Wolfgang Ellermeier - Profile on Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Wolfgang Ellermeier

A Listening Test System for Automotive Audio - Part 4: Comparison of Attribute Ratings Made by Expert and Non-Expert Listeners

Journal of The Audio Engineering Society, Oct 1, 2007

Frontiers in Robotics and AI, Feb 21, 2020

For effective virtual realities, "presence," the feeling of "being there" in a virtual environmen... more For effective virtual realities, "presence," the feeling of "being there" in a virtual environment (VR), is deemed an essential prerequisite. Several studies have assessed the effect of the (non-)availability of auditory stimulation on presence, but due to differences in study design (e.g., virtual realities used, types of sounds included, rendering technologies employed), generalizing the results and estimating the effect of the auditory component is difficult. In two experiments, the influence of an ambient nature soundscape and movement-triggered step sounds were investigated regarding their effects on presence. In each experiment, approximately forty participants walked on a treadmill, thereby strolling through a virtual park environment reproduced via a stereoscopic head-mounted display (HMD), while the acoustical environment was delivered via noise-canceling headphones. In Experiment 1, conditions with the ambient soundscape and the step sounds either present or absent were combined in a 2 × 2 within-subjects design, supplemented with an additional "no-headphones" control condition. For the synchronous playback of step sounds, the probability of a step being taken was estimated by an algorithm using the HMD's sensor data. The results of Experiment 1 show that questionnaire-based measures of presence and realism were influenced by the soundscape but not by the reproduction of steps, which might be confounded with the fact that the perceived synchronicity of the sensor-triggered step sounds was rated rather low. Therefore, in Experiment 2, the step-reproduction algorithm was improved and judged to be more synchronous by participants. Consequently, large and statistically significant effects of both kinds of audio manipulations on perceived presence and realism were observed, with the effect of the soundscape being larger than that of including footstep sounds, possibly due to the remaining imperfections in the reproduction of steps. Including an appropriate soundscape or self-triggered footsteps had differential effects on subscales of presence, in that both affected overall presence and realism, while involvement was improved and distraction reduced by the ambient soundscape only.

Task interference plays a role in assessing noise annoyance

Memory & Cognition, Oct 14, 2022

Previous studies suggest that task-irrelevant changing-state sound interferes specifically with t... more Previous studies suggest that task-irrelevant changing-state sound interferes specifically with the processing of serial order information in the focal task (e.g., serial recall from short-term memory), whereas a deviant sound in the auditory background is supposed to divert central attention, thus producing distraction in various types of cognitive tasks. Much of the evidence for this distinction rests on the observed dissociations in auditory distraction between serial and non-serial short-term memory tasks. In this study, both the changing-state effect and the deviation effect were contrasted between serial digit recall and mental arithmetic tasks. In three experiments (two conducted online), changing-state sound was found to disrupt serial recall, but it did not lead to a general decrement in performance in different mental arithmetic tasks. In contrast, a deviant voice in the stream of irrelevant speech sounds did not cause reliable distraction in serial recall and simple addition/subtraction tasks, but it did disrupt a more demanding mental arithmetic task. Specifically, the evaluation of math equations (multiplication and addition/subtraction), which was combined with a pair-associate memory task to increase the task demand, was found to be susceptible to auditory distraction in participants who did not serially rehearse the pair-associates. Together, the results support the assumption that the interference produced by changing-state sound is highly specific to tasks that require serial-order processing, whereas auditory deviants may cause attentional capture primarily in highly demanding cognitive tasks (e.g., mental arithmetic) that cannot be solved through serial rehearsal.

Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Mar 1, 1997

Inequalities on reaction time distribution functions for parallel models with an unlimited capaci... more Inequalities on reaction time distribution functions for parallel models with an unlimited capacity assumption are presented, extending previous work on first-terminating and exhaustive stopping rules to second-terminating processes. This extension thus generates transitions between first-terminating and exhaustive models that might be of interest in situations in which observers behave as if collecting more evidence before a decision is made. Moreover, a generalization of the inequalities is derived and tested in an auditory profile analysis task in which subjects have to decide whether two multitone complexes are of the same or of different spectral shape.

Akustische Messungen an Photovoltaik-Wechselrichtern

Tonal components in tire sounds: refined subjective and computional procedures

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2018

To disentangle the contributions of local and global temporal characteristics of irrelevant speec... more To disentangle the contributions of local and global temporal characteristics of irrelevant speech in native and non-native language, irrelevant speech/sound effects (ISEs) of normal speech, reversed speech, locally time-reversed speech [Ueda et al. (2017). Sci. Rep. 7:1782] and its reversal on serial-recall of visually presented series of digits were examined. ISE experiments were performed with German native listeners (n= 79) and with Japanese native listeners (n= 81), employing both German and Japanese speech with either sample. All conditions involving speech significantly impaired memory performance when compared to a pink-noise control condition. When the native language of each group of listeners was presented, locally time-reversed speech with the shortest segment duration (20 ms), which was highly intelligible, was as equally disruptive as normal speech to the memory task, whereas locally time-reversed speech with longer segment durations (70 or 120 ms) was less disruptive....

The Proceedings of the Annual Convention of the Japanese Psychological Association, 2018

Effect of Direction on Loudness in Individual Binaural Synthesis

Electric vehicles (or hybrid ones) are very silent at low speeds (below 30 km/h) and can be dange... more Electric vehicles (or hybrid ones) are very silent at low speeds (below 30 km/h) and can be dangerous for pedestrian, especially vulnerable ones as visually impaired people. The European founded project eVADER aims at developing a prototype vehicle including an automatic pedestrian detection device and an array of speakers focusing a warning sound in the direction of the pedestrian. The warning sound should be optimized too, in order to be easily detectable while not too loud. Research is conducted in order to investigate the influence of some timbre parameters on the detectability and annoyance of warning sounds. Different warning sounds were synthesized according to a fractional factorial design. Factors were related to three basic timbre parameters. Two laboratory experiments took place. The first one focused on detectability. The task of the listener was to detect an approaching car (20 km/h) as soon as possible. The second experiment was devoted to the unpleasantness of warning sounds. Stimuli were presented to listeners who had to evaluate their unpleasantness on a continuous scale. The tests have shown that some warning sounds can make an electric vehicle as detectable as a diesel car, for a much lower sound level. However, most warning sounds also tend to increase the unpleasantness of the car sound. Nevertheless, some signals seem to provide a good compromise between the two objectives.

Irrelevant speech does not interfere with serial recall in early blind listeners

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2014

Phonological working memory is known be (a) inversely related to the duration of the items to be ... more Phonological working memory is known be (a) inversely related to the duration of the items to be learned (word-length effect), and (b) impaired by the presence of irrelevant speech-like sounds (irrelevant-speech effect). As it is discussed controversially whether these memory disruptions are subject to attentional control, both effects were studied in sighted participants and in a sample of early blind individuals who are expected to be superior in selectively attending to auditory stimuli. Results show that, while performance depended on word length in both groups, irrelevant speech interfered with recall only in the sighted group, but not in blind participants. This suggests that blind listeners may be able to effectively prevent irrelevant sound from being encoded in the phonological store, presumably due to superior auditory processing. The occurrence of a word-length effect, however, implies that blind and sighted listeners are utilizing the same phonological rehearsal mechanis...

Temporal weights for loudness comparisons

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2000

Temporal integration of the loudness of level-fluctuating sounds was investigated using the trial... more Temporal integration of the loudness of level-fluctuating sounds was investigated using the trial-by-trial analysis developed by Berg [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 86, 1743–1746 (1989)]. In a two-interval, forced-choice procedure, two noise samples of 1-s duration were presented on each trial. Their levels were randomly varied every 100 ms by repeatedly, and independently, drawing from normal distributions having expected values of 60 or 61 dB SPL, respectively. The subject’s task was to decide which of the two noise samples sounded louder. Based on a few thousand judgments, conditional psychometric (COSS) functions were estimated in order to determine to what extent each temporal segment contributed to the judgment. Data collected on six subjects showed considerable individual differences in the weighting functions, but—in contrast to averaging techniques widely used in sound evaluation—exhibited a statistically significant trend to accentuate the onset of the noise. These results were comp...

Role of short-term memory in loudness comparisons

The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2003

In an earlier study of the auditory discrimination of time-varying noise bursts [Ellermeier and S... more In an earlier study of the auditory discrimination of time-varying noise bursts [Ellermeier and Schrödl, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 108, 2596 (2000)], listeners were found to place greater weight on the beginning and end of the sounds than on the middle portion. To investigate whether this outcome is due to primacy and recency effects in short-term memory which tend to be sensitive to manipulations of the inter-stimulus interval (ISI), the ISI separating the two noise bursts in a 2IFC task was varied systematically. Six participants performed loudness comparisons on 1-s samples of white noise randomly changing in level every 100 ms. In different blocks of trials, the two noise bursts to be compared were either separated by a 500-ms or a 2-s ISI. COSS analysis [Berg, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 86, 1743–1746 (1989)] of the overall loudness judgments revealed elevated weights for the beginning and end of the noises, as in the earlier study. These weighting patterns were largely unaffected by the man...

Applied Acoustics

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific r... more HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés.

Psychologie in Erziehung und Unterricht

Mit dem Ziel, die Suizidprävention an Schulen zu verbessern, wurden Lehrkräfte und Schulsozialarb... more Mit dem Ziel, die Suizidprävention an Schulen zu verbessern, wurden Lehrkräfte und Schulsozialarbeiter*innen als Gatekeeper ausgebildet. Während bisherige Studien zeigen, dass Gatekeeper-Trainings regelmäßig zu einer Zunahme suizidbezogenen Wissens führen, ist noch nicht erwiesen, wie dieses theoretische Wissen in handlungsbezogenes Wissen umgesetzt werden kann und ob es sich auch auf das Verhalten auswirkt. Deshalb wurden N = 150 Lehrkräfte und in Schulen beratend Tätige zufällig einer Wartelisten-Kontrollgruppe oder einer Trainingsgruppe (12 Stunden) zugewiesen. Handlungsbezogenes Wissen wurde anhand der Reaktionen auf eine fiktive Situation gemessen. Die Anzahl geführter Gespräche wurde vor und nach der Intervention erfasst. Die Teilnehmenden verfügten nach der Gatekeeper-Fortbildung nicht nur über signifikant mehr suizidbezogenes Wissen, sondern schnitten auch in ihrem handlungsbezogenen Wissen besser ab als die Kontrollgruppe. Vor allem aber initiierten sie signifikant mehr Krisengespräche. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass sich durch ein intensives, aktives Üben betonendes und längerdauerndes Training nicht nur das suizidbezogene Wissen zukünftiger Gatekeeper, sondern auch das reale Krisenmanagement verbessern lässt.

Zeitschrift für Entwicklungspsychologie und Pädagogische Psychologie

Zusammenfassung. Um die Suizidprävention an Schulen zu verbessern, wurden psychoedukative Worksho... more Zusammenfassung. Um die Suizidprävention an Schulen zu verbessern, wurden psychoedukative Workshops für Schüler_innen implementiert und angeboten. N=200 Schüler_innen der 8.–10. Jahrgangsstufe wurden zufällig einer Experimental- oder Kontrollgruppe zugewiesen. Vor und nach dem Training sowie nach drei Monaten wurden sie zu ihrem hilfesuchenden und hilfegebendem Verhalten sowie ihrer depressiven Symptomatik befragt. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass besonders die als stärker suizidgefährdet eingestuften Jugendlichen von dem Training durch eine Abnahme ihrer depressiven Symptomatik profitierten. Schüler_innen der Kontrollgruppe verbesserten sich demgegenüber nicht signifikant in ihrer depressiven Symptomatik. Für das hilfesuchende ebenso wie das hilfegebende Verhalten zeigten sich positive Trends, die jedoch nicht statistisch signifikant wurden. Diese Ergebnisse zeigen – wenn auch mit Limitationen aufgrund von Ausfällen durch die Coronapandemie 2020 und durch ein restriktives Vor...

Proceedings of the ICA congress, 2019

In order to study noise annoyance in the laboratory, a total of N=59 participants were exposed to... more In order to study noise annoyance in the laboratory, a total of N=59 participants were exposed to short 5-s segments of pass-by recordings of motor vehicles presented at levels ranging from 50 to 70 dB(A). In Experiment 1, they just rated the annoyance due to sounds on a visual-analogue scale, in Experiment 2, they had to simultaneously perform a visual multiple-object tracking task. Annoyance was judged to be lower when participants were engaged in the cognitively demanding task (in Experiment 2). Presenting sounds spanning two different decibel ranges in separate blocks (in Experiment 1) did not affect the function relating level to perceived annoyance very much, suggesting the judgments to be robust with respect to stimulus range effects. Across both experiments, the magnitude of simultaneously recorded phasic skin conductance responses increased significantly with the sound pressure level of the annoying vehicle sounds. Finally, annoyance ratings tended to be elevated in participants describing themselves as noise sensitive, as assessed using a 52-item questionnaire completed after they had judged the sounds. Observing such systematic relations between noise sensitivity, annoyance, task load during exposure, and psychophysiological responses in the laboratory might contribute to enhancing our understanding of noise annoyance.

In noise-control engineering, one is often faced with the task of identifying the most problemati... more In noise-control engineering, one is often faced with the task of identifying the most problematic of several simultaneous sound sources. Traditionally, this has been done by deriving sound pressure (or intensity) maps by means of a microphone array. This approach does not, however, take psychoacoustic attributes into account. Therefore, a method for deriving loudness maps was developed in an earlier study [Song, Internoise2004, paper 271]. In this study two experiments were done to investigate to which extent perceived loudness depends on the distribution of individual sound sources. Three loudspeakers were positioned 1.5 m from the centre of the listener’s head, one straight ahead, and two 10 degrees to the right and left, respectively. Six participants matched the loudness of either one, or two simultaneous sounds (narrow-band noises with 1-kHz, and 3.15-kHz centre frequencies) to a 2-kHz, 60-dB SPL narrow-band noise placed in the frontal loudspeaker. The two sounds were either o...