arXiv subjects

Tim Ziemer

Publications and source records attributed to Tim Ziemer.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

From Imitation to Innovation: The Divergent Paths of Techno in Germany and the USA

Many documentaries on early house and techno music exist. Here, protagonists from the scenes describe key elements and events that affected the evolution of the music. In the research community, there is consensus that such descriptions have to be examined critically. Yet, there have not been attempts to validate such statements on the basis of audio analyses. In this study, over 9,000 early house and techno tracks from Germany and the United States of America are analyzed using recording studio features, machine learning and inferential statistics. Three observations can be made: 1.) German and US house/techno music are distinct, 2.) US styles are much more alike, and 3.) scarcely evolved over time compared to German house/techno regarding the recording studio features. These findings are in agreement with documented statements and thus provide an audio-based perspective on why techno became a mass phenomenon in Germany but remained a fringe phenomenon in the USA. Observations like these can help the music industry estimate whether new trends will experience a breakthrough or disappear.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2025

Non-verbal Perception of Room Acoustics using Multi Dimensional Scaling Metho

Subjective room acoustics impressions play an important role for the performance and reception of music in concert venues and auralizations. Therefore, room acoustics since the 20th century dealt with the relationship between objective, acoustic parameters and subjective impressions of room acoustics. One common approach is to correlate acoustic measures with experts' subjective ratings of rooms as recalled from their long-term memory, and explain them using acoustical measures. Another approach is to let listeners rate auralized room acoustics on bipolar scales and find objective correlates. In this study, we present an alternative approach to characterizing the subjective impressions of room acoustics. We concolve music with binaural room impulse response measurements and utilize Multi Dimensional Scaling (MDS) to identify the perceptual dimensions of room acoustics. Results show that the perception of room acoustics has $5$ dimensions that can be explained by the (psycho-)acoustical measures echo density, fractal correlation dimension, roughness, loudness, and early decay time.

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arXiv2024

Producer vs. Rapper: Who Dominates the Hip Hop Sound? A Case Study

In hip-hop music, rappers and producers play important, but rather different roles. However, both contribute to the overall sound, as rappers bring in their voice, while producers are responsible for the music composition and mix. In this case report, we trained Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs) with songs produced by Dr. Dre, Rick Rubin and Timbaland using the goniometer and Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCCs). With these maps, we investigate whether hip hop producers have a unique sound profile. Then, we test whether collaborations with the rappers Eminem, Jay-Z, LL Cool J and Nas stick to, or break out of this sound profile. As these rappers are also producers of some songs, we investigate how much their sound profile is influenced by the producers who introduced them to beat making. The results speak a clear language: producers have their own sound profile that is unique concerning the goniometer, and less distinct concerning MFCCs. They dominate the sound of hip hop music over rappers, who emulate the sound profile of the producers who introduced them to beat making.

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arXiv2024

SOMson -- Sonification of Multidimensional Data in Kohonen Maps

Kohonen Maps, aka. Self-organizing maps (SOMs) are neural networks that visualize a high-dimensional feature space on a low-dimensional map. While SOMs are an excellent tool for data examination and exploration, they inherently cause a loss of detail. Visualizations of the underlying data do not integrate well and, therefore, fail to provide an overall picture. Consequently, we suggest SOMson, an interactive sonification of the underlying data, as a data augmentation technique. The sonification increases the amount of information provided simultaneously by the SOM. Instead of a user study, we present an interactive online example, so readers can explore SOMson themselves. Its strengths, weaknesses, and prospects are discussed.

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arXiv2023

Sound Terminology Describing Production and Perception of Sonification

Sonification research is intrinsically interdisciplinary. Consequently, a proper documentation of, and interdisciplinary discourse about a sonification is often hindered by terminology discrepancies between involved disciplines, i.e., the lack of a common sound terminology in sonification research. Without a common ground, a researcher from one discipline may have troubles understanding the implementation and imagining the resulting sound perception of a sonification, if the sonification is described by a researcher from another discipline. To find a common ground, I consulted literature on interdisciplinary research and discourse, identified problems that occur in sonification, and applied the recommended solutions. As a result, I recommend considering three aspects of sonification individually, namely 1.) Sound Design Concept, 2.) Objective and 3.) Method, clarifying which discipline is involved in which aspect, and sticking to this discipline's terminology. As two requirements of sonifications are that they are a) reproducible and b) interpretable, I recommend documenting and discussing every sonification design once using audio engineering terminology, and once using psychoacoustic terminology. The appendix provides comprehensive lists of sound terms from both disciplines, together with relevant literature and a clarification of often misunderstood and misused terms.

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arXiv2023

Three-Dimensional Sonification as a Surgical Guidance Tool

Interactive Sonification is a well-known guidance method in navigation tasks. Researchers have repeatedly suggested the use of interactive sonification in neuronavigation and image-guided surgery. The hope is to reduce clinicians' cognitive load through a relief of the visual channel, while preserving the precision provided through image guidance. In this paper, we present a surgical use case, simulating a craniotomy preparation with a skull phantom. Through auditory, visual, and audiovisual guidance, non-clinicians successfully find targets on a skull that provides hardly any visual or haptic landmarks. The results show that interactive sonification enables novice users to navigate through three-dimensional space with a high precision. The precision along the depth axis is highest in the audiovisual guidance mode, but adding audio leads to higher durations and longer motion trajectories.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2023

Mixing Levels -- A Rock Music Spirit Level App

To date, sonification apps are rare. Music apps on the other hand are widely used. Smartphone users like to play with music. In this manuscript, we present Mixing Levels, a spirit level sonification based on music mixing. Tilting the smartphone adjusts the volumes of 5 musical instruments in a rock music loop. Only when perfectly leveled, all instruments in the mix are well-audible. The app is supposed to be useful and fun. Since the app appears like a music mixing console, people have fun to interact with Mixing Levels, so that learning the sonification is a playful experience.

cs.MM↗

arXiv2023

Goniometers are a Powerful Acoustic Feature for Music Information Retrieval Tasks

Goniometers, also known as Phase Scopes or Vector Scopes, are audio metering tools that help music producers and mixing engineers monitor spatial aspects of a music mix, such as the stereo panorama, the width of single sources, the amount and diffuseness of reverberation as well as phase cancellations that may occur on the sweet-spot and in a mono-mixdown. In addition, they implicitly inform about the dynamics of the sound. Self-organizing maps trained with a goniometer, are consulted to explore the usefulness of this acoustic feature for music information retrieval tasks. One can see that goniometers are able to classify different genres and cluster a single album. The advantage of goniometers is the causality: Music producers and mixing engineers consciously consult goniometers to reach their desired sound, which is not the case for other acoustic features, from Zero-Crossing Rate to Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients.

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arXiv2022

Recommendations to Develop, Distribute and Market Sonification Apps

After decades of research, sonification is still rarely adopted in consumer electronics, software and user interfaces. Outside the science and arts scenes the term sonification seems not well known to the public. As a means of science communication, and in order to make software developers, producers of consumer electronics and end users aware of sonification, we developed, distributed, and promoted Tiltification. This smartphone app utilizes sonification to inform users about the tilt angle of their phone, so that they can use it as a torpedo level. In this paper we report on our app development, distribution and promotion strategies and reflect on their success in making the app in particular, and sonification in general, better known to the public. Finally, we give recommendations on how to develop, distribute and market sonification apps. This article is dedicated to research institutions without commercial interests.

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arXiv2021

The Antenna Base Plays a Crucial Role in Mosquito Courtship Behavior

Mosquitoes are vectors of diseases like malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya and Zika. For mosquito control it is crucial to understand their hearing system, as mosquitoes' courting behavior is mostly auditory. Many nonlinear characteristics of the mosquito hearing organ have been observed through behavioral studies and neural measurements. These enable mosquitoes to detect and synchronize to other mosquitoes. Many hypotheses concerning the role of the flagellum and the fibrillae of the antenna in mosquito hearing have been made, and neural processes have been considered as the origin of the nonlinearities. In this study we introduce a geometric model based on the morphology of the mosquito antenna base. The model produces many of the observed nonlinear characteristics, providing evidence that the base of the antenna plays a crucial role in mosquito hearing. Even without neural processing, the antenna response to sound produces behaviorally relevant cues that can inform about the presence, location and sex of other mosquitoes.

nlin.AO↗

arXiv2021

Novel Recording Studio Features for Music Information Retrieval

In the recording studio, producers of Electronic Dance Music (EDM) spend more time creating, shaping, mixing and mastering sounds, than with compositional aspects or arrangement. They tune the sound by close listening and by leveraging audio metering and audio analysis tools, until they successfully creat the desired sound aesthetics. DJs of EDM tend to play sets of songs that meet their sound ideal. We therefore suggest using audio metering and monitoring tools from the recording studio to analyze EDM, instead of relying on conventional low-level audio features. We test our novel set of features by a simple classification task. We attribute songs to DJs who would play the specific song. This new set of features and the focus on DJ sets is targeted at EDM as it takes the producer and DJ culture into account. With simple dimensionality reduction and machine learning these features enable us to attribute a song to a DJ with an accuracy of 63%. The features from the audio metering and monitoring tools in the recording studio could serve for many applications in Music Information Retrieval, such as genre, style and era classification and music recommendation for both DJs and consumers of electronic dance music.

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arXiv2019

Psychoacoustic Sonification as User Interface for Human-Machine Interaction

When operating a machine, the operator needs to know some spatial relations, like the relative location of the target or the nearest obstacle. Often, sensors are used to derive this spatial information, and visual displays are deployed as interfaces to communicate this information to the operator. In this paper, we present psychoacoustic sonification as an alternative interface for human-machine interaction. Instead of visualizations, an interactive sound guides the operator to the desired target location, or helps her avoid obstacles in space. By considering psychoacoustics --- i.e., the relationship between the physical and the perceptual attributes of sound --- in the audio signal processing, we can communicate precisely and unambiguously interpretable direction and distance cues along three orthogonal axes to a user. We present exemplary use cases from various application areas where users can benefit from psychoacoustic sonification.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2019

Three Orthogonal Dimensions for Psychoacoustic Sonification

Objective: Three perceptually orthogonal auditory dimensions for multidimensional and multivariate data sonification are identified and experimentally validated. Background: Psychoacoustic investigations have shown that orthogonal acoustical parameters may interfere perceptually. The literature hardly offers any solutions to this problem, and previous auditory display approaches have failed to implement auditory dimensions that are perceived orthogonally by a user. In this study we demonstrate how a location in three-dimensional space can be sonified unambiguously by the implementation of perceptually orthogonal psychoacoustic attributes in monophonic playback. Method: Perceptually orthogonal auditory attributes are identified from literature research and experience in music and psychoacoustic research. We carried out an experiment with 21 participants who identified sonified locations in two-dimensional space. Results: With just 5 minutes of explanation and exploration, naive users can interpret our multidimensional sonification with high accuracy. Conclusion: We identified a set of perceptually orthogonal auditory dimensions suitable for three-dimensional data sonification. Application: Three-dimensional data sonification promises blind navigation, e.g. for unmanned vehicles, and reliable real-time monitoring of multivariate data, e.g., in the patient care sector.

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