Catherine Guastavino

The role of music producers and sound engineers in the current recording context, as perceived by young professionals:

As a result of recent technological advances, musicians tend to produce their music themselves in home studios, without necessarily collaborating with a professional producer or a sound engineer. To understand how this new paradigm affects musical recordings, we need to study the context of recording sessions involving a producer and a sound engineer. In this article we investigate the role of producers and sound engineers, as perceived by young professionals actively involved in recording sessions. We collected verbal data from 16 musicians and 6 sound engineers, from different countries and backgrounds. Participants were asked to freely define in their own words the role of an ideal producer and an ideal sound engineer. Then, we invited them to describe positive or negative experiences they had previously encountered in the studio. We classified their spontaneous descriptions into emerging themes using the constant comparison method. The three main categories referred to mission, skills, and interaction. A consensus emerged regarding the respective missions of producers and sound engineers. While the producer is responsible for the artistic direction of the project, the sound engineer has to make appropriate sound choices by taking into consideration the musicians’ requests. The primary skills reported for the ideal producer were communication and interpersonal skills. The ideal sound engineer, paradoxically, was described as minimally interacting with musicians during sessions. To conclude, we discuss future directions to clarify the relationships between the missions and skills producers and sound engineers are expected to exhibit, and to further investigate the level of the producer’s artistic involvement.

Perceptual evaluation of interior aircraft sound models

We report a listening test conducted to investigate the validity of sinusoids+noise synthesis models for interior aircraft sounds. Two models were evaluated, one for monaural signals and the other for binaural signals. A parameter common to both models is the size of the analysis/synthesis window. This size determines the computation cost and the time/frequency resolution of the synthesis. To evaluate the perceptual impact of reducing the window size, we varied systematically the size Ns of the analysis/synthesis window. We used three reference sounds corresponding to three different rows. Twenty-two participants completed an ABX discrimination task comparing original recorded sounds to various resynthesized versions. The results highlight a better discrimination between resynthesized sounds and original recorded sounds for the monaural model than for the binaural model and for a window size of 128 samples than for larger window sizes. We also observed a significant effect of row on discrimination. An analysis/synthesis window size Ns of 1024 samples seems to be sufficient to synthesize binaural sounds which are indistinguishable from original sounds; but for monaural sounds, a window size of 2048 samples is needed to resynthesize original sounds with no perceptible difference.

Binaural analysis/synthesis of interior aircraft sounds

A binaural sinusoids+noise synthesis model is proposed for reproducing interior aircraft sounds. First, a method for spectral and spatial characterization of binaural interior aircraft sounds is presented. This characterization relies on a stationarity hypothesis and involves four estimators: left and right power spectra, interaural coherence and interaural phase difference. Then we present two extensions of the classical sinusoids+noise model for the analysis and synthesis of stationary binaural sounds. First, we propose a binaural estimator using relevant information in both left and right channels for peak detection. Second, the residual modeling is extended to integrate two interaural spatial cues, namely coherence and phase difference. The resulting binaural sinusoids+noise model is evaluated on a recorded aircraft sound.

Moving forward: Conceptualizing comfort in information sources for enthusiast cyclists

This research aims to identify how the notion of comfort in the context of bicycling is conveyed in an American bicycling magazine and online forum. An iterative approach, comprising of a content analysis and linguistic discourse analysis aims to go beyond the generally-accepted definition that focuses on vibrations, and identify the different concepts and typical situations relevant to study comfort for enthusiast cyclists. Are discussed the selection criteria for the magazine and online forum, the development of the coding protocol (including the final operational definition of each concepts) and the method for retrieving and analyzing online forum posts. A quantitative analysis, looking at the number of occurrences for each concept and theme, combined with a qualitative analysis of pronoun use, positive and negative descriptors, and opposing statements shows a complex link between the cyclist, the bicycle, and the environment. The behaviour of the bicycle, environmental factors, what the cyclists thinks and feels as well as the goal of the ride affect how comfort is conceptualized.

Perceptual Evaluation of Rolling Sound Synthesis

Three listening tests were conducted to perceptually evaluate different versions of a new real-time synthesis approach for sounds of sustained contact interactions. This study aims to identify the most effective algorithm to create a realistic sound for rolling objects. In Experiment 1 and 2, participants were asked to rate the extent to which 6 different versions sounded like rolling sounds. Subsequently, in Experiment 3, participants compared the 6 versions best rated in Experiment 1 and 2, to the original recordings. Results are presented in terms of both statistical analysis of the most effective synthesis algorithm and qualitative user comments. On methodological grounds, the comparison of Experiments 1, 2 and 3 highlights major differences between judgments collected in reference to the original recordings as opposed to judgments based on memory representations of rolling sounds.

The Tuning of Place: Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media

In his fourth book, Richard Coyne continues the exploration of the social shaping and impact of digital technologies. The Tuning of Place provides a wide-ranging, articulate, and probing investigation of how pervasive digital devices (e.g., smartphones, cameras, GPS systems) influence the way we interact with each other and continuously adjust ourselves to our environment. Inspired by Murray Schafer’s seminal book The Tuning of the World, Coyne further develops the metaphor of tuning to describe the relationships between people and places they inhabit. According to Schafer, people shape their environment, willfully or unwittingly, through sound. Coyne introduces digital devices as intermediary between people and places. In this view, tuning is a series of incremental adjustments using digital devices. The Tuning of Place is impressively well documented, drawing on numerous disciplines rarely connected with digital media, including music, architecture, urbanism, psychology, ecology, and philosophy. Coyne synthesized a wide range of philosophical, technical, design, and humanistic considerations to summarize scientific and cultural knowledge of the subtleties of the sense of place in the digital era. The book is divided into three sections: “Temperament,” “Everyday,” and “Commonplace.” Each section is then organized into chapters around the metaphors of intervention, calibration, wedges, habits, rhythm, tags, taps, tactics, thresholds, aggregation, noise, and interference. The first section, “Temperament,” introduces the metaphor of tuning and shows how it can illuminate the design process in its relation to actual use and context of reference (instead of grand plans and intended use). According to Coyne, “The tuning is the design” (p. 69). The role of the designer is to introduce fine differences in standard designs or templates to propose a first solution for a specific area of application, and later refine it. Tuning consists of a series of adaptations and adjustments to different circumstances such as local conditions, target users, or market differentiation. Coyne further expands on public participation in design illustrated with Web 2.0 development examples of incremental refinements based on user comments and reviews. The second section, “Everyday,” provides an ecological framework to examine how digital devices impinge on the habits of our everyday life, with an emphasis on the temporal cycles and repetitions in our daily routine. Ubiquitous digital media support access, communication, and social practices for the negotiation of schedules and coordination of activities. Coyne illustrates the importance of social context, practices, and cultures with examples of various means of adjusting meeting times or coordinating instructions between users operating from different places and time frames. Tuning is conceived as a dynamic process to bring two or more models into alignment and compare and adjust them. Digital devices are then “mechanisms people use to synchronize their relationships and interactions” (p. xiii). The third section, “Commonplace,” includes various discussions on the tactical nature of our use and appropriation of digital devices,

Soundscape ecology: A worldwide network

The overarching objective of our network is to bring together acousticians, cognitive psychologists, ecologists, and creative artists to integrate how they study and perceive soundscapes and use this knowledge to help shape a research agenda for the conservation of soundscapes. Many natural soundscapes are being threatened from various directions, e.g., habitat destruction, climate change, invasive species. This project aims at recording and documenting soundscapes in remote locations and identifying conceptualizations of these soundscapes across different cultures and disciplines. The network will help to (1) foster open communication between different disciplines and communities about soundscapes; (2) coordinate soundscape monitoring sites where acoustic data are being collected long-term; (3) develop a common vocabulary, long-term monitoring standards, and metadata standards for acoustic data for use by ecologists; (4) increase awareness of this new field among ecologists and social scientists; and (5)...