Sound production is a widespread phenomenon in fishes; however, the importance of acoustic signals and their potential to influence reproduction has not been determined. This dissertation examines fish acoustic courtship signals to investigate whether sound has a role in reproductive success. The pre-spawning sounds of several fishes were recorded and analyzed. The male advertisement call of two species of Belizean toadfish, Sanopus astrifer and Batrachoides gilberti, were found to significantly differ. These data, coupled with data in the literature suggest an influence of habitat characteristics on the calling behavior of toadfishes. Additionally, acoustic playback experiments were employed to investigate the role of male courtship sounds in the Malawi cichlid species, Tramitichromis intermedius. Playback results indicated that male sounds may initiate egg-laying behavior in females, but may not be behaviorally relevant to conspecific males. A discussion of confounding factors in aquarium playback experiments is presented. Technical aspects of fish sound recording, playback, and analysis were also examined to provide information for future fish bioacoustics studies. It was determined that digital cameras are a useful method of recording fish sounds to describe metric characteristics; however, temporal parameters are more accurately captured by hydrophones, which are optimal for use in scientific description of fish sounds. Underwater speakers commonly used in fish playback experiments were tested for fidelity when producing a low-frequency pulsed fish sound. The Electro-Voice UW30 speaker was found to perform the best playback at low sound pressure levels (<120 dB re 1 μPa) and at short distances (< 15 cm). The Clark Synthesis AQ339 speaker performed the best playback at higher sound pressure levels (>120 dB re 1 μPa) and at greater distances than the UW30. Many fish sounds have been described in the literature; however, there is no standardization of sample size used in species descriptions. A method is presented that can be used to estimate the level of inclusiveness of sound variability in sound descriptions, and to approximate sufficient sample sizes of recordings. The courtship calls of Dascyllus albisella and Batrachoides gilberti were examined to illustrate this method and to provide a benchmark for future sound descriptions.

付記する学位プログラム名: 霊長類学・ワイルドライフサイエンス・リーディング大学院 / 京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(理学) / 甲第22298号 / 理博第4612号 / 新制||理||1661(附属図書館) / 京都大学大学院理学研究科生物科学専攻 / (主査)教授 幸島 司郎, 教授 平田 聡, 教授 伊谷 原一 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Science / Kyoto University / DGAM

Red grouper (Epinephelus morio) are long-lived, commercially important, soniferous fish belonging to the family Epinephelidae. Found throughout the western North Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico, they are protogynous hermaphrodites, and peak spawning occurs from March through May. Unlike many grouper species, red grouper do not form large spawning aggregations; rather, they form small polygynous groups, and remain in relatively close proximity to rocky depressions excavated in the sandy bottom by males. This excavation activity creates structure and habitat for a wide variety of species, and as a result, red grouper are a keystone species on the West Florida Shelf. While extensive life-history information exists, largely from fishery catches, little is known about sound production or behavior of red grouper in their natural environment. Passive acoustic recordings combined with simultaneous digital video recordings were used to investigate sonic activity and behavior of red grouper on the Steamboat Lumps and Madison-Swanson marine reserves on the West Florida Shelf. Red grouper were found to produce a unique series of low-frequency (180 Hz peak) pulses, consisting of 1-4 brief (0.15 s) broadband pulses and a 0.5-2 s down-swept "buzz" (i.e., short call); occasionally these were followed by a rapid series of 10-50 broadband pulses (i.e., pulse train). Sound production was observed throughout the day and night, but most sounds occurred between sunrise and sunset, with a noticeable increase during late afternoon. Behaviors associated with sound production included territorial displays and courtship interactions, indicating that sound production is likely related to spawning activity. Thus, monitoring red grouper using passive acoustics could be an effective tool in fisheries management and conservation efforts.

<p>  </p> <p>This thesis is a book length collection of poetry. Divided into four sections, the book explores longing, distance, and often reckons with absence, as the poems attempt to overcome absence to achieve connection. Each of the first three sections seek to reach connection in their own distinct ways: the first through engaging the natural world, the second through exploring universal challenges of the human condition, and the third through place and location. The fourth and final section displays connections achieved or reimagines absence as something that can take on a presence through language and art. Many poems throughout the book stem from personal experience, longing for a lover or reimagining childhood experiences. Other poems step outside of the self to explore historical figures, events, or places. Many poems blend personal experiences with historical or scientific research to arrive somewhere new. The poems range from narrative to lyric and often engage modes such as elegy, reverie, meditation, and ars poetica. The poems possess a strong attention to sound and line and often utilize horizontal whitespace to physically manifest absence or motion on the page. In <em>Smallest Excavations</em>, the poet can be thought of as a collector—of snippets of memories, factoids, places, people, and natural wonders. What is collected is changed by the speaker’s poetic rendering, just as what is collected changes and molds the speaker’s identity.</p>

Le traitement et la synthèse des sons environnementaux sont devenue un sujet important. Une classe des sons, qui est très important pour la constitution d'environnements sonore, est la classe des textures sonores. Les textures sonores sont décrit par des relations stochastiques et qui contient des composantes non-sinusoïdales à caractère fortement bruité. Il a été montré récemment que la reconnaissance de textures sonores est basée sur des mesures statistiques caractérisant les enveloppes dans les bandes critiques. Il y actuellement très peu d'algorithmes qui permettent à imposer des propriétés statistiques de façon explicite lors de la synthèse de sons. L'algorithme qui impose l'ensemble de statistique qui est perceptivement relevant pour les textures sonore est très couteuse en temps de calcul. Nous proposons une nouvelle approche d'analyse-synthèse qui permet une analyse des statistiques relevant et un mécanisme efficace d'imposer ces statistiques dans le domaine temps-fréquence. La représentation temps-fréquence étudié dans cette thèse est la transformée de Fourier à court terme. Les méthodes proposées par contre sont plus générale et peuvent être généralisé à d'autres représentations temps-fréquence reposant sur des banques de filtres si certaines contraintes sont respectées. L'algorithme proposé dans cette thèse ouvre plusieurs perspectives. Il pourrait être utilisé pour générer des textures sonores à partir d'une description statistique créée artificiellement. Il pourrait servir de base pour des transformations avancées comme le morphing, et on pourrait aussi imaginer à utiliser le modèle pour développer un contrôle sémantique de textures sonores. / The processing of environmental sounds has become an important topic in various areas. Environmental sounds are mostly constituted of a kind of sounds called sound textures. Sound textures are usually non-sinusoidal, noisy and stochastic. Several researches have stated that human recognizes sound textures with statistics that characterizing the envelopes of auditory critical bands. Existing synthesis algorithms can impose some statistical properties to a certain extent, but most of them are computational intensive. We propose a new analysis-synthesis framework that contains a statistical description that consists of perceptually important statistics and an efficient mechanism to adapt statistics in the time-frequency domain. The quality of resynthesised sound is at least as good as state-of-the-art but more efficient in terms of computation time. The statistic description is based on the STFT. If certain conditions are met, it can also adapt to other filter bank based time-frequency representations (TFR). The adaptation of statistics is achieved by using the connection between the statistics on TFR and the spectra of time-frequency domain coefficients. It is possible to adapt only a part of cross-correlation functions. This allows the synthesis process to focus on important statistics and ignore the irrelevant parts, which provides extra flexibility. The proposed algorithm has several perspectives. It could possibly be used to generate unseen sound textures from artificially created statistical descriptions. It could also serve as a basis for transformations like stretching or morphing. One could also expect to use the model to explore semantic control of sound textures.

Purpose: This study will identify that patients with chronic neck pain have an altered autonomic functioning compared to a control group, and that manipulation might directly influence the autonomic nervous system as measured by using a fully automated pupillometry system. Subjects: 100 chronic pain patients and 50 control subjects participated in this study to achieve a power of 0.80, effect size of 0.5, and a type I error rate of 0.05 for two-tailed hypothesis testing. Method: A quasi-experimental design was be used. The ANOVA and Chi square test were used to establish homogeneity of baseline characteristics. The Mann-Whitney U test was performed to compare the pre-intervention pupil diameter amongst the groups. The Friedman's test was used to determine the pupil diameter change during the three measurements. The Wilcoxen Signed-ranks test was used to analyze the difference in pupil size between the pre- and post-intervention measures and to determine if there was a difference in pupil diameter between the two groups undergoing the thoracic manipulation. The Kruskal-Wallis test was used to compare the pupil diameter change to the presence of joint sounds. And the Fisher's Exact test was used to determine the relationship between the number of pops and the VAS change score > 13mm. Results: This study demonstrated that the chronic pain group had a statistically significant smaller pupil diameter than the healthy control group (P=0.022). Manipulation resulted in a relative increase in pupil diameter following the manipulation, however this was not statistical significant. There was a statistical significant decrease in pupil diameter in the placebo group (pConclusions: It appears that a T3-T4 manipulation results in a relative non-specific increase in sympathetic activity. Recommendations: Manipulation may be used by physical therapists to affect the autonomic nervous system. Visual pupil assessment may become part of the evaluation process to identify patients that might present with autonomic dysfunction and to determine the effect of treatment modalities.

Some fish produce sounds for a variety of reasons, such as to find mates, defend their territory, or maintain cohesion within their group. These sounds could be used to non-intrusively detect the presence of fish and potentially to estimate their number (or density) over large areas and long time periods. However, many fish sounds have not yet been associated to specific species, which limits the usefulness of this approach. While recording fish sounds in tanks is reasonably straightforward, it presents several problems: many fish do not produce sounds in captivity or their behavior and sound production is altered significantly, and the complex acoustic propagation conditions in tanks often leads to distorted measurements. The work presented in this thesis aims to address these issues by providing methodologies to record, detect, and identify species-specific fish sounds in the wild. A set of hardware and software solutions are developed to simultaneously record fish sounds, acoustically localize the fish in three-dimensions, and record video to identify the fish and observe their behavior. Three platforms have been developed and tested in the field. The first platform, referred to as the large array, is composed of six hydrophones connected to an AMAR acoustic recorder and two open-source autonomous video cameras (FishCams) that were developed during this thesis. These instruments are secured to a PVC frame of dimension 2 m x 2 m x 3 m that can be transported and assembled in the field. The hydrophone configuration for this array was defined using a simulated annealing optimization approach that minimized localization uncertainties. This array provides the largest field of view and most accurate acoustic localization, and is well suited to long-term deployments (weeks). The second platform, referred to as the mini array, uses a single FishCam and four hydrophones connected to a SoundTrap acoustic recorder on a one cubic meter PVC frame; this array can be deployed more easily in constrained locations or on rough/uneven seabeds. The third platform, referred to as the mobile array, consists of four hydrophones connected to a SoundTrap recorder and mounted on a tethered Trident underwater drone with built-in video, allowing remote control and real-time positioning in response to observed fish presence, rather than long-term deployments as for the large and mini arrays. For each array, acoustic localization is performed by measuring time-difference of arrivals between hydrophones and estimating the sound-source location using linearized (for the large array) or non-linear (for the mini and mobile arrays) inversion. Fish sounds are automatically detected and localized in three dimensions, and sounds localized within the field of view of the camera(s) are assigned to a fish species by manually reviewing the video recordings. The three platforms were deployed at four locations off the East coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada, and allowed the identification of sounds from quillback rockfish (Sebastes maliger), copper rockfish (Sebastes caurinus), and lingcod (Ophiodon elongatus), species that had not been documented previously to produce sounds. While each platform developed during this thesis has its own set of advantages and limitations, using them in coordination helps identify fish sounds over different habitats and with various budget and logistical constraints. In an effort to make passive acoustics a more viable way to monitor fish in the wild, this thesis also investigates the use of automatic detection and classification algorithms to efficiently find fish sounds in large passive acoustic datasets. The proposed approach detects acoustic transients using a measure of spectrogram variance and classifies them as “noise” or “fish sounds” using a binary classifier. Five different classification algorithms were trained and evaluated on a dataset of more than 96,000 manually annotated examples of fish sounds and noise from five locations off Vancouver Island. The classification algorithm that performed best (random forest) has an Fscore of 0.84 (Precision = 0.82,Recall = 0.86) on the test dataset. The analysis of 2.5 months of acoustic data collected in a rockfish conservation area off Vancouver Island shows that the proposed detector can be used to efficiently explore large datasets, formulate hypotheses, and help answer practical conservation questions. / Graduate

No description available.

Sound quality analysis is a tool designed to help determine customer preferences, which can be used to help the designer improve product quality. Many industries desire to know how the consuming public perceives their product, as this affects the product life and success. This research investigates which of the six sewing machines provided by Viking Sewing Machine Group (VSM group) consumers find most acoustically appealing. The sound quality analysis methods used include both jury based listening tests and quantitative sound quality metrics from empirical equations. The results from both methods are completely independent and are shown to have a very strong correlation. The procedures and results of both methods, jury listening tests and mathematical metrics, are presented. Near field sound intensity scans identified acoustic hot spots and give direction for possible design modifications to improve the acoustic signature of the two top tier machines, the Designer 1 and Creative 2144 (Husqvarna Viking and Pfaff respectively). This research determined that the entry level Pfaff Select 1530 has the most acoustically appealing sound of the six machines evaluated. In addition, it was also determined that a reduction in the higher frequency sounds produced by the machines is preferred over a reduction in the lower frequency sounds. Further investigations, including an evaluation of machine isolation and startup sounds, were also performed. The machine isolation results are highly dependant on the individual machine being evaluated and would require independent evaluation. In the machine startup sound assessment, it was discovered that again the Pfaff Select 1530 has the preferred sound. Near field acoustic intensity scans provide additional information on locations of strong acoustic radiation. The near field scans provided valuable design information. The acoustic "hot" spots were discovered to exist in the lower portions of the machines near the main stepper motor in the Designer 1, and radiating from the bottom plate of the machine in the Pfaff Creative 2144. This analysis has led to various design modifications that could be implemented to improve the sound quality of the machines, specifically the Designer 1 and the Creative 2144.

This thesis investigates the effect of incorporating various information visualisation techniques and non-speech sounds (i.e. auditory icons and earcons) in email browsing. This empirical work consisted of three experimental phases. The first experimental phase aimed at finding out the most usable visualisation techniques for presenting email information. This experiment involved the development of two experimental email visualisation approaches which were called LinearVis and MatrixVis. These approaches visualised email messages based on a dateline together with various types of email information such as the time and the senders. The findings of this experiment were used as a basis for the development of a further email visualisation approach which was called LinearVis II. This novel approach presented email data based on multi-coordinated views. The usability of messages retrieval in this approach was investigated and compared to a typical email client in the second experimental phase. Users were required to retrieve email messages in the two experiments with the provided relevant information such as the subject, status and priority. The third experimental phase aimed at exploring the usability of retrieving email messages by using other type of email data, particularly email threads. This experiment investigated the synergic use of graphical representations with non-speech sounds (Multimodal Metaphors), graphical representations and textual display to present email threads and to communicate contextual information about email threads. The findings of this empirical study demonstrated that there is a high potential for using information visualisation techniques and non-speech sounds (i.e. auditory icons and earcons) to improve the usability of email message retrieval. Furthermore, the thesis concludes with a set of empirically derived guidelines for the use of information visualisation techniques and non-speech sound to improve email browsing. / Taibah University in Medina and the Ministry of Higher Education in Saudi Arabia.