• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
• /
• v.11 no.1
• /
• pp.39-56
• /
• 2008

Previous studies of music, user interface, and human-computer interaction have used sounds which include musical structure rather than real music. This study investigated whether real music affects objective and perceived usability. Silence, sound, and music conditions were compared in experiment 1 (kimchi refrigerator) and 2 (remote controller for air conditioner). Participants' performances of reaction time and accuracy, and the degree of subjective satisfaction were analyzed. The results showed that main effects on task performances were not different significantly; however, perceived usability of music condition was better than sound condition, which was better than silence condition. It means that musical user interface improves perceived usability while not interfering task performance. This study provides a basis of emotional and aesthetic effects of music in home appliances design, and can be applied to studies for the blind. More specific guideline for the musical user interface can be drafted if further studies consider more various tasks, context, musical structure and types for the appliances.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.35 no.1
• /
• pp.74-82
• /
• 2016

In this paper, a new automatic speech recognition (ASR) was proposed where ultrasonic doppler signals were used, instead of conventional speech signals. The proposed method has the advantages over the conventional speech/non-speech-based ASR including robustness against acoustic noises and user comfortability associated with usage of the non-contact sensor. In the method proposed herein, 40 kHz ultrasonic signal was radiated toward to the mouth and the reflected ultrasonic signals were then received. Frequency shift caused by the doppler effects was used to implement ASR. The proposed method employed multi-channel ultrasonic signals acquired from the various locations, which is different from the previous method where single channel ultrasonic signal was employed. The PCA(Principal Component Analysis) coefficients were used as the features of ASR in which hidden markov model (HMM) with left-right model was adopted. To verify the feasibility of the proposed ASR, the speech recognition experiment was carried out the 60 Korean isolated words obtained from the six speakers. Moreover, the experiment results showed that the overall word recognition rates were comparable with the conventional speech-based ASR methods and the performance of the proposed method was superior to the conventional signal channel ASR method. Especially, the average recognition rate of 90 % was maintained under the noise environments.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.35 no.2
• /
• pp.134-142
• /
• 2016

In this paper, a method synthesizing speech signal using the 40 kHz ultrasonic signals reflected from the articulatory muscles was introduced and performance was evaluated. When the ultrasound signals are radiated to articulating face, the Doppler effects caused by movements of lips, jaw, and chin observed. The signals that have different frequencies from that of the transmitted signals are found in the received signals. These ADS (Acoustic-Doppler Signals) were used for estimating of the speech parameters in this study. Prior to synthesizing speech signal, a quantitative correlation analysis between ADS and speech signals was carried out on each frequency bin. According to the results, the feasibility of the ADS-based speech synthesis was validated. ADS-to-speech transformation was achieved by the joint Gaussian mixture model-based conversion rules. The experimental results from the 5 subjects showed that filter bank energy and LPC (Linear Predictive Coefficient) cepstrum coefficients are the optimal features for ADS, and speech, respectively. In the subjective evaluation where synthesized speech signals were obtained using the excitation sources extracted from original speech signals, it was confirmed that the ADS-to-speech conversion method yielded 72.2 % average recognition rates.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
• /
• v.38 no.4
• /
• pp.433-441
• /
• 2019

In this paper, a method of estimating speech parameters for ultrasonic Doppler signals reflected from the articulatory muscles using LSTM (Long Short Term Memory) RNN (Recurrent Neural Networks) was introduced and compared with the method using MLP (Multi-Layer Perceptrons). LSTM RNN were used to estimate the Fourier transform coefficients of speech signals from the ultrasonic Doppler signals. The log energy value of the Mel frequency band and the Fourier transform coefficients, which were extracted respectively from the ultrasonic Doppler signal and the speech signal, were used as the input and reference for training LSTM RNN. The performance of LSTM RNN and MLP was evaluated and compared by experiments using test data, and the RMSE (Root Mean Squared Error) was used as a measure. The RMSE of each experiment was 0.5810 and 0.7380, respectively. The difference was about 0.1570, so that it confirmed that the performance of the method using the LSTM RNN was better.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.531-544
• /
• 2009

In the past, objective usability was one of the most important aspects when user used system. But nowadays user's subjective experiences are getting more critical element than objective usability in HCI(human-computer interaction). Most people own their mobile phone and use it frequently these days. It is especially important to make user's subjective experiences more positive when using devices like mobile phones people frequently carry and interact with. This study investigates whether the interfaces which express the emotion give more positive experiences to users. Researchers created mobile phone prototypes to compare the effect of mechanical melody feedback(the major auditory feedbacks on mobile phones) and emotional voice feedback(recorded human voice). Participants experienced four kinds of mobile phone prototypes(no feedback, mechanical melody feedback, emotional voice feedback and dual feedback) and evaluated their experienced usability, hedonic quality and preference. The result suggests that person's perceptional fun and hedonic quality were getting increased in the phone which gave the emotional voice feedback than the mechanical melody feedback. Nevertheless, the preference was evaluated lower in the emotional voice feedback condition than the others.