In this study, we used near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) to examine the effects of environmental sounds on performance of a serial arithmetic task. Subjects included 6 males and 15 females aged 21 or 22 years. All subjects were required to perform a serial arithmetic task according to the Uchida-Kraepelin performance test. We used four environmental conditions: hubbub sound, forest sound, traff...

Sound effect libraries are commonly used by sound designers in a range of industries. Taxonomies exist for the classification of sounds into groups based on subjective similarity, sound source or common environmental context. However, these taxonomies are not standardised, and no taxonomy based purely on the sonic properties of audio exists. We present a method using feature selection, unsuperv...

Onomatopoeia, or sound-imitation words (SIWs) are important in informing sound events in human-computer communication. One problem is listener-dependency in recognizing environmental sounds by means of SIWs, that is, different listener hears the same environmental sound as a different SIW even under the same condition. Therefore, the use of usual Japanese phonemes is not adequate to express SIW...

Overall impression of long-term sound will be judged on the basis of memory. The results of our former studies comparing overall impression with instantaneous impression suggest that the prominent portions of the sound contribute to the overall impression more greatly than less prominent portions. Long-term environmental sound consists of various kinds of sound. In order to examine what kind of...