• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2003.05a
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• pp.1009-1009
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• 2003

VIPER a new tool for the VIsual PERception of sound quality and for sound design will be presented. Requirement for the visualization of sound quality is a signal analysis modeling the information processing of the ear. The first step of the signal processing implemented in VIPER, calculates an auditory spectrogram by a filter bank adapted to the time- and frequency resolution of the human ear. The second step removes redundant information by extracting time- and frequency contours from the auditory spectrogram in analogy to contours of the visual system. In a third step contours and/or auditory spectrogram can be resynthesised confirming that only aurally relevant information were extracted. The visualization of the contours in VIPER allows intuitively to grasp the important components of a signal. Contributions of parts of a signal to the overall quality can be easily auralized by editing and resynthesising the contours or the underlying auditory spectrogram. Resynthesis of time contours alone allows e.g. to auralize impulsive components separately from the tonal components. Further processing of the contours determines tonal parts in form of tracks. Audible differences between two versions of a sound can be visually inspected in VIPER through the help of auditory distance spectrograms. Applications are shown for the sound design of several interior noises of cars.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.22 no.4
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• pp.318-327
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• 2012

The operating sound radiated from a laser printer includes tonal noise components caused by the rotating mechanical parts such as gear, shaft, motor, fan, etc. The negative effects of the tonal noise components need to be considered in the process of developing a sound quality index for the quantitative evaluation of the emotional satisfaction in terms of psycho-acoustics. However, in a previous paper, it was confirmed that the Aures tonality did not have enough correlation with the results of jury evaluation. The sound quality index based on loudness, articulation index, fluctuation strength has a little problem in considering the effects of rotating mechanical parts on the sound quality. In this paper, to solve the tonality evaluation problem, the calculation algorithm of Aures tonality was investigated in detail to find the cause of decreasing the correlation. The new tonality evaluation model was proposed by modifying and optimizing the masking effect, loudness ratio, and shape of weighting curve based on the basic algorithm of Aures tonality, and applied to two kinds of operating sound groups in order to verify the usefulness of proposed model. As a result, it is confirmed that the proposed tonality evaluation model has enough correlation and usefulness for expressing the tonalness in the operating sounds of laser printers. In the following paper, this results will be used to model the sound quality index as the input data by using the classification algorithm.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering Conference
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• 2012.04a
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• pp.348-353
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• 2012

This paper presents the HRTF based experimental approach to figure out why the human auditory perception on the interior noise source including the directional tonal components does not well match with the dominant features extracted from recorded acoustic signals in terms of psycho-acoustics. Since the general objective evaluation models for tonalness among various sound attributes are a function of width, frequency, excessive level of tonal components respectively, the directional tonal components cannot be properly evaluated without considering the effects of head-related transfer function on the binaural auditory perception. Thus, the directivity of source is additionally considered to prevent the erroneous conclusions from the same sound source in the process of source identification. The signal synthesis technique is used to solve a little difficulty in measuring all of desired acoustic signals for jury evaluation. The sound attributes of synthetic acoustics signals are analyzed to roughly predict the results of jury evaluation in advance by using sound quality factors such as loudness, sharpness, roughness, fluctuation strength and tonality. The jury evaluation is carefully conducted based on the recommended guideline suggested by N. Ottoet al. Each sound is respectively evaluated by selecting a value between -2 and 2 in intervals of 0.2 point. Through above procedure, based on the results of jury evaluation, it is confirmed that serious problems can be caused in the process of analyzing the dominant sound attributes in terms of psycho-acoustics according to the type of a microphone and a playback system.

• Transactions of the Korean Society for Noise and Vibration Engineering
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• v.22 no.6
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• pp.509-523
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• 2012

The sound quality based on design optimization, throughout the development process of various electronic office equipments, needs to be considered in order to respond the increased needs for the emotional satisfaction of customers in terms of psycho-acoustics. This paper focuses on how to describe the characteristics of operating sound radiated from laser printers by using various sound attributes, and to model the sound quality index that can properly evaluate the subjective preference on modification conditions in the improvement study quantitatively. Especially, the proposed verification process, in the form of combining the correlation based method and the decision error based method, was applied to improve the generality and reliability of a group of participants in the jury evaluation. The modified Aures tonality model was also proposed to improve the correlation coefficient with the mean response of participants by optimizing some parameters. As a result, the loudness, articulation index, roughness, tonality, fluctuation strength were used to model the sound quality index for laser printers by using the multiple-linear regression method. Through the improvement study, it was confirmed that replacing the absorbing materials is effective to reduce the tonalness radiated from the side of a reference printer model. Based on above results, it can be concluded that the proposed model has enough usefulness as quantitative evaluation index to evaluate the difference between modification conditions in the improvement study.