Introduction

• What makes audio sound good?
  Francis Rumsey / Research advisor↓summary

  summary

  This issue of the NHK R&D bulletin is concerned with "Perception and recognition of sound". In particular it contains some interesting articles on the way in which human listeners respond to reproduced sound, including an emphasis on the emotional response that arises when certain types of sound or music are played. It leads me to ask the apparently simple question : ‘What makes audio sound good?’ By audio, I mean reproduced sound of one sort or another, using loudspeakers or headphones, as opposed to naturally occurring sound.

Paper

• Development of Radio and Television Receiver with Functions to Assist Hearing of Elderly People.
  Atsushi IMAI, Tohru TAKAGI and Hiroyuki TAKEISHI↓summary

  summary

  Elderly people often find that the speech of contemporary broadcasts is too fast for comfortable listening. In order to respond to such needs, we have developed a new radio and television receiver that enables users to reduce the speed of speech delivery while maintaining the voice pitch and quality, without overrunning the entire program time slot. Practical assessments by elderly people have confirmed its effectiveness for hearing comfort. In addition to this function, efficacious sound level compression technology is also incorporated to compensate for the so-called "recruitment phenomenon". Radio and television receivers incorporating this technology will provide an integrated hearing compensation function for elderly people.

• Classification of Words Expressing the "Emotional-Affects" Based on the Subjective Similarity Measures
  Satoshi OODE, Atsushi IMAI, Akio ANDO and Takashi TANIGUCHI↓summary

  summary

  The Japanese word "Kandoh" is defined as a "strong feeling when experiencing beautiful or wonderful things. " and it could be translated into English as "emotional affect". There have been no studies that tried to define the mental state of emotional affect. The purpose of our study is to describe emotional affect for evaluation of broadcast programs. First, we developed a questionnaire about emotional affect and picked out words which expressed the situation of emotional affect from the answers. Furthermore, we calculated a distance between words by similarity measures based on subjective evaluations. The results are that 1) the emotional affect could be classified into a few main groups, and 2) individual groups were classified by factors including the object and kind of emotion, not the emotion itself. These results suggest that emotional affect is a general term describing the conditions of mind such as affirmative impressions and uncontrollable responses due to a very strong passive and compulsory stimulus.