TY - JOUR A1 - Himmelein, Hendrik A1 - von Berg, Markus A1 - Pörschmann, Christoph A1 - Steffens, Jochen T1 - Influence of mental effort on sound evaluations in virtual and real experimental environments JF - Frontiers in Virtual Reality N2 - Psychoacoustic research increasingly relies on virtual reality (VR) to account for the complexity of acoustic scenarios and enhance the ecological validity of laboratory findings. However, recent studies suggest that virtual environments can alter mental effort compared to real-world settings, for example, through increased perceptual complexity which in turn may affect auditory perception.This could bias experimental outcomes and compromise the ecological validity of studies conducted in VR. To investigate this, a 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment was conducted to assess whether VR environments increase mental effort and thereby influence auditory perception. A real office environment was visually reconstructed in Unity and presented to the participants via a head-mounted display (HMD) and compared to its real counterpart. Participants in both environments were asked to retrospectively rate the loudness and unpleasantness of dynamically rendered binaural office noise scenarios presented via headphones and to report perceived sound sources. Moreover, participants were divided into two groups to induce different levels of mental effort. One group was asked to listen only to the sounds, while the other performed the Stroop Color-Word interference test in parallel. The results show no significant difference in the overall induced mental effort between environment conditions. Furthermore, performing the Stroop test had an effect on loudness and unpleasantness that was mediated by subjective effort. The results also suggest that auditory jugment depend primarily on individual sound properties, regardless of the visual environment. KW - Psychoakustik KW - Virtuelle Realität KW - Lautwahrnehmung KW - Head-mounted Display Y1 - 2025 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:due62-opus-57985 SN - 2673-4192 VL - 6 PB - Frontiers Media SA ER - TY - CHAP A1 - von Berg, Markus A1 - Prinz, Lukas A1 - Steffens, Jochen T1 - Comparing individual perception of timbre and reverberance BT - Proceedings of the 24th International Congress on Acoustics N2 - Room reverberation alters the spatial impression and timbre of a sound by modulating its spectral and temporal characteristics. Thus, we argue that, on a perceptual level, reverberation basically breaks down into interaural differences and spectro-temporal cues and that the separation of a perceived timbre into a sound source and a surrounding room is a purely cognitive process. To investigate the connection between the perception of reverberation cues and timbre analysis, the sensitivity for changes in reverberation was compared to timbre perception abilities. The Timbre Perception Test was used to measure the perception of the temporal envelope, spectral centroid, and spectral flux of artificial sounds. Sensitivity for changes in reverberation time was tested with a discrimination task using speech and noise with speech-alike spectral and temporal envelopes as source signals. Musical and acoustical expertise was assessed through the Goldsmiths Musical Sophistication Index and self-reports on experience with and knowledge of acoustics. There was a considerable correlation between timbre and reverberance perception ability, but timbre perception and academic experience predicted only 41% of the variance in reverberance perception. Still, perception abilities related to similar acoustical phenomena seem to be better indicators of listening skills than self-reports on acoustical or musical expertise. KW - Timbre KW - Klangfarbe KW - Reverberation KW - Nachhall Y1 - 2022 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:due62-opus-38706 UR - https://ica2022korea.org/data/Proceedings_A11.pdf PB - International Commission for Acoustics CY - Gyeoungju, Südkorea ER - TY - JOUR A1 - von Berg, Markus A1 - Wolf, Anna-Christina A1 - Steffens, Jochen T1 - Age- and Sex-Related Differences in Music Requests on a Radio Show for Children JF - Music & Science N2 - In research on the development of musical preferences, children are often asked either to evaluate musical pieces that have been previously selected by adult experimenters, or to give self-reports on preferences for different musical styles. This study involved analyzing a sample of 1,412 freely and publicly expressed music requests from children aged between 4 and 11 years taken from a German radio program, with regard to age- and sex-specific differences. The music was categorized into genres, as listed on Spotify, and examined using methods of music information retrieval provided by the Spotify Developer application programming interface. Results showed that, at younger ages, the requests were generally more evenly distributed across different genres. Regarding single genres, we observed small positive relationships between age and the likelihood of requesting the genres pop or electro and small negative relationships between age and the likelihood of requesting A capella, German songwriter, indie, theme songs, or children's music. Furthermore, we found that boys requested significantly more rock or hip-hop, whereas girls had a higher tendency to ask for pop. Finally, age- (but no sex-) related differences regarding the Spotify features of valence and liveness of the requested music were found, which were related to the preference for children's music at younger ages. The results thus suggest that previous findings regarding differences between boys and girls and an increasing formation of distinct genre preferences during infancy also apply to single song requests made on a radio show. KW - children’s music KW - children’s musical preferences KW - genre preferences KW - music requests KW - musical identity KW - DFG Publikationskosten KW - HSD Publikationsfonds Y1 - 2024 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:due62-opus-46588 SN - 2059-2043 N1 - Funding: Funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – 532148125 and supported by the central publication fund of Hochschule Düsseldorf University of Applied Sciences. VL - 7 SP - 1 EP - 16 PB - Sage Publications ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Steffens, Jochen A1 - Blättermann, Patrick A1 - Sattler, Maximilian A1 - Tang, Kevin T1 - How does a credible voice sound? JF - The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America N2 - Credibility is a crucial social factor that influences people's perception and decision-making. This study explores the acoustic attributes that define credible speech compared to neutral and ironic speech. A custom-built German corpus was developed, containing speech samples recorded from amateurs to enhance ecological validity. The study extracted a broad set of audio features from these samples, employing recursive feature elimination to identify the most influential attributes. These were then analyzed using a machine-learning-supported multinomial logistic regression model. The results indicated significant differences in the acoustic features associated with credible speech compared to neutral and ironic speech. Key findings include the role of a higher energy level (1st mel-frequency cepstral coefficient) in credible compared to neutral and ironic speech and a higher speaking rate in both credible and ironic compared to neutral speech. Also, irony is characterized by more high-frequency content (mean spectral centroid) compared to credible or neutral speech. Gender differences in spoken irony involve a greater influence of speaking rate in women's speech, while high pitch plays a more significant role in men's speech. This research thus contributes to the understanding of how credibility is conveyed through speech and offers insights for applications in communication, media, and artificial intelligence. The study also highlights the methodological advancements made by incorporating a diverse range of acoustic features and employing a robust machine-learning framework. KW - Sprechen KW - Glaubwürdigkeit KW - Akustik Y1 - 2025 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:hbz:due62-opus-53133 SN - 1520-8524 VL - 157 IS - 5 SP - 3780 EP - 3792 PB - Acoustical Society of America ER - TY - CHAP A1 - Hüsen, Jonsa A1 - von Berg, Markus A1 - Steffens, Jochen T1 - Evaluating the Effectiveness of Virtual Listening Tests for Balanced Armature Headphone Drivers T2 - AES International Conference on Headphone Technology 2025 August 27–29, Espoo, Finland Y1 - 2025 UR - https://aes.org/publications/elibrary-page/?id=22929 IS - 3 PB - Audio Engineering Society ER -