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Mathematician and philosopher Charles Howard Hinton posited a plausible correlation between higher-dimensional spaces, also referred to as ‘hyperspaces’, and the allegorical concept articulated by the Ancient Greek philosopher Plato in his work, Republic, known as the ‘Cave.’ In Plato’s allegory, individuals find themselves situated in an underground ‘Cave’, constrained by chains on their legs and neck, perceiving shadows and sound reflections from the ‘real’ world cast on the ‘Cave’ wall as their immediate reality. Hinton extended the interpretation of these ‘shadows’ through the induction method, asserting that, akin to a 3D object casting a 2D shadow, the ‘shadow’ of a 4D hyper-object would exhibit one dimension less, manifesting as a 3D object. Building upon this conceptual framework, the authors posit a correlation between the perceived acoustic space of the bounded individuals within the ‘Cave’ and the characteristics of a 4D acoustic space, a proposition substantiated mathematically by scientific inquiry. Furthermore, the authors introduce an interactive art application developed as a methodical approach to exploring the hypothetical 4D acoustic space within Plato’s ‘Cave’, as perceived by the bounded individuals and someone liberated from his constraints navigating through the ‘Cave.’

This paper proposes a novel approach to audio game design by introducing the concept of speech puzzles (spuzzles) to describe the utilisation of recorded voice for the creation of audio puzzles in ways that challenge players’ different listening modes. In the fields of audio games and audio-interactive applications, speech serves instructive, descriptive, narrative, and in some cases—in the form of hints or quizzes—gameplay purposes by addressing users through language. The suggested approach of spuzzles extends this potential by including, besides encoded meaning, the acoustic properties of sound, thus engaging the user’s causal and reduced listening modes in parallel with the semantic listening mode. An audio game consisting of four inherently different spuzzles was designed as proof of concept and tested by seven third-year students of Audiovisual Arts, who elaborated on their experience through a focus group semi-structured discussion. Despite their difficulty, the spuzzles were well accepted by most of the participants (5/7), whereas all participants agreed on their acoustic richness, need for concentration, and independence from pre-existing musical knowledge. Therefore, the authors suggest that the proposed design approach could serve as a paradigm for future research in the design of complex audio-based game mechanics.

The aim of this research is to discover the bond of entropy and the experience of video game immersion, using an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) to interpret the immersive experiences of players and how this bond of entropy and immersion could be transferred on other immersive technologies. The experiment was conducted on a selection of low-entropy scenes in three video games belonging to the genre of interactive drama. Six players were selected as the sample group for this research, based on their playthrough experiences of the games Heavy Rain (2010), Until Dawn (2015) and Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan (2019) on the PlayStation platform. By monitoring the levels of entropy and immersion during their playthroughs, this research explores the potential of transferring immersion through the use of entropy from digital games to other immersive technologies. According to the research highlights and through data interpretation, entropy is found to be immensely influential upon achieving and maintaining narrative, physical and emotional immersion, and its effect could be further applied to other immersive technologies sharing a common ground with digital games, which features are further examined in finer detail in the current research.

At the core of augmented reality audio (ARA) technology lies the ARA mix, a process responsible for the assignment of a virtual environment to a real one. Legacy ARA mix models have focused on the natural reproduction of the real environment, whereas the virtual environment is simply mixed through fixed gain methods. This study presents a novel approach of a dynamic ARA mix that facilitates a smooth adaptation of the virtual environment to the real one, as well as dynamic control of the virtual audio engine, by taking into account the inherent characteristics of both ARA technology and binaural auditory perception. A prototype feature extraction technique of auditory perception characteristics through a real-time binaural loudness prediction method was used to upgrade the legacy ARA mix model into a dynamic model, which was evaluated through benchmarks and subjective tests and showed encouraging results in terms of functionality and acceptance.

Innate immune molecules, SP-A1 (6A2, 6A4) and SP-A2 (1A0, 1A3), differentially affect young mouse survival after infection. Here, we investigated the impact of SP-A variants on the survival of aged mice. hTG mice carried a different SP-A1 or SP-A2 variant and SP-A-KO were either infected with Klebsiella pneumoniae or exposed to filtered air (FA) or ozone (O3) prior to infection, and their survival monitored over 14 days. In response to infection alone, no gene- or sex-specific (except for 6A2) differences were observed; variant-specific survival was observed (1A0 > 6A4). In response to O3, gene-, sex-, and variant-specific survival was observed with SP-A2 variants showing better survival in males than females, and 1A0 females > 1A3 females. A serendipitous, and perhaps clinically important observation was made; mice exposed to FA prior to infection exhibited significantly better survival than infected alone mice. 1A0 provided an overall better survival in males and/or females indicating a differential role for SP-A genetics. Improved ventilation, as provided by FA, resulted in a survival of significant magnitude in aged mice and perhaps to a lesser extent in young mice. This may have clinical application especially within the context of the current pandemic.

Although uniformly sampled pulse width modulation (UPWM) represents a very efficient digital audio coding scheme for digital-to-analog conversion and full-digital amplification, it suffers from strong harmonic distortions, as opposed to benign non-harmonic artifacts present in analog PWM (naturally sampled PWM, NPWM). Complete elimination of these distortions usually requires excessive oversampling of the source PCM audio signal, which results to impractical realizations of digital PWM systems. In this paper, a description of digital PWM distortion generation mechanism is given and a novel principle for their minimization is proposed, based on a process having some similarity to the dithering principle employed in multibit signal quantization. This conditioning signal is termed “jither” and it can be applied either in the PCM amplitude or the PWM time domain. It is shown that the proposed method achieves significant decrement of the harmonic distortions, rendering digital PWM performance equivalent to that of source PCM audio, for mild oversampling (e.g., ×4) resulting to typical PWM clock rates of 90 MHz.

Audio delivery and reproduction for home or professional applications may greatly benefit from the adoption of digital wireless local area network (WLAN) technologies. The most challenging aspect of such integration relates the synchronized and robust real-time streaming of multiple audio channels to multipoint receivers, for example, wireless active speakers. Here, it is shown that current WLAN solutions are susceptible to transmission errors. A detailed study of the IEEE802.11e protocol (currently under ratification) is also presented and all relevant distortions are assessed via an analytical and experimental methodology. A novel synchronization scheme is also introduced, allowing optimized playback for multiple receivers. The perceptual audio performance is assessed for both stereo and 5-channel applications based on either PCM or compressed audio signals.