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Highlights • The role of spectral tilt in sentence prominence was investigated. • Estimators for tilt of glottal source spectrum and surface spectrum were compared. • Multidimensional representations for spectral tilt were also investigated. • Robustness of different tilt estimators was tested for noisy and coded speech. • Experiments were conducted on both French and Dutch speech data. Abstract Linguistic prominence in speech is known to correlate with the acoustic measures of energy, F0, and duration. In contrast, the role of spectral tilt in the realization of prominence has remained more inconsistent between previous empirical investigations. This may be partially due to the lack of a standard method for quantifying spectral tilt or due to difficulties in estimating the acoustical source of spectral tilt, the glottal flow, from continuous speech. These issues have rendered interpretations and comparisons between studies difficult. In addition, (i) little is known about the robustness of tilt estimators for prominence detection in the case when speech is not clean but corrupted, as in real life, by environmental noise or telephone transmission (i.e. degradation caused by bandpass filtering and quantization noise). Moreover, (ii) little attention has been paid to multidimensional representations of source spectrum that can potentially incorporate more information about the phonation style than purely scalar measures. In this work, we study spectral tilt in signaling prominence in spoken Dutch and French under different levels of additive noise, and for telephone-band coded speech, and compare several one-dimensional tilt measures that have been previously encountered in the literature as well as multidimensional tilt measures. We also compare spectral tilt measures with other standard acoustic correlates for prominence, namely, energy, F0, and duration. Our results provide further empirical support for the finding that tilt is a systematic correlate of prominence in Dutch, that the role is smaller in French, and that energy, F0, and duration appear still to be the most robust features for discriminating prominent and non-prominent words. In addition, our results show that there are notable differences between different tilt measures at different levels of noise, and that multidimensional representations for tilt improve class separability from the scalar measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The acoustic signature of a controlled-diffusion airfoil immersed in a flow is experimentally characterized. Acoustic measurements have been carried out in an anechoic open-jet-wind-tunnel for low Reynolds numbers (from 5×104 to 4.3×105) and several angles of attack. As with the NACA0012, the acoustic spectrum is dominated by discrete tones. These tonal behaviors are divided into three different regimes. The first one is characterized by a dominant primary tone which is steady over time, surrounded by secondary peaks. The second consists of two unsteady primary tones associated with secondary peaks and the third consists of a hump dominated by several small peaks. A wavelet study allows one to identify an amplitude modulation of the acoustic signal mainly for the unsteady tonal regime. This amplitude modulation is equal to the frequency interval between two successive tones. Finally, a bispectral analysis explains the presence of tones at higher frequencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians of science, technology and medicine have looked at noise in the interwar period in the context of the anti-noise movement, public hygiene and the modern city. I offer a different view, drawing upon distinctions in German between "Lärm," "Geräusch," and "Rauschen," which all translate into "noise" in English. I argue that at least three historical developments altered the concept and significance of noise within science: the deployment of acoustics and acousticians in the Great War, the rise of electroacoustics and media technologies such as telephony and radio broadcasting, and the emergence of comparative musicology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The manufacturing of a batch of commercially available passive seismoacoustic sensors to be used concurrently in an array format requires a procedure for the determination of performance. Performance is typically measured by comparing each individual's sensor's response to a known control response. Unfortunately, as is the case with the sensors used in this analysis, it is not always practical to obtain or consistently derive a response for comparison. The method described can be applied to a variety of situations where sensor-to-sensor variation is of importance within the array and the sensor produces a multivariate measurement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents a theory for rain noise prediction, consolidating discussions of drop impact on a plate and resulting work on rain noise predictions that is found in the literature. An objective of the consolidated theory is a robust engineering model which does not rely on complex computational techniques or lengthy computer simulation. The model described is compared to measured data to establish accuracy and reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the role of architecture and the city in the study of noise and sound. It mentions that noise and sound affect the way people live in the city and their aural substance as proposed by Georg Simmel. It adds that for architecture, noise is a matter of acoustics and of blurred distinction between institutional and social zones.