An important inverse problem in the field of acoustics is that of reconstructing the strengths of a number of sources given a model of transmission paths from the sources to a number of sensors at which measurements are made. In dealing with this kind of the acoustical inverse problem, strengths of the discretised source distribution can be simply deduced from the measured pressure field data and the inversion of corresponding matrix of frequency response functions. However, deducing :he solution of such problems is not straightforward due to the practical difficulty caused by their inherent ill-conditioned behaviour. Therefore, in order to overcome this difficulty associated with the ill-conditioning, the problem is replaced by a nearby well-conditioned problem whose solution approximates the required solution. In this paper a microphone array are identified for which the inverse problem is optimally conditioned, which can be robust to contaminating errors. This involves sampling both source and field in a manner which results in the discrete pressures and source strengths constituting a discrete Fourier transform pair.

In performing speech conversion from a source speaker to a target speaker, it is important that the pitch contour of the source speakers utterance be converted into that of the target speaker, because pitch contour of a speech utterance plays an important role in expressing speaker's individuality and meaning of the utterance. This paper describes statistical algorithms of pitch contour conversion for Korean language. Pitch contour conversions are investigated at two 1 evels of prosodic phrases: intonational phrase and accentual phrase. The basic algorithm is a Gaussian normalization [7] in intonational phrase. The first presented algorithm is combined with a declination-line of pitch contour in an intonational phrase. The second one is Gaussian normalization within accentual phrases to compensate for local pitch variations. Experimental results show that the algorithm of Gaussian normalization within accentual phrases is significantly more accurate than the other two algorithms in intonational phrase.

There have been numerous studies on the enhancement of the noisy speech signal. In this paper, I propose a completely new speech enhancement method, that is, a filtering of a dissonant frequency combined with noise reduction algorithm. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method provides a significant gain in audible improvement compared with the conventional method. Therefore if the proposed enhancement scheme is used as a pre-filter, the perceptual quality of speech is greatly enhanced.

This paper presents an experimental technique to generate and detect axisymmetric longitudinal waves in a pipe by using piezoelectric cylindrical transducers. Radial pulses transmitted by one transducer have propagated in two opposite directions along the pipe, and other two transducers have received the propagating waves. The difference of the transit times measured for the waves in two paths of known distance difference has yielded the phase speed of the wave propagation. Wave speed has been measured in an empty pipe and in a water-filled pipe.

This study is aimed to evaluate a tunneling effect in the laboratory measurement of sound transmission loss. Based on the formulation for sound transmission loss of a finite panel in the presence of tunnel, variations of the sound transmission loss with the parameters of panel location and tunnel depth are investigated. In comparison with the transmission loss of a finite plate in an infinite rigid baffle, the maximum difference occurs in the laboratory measurement when the panel is placed at the center of the tunnel, while a better estimation of true transmission loss is obtained when the panel is located at either end.

Backscattered underwater signals from multiple scatterers contain information regarding resolvable spatial distribution of scatterers. This experimental study describes the spectral characteristics of backscattered signal from multiple scatterers, which are regularly or randomly spaced, in terms of their amplitude and phase and a proper signal analysis that will eventually provide scatterer spacing estimation. Air-filled tubes suspended in water, steel balls and plastic tubes buried in the sediment are the multiple scatterers. The cepstrum and the spectral autocorrelation (SAC) methods were used to estimate the scatterer spacing from the backscattered signals. It was found that the SAC method could be improved by employing singular value decomposition (SVD) to extract the effective rank for the spectral components. Unlike the conventional method of estimating the density of scatterers within the insonified volume of water, this type of estimation method would provide better understanding of the spatial distribution of scatterers in the ocean.