SOFTNESS OF LIGHT PASSING THROUGH WINDOWS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH LUMINANCE GRADIENT

Architects and users frequently use window coverings, such as frosted glasses, shoji screens, and lace curtains to create high quality of light. This kind of light is sometimes called “soft light”, and most people feel that it is required in residential spaces. However, the term “soft light” is somewhat vague, and we do not accurately understand what is the “soft light” and how we can create it. The aim of this research is to derive a physical indicator of "ambiguity of brightness-darkness boundary”, which is one of factors for judging the softness of light. We conducted a subjective experiment with 53 evaluation items including the “ambiguity of brightness-darkness boundary” in various actual daylighting spaces. It was found that "ambiguity of brightness-darkness boundary", was not highly evaluated when the average value of the luminance change rate on the wall is high.

EFFECTS OF LUMINOUS COLOUR SHIFT Duv ON COLOUR PREFERENCE

Subjective experiment was carried out to investigate the combined effect on the colour preference of the interior style, correlated colour temperature (CCT) and duv. Twenty university age subjects evaluated all 28 conditions with 2 types of the interior style, 2 levels of the CCT and 7 levels of the duv. This paper reports the measured results of the chromaticity shift of the interior surface due to duv and the perception of the colour difference between the condition with any other duv and that with duv0. Subjective evaluation on the colour preference of the entire space related to the interior style, CCT and duv is also summarized. It is concluded that the acceptable range of duv to be classified as the same CCT should be reconsidered, considering colour preference.

EVALUATION STRUCTURE ON PREFERENCE OF PAINTING’S APPEARANCE WITH LOW REFLECTANCE IN THE MUSEUM LIGHTING ENVIRONMENT

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the evaluation structure of the preference for the visibility of paintings, taking into account the characteristics of paintings with low reflectance. Although illuminance is used in the standards for museum lighting (CIE 157:2004), it is desirable to design lighting that also considers luminance from the viewpoint of perceived brightness. Therefore, we conducted the subjective experiment of oil paintings in which luminance ratio was set as an experimental variable and examined the evaluation structure of paintings with low reflectance. As a result, it was found that the evaluation of black details affects the preference for the visibility of paintings with low reflectance. However, the path diagram of the evaluation structure applied to each painting was different, indicating that it is difficult to represent the characteristics of a painting only by the mean reflectance.

QUANTIFICATION OF THE EFFECT OF LIGHTING ENVIRONMENT ON SPACIOUSNESS OF INTERIOR SPACE

Spaciousness is an important quality of space which is affected by both the volume of space and the lighting environment. This study’s aim is to create the calculation model to quantify the effect of lighting environment on spaciousness. 3D luminance mapping, which is the combined data of luminance of surface and its distance to the observer, is used for the analysis of lighting environment, because we hypothesized that the three-dimensional localization of light affects the spaciousness. From the result of a subjective experiment to evaluate spaciousness with different lighting environment, it is revealed that spaciousness can be quantified from average luminance and “Dark-part-reduced visible volume” which is the reduced visible volume according to the distribution of dark pixels in the 3D luminance mapping. We also compared average illuminance of whole image and of ceiling, walls, floor, and concluded that the whole average illuminance best describes the effect.

Analysis and Assessment of Controllability of an Expressive Deep Learning-Based TTS System

In this paper, we study the controllability of an Expressive TTS system trained on a dataset for a continuous control. The dataset is the Blizzard 2013 dataset based on audiobooks read by a female speaker containing a great variability in styles and expressiveness. Controllability is evaluated with both an objective and a subjective experiment. The objective assessment is based on a measure of correlation between acoustic features and the dimensions of the latent space representing expressiveness. The subjective assessment is based on a perceptual experiment in which users are shown an interface for Controllable Expressive TTS and asked to retrieve a synthetic utterance whose expressiveness subjectively corresponds to that a reference utterance.

Subjective responses between real impact sound and rubber ball im-pact sound

By the recent COVID-19 situation, people stay more time in their home and abatements on noise between neighbouring units are increasing. Heavy/soft impact sound is one of the major noise sources in high-rise apartment buildings. Standardized heavy/soft impact source is known for having the most similar physical and subjective characteristics with real impact sound such as a child running, jumping and an adult walking. The single number quantity on the rubber ball was standardized. A classification scheme for rubber ball impact sound needs to be standardized. Several studies on subjective responses were conducted on rubber ball impact sound in various situations. In this study, subjective responses on the rubber impact sound and real impact sound were compared. The subjective experiment was conducted in the listening chamber which is furnished similarly to the typical living room of Korean apartment buildings. In the experiment, rubber ball impact sounds recorded in the real apartment building and real impact sound recorded in the mock-up building were presented through a sub-woofer and multi-channel loudspeaker system. Subjective responses were collected with an 11 points SD scale.

Background Noise, Noise Sensitivity, and Attitudes towards Neighbours, and a Subjective Experiment Using a Rubber Ball Impact Sound

When children run and jump or adults walk indoors, the impact sounds conveyed to neighbouring households have relatively high energy in low-frequency bands. The experience of and response to low-frequency floor impact sounds can differ depending on factors such as the duration of exposure, the listener’s noise sensitivity, and the level of background noise in housing complexes. In order to study responses to actual floor impact sounds, it is necessary to investigate how the response is affected by changes in the background noise and differences in the response when focusing on other tasks. In this study, the author presented subjects with a rubber ball impact sound recorded from different apartment buildings and housings and investigated the subjects’ responses to varying levels of background noise and when they were assigned tasks to change their level of attention on the presented sound. The subjects’ noise sensitivity and response to their neighbours were also compared. The results of the subjective experiment showed differences in the subjective responses depending on the level of background noise, and high intensity rubber ball impact sounds were associated with larger subjective responses. In addition, when subjects were performing a task like browsing the internet, they attended less to the rubber ball impact sound, showing a less sensitive response to the same intensity of impact sound. The responses of the group with high noise sensitivity showed an even steeper response curve with the same change in impact sound intensity. The group with less positive opinions of their neighbours showed larger changes in their subjective response, resulting in the expression of stronger opinions even to the same change in loudness of the impact sound. It was found that subjective responses were different when subjects were performing activities of daily living, such as reading or watching TV in the evening, and when they were focused on floor impact sounds in the middle of the night.

Allocentric and Egocentric Controllers: Similarities and Differences

Gestural instruments can be divided into two categories based on the type of the reference frame used by the controller. An egocentric controller uses a reference frame that is centered on and follows a point of the performer's body to measure the body point positions relative to some other body points. An allocentric controller uses a stationary reference frame attached to an object other than the performer's body. The allocentric option is the more commonly used by gestural instrument designers. The egocentric option has been used and explored less frequently. This paper studies, at a low level and high level: 1- The similarities and differences between egocentric and allocentric controllers for gestural instruments from the perspective of performer and instrument designer. 2- The affordances and constraints of egocentric and allocentric controllers as they, to a large degree, define the characteristics of an instrument. The paper presents the initial results of a subjective experiment to encourage the future discussion and study of the subject.

Subjective Effects of Sound Absorption and Investigation of Reverberation Times in Modern Japanese Dwellings

This study aimed to reveal the influence of sound absorption in general dwellings on the subjective evaluation of acoustics. First, a subjective experiment was conducted using a full-scale room model. The results indicate that the feelings of silence and serenity can be experienced at absorption coefficients above 0.17, particularly above 0.25. Additionally, we used the recorded binaural sounds for a subjective test instead of using a full-scale room model. This trial showed that the reverberance, feeling of silence, and feeling of serenity can also be evaluated using a headphone listening test. We also measured the reverberation times and recorded the sound environments in three bedrooms, three living and dining (LD) rooms, and three child rooms in modern Japanese dwellings. The average absorption coefficients of the LD and child rooms were lower than 0.17, in the range of 500 Hz to 4 kHz. Therefore, we analyzed the subjective effect of absorption through a psychological test using binaural recorded sounds. The bedrooms with absorption coefficients of 0.18–0.23 were significantly less reverberant, quieter, and more serene than the other rooms.