; second language English). We developed a video corpus of an English language classroom, and examined the speech of 3 native and 1 non-native instructors. The corpus contains 49 English lessons of 45 minutes each in a Japanese public high school with monolingual learners of English as a foreign language. The native and non-native instructors occasionally taught together. Almost all speech in the lessons was in English. We compared lexical tokens and types found in our transcriptions with a collection of typical classroom English dialogues, and a wordlist created from large bodies of written and spoken English. We obtained the distributions of words, and words preferred by either native or non-native instructors. Results suggest that (a) native and non-native instructors share a core vocabulary of classroom English, (b) native instructors teach vocabulary depth via open-ended conversations, (c) non-native instructors teach vocabulary breadth via textbook explanations, and (d) native and non-native instructors differ in teaching roles but not in language ability.
著者
Sun Chao Yang Yi-xin
出版者
ACOUSTICAL SOCIETY OF JAPAN
雑誌
Acoustical science and technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.25, no.1, pp.2-8, 2004
参考文献数
9
被引用文献数
8

The problem of beamforming and related beamspace high resolution direction-of-arrival (DOA) estimation is studied in this paper. All beamspace processing methods are based on the beam outputs and the beampattern design plays an important role in providing high quality beam output data for further processing. Three typical situations which are frequently encountered in practical sonar system working environment and the most widely studied MUSIC algorithm are considered herein. First, when isotropic noise is the dominant noise at sensors, conventional beamforming techniques provide the optimum performance in the sense that DOA estimate is the ML estimate. Good DOA estimates are obtainable by applying MUSIC to the beam outputs directly. Then, uncorrelated interferes with much higher strength than the wanted signals are assumed to be present in the sidelobe region, and low sidelobe Dolph-Chebyshev and adaptive MVDR beampatterns are designed to guarantee the performance of MUSIC. And finally, the robustness of conventional techniques is combined with the adaptivity of MVDR beamforming to deal with the situation when the interfere in the sidelobe region is strongly correlated with one of the wanted sources. Performance in all three situations is studied with numerical examples.
著者
Satoru Fujita Kiyoshi Honda
出版者
一般社団法人 日本音響学会
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.26, no.4, pp.353-357, 2005 (Released:2005-07-01)
参考文献数
8
被引用文献数
2 10

Solid models of the vocal tract with hypopharyngeal cavities were molded with a stereolithographic technique based on MRI data obtained from a male speaker during the production of Japanese vowels /a/ and /o/. A vowel synthesis experiment conducted with the models revealed a relatively good agreement in the second and third formants, as well as in anti-resonance at 4–5 kHz. The elimination of the models’ piriform fossa resulted in the disappearance of the anti-resonance and shifts of the adjacent formants. The modification of the laryngeal cavity into a uniform tube caused spectral changes in the frequency range of 1.5–7.0 kHz. These acoustic effects of hypopharyngeal cavities were dependent on vocal tract shapes.
著者
Rieko Kubo Masato Akagi Reiko Akahane-Yamada
出版者
一般社団法人 日本音響学会
雑誌
Acoustical Science and Technology (ISSN:13463969)
巻号頁・発行日
vol.36, no.5, pp.397-407, 2015 (Released:2015-09-01)
参考文献数
15

This study investigated the differences in first-language-based (L1-based) phonetic processing for second language (L2) phonemes among different age groups of adults. A speech-in-speech masking paradigm was utilized to examine the contribution of the L1-based processing. A phoneme identification task in one language was conducted in the presence or absence of an interferer of a masker of the same or a different language. The degree of interference (i.e., the decrease in identification performance) was postulated to increase as the similarity of underlying processes for the target and masker increases. Experiment 1 was conducted to test the effectiveness of the paradigm. As expected, the interference increased as the similarity of underlying processes for the target and masker increased. Experiment 2 examined the perception of English /r/–/l/ and other phonetic contrasts by Japanese listeners in various adult age groups, to examine whether the degree of interference differs depending on the putative degrees of L1-based processing and on age. The results demonstrated such differences and showed that the L1-based processing can be estimated from the decrease in the identification performance. They also suggested that the perception of /r/–/l/ in the initial singleton and initial cluster positions was high L1-based in older adults.