Hasil untuk "Acoustics in engineering. Acoustical engineering"

Matthew C.M. Wright

Mark Looi

The rapid advance of Generative AI into software development prompts this empirical investigation of perceptual effects on practice. We study the usage patterns of 147 professional developers, examining perceived correlates of AI tools use, the resulting productivity and quality outcomes, and developer readiness for emerging AI-enhanced development. We describe a virtuous adoption cycle where frequent and broad AI tools use are the strongest correlates of both Perceived Productivity (PP) and quality, with frequency strongest. The study finds no perceptual support for the Quality Paradox and shows that PP is positively correlated with Perceived Code Quality (PQ) improvement. Developers thus report both productivity and quality gains. High current usage, breadth of application, frequent use of AI tools for testing, and ease of use correlate strongly with future intended adoption, though security concerns remain a moderate and statistically significant barrier to adoption. Moreover, AI testing tools' adoption lags that of coding tools, opening a Testing Gap. We identify three developer archetypes (Enthusiasts, Pragmatists, Cautious) that align with an innovation diffusion process wherein the virtuous adoption cycle serves as the individual engine of progression. Our findings reveal that organizational adoption of AI tools follows such a process: Enthusiasts push ahead with tools, creating organizational success that converts Pragmatists. The Cautious are held in organizational stasis: without early adopter examples, they don't enter the virtuous adoption cycle, never accumulate the usage frequency that drives intent, and never attain high efficacy. Policy itself does not predict individuals' intent to increase usage but functions as a marker of maturity, formalizing the successful diffusion of adoption by Enthusiasts while acting as a gateway that the Cautious group has yet to reach.

Hashini Gunatilake, John Grundy, Rashina Hoda et al.

Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and share others' perspectives and emotions, is essential in software engineering (SE), where developers often collaborate with diverse stakeholders. It is also considered as a vital competency in many professional fields such as medicine, healthcare, nursing, animal science, education, marketing, and project management. Despite its importance, empathy remains under-researched in SE. To further explore this, we conducted a socio-technical grounded theory (STGT) study through in-depth semi-structured interviews with 22 software developers and stakeholders. Our study explored the role of empathy in SE and how SE activities and processes can be improved by considering empathy. Through applying the systematic steps of STGT data analysis and theory development, we developed a theory that explains the role of empathy in SE. Our theory details the contexts in which empathy arises, the conditions that shape it, the causes and consequences of its presence and absence. We also identified contingencies for enhancing empathy or overcoming barriers to its expression. Our findings provide practical implications for SE practitioners and researchers, offering a deeper understanding of how to effectively integrate empathy into SE processes.

Roberto Verdecchia, Justus Bogner

From its first adoption in the late 80s, qualitative research has slowly but steadily made a name for itself in what was, and perhaps still is, the predominantly quantitative software engineering (SE) research landscape. As part of our regular column on empirical software engineering (ACM SIGSOFT SEN-ESE), we reflect on the state of qualitative SE research with a focus group of experts. Among other things, we discuss why qualitative SE research is important, how it evolved over time, common impediments faced while practicing it today, and what the future of qualitative SE research might look like. Joining the conversation are Rashina Hoda (Monash University, Australia), Carolyn Seaman (University of Maryland, United States), and Klaas Stol (University College Cork, Ireland). The content of this paper is a faithful account of our conversation from October 25, 2025, which we moderated and edited for our column.

Dipin Khati, Yijin Liu, David N. Palacio et al.

Applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) are rapidly growing in industry and academia for various software engineering (SE) tasks. As these models become more integral to critical processes, ensuring their reliability and trustworthiness becomes essential. Consequently, the concept of trust in these systems is becoming increasingly critical. Well-calibrated trust is important, as excessive trust can lead to security vulnerabilities, and risks, while insufficient trust can hinder innovation. However, the landscape of trust-related concepts in LLMs in SE is relatively unclear, with concepts such as trust, distrust, and trustworthiness lacking clear conceptualizations in the SE community. To bring clarity to the current research status and identify opportunities for future work, we conducted a comprehensive review of $88$ papers: a systematic literature review of $18$ papers focused on LLMs in SE, complemented by an analysis of 70 papers from broader trust literature. Additionally, we conducted a survey study with 25 domain experts to gain insights into practitioners' understanding of trust and identify gaps between existing literature and developers' perceptions. The result of our analysis serves as a roadmap that covers trust-related concepts in LLMs in SE and highlights areas for future exploration.

Ali Randall, Christian Andrew

When developing an auralization for acoustic scenarios involving moving sources and receivers, one key feature is the ability to simulate the Doppler shift, i.e., the changing frequency content from the receiver’s perspective. As the time-varying delay between a source and receiver is what accounts for the Doppler shift, an approximation of this delay is required to successfully render the changes in frequency content at the receiver. Depending on the signal-processing strategy chosen to accomplish this task, there is, however, a potential to introduce audible artifacts due to frequency folding (aliasing), frequency replication (imaging), and broadband noise. In this paper we discuss the manifestation of such artifacts and propose a method to eliminate them, which can be integrated into the digital signal processing chain of larger auralization schemes. The method is built upon a source-time dominant approach and uses a combination of oversampling, interpolation, and time-varying filtering to predict and eliminate frequency regions at the receiver that are vulnerable to aliasing and imaging. We demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of the method using a circularly moving source with a fixed receiver.

Caiazzo Alfonso, Kraxberger Florian, Wurzinger Andreas et al.

Impedance tube measurements are a widespread method for determining the sound absorption coefficient (SAC) of porous materials for normal sound incidence. The measurement method is standardised in ISO 10534-2. However, the standards offer limited guidance on sample preparation and mounting. Many impedance tubes have a circular cross-section and can be mounted at various angles. Therefore, it is crucial to investigate the influence of the mounting angle on the SAC and its interaction with diameter imperfections and different thicknesses using different materials. Following the dataset FOAM 01 this work documents the creation of a new dataset (called FOAM 02) containing SAC measurements from the ISO 10534-2 two-microphone method. The following factors are considered: two different materials, four thicknesses, three diameters, and four rotation angles. For each combination of material, thickness, and diameter, three specimens are produced, resulting in 72 specimens. Each specimen is measured three times at each rotation angle, yielding 864 SAC measurements. The dataset contains the SAC measurements and one-hot encoded label vectors, and is publicly available. A cutting device is proposed to saw cylindrical specimens accurately on a band saw with variable thickness and diameter. The workshop drawings of the cutting device are available as supplementary material.

Chmelík Vojtech, Urbán Daniel, Rychtáriková Monika

This paper outlines the history and activities related to acoustics in Slovakia during the 20th century, focusing specifically on the Faculty of Civil Engineering at Slovak Technical University (STU) in Bratislava. The research in acoustics is presented within a historical context that has been notably turbulent in the Central European region. Consequently, the article examines the research and education in acoustics separately for the period before 1989 and the period following the fall of communism. It shows how the development of acoustics as a scientific discipline has been influenced by historical, political, and economic factors, particularly by several waves of emigration from Slovakia to Western EU and North America. The article is based on accessible information in the university library, historical research performance, testimonies of retired professors and colleagues, visits to university archives, and the archives of the Catholic Church. Finally, this paper presents recent research activities at STU Bratislava, the largest and technical university in Slovakia, within national and European frameworks. It outlines the focus of scientific work and education for future architects, civil engineers, and material scientists.

Hoffmann Rüdiger

At the TU (formerly TH) Dresden, acoustics is part of the faculty of electrical engineering. Its development started in 1911 when Heinrich Barkhausen was appointed Professor for “low-current technology", which was an umbrella for both, acoustics and communications engineering. Barkhausen contributed to the field of acoustics, e.g., with the first device for loudness measurement. After the war and the retirement of Barkhausen, several new institutes were established from which we mention: (1) the Institute of Electro- and Building Acoustics led by Walter Reichardt, contributing to many fields of technical acoustics, and (2) the Institute of Telecommunications Engineering supervised by Kurt Freitag, contributing to speech acoustics with the design of a vocoder and the measurement of speech quality. When the GDR performed a “higher education reform" in 1969, the acoustical activities were concentrated in a laboratory for “communications and data acquisition" which included five chairs in acoustics, sensors, speech, and measurement. This step took into account the growing role of computer technology. After the political changes in 1990, the number of chairs was reduced to two which is expressed by the today’s name “Institute of Acoustics and Speech Communications". The paper is finished by an overview on the recent activities of the institute.

Svensson U. Peter, Henriksen Viggo, Olsen Herold

An edge-diffraction based method for computing the scattering from rigid convex 3D polyhedra, the “Edge Source Integral Equation” (ESIE), has previously been shown to give very accurate results and to be an efficient calculation method, in comparison with the boundary element method. Here, the ESIE method is used in a secondary source approach, referred to as “ESIE+SS”, to compute the scattering from rigid convex objects with impedance boundary conditions at part of the surface. Secondary piston sources are introduced at the impedance surface and made to fulfill the boundary conditions. Expressions are presented for handling 2D scattering problems with the 3D ESIE method. The ESIE+SS method is evaluated by computing the 2D scattering from a 3 m by 0.2 m rigid box where a 0.3 m wide patch has a locally reacting impedance boundary condition that represents a 20 cm thick porous absorber. For a nearfield 2D point source and a circle of receivers, across the frequency range 50 Hz–2.5 kHz, the ESIE+SS computed the pressure within [ − 0.30,+0.32] dB of the reference FEM results for 90% of all the data points. Large errors were observed for some receiver positions, for the same reason as has been previously found for the ESIE method: a slow convergence for the higher-order diffraction computations. It was found that for the transfer functions that represent the interaction between the secondary sources, diffraction can typically be left out, which reduces the computational load.

Ebube Alor, Ahmad Abdellatif, SayedHassan Khatoonabadi et al.

Software engineering (SE) chatbots are increasingly gaining attention for their role in enhancing development processes. At the core of chatbots are Natural Language Understanding platforms (NLUs), which enable them to comprehend user queries but require labeled data for training. However, acquiring such labeled data for SE chatbots is challenging due to the scarcity of high-quality datasets, as training requires specialized vocabulary and phrases not found in typical language datasets. Consequently, developers often resort to manually annotating user queries -- a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. Previous approaches require human intervention to generate rules, called labeling functions (LFs), that categorize queries based on specific patterns. To address this issue, we propose an approach to automatically generate LFs by extracting patterns from labeled user queries. We evaluate our approach on four SE datasets and measure performance improvement from training NLUs on queries labeled by the generated LFs. The generated LFs effectively label data with AUC scores up to 85.3% and NLU performance improvements up to 27.2%. Furthermore, our results show that the number of LFs affects labeling performance. We believe that our approach can save time and resources in labeling users' queries, allowing practitioners to focus on core chatbot functionalities rather than manually labeling queries.

Hots Jan, Oberfeld Daniel, Verhey Jesko L.

In everyday life, the auditory system often receives input from various sound sources at different positions in space more or less simultaneously. The present study investigates how listeners weight different spatial positions when judging the overall loudness of a spatially distributed sound field. Spatial weights were measured in two conditions. In both conditions, sounds were presented from five spatial positions: front, left, right, top and back, using five loudspeakers distributed spatially around the listener. In the first condition, bandpass noises were presented simultaneously on all five loudspeakers. The sounds emanating from the different loudspeakers did not overlap spectrally, to ensure that they could be differentiated from each other. In the second condition, a broadband noise was presented at each of the five spatial positions. In this condition, sounds from the five different positions were presented consecutively. In both conditions, listeners judged the overall loudness of the sound fields. Before measuring spatial weights, all sounds were equalised in loudness. Both conditions showed virtually identical spatial weights for all five spatial positions. Thus, the weight assigned to a specific sound source in judgments of the overall loudness of spatially distributed sound fields appears to be unaffected by the spatial position of the source.

Bellows Samuel D., Nakayama Daisuke

The violin’s f-hole shape plays a significant role in determining the instrument’s modal response. Researchers have long studied the influence of the f-hole shape on the A0 or Helmholtz mode through simplified lumped-element representations of this resonator-like mode. Nonetheless, the f-hole shape’s impact on the violin’s other modes remains ambiguous, partly due to the difficulties of modeling the instrument’s coupled acoustic and structural modal response. This work presents a coupled structural-acoustic model to predict how the f-hole shape alters the violin’s signature modes. The simulated results suggest that increasing the f-hole aperture size increases the radiated sound power of the A0 and B1− modes. The enlarged f-hole size also augments radiated levels for some higher frequency modes, including modes in the bridge-island region. Sequential measurements on a fractional-sized violin using two different f-hole shapes confirm the trend, highlighting the utility of altering the f-hole shape to tune the violin’s modal response.

Jacobsen Simon, Siedenburg Kai

Pitch and timbre perception centrally depend on fundamental frequency (F0) and spectral envelopes (SE), respectively. However, timbre perception as a function of F0 is less explored in the literature. An analysis-synthesis approach was used to compare sounds with congruent and incongruent F0 and SE parameters via sound pleasantness, brightness, and plausibility ratings. Analyzing 1900 musical instruments and voice sounds, a two-dimensional synthesis space was derived. The space was sampled in its inner and outer regions, reflecting high and low similarity to existing acoustical instrument sounds. Sounds with congruent and incongruent F0-SE relations were synthesized, defining congruency as the co-occurrence of F0 and SE in the analyzed set of sounds. In Experiment 1, inner regions of the space were rated as more pleasant compared to outer regions. Further, sounds with incongruent F0-SE relation were rated as less pleasant only for F0 discrepancies above two octaves. Finally, the first dimension of the space strongly reflected differences in brightness when F0 was controlled for. In Experiment 2, a spectrally more fine-grained resynthesis approach revealed effects of congruency on pleasantness and plausibility for smaller F0 separations. These results provide evidence for a co-dependence of F0 and SE properties in the perception of harmonic sounds.

Bellows Samuel D., Katz Brian F. G.

Obtaining high-resolution, spherical phoneme-dependent directivities for voice radiation is beneficial for numerous acoustics applications. This work reports on a spherical interpolation method based on two interleaved measurements using a regularized least-squares fit with reference data. Maximizing the spherical correlation between previously reported results and measured data determines the regularization hyper-parameters to ensure physical solutions. While the resultant spherical directivity patterns show similarities to time-averaged results, distinct radiation characteristics appear, particularly in the range of 630 Hz to 2 kHz.

Ohlenbusch Mattes, Rollwage Christian, Doclo Simon

Many hearables contain an in-ear microphone, which may be used to capture the own voice of its user. However, due to the hearable occluding the ear canal, the in-ear microphone mostly records body-conducted speech, typically suffering from band-limitation effects and amplification at low frequencies. Since the occlusion effect is determined by the ratio between the air-conducted and body-conducted components of own voice, the own voice transfer characteristics between the outer face of the hearable and the in-ear microphone depend on the speech content and the individual talker. In this paper, we propose a speech-dependent model of the own voice transfer characteristics based on phoneme recognition, assuming a linear time-invariant relative transfer function for each phoneme. We consider both individual models and models averaged over several talkers. Experimental results based on recordings with a prototype hearable show that the proposed speech-dependent model enables to simulate in-ear signals more accurately than a speech-independent model in terms of technical measures, especially under utterance mismatch and talker mismatch. Additionally, simulation results show that talker-averaged models generalize better to different talkers than individual models.

Hopkins Carl

Sheng Sang, Chen Xu

Composites have been widely used in the field of acoustics due to their extraordinary ability of sound insulation. To date, the design of acoustic composites relies primarily on the expertise of engineers and experimental tests. This preliminary study outlines a deep learning (DL) based approach to optimize the microstructure of the composite bars to achieve the best performance in sound insulation. This approach first trains DL networks using data generated using finite element simulation to predict the pressure amplitude and energy of the output waves, then a genetic algorithm (GA) uses the DL model as its evaluation function and generates new designs. The results indicate that a combination of DL and GA can generate Pareto-optimal designs to satisfy the specific needs of engineering projects. We demonstrate that starting with a quite small data set (less than of all possible designs) and applying a DL approach is an efficient and robust method to obtain optimal designs. The DL model is accurate in its predictions which enables the GA to find unique composite designs that are optimal for sound insulation.

Lvyang Yang, Jiankang Zhang, Huaiqiang Li et al.

The digitization of engineering drawings is crucial for efficient reuse, distribution, and archiving. Existing computer vision approaches for digitizing engineering drawings typically assume the input drawings have high quality. However, in reality, engineering drawings are often blurred and distorted due to improper scanning, storage, and transmission, which may jeopardize the effectiveness of existing approaches. This paper focuses on restoring and recognizing low-quality engineering drawings, where an end-to-end framework is proposed to improve the quality of the drawings and identify the graphical symbols on them. The framework uses K-means clustering to classify different engineering drawing patches into simple and complex texture patches based on their gray level co-occurrence matrix statistics. Computer vision operations and a modified Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Network (ESRGAN) model are then used to improve the quality of the two types of patches, respectively. A modified Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN) model is used to recognize the quality-enhanced graphical symbols. Additionally, a multi-stage task-driven collaborative learning strategy is proposed to train the modified ESRGAN and Faster R-CNN models to improve the resolution of engineering drawings in the direction that facilitates graphical symbol recognition, rather than human visual perception. A synthetic data generation method is also proposed to construct quality-degraded samples for training the framework. Experiments on real-world electrical diagrams show that the proposed framework achieves an accuracy of 98.98% and a recall of 99.33%, demonstrating its superiority over previous approaches. Moreover, the framework is integrated into a widely-used power system software application to showcase its practicality.

Elizabeth Bjarnason, Mirko Morandini, Markus Borg et al.

The RET (Requirements Engineering and Testing) workshop series provides a meeting point for researchers and practitioners from the two separate fields of Requirements Engineering (RE) and Testing. The goal is to improve the connection and alignment of these two areas through an exchange of ideas, challenges, practices, experiences and results. The long term aim is to build a community and a body of knowledge within the intersection of RE and Testing, i.e. RET. The 2nd workshop was held in co-location with ICSE 2015 in Florence, Italy. The workshop continued in the same interactive vein as the 1st one and included a keynote, paper presentations with ample time for discussions, and a group exercise. For true impact and relevance this cross-cutting area requires contribution from both RE and Testing, and from both researchers and practitioners. A range of papers were presented from short experience papers to full research papers that cover connections between the two fields. One of the main outputs of the 2nd workshop was a categorization of the presented workshop papers according to an initial definition of the area of RET which identifies the aspects RE, Testing and coordination effect.