[vorbis-dev] Psycho-acoustics research

[Chris Riddoch]

Hi.

I'm an undergraduate linguistics major and computer science minor at
the University of Colorado in Boulder, and am taking a couple classes
this semester which give me the opportunity to do a research project -
one on introductory acoustics in the physics department, and one in
the linguistics department on phonetics and phonology. I've got an
idea, but I'd like to hear from anyone here could help me refine my
project to be useful to you folks in some way.

I should mention that I don't have the math background to really
understand the Fourier transform (much less more complicated beasts),
since the highest math class I've taken so far is calculus 1, so this
is a major caveat.

My idea so far is to record several speakers producing minimal pairs
(such as 'zip' and 'sip') and to compress the sound under different
compression schemes (Ogg, MP3, GSM, etc) at varying levels of
compression, then play them back on decent audio equipment for
listening tests to see if listeners can still distinguish important
parts of the sounds in the recordings. In particular, I'm interested
in looking at the nature of degradation when the compression ratio is
particularly high: what phonemes become more difficult to distinguish
soonest, as the compression ratio goes up?  And then, if possible, I'd
like to come up with an analysis of *why* those particular sounds are
poorly recreated, as opposed to others.  My guess is that fricative
sounds (/f/, /v/, /s/, /z/) will "degrade" first because they contain
larger amounts of white noise, which is often poorly handled by
compression.

A couple other people in my classes are interested in working with me
on the project - one has more math background, one is willing to
administer perception tests on a group of people.  I have the
linguistics background.  We have until the end of April to do the
project, and the exact idea should be decided on by the end of this
week.

I'd like to know if there's something I could do that would be more
helpful than academic. So... got any ideas for a project within this
scope that would directly benefit Ogg Vorbis development? Changing
topics is possible, though it would be preferable for it to have a
strong linguistic element so I can use the project for both classes.


-- 
Chris Riddoch       | epistemological
socket at peakpeak.com | humility

--- >8 ----
List archives:  http://www.xiph.org/archives/
Ogg project homepage: http://www.xiph.org/ogg/
To unsubscribe from this list, send a message to 'vorbis-dev-request at xiph.org'
containing only the word 'unsubscribe' in the body.  No subject is needed.
Unsubscribe messages sent to the list will be ignored/filtered.