An auditory-visual tradeoff in susceptibility to clutter

Sensory cortical mechanisms combine auditory or visual features into perceived objects. This is difficult in noisy or cluttered environments. Knowing that individuals vary greatly in their susceptibility to clutter, we wondered whether there might be a relation between an individual’s auditory and visual susceptibilities to clutter. In auditory masking, background sound makes spoken words unrecognizable. When masking arises due to interference at central auditory processing stages, beyond the cochlea, it is called informational masking. A strikingly similar phenomenon in vision, called visual crowding, occurs when nearby clutter makes a target object unrecognizable, despite being resolved at the retina. We here compare susceptibilities to auditory informational masking and visual crowding in the same participants. Surprisingly, across participants, we find a negative correlation (R = –0.7) between susceptibility to informational masking and crowding: Participants who have low susceptibility to auditory clutter tend to have high susceptibility to visual clutter, and vice versa. This reveals a tradeoff in the brain between auditory and visual processing.

Efficient acoustic perception for virtual AI agents

We model acoustic perception in AI agents efficiently within complex scenes with many sound events. The key idea is to employ perceptual parameters that capture how each sound event propagates through the scene to the agent's location. This naturally conforms virtual perception to human. We propose a simplified auditory masking model that limits localization capability in the presence of distracting sounds. We show that anisotropic reflections as well as the initial sound serve as useful localization cues. Our system is simple, fast, and modular and obtains natural results in our tests, letting agents navigate through passageways and portals by sound alone, and anticipate or track occluded but audible targets. Source code is provided.

The Underwater Soundscape at Gulf of Riga Marine-Protected Areas

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is widely used as an initial step towards an assessment of environmental status. In the present study, underwater ambient sound recordings from two monitoring locations in marine-protected areas (MPAs) of the Gulf of Riga were analysed. Both locations belong to the natural habitat of pinnipeds whose vocalisations were detected and analysed. An increase of vocal activity during the mating period in the late winter was revealed, including percussive signallings of grey seals. The ambient sound spectra showed that in the current shallow sea conditions ship traffic noise contributed more in the higher frequency bands. Thus, a 500 Hz one-third octave band was chosen as an indicator frequency band for anthropogenic noise in the monitoring area. It was shown that changes in the soundscape occurring during the freezing period create favourable conditions for ship noise propagation at larger distances. Based on the monitoring data, the environmental risks related to the anthropogenic sound around the monitoring sites were considered as low. However, further analysis showed that for a small percentage of time the ship traffic can cause auditory masking for the ringed seals.

Privacy Threats of Acoustic Covert Communication among Smart Mobile Devices

The emerging, overclocking signal-based acoustic covert communication technique allows smart devices to communicate (without users’ consent) utilizing their microphones and speakers in ultrasonic side channels, which offers users imperceptible and convenient personalized services, e.g., cross-device authentication and media tracking. However, microphones and speakers could be maliciously used and pose severe privacy threats to users. In this paper, we propose a novel high-frequency filtering- (HFF-) based protection model, named UltraFilter, which protects user privacy by enabling users to selectively filter out high-frequency signals from the metadata received by the device. We also analyze the feasibility of using audio frequencies (i.e., ≤18 kHz) to the acoustic covert communication and carry out the acoustic covert communication system by introducing the auditory masking effect. Experiments show that UltraFilter can prevent users’ private information from leaking and reduce system load and that the audio frequencies can pose threats to user privacy.

The Use of Psychoacoustics in Marine Mammal Conservation in the United States: From Science to Management and Policy

Underwater sound generated from human activities has been long recognized to cause adverse effects on marine mammals, ranging from auditory masking to behavioral disturbance to hearing impairment. In certain instances, underwater sound has led to physical injuries and mortalities. Research efforts to assess these impacts began approximately four decades ago with behavioral observations of large whales exposed to seismic surveys and rapidly progressed into the diverse field that today includes studies of behavioral, auditory, and physiological responses of marine mammals exposed to anthropogenic sound. Findings from those studies have informed the manner in which impact assessments have been and currently are conducted by regulatory agencies in the United States. They also have led to additional questions and identified information needed to understand more holistically the impacts of underwater sound, such as population- and species-level effects, long-term, chronic, and cumulative effects, and effects on taxa for which little or no information is known. Despite progress, the regulatory community has been slow to incorporate the best available science in marine mammal management and policy and often has relied on outdated and overly simplified methods in its impact assessments. To implement conservation measures effectively, regulatory agencies must be willing to adapt their regulatory scheme to ensure that the best available scientific information is incorporated accordingly.

Informational masking vs. crowding — A mid-level trade-off between auditory and visual processing

In noisy or cluttered environments, sensory cortical mechanisms help combine auditory or visual features into perceived objects. Knowing that individuals vary greatly in their ability to suppress unwanted sensory information, and knowing that the sizes of auditory and visual cortical regions are correlated, we wondered whether there might be a corresponding relation between an individual’s ability to suppress auditory vs. visual interference. In auditory masking, background sound makes spoken words unrecognizable. When masking arises due to interference at central auditory processing stages, beyond the cochlea, it is called informational masking (IM). A strikingly similar phenomenon in vision, called visual crowding, occurs when nearby clutter makes a target object unrecognizable, despite being resolved at the retina. We here compare susceptibilities to auditory IM and visual crowding in the same participants. Surprisingly, across participants, we find a negative correlation (R = −0.7) between IM susceptibility and crowding susceptibility: Participants who have low susceptibility to IM tend to have high susceptibility to crowding, and vice versa. This reveals a mid-level trade-off between auditory and visual processing.

Toward an Index of Oral Somatosensory Acuity: Comparison of Three Measures in Adults

Purpose Somatosensory targets and feedback are instrumental in ensuring accurate speech production. Individuals differ in their ability to access and respond to somatosensory information, but there is no established standard for measuring somatosensory acuity. The primary objective of this study was to determine which of three measures of somatosensory acuity had the strongest association with change in production accuracy in a vowel learning task, while controlling for the better studied covariate of auditory acuity. Method Three somatosensory tasks were administered to 20 female college students: an oral stereognosis task, a bite block task with auditory masking, and a novel phonetic awareness task. Individual scores from the tasks were compared to their performance on a speech learning task in which participants were trained to produce novel Mandarin vowels with visual biofeedback. Results Of the three tasks, only bite block adaptation with auditory masking was significantly associated with performance in the speech learning task. Participants with weaker somatosensory acuity tended to demonstrate larger increases in production accuracy over the course of training. Conclusions The bite block adaptation task measures proprioceptive awareness rather than tactile acuity and assesses somatosensory knowledge implicitly, with limited metalinguistic demands. This small-scale study provides preliminary evidence that these characteristics may be desirable for the assessment of oral somatosensory acuity, at least in the context of vowel learning tasks. Well-normed somatosensory measures could be of clinical utility by informing diagnosis/prognosis and treatment planning. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.14044082