Denna uppsats handlar om huruvida instrumentering i filmmusik har en betydelse för hur vi tolkar en berättelse. Syftet med uppsatsen är att försöka bidra med en ökad förståelse för hur instrumenteringen i musik till bild påverkar narrativet själv. I undersökningen ingick 40 personer från Högskolan Dalarna och de fick göra ett lyssningstest med tillhörande enkät med både slutna och öppna frågor. Testdeltagarna fick se tre versioner av ett klipp ur filmen Into the Wild. En version var tyst, till de andra två hade författaren själv komponerat ett musikstycke, som instrumenterats på två olika sätt, en version med stråkar och en version med populärmusiksintrument. Musiken i sig är alltså likadan i båda versionerna, det enda som skiljer är vilka instrument som spelar. I resultatet redovisas både kvantitativa och kvalitativa data som ger en inblick i hur instrumenteringen påverkar publikindividen. Undersökningen visade att vissa instrument har en högre betydelsepotential för vissa känslor, version stråkar visade på hög potential för att förmedla heroiska känslor och version populär visade på en tolkning som lutade mer åt tuffa, hårda känslor. Vidare förklaras även hur subjektiv en tolkning av ett klipp kan vara med hänsyn till instrumenteringen.

本研究旨在比較國中學生在全民英檢聽力測驗中不同聽力題型之測驗結果，並探究聽力題型是否造成學生聽力策略選擇之差異。 本研究對象為宜蘭一所公立國中八年級六個班級共177位學生。研究工具為全民英檢初級聽力測驗以及聽力策略問卷。問卷內容以Vandergrift(1997)的聽力策略分類為架構，改編自蘇曉雯(2007)自編問卷。問卷回收後資料以統計軟體SPSS 17.0進行敘述性統計、單因子變異數分析及雙因子變異數分析，獲得結果簡述如下： 1.國中學生在全民英檢聽力測驗四種題型中的聽力表現有所差異。四種題型的不同因素包括了聽力內容中參與談話者的人數、聽力內容所包含的難字以及測驗題型是否提供圖片輔助。 2.整體來說，在聽力測驗作答時，國中學生較常使用後設認知策略。例如:理解監測(monitoring)，選擇性專注(selective attention)和前導組織(advance organizers)。然而，若細究不同的聽力題型，學生則較常使用不同認知策略。例如:當遇到較長的聽力內容，學生較常使用摘要(summarization)策略。而遇到較難的聽力內容，學生則慣用由下自上(bottom-up)策略。 3.綜觀不同語言能力之學生在不同題型中使用聽力策略的差異，本研究發現學生之語言能力與題型對聽力策略使用上並無交互作用。整體而言，高低成就學生 在四種不同題型中使用相似的聽力策略。然而，若細究各項不同聽力策略的使用頻率，則高低成就者中所慣用的聽力策略有所不同。 根據統計及問卷調查結果，本研究最後提供教學上相關建議以供參考。第一，教師可協助學生分析試題題型，以幫助作答。第二，教師應提供學生不同類型之聽力練習，讓學生嘗試使用不同聽力策略。第三，教師可請高成就學生分享聽力理解過程，以幫助低成就學生能有更好的聽力表現。 / The major purpose of the study is to examine whether question types influence junior high students’ listening performance and their listening strategy choice. The study is mainly concerned with three aspects: (1) whether students performed differently among the four different question types of GEPT listening section; (2) what kind of strategies did junior high students tend to use in the four types of questions; (3) whether proficiency level played a significant role in listening strategy choice among four question types. GEPT elementary level of listening comprehension test and a questionnaire were used to collect quantitative data from 177 students in one public junior high school in Yilan Area. The items in the questionnaire were mainly adapted from Su (2007), which followed Vandergrift’s (1997) classification of strategy use. In this study, statistical analysis, including descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA with Scheffe post- hoc test and two-way ANOVA were used to analyze the collected data. The major findings are summarized as follows: 1.Junior high students performed differently in the four different types of listening questions. Factors that differentiate the four question types include the number of speaker, the content itself and the presence of pictures. 2.Generally speaking, junior high students tended to use metacognitive strategies, such as monitoring, selective attention and advance organizers more often in different question types. However, in specific question types, students appeared to have preference in using certain cognitive strategies. For example, students were inclined to use summarization when encountering question type with longer listening text. They also tended to use bottom-up strategies to tackle with more difficulty text. 3.There was no significant interaction effect between question types and proficiency level. Overall on the four question types, students with high and low levels used same strategies. However, when examining strategy items specifically, high and low achievers had different preference for using strategy in different question types. Finally, based on the findings in this study, several suggestions and implications were presented in the conclusion of the paper. First, teachers could help students analyze question types before listening test. Second, teachers could give students more kinds of listening activities to make students experience the effectiveness of using different kinds of listening strategies. Third, teachers could invite high level listeners to share their listening process so that low level listeners might learn from them.

Recent research within the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) field has shown the relevance of perceptual features for musical signals. The idea is to identify a small set of features that are natural descriptions from a perceptual perspective. The notion of perceptual features is based on the ecological approach to music, that is, focussing on sound events rather than spectral information. Furthermore, MIR research has had an overemphasis on Western music and listeners. This leads to the question of whether the concept of perceptual features is culturally independent or not. This was investigated by having listeners of two distinct cultural backgrounds (Swedish and Chinese) rating a set of eight perceptual features: dissonance, speed, rhythmic complexity, rhythmic clarity, articulation, harmonic complexity, modality and pitch. A culturally specific dataset consisting of Korean pop songs was used to provide the stimuli. This was a subset of a larger set of songs from a previous study selected based on genre and mood annotations to create a diverse dataset. The listener ratings were evaluated by a variety of statistical measures, including cross-correlation and ANOVA. It was found that there was a small but significant difference in the ratings of the perceptual features speed and rhythmic complexity between the two cultural groups.

Reverb är en effekt brukad inom bland annat musikproduktion för att mixa ljud, som flitigt används och är universellt erkänd som ett väsentligt verktyg. Däremot, inom domänen för röstinspelningar -framförallt radio och podcasts- är användningen av reverb mer begränsad, om inte obefintlig. Hur lyssnaren upplever en inspelning påverkas av efterklangen tillhörande den inspelningen. Alltså upplevs en lång efterklang tillhöra ett stort rum, medan ett mer dämpat ljud med en kort efterklang upplevs som ett litet rum. Ett nyhetsreportage som påminner om akustiken i en kyrka eller för den delen en inspelning i stil av en podcast -utan efterklang- kan upplevas svårt att lyssna på, framförallt med isolerande hörlurar. Många studier har publicerats om konceptet personligt föredragen efterklang för musik, men få finns för talad röst. Därför genomfördes denna studie med avsikt att hitta en konsensus mellan oberoende deltagare. Vilken efterklangstid föredras vid lyssning till en nyhetsrapport? Varje deltagare i studien lyssnade på sju versioner av en och samma röstinspelning i stilen av ett nyhetsreportage. Varianterna hade olika långa efterklangstider, från 0 ms till 800 ms. Därefter betygssatte deltagaren varje version av ljudklippet på en skala från 1 till 100, motsvarande hur nära inspelningen var till en perfekt lyssningsupplevelse enligt deras personliga preferens. Den extraherade datan från undersökningen indikerar en preferens mot lägre efterklangstider för det givna stimulit. Skillnaden mellan lägre efterklangstider visade sig vara mer signifikanta gentemot motsvarande intervall för längre efterklangstider. Den förväntade toppen för preferensbetygen mellan 200 och 400 ms kunde inte finnas, men avsaknaden av den kan till en del förklaras av flera faktorer, såsom: en skiljaktighet mellan ljudklippets och reverbets kvalitet, omfattningen av studien eller det faktum att ett träningsmoment saknades innan studiens start. / The reverb effect in the world of music production is frequently used and universally regarded as an essential tool. On the other hand in the domain of speech recordings -primarily radio and podcasts- is the use of reverberation more limited if even used at all. How the listener percieves a recording is affected by the reverberation of said recording. More precisely, a long reververation can be percieved as belonging to a large room, while a more damped sound with shorter reverberation sounds like a small room. A news broadcast sounding similar to church acoustics or a recording in the style of a podcast -with no room response- can be difficult to listen to, especially for a listener with isolating headphones. Many research articles and studies have been published about the concept of personally preferred reverberation for music, but very few for speech. Therefore this study was conducted with an intent to find a consensus between independent participants. What reverberation time is preferred when listening to a news report? Each participant in the study listened to a set of seven versions of a single voice recording in the style of a news report. The variants had reverberation times spanning from 0 ms up to 800. They then graded the recordings on a scale from 1 through 100 corresponding to how close to an ideal listening experience they had, according to their personal preference. The data extracted from the study points to a preference towards less reverberation time. The difference between smaller reverberation times were shown to be more significant compared to the difference between the same interval at a longer reverberation time. The expected preference-peak at between 200 and 400 ms was not found but the absence of it could be explained by several factors, such as: disparity between the quality of the soundclip and the quality of the reverb effect used, the extent of the study of the lack of a training session for the participants before the start of the study.

Sound pressure equalization of audio signals using digital signal processors has been a subject of ongoing study for many years. The traditional approach is to equalize sound at a point in a listening environment, but because of its specific dependence on the room frequency response between a source and receiver position, this equalization generally causes the spectral response to worsen significantly at other locations in the room. This work presents both a time-invariant and a time-varying implementation of an adaptive acoustic energy density equalization filter for a one-dimensional sound field. Energy density equalization addresses the aforementioned challenge and others that relate to sound equalization. The theory and real-time implementation of time-invariant sound pressure and energy density equalizers designed using the least-squares method are presented, and their performances are compared. An implementation of a time-varying energy density equalizer is also presented. Time-invariant equalization results based on real-time measurements in a plane-wave tube are presented. A sound pressure equalizer results in a nearly flat spectral magnitude at the point of equalization. However, it causes the frequencies corresponding to spatial nulls at that point to be undesirably boosted elsewhere in the sound field, where those nulls do not exist at the same frequencies. An energy density equalization filter identifies and compensates for all resonances and other global spectral effects of the tube and loudspeaker. It does not attempt to equalize the spatially varying frequency nulls caused by local pressure nodes at the point of equalization. An implementation of a time-varying energy density equalizer is also presented. This method uses the filtered-x filter update to adjust the filter coefficients in real-time to adapt to changes in the sound field. Convergence of the filter over time is demonstrated as the closed end of the tube is opened, then closed once again. Thus, the research results demonstrate that an acoustic energy density filter can be used to time-adaptively equalize global spectral anomalies of a loudspeaker and a one-dimensional sound field.

This is a study where I examine and compare the perceived emotional expression of brass instruments and reed instruments to investigate whether one group have an inherent tendency to better express a certain emotion than the other group. Based on scientifically proven methods, I have composed two musical pieces, where one of them represents the emotion of happiness and the other one represents the emotion of sadness. I have then written 5 arrangements per musical piece, where one of them consists of piano, two consists of solo instruments from each instrument group accompanied by piano, and two consists of a trio from each instrument group. This makes a total of 10 arrangements. These arrangements serve as audio examples in a web survey where I compare the two instrument groups based on how the audience perceive their emotional expression. A total of 36 people participated in the survey. Regarding the emotion of happiness, 71 % of the participants felt that trumpet and piano was the solo instrument version that best expressed happiness while 18 % chose oboe and piano. 44 % chose the brass trio as the happiest version while 36 % felt that the reed trio best expressed happiness. When it came to the emotion of sadness, 19 % of the participants chose trumpet and piano as the saddest solo instrument version, while 72 % felt that oboe and piano sounded the saddest. 25 % chose the brass trio as the saddest version while 67 % chose the reed trio.

Under mina tidiga år som gitarrist i utveckling, figurerade otalet myter och berättelser på musikaffärer, i konsertlokaler och bland gitarristvänner. Detta var myter om gitarrutrustning, hur man fick samma gitarrljud som på favoritskivorna, vissa gitarrmodellers bästa årgångar osv. Nu, äldre, möjligen klokare, och strävande efter att bli en mer upplyst musikproducent, har ett utforskande av dessa myter förändrats från att vara ett till synes omöjligt uppdrag, till ett realistiskt projekt. Den här undersökningen har fokuserat på uppfattningen av elgitarrförstärkarna i min ägo och tagit avstamp i mitt eget musikskapande, detta med utgångspunkt både från lyssnar- och användarperspektiv. Förstärkarmodellerna skiljer sig åt konstruktionsmässigt och slagkraften de haft i populärkulturen. Två intervjuer, två blindtester och en personlig utvärdering gjordes för att utforska gitarrförstärkarnas sound, spelbarhet och gensvar. Resultaten pekade i slutändan på att vi väljer förstärkare annorlunda då vi utgår från fördomar, tidigare erfarenhet och visuellt intryck än vad vi gör när vi enbart lyssnar på deras ljud. En antydan till variation mellan förstärkarnas påverkan på gitarristers spelkänsla verkar också kunna existera men på grund av de komplexa parametrarna involverade i en sådan analys är det svårt att fastställa några tydliga tendenser. Det som dock kan reflekteras över är att vi troligen lyssnar på, och spelar genom gitarrförstärkare med mer än våra öron och ögon, samt att en förstärkares taktila egenskaper, design och kulturella signifikans troligtvis är av större värde än vi kanske uppfattar enbart genom ljudande material. / During my early years as a developing guitarist, numerous myths and stories circulated in music stores, concert venues, and among guitarist friends. These myths revolved around guitar equipment, how to achieve the same guitar sound as on favourite records, the best years for certain guitar models, and so on. Now, older and possibly wiser, striving to become a more enlightened music producer, my exploration of these myths has shifted from being a seemingly impossible mission to a realistic project. This investigation has focused on the perception of the electric guitar amplifiers in my possession, based on my own music creation, taking into account both listener and user perspectives. The amplifier models differ in their construction and the impact they have had on popular culture. Two interviews, two blind tests, and a personal evaluation were conducted to explore the sound, playability, and response of the guitar amplifiers. Ultimately, the results indicated that we choose amplifiers differently when we rely on biases, past experiences, and visual impressions than when we solely listen to their sound. There also seems to be a hint of variation in how amplifiers affect guitarists' feeling of ease when playing, but due to the complex parameters involved in such an analysis, it is difficult to establish clear tendencies. However, what can be reflected upon is that we likely listen to and play through guitar amplifiers with more than just our ears and eyes, and that the tactile properties, design, and cultural significance of an amplifier are probably of greater value than we may perceive through purely sonic qualities.

Dialogue Enhancement (DE) is a process used in audio delivery systems to improve the clarity, intelligibility, and overall quality of the spoken dialogue in audio content. It is primarily used when dialogue is masked by music, surrounding noise, or other audio sources. This thesis project involves experiments to find the optimal time and frequency resolution needed for a DE system. The time resolution focuses on experimenting with various attack/release times for a DE system. The frequency domain analysis investigates whether people prefer a noise spectrum-dependent gain over a conventional full-band gain. The research methodology comprises three main parts. The first part focuses on system setup and choosing content/vectors to be used for the experiments. Next, the experiments are designed for time and frequency resolution. An exponential smoothing model is used to amplify/attenuate the dialogue stream at various times of attack/release. For the frequency counterpart, a banded gain model is designed which uses banded noise levels as input. Subsequently, a modified subjective listening test is designed to evaluate the experiments designed. The responses recorded for various types of content-noise combinations from the listeners are recorded and analyzed. Finally, the main outcome of this research emphasizes the advantages of a DE system. Further, it paves the way for further exploration of DE models and rigorous testing schemes with expert listeners. / Dialogue Enhancement (DE) är en process som används i ljudleveranssystem för att förbättra tydligheten, förståeligheten och den övergripande kvaliteten på den talade dialogen i ljudinnehåll. Det används främst när dialog maskeras av musik, omgivande brus eller andra ljudkällor. Detta examensarbete omfattar experiment för att hitta den optimala tids- och frekvensupplösningen för ett DEsystem. Tidsupplösningsexperimenten fokuserar på olika attack- och releasetider för ett DE-system. Frekvensdomänanalysen undersöker om människor föredrar en brusspektrumberoende förstärkning framför en konventionell fullbandsförstärkning. Forskningsmetodiken består av tre huvuddelar. Den första delen fokuserar på systeminställning och val av innehåll/vektorer som ska användas för experimenten. Därefter designas tids- och frekvensupplösningsexperimenten. En exponentiell tidsenvelopp används för att förstärka/dämpa dialogen vid olika tider för attack/release. För frekvensdomänexperimenten används en bandad förstärkningsmodell som använder bandade brusnivåer som insignal. I den tredje delen utformas ett subjektivt lyssningstest för att utvärdera experimenten. Lyssnarnas svar för olika typer av innehåll-bruskombinationer registreras och analyseras. Det huvudsakliga resultatet av denna forskning betonar fördelarna med ett DEsystem. Vidare banar det väg för utforskning av fler DE-modeller och rigorösa testscheman med expertlyssnare.