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A Better Sound

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MATLAB for Psychologists

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Abstract

MATLAB is an extremely powerful tool for dealing with sounds. You can use MATLAB for sound synthesis as well as for sound analysis. It is possible to create your own custom sound from scratch, and it is also possible to edit at will an existing sound. Furthermore, MATLAB can be used to understand several acoustical characteristics of digital sounds. This chapter shows how to do all of these.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Although MATLAB enables the generation of sounds at several sample rates, 44,100 Hz is the most used. This is, for example, the sample rate of an audio CD.

  2. 2.

    Note that wavplay is only for use with windows machines.

  3. 3.

    Note that it is possible to generate white noises according to various distributions. For example, the rand function returns random and uniformly distributed numbers. Therefore, our white noise would be a “uniform white noise.” If we use randn, a function that generates random numbers according to the normal distribution, we would have a Gaussian white noise instead. See, for instance, Wikipedia for further details.

  4. 4.

    Convolution is an operation done in time. Thanks to Fourier transform properties, the convolution operation in time become a simple product in frequency between the Fourier transform of the noise and the filter frequency response.

References

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Suggested Readings

  • There are a number of MATLAB tools developed by researchers that can be used in audition. Here is a certainly incomplete list of the available tools:

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  • Grassi M, Soranzo A (2009) MLP: a MATLAB toolbox for rapid and reliable auditory threshold estimations. Behav Res Methods 41:20–28 (This paper implements several psychoacoustic experiment together with sound generators and modifiers.)

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  • Peeters G, Giordano BL, Susini P, Misdariis N, McAdams S (2011) The Timbre Toolbox: Extracting audio descriptors from musical signals. J Acoust Soc Am 130:2902–2916 (This paper shows a toolbox for the analysis of musical signals.)

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  • Malcom Stanley has released a toolbox that implements several popular auditory models:

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  • http://cobweb.ecn.purdue.edu/∼malcolm/interval/1998-010/

  • Pérez E, Rodriguez-Esteban R (2006) Oreja: a MATLAB environment for the design of psychoacoustic stimuli. Behav Res Methods 38:574–578 (The Oreja software package was designed to study speech intelligibility. It is a tool that allows manipulation of speech signals to facilitate study of human speech perception.)

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  • Readers interested in MATLAB tools for audition should take a look at the following journals: Behavior Research Methods and the Journal of Neuroscience Methods. Both journals often publish MATLAB tools for audition.

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  • Readers Interested in more technical and advanced audio processing should read the following book:

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  • McLoughlin I (2009) Applied speech and audio processing: With Matlab examples. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

    Book  Google Scholar 

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Via Marosticana 168, Dueville, VI, Italy

    Mauro Borgo

  2. School of Social Science & Law, University of Teesside, Middlesbrough, UK

    Alessandro Soranzo

  3. Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Padova, Italy

    Massimo Grassi

Authors
  1. Mauro Borgo
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  2. Alessandro Soranzo
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  3. Massimo Grassi
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© 2012 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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Borgo, M., Soranzo, A., Grassi, M. (2012). A Better Sound. In: MATLAB for Psychologists. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-2197-9_5

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