The task of navigating and orienting oneself in an unknown environment might seem arbitrary to most people. For a person with a visual impairment however, it can prove to be a challenge. Much research has been conducted to provide useful software solutions to aid this problem. Nevertheless, not enough research has been put into studying the use of our everyday sounds for such software. The present thesis is aimed at evaluating the usefulness of utilising diegetic spatial audio. After a real environment was replicated in a virtual audio environment without visual input, 16 sound students from the University of Skövde were asked to perform the same set of tasks in the virtual and the real environment. The results indicated that diegetic spatial audio is an important part of navigating without vision and that the experiment would be interesting to perform on a larger scale with visually impaired participants.

The purpose of this study is to establish criteria that will be valid for the selection through evaluation of social studies materials for grades one through six in the Alameda Unified School District. The school system feels a need for a rich variety of audio-visual instructional materials for their program so that its teachers might enrich the curriculum of the learner. It is recognized that many varied experiences will increase learning on the part of the student and will help him better to meet life with what he is familiar and has perceived. Kingsley gives the secret of securing and maintaining attention as change, novelty, interest, and meeting a need. It is with this conception that the school system is seeking to develop a list of materials that will become an integral part of the social studies curriculum. Children learn more by seeing than by hearing. The sensory mechanism of the eye is quicker than that of the ear. Morgan states that the child is more susceptible to some stimuli than to others and not because some have more original significance. The United States Navy Department published a Training Aids Manual which indicates that students learn up to 35 per cent more in a given time and remember the facts learned up to 55 per cent longer when teachers use visual material. The Payne Fund Studies have shown that little children attending motion pictures will grasp three out of every five facts that an adult grasps. These children were tested three months from the time they first saw the picture. At the end of this period it was found that they still remembered 90 per cent of what they saw. This points to the conclusive evidence that learning with pictures is not only satisfying to the learner but also makes a lasting impression upon the physical receptors. The visual perceiving of a sound motion picture full of action combined with the sound effects, such as might be found in a film, showing the woodsman cutting the tree and then the terrific crash, is a dynamic way of teaching.

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Loudspeakers are used professionally and for leisure as a device which presents audio information to a listener. Loudspeakers “color” this information in different ways because of different properties, which they inherit from the decisions made in the design process. This study investigated the audibility of phase distortion in loudspeaker systems in ecologically valid environments using different types of program material and levels of group-delay. 13 subjects participated in a listening test, each performing 48 trials across various conditions. Results revealed significant differences in the ability to differentiate between reference and impaired signals based on program material and impairment level. Notably, participants demonstrated better discrimination for simple transient sounds compared to a mixed music recording. These results suggest that phase distortion may be less audible in mixed music reproduction than in click-like sounds. However, findings indicate a lower audible threshold for phase distortion compared to existing literature for click-like stimuli. Overall, while phase distortion may not always be audible, consideration for it can be relevant for achieving high audio quality in loudspeaker systems. These findings hopefully contribute to the understanding of phase distortion's perceptual effects and its implications for audio engineering and consumer electronics design.

Smart musical instruments are an emerging class of digital musical instruments designed for music creation in an interconnected Internet of Musical Things scenario. These instruments aim to integrate embedded computation, real-time feature extraction, gesture acquisition, and networked communication technologies. As embedded computers become more capable and new embedded audio platforms are developed, new avenues for real-time embedded gesture acquisition open up. Expressive guitar technique recognition is the task of detecting notes and classifying the playing techniques used by the musician on the instrument. Real-time recognition of expressive guitar techniques in a smart guitar would allow players to control sound synthesis or to wirelessly interact with a wide range of interconnected devices and stage equipment during performance. Despite expressive guitar technique recognition being a well-researched topic in the field of Music Information Retrieval, the creation of a lightweight real-time recognition system that can be deployed on an embedded platform still remains an open problem. In this thesis, expressive guitar technique recognition is investigated by focusing on real-time execution, and the execution of deep learning inference on resource-constrained embedded computers. Initial efforts have focused on clearly defining the challenges of embedded real-time music information retrieval, and on the creation of a first, fully embedded, real-time expressive guitar technique recognition system. The insight gained, led to the refinement of the various steps of the proposed recognition pipeline. As a first refinement step, a novel procedure for the optimization of onset detectors was developed. The proposed procedure adopts an evolutionary algorithm to find parameter configurations that are optimal both in terms of detection accuracy and latency. A subsequent study is devoted to shedding light on the performance of generic deep learning inference engines for embedded real-time audio classification. This consisted of a comparison of four common inferencing libraries, which focus on the applicability of each library to real-time audio inference, and their performance in terms of execution time and several additional metrics. Different insights from these studies supported the development of a new expressive guitar technique classifier, which is accompanied by an in-depth analysis of different aspects of the recognition problem. Finally, the experience collected during these studies culminated in the definition of a procedure to deploy deep learning inference to a prominent embedded platform. These investigations have been shown to improve the state-of-the-art by proposing approaches that surpass previous alternatives and providing new knowledge on problems and tools that can aid the creation of a smart guitar. The new knowledge provided was also adopted for embedded audio tasks that differ from real-time expressive guitar technique recognition.

In recent years, wireless audio devices have become a staple of our everyday lives. The growing demands for low-latency and multi-speaker wireless audio streaming have led to the adoption of various technologies such as Wi-Fi and a combination of Bluetooth and other proprietary radio links. Since Bluetooth has a fairly limited range and a peer-to-peer topology, it is unsuitable for streaming audio directly to multiple devices. This is where Wi-Fi based systems gained popularity, owing to their high bandwidth and flexible architecture to support audio streaming to multiple devices over larger distances. This however, comes at the cost of high power consumption and non-deterministic packet latency. With the advent of Bluetooth LE Audio, we now have a framework for broadcast audio streaming over the power efficient Bluetooth LE standard. This thesis explores the performance characteristics of Bluetooth LE Audio systems and draws a comparison with the current landscape of Wi-Fi based audio solutions. This performance data is further used to develop a proof-of-concept LE Audio repeater system, which could help solve the range limitation that has plagued Bluetooth devices in the past. For the specific system developed, a power consumption of around 14 mA was obtained, which is a fraction of the power required by equivalent Wi-Fi based systems. We also obtained a deterministic and relatively low latency of 34 ms and were able to demonstrate the feasibility of implementing repeater nodes using Bluetooth LE Audio. / Under de senaste åren har trådlösa ljudenheter blivit en stapelvara i vår vardag. De växande kraven på trådlöst strömmande ljud med låg tidsfördröjning och flera högtalare har resulterat i olika tekniker såsom WiFi och en kombination av Bluetooth och tillverkarspecifika radiolösningar. Eftersom Bluetooth har begränsningar både i räckvidd och topologi, är den olämplig för direktströmmande ljud till flera enheter. Därför har WiFi-baserade system blivit populära, med sin högre bandbredd och flexibla arkitektur som stöder strömmande ljud till flera enheter över större avstånd. Detta kommer dock på bekostnad av hög strömförbrukning och icke-deterministisk tidsfördröjning. Med tillkomsten av Bluetooth LE Audio, har vi nu ett ramverk för att strömma ljud över den strömsnåla Bluetooth LE-standarden. Denna avhandling utforskar prestandaegenskaper hos Bluetooth LE Audio-system och gör en jämförelse med nuvarande typer av WiFi-baserade ljudlösningar. Resultatet används vidare för att utveckla en prototyp till repeater-system för LE Audio, som kan hjälpa till att öka räckvidden som har hittills har varit en begränsande faktor hos Bluetooth-enheter. För den utvecklade prototypen erhölls en strömförbrukning på ca 14 mA, vilket är en bråkdel av den effekt som krävs av motsvarande WiFi-baserade system. Vi fick också en deterministisk och relativt låg fördröjning på 34 ms och kunde därmed visa att det är genomförbart att implementera repeater-noder för Bluetooth LE Audio.

The purpose of this study is to develop an in-service training program for the teachers of the Sherman Elementary Schools in the use of audio-visual aids and materials as a means toward effective child growth and development.

Audio-visual aids can help to cause the student to realize that "government" is an animate, ever-changing thing that affects him in many ways. The purpose of this paper is to suggest ways in which government courses may be given life.

The problem of this study is to determine, if possible, whether any significant difference in achievement existed when the eighth-grade social studies were taught by two methods; namely, the textual method and the textual method supplemented by audio-visual aids.

The problem of this investigation was two fold: first, to obtain information on available auditory and visual aids adaptable to teaching reading on the low-first-grade level; and second, to determine the progress in general reading efficiency of three groups of beginning readers who were taught by three different methods.