Information and linearity of time-domain complex demodulated amplitude and phase data in shallow water

Wave-theoretic ocean acoustic propagation modeling is used to derive the sensitivity of pressure, and complex demodulated amplitude and phase, at a receiver to the sound speed of the medium using the Born-Fre?chet derivative. Although the procedure can be applied for pressure as a function of frequency instead of time, the time domain has advantages in practical problems, as linearity and signal-to-noise are more easily assigned in the time domain. The linearity and information content of these sensitivity kernels is explored for an example of a 3-4 kHz broadband pulse transmission in a 1 km shallow water Pekeris waveguide. Full-wave observations (pressure as a function of time) are seen to be too nonlinear for use in most practical cases, whereas envelope and phase data have a wider range of validity and provide complementary information. These results are used in simulated inversions with a more realistic sound speed profile, comparing the performance of amplitude and phase observations.     

An Experimental Approach for Detection of the Acoustic Radiation Induced Static Component in Solids

We propose an experimental approach to directly detect the acoustic radiation induced static component(SC)of primary longitudinal(L) wave propagation in solids using an ultrasonic pitch-catch technique,where a lowfrequency ultrasonic transducer is used to detect the SC generated by the co-propagating primary L-wave tone burst that is excited by a high-frequency ultrasonic transducer.Essentially,the experimental approach proposed uses a dynamic method to detect the SC generated.The basic requirement is that the central frequency of the low-frequency ultrasonic transducer needs to be near the center of the main lobe frequency range of the time-domain envelope of the primary L-wave tone burst.Under this condition,the main lobe of the frequency spectrum of the SC pulse generated adequately overlaps with that of the low-frequency ultrasonic transducer.This will enable the generated SC pulse to be directly detected by the low-frequency ultrasonic transducer.The performed experimental examination validates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach for direct detection of the acoustic radiation induced SC generated by L-wave propagation in solids.     

Delay and Doppler spreads in underwater acoustic particle velocity channels

Signal processing and communication in acoustic particle velocity channels using vector sensors are of interest in the underwater medium. Due to the presence of multiple propagation paths, a mobile receiver collects the signal with different delays and Doppler shifts. This introduces certain delay and Doppler spreads in particle velocity channels. In this paper, these channel spreads are characterized using the zero-crossing rates of channel responses in frequency and time domain. Useful expressions for delay and Doppler spreads are derived in terms of the key channel parameters mean angle of arrival and angle spread. These results are needed for design and performance prediction of systems that utilize underwater acoustic particle velocity and pressure channels.     

The influence of noise on vowel and consonant cues

This study assessed the acoustic and perceptual effect of noise on vowel and stop-consonant spectra. Multi-talker babble and speech-shaped noise were added to vowel and stop stimuli at -5 to +10 dB S/N, and the effect of noise was quantified in terms of (a) spectral envelope differences between the noisy and clean spectra in three frequency bands, (b) presence of reliable F1 and F2 information in noise, and (c) changes in burst frequency and slope. Acoustic analysis indicated that F1 was detected more reliably than F2 and the largest spectral envelope differences between the noisy and clean vowel spectra occurred in the mid-frequency band. This finding suggests that in extremely noisy conditions listeners must be relying on relatively accurate F1 frequency information along with partial F2 information to identify vowels. Stop consonant recognition remained high even at -5 dB despite the disruption of burst cues due to additive noise, suggesting that listeners must be relying on other cues, perhaps formant transitions, to identify stops.     

Diffraction of sound pulses on an elastic spherical shell submerged in an oceanic waveguide

The paper is devoted to simulating an acoustic field scattered by an elastic spherical shell placed in a waveguide with a fluid attenuating bottom. The emitted signal is a wideband pulse with a Gaussian envelope. The normal wave method is used in the frequency domain for calculating the field of a point source in a free waveguide and the shell scattering coefficients. Movement of the receiver along a vertical straight line located behind the shell makes it possible to obtain a “three-dimensional” image of the field scattered by the shell. In this representation, the horizontal axis is time; the vertical axis is the submersion depth of the receiver; the intensity shows the amplitude of the received signal. Such three-dimensional structures make it possible to analyze the dependence of the complex diffraction structure of the acoustic field on receiver depth. In the considered numerical example, a thin, elastic, spherical shell is located near the attenuating fluid bottom.     

Planar near-field acoustical holography in a moving medium

Near-field acoustical holography (NAH) is a well-established method to study acoustic radiation near a stationary sound source in a homogeneous, stationary medium. However, the current theory of NAH is not applicable to moving sound sources, such as automobiles and trains. In this paper, the inclusion of a moving medium (i.e., moving source and receiver) is introduced in the wave equation and a new set of equations for plannar NAH is developed. Equations are developed for the acoustic pressure, particle velocity, and intensity when mean flow is either parallel or perpendicular to the hologram plane. If the source and the measurement plane are moving at the same speed, the frequency Doppler effect is absent, but a wave number Doppler effect exists. This leads to errors when reconstructing the acoustic field both towards and away from the source using static NAH. To investigate these errors, a point source is studied analytically using planar NAH with flow in one direction. The effect of the medium moving parallel to the hologram plane is noted by a shift of the radiation circle in wave number space (k-space). A k-space Green's function and a k-space filter are developed that include the effects of the moving medium.     

Complex calibration of a pressure gradient receiver using the reciprocity method procedure

Absolute complex free-field calibration of a pressure gradient receiver is considered. The calibration is carried out in a reflecting water tank using the reciprocity method procedure during radiation of continuous signals with linear free-field frequency modulation. To obtain the free-field frequency dependences, complex moving weighted averaging is used. It is shown that this method, developed for calibration of sound pressure receivers, allows effective recovery and measurement of the vector component of a direct acoustic wave in the presence of reflections. The method makes it possible to measure the modulus and phase angle of the complex sensitivity and reveal the insufficiencies of an experimental pressure gradient receiver.     

Noise immunity of a combined hydroacoustic receiver

A statistical analysis of the noise immunity of a combined receiver is performed for the observation of a fluctuating tone signal against the background of underwater dynamic noise. The analysis is based on the experimental data obtained in deep ocean with the use of two four-component combined hydroacoustic receivers positioned at depths of 150 and 300 m. Theoretical expressions are obtained for the signal-to-noise ratio of a combined receiver, for reciprocal spectral levels of the signal and noise in both narrow and wide frequency bands. The definition of the combined receiver gain is introduced in terms of the functions of a common single-point coherence for the acoustic pressure and the particle velocity in an acoustic wave. According to the experimental data obtained, in the case of multiplicative processing, the maximal gain in the signal-to-noise ratio of a combined receiver, as compared to a hydrophone-based square-law detector, can reach 15–16 dB for the horizontal channel and 30 dB for the vertical channel of the combined receiver in the case of the compensation of opposing flows of the signal and noise energy.     

Optical-acoustic soliton under the conditions of slow light and stimulated Mandelstam-Brillouin scattering

The possibility of forming a stable optical-acoustic soliton in the regime of electromagnetically induced transparency has been analyzed under the condition that the group velocity of light in a medium with stimulated Mandelstam-Brillouin scattering decreases to the speed of sound. This possibility exists because the forward Mandelstam-Brillouin scattering, which is forbidden in a nondispersive medium, is allowed under this condition. The optical component is an envelope pulse, and the acoustic component has no carrier frequency. It has been shown that such a soliton can be formed for anomalously low input intensities of the optical pulse.     

Suppression of acoustic noise in the measurements of wall pressure fluctuations

It is shown that, in hydrodynamic noise measurements in the presence of acoustic noise acting upon the pressure fluctuation receiver, spatial filtering methods should provide the best results. Active methods are developed for suppressing the acoustic noise that affects a miniature receiver in the course of turbulent pressure fluctuation measurements. The methods are based on complicating the structure of the measuring transducer by introducing an extra compensating sensing element whose characteristics are identical with those of the main sensing element. The spatial filtering of small-scale turbulent pressure fluctuations by a finite-size electroacoustic transducer is used as the basis for the development of noise-compensated measuring systems, as well as methods of measuring the turbulent pressure fluctuations by receivers with noise compensation. A numerical study of the wave-number filtering of acoustic noise in wall pressure measurements by a noise-compensated receiver is performed.     

Coding of amplitude-modulated signals in the cochlear nucleus of a grass frog

To study the mechanisms that govern the coding of temporal features of complex sound signals, responses of single neurons located in the dorsal nucleus of the medulla oblongata (the cochlear nucleus) of a curarized grass frog (Rana temporaria) to pure tone bursts and amplitude modulated tone bursts with a modulation frequency of 20 Hz and modulation depths of 10 and 80% were recorded. The carrier frequency was equal to the characteristic frequency of a neuron, the average signal level was 20–30 dB above the threshold, and the signal duration was equal to ten full modulation periods. Of the 133 neurons studied, 129 neurons responded to 80% modulated tone bursts by discharges that were phase-locked with the envelope waveform. At this modulation depth, the best phase locking was observed for neurons with the phasic type of response to tone bursts. For tonic neurons with low characteristic frequencies, along with the reproduction of the modulation, phase locking with the carrier frequency of the signal was observed. At 10% amplitude modulation, phasic neurons usually responded to only the onset of a tone burst. Almost all tonic units showed a tendency to reproduce the envelope, although the efficiency of the reproduction was low, and for half of these neurons, it was below the reliability limit. Some neurons exhibited a more efficient reproduction of the weak modulation. For almost half of the neurons, a reliable improvement was observed in the phase locking of the response during the tone burst presentation (from the first to the tenth modulation period). The cooperative histogram of a set of neurons responding to 10% modulated tone bursts within narrow ranges of frequencies and intensities retains the information on the dynamics of the envelope variation. The data are compared with the results obtained from the study of the responses to similar signals in the acoustic midbrain center of the same object and also with the psychophysical effect of a differential sensitivity increase in the process of adaptation.     

A new synthetic detection technique for trackside acoustic identification of railroad roller bearing defects

The detection of railroad roller bearing defects is of great importance for railway traffic. The acoustic defective bearing detector (ADBD) via a trackside acoustic detection system (TADS) is a popular and reliable tool for trackside identification of railroad bearing incipient defects. However, the defective trackside acoustic signal of bearing is confronted with three challenges: demodulation of acoustic signal, removal of Doppler effect and enhancement of defect frequency. This paper proposes a synthetic detection technique to overcome these difficulties successively. In the technique, the signal envelope is first extracted by a new variable-resolution ridge demodulation (VRRD) method. Then the Doppler effect is removed in the envelope via a dynamic signal resampling method. Finally, the rectified defect frequency is enhanced through the means of logarithmic transformation and piecewise linear detrending. The VRRD technique extracts the envelope from the signal time–frequency distribution (TFD) along the Doppler shift curve of resonance frequency traced by an improved ridge extraction algorithm. The resampling method is carried out on the envelope according to the Doppler shift curve of defect frequency obtained by the same ridge extraction algorithm. The sidebands around defect frequency can be suppressed by the logarithmic transformation and the low-frequency non-linear trend can be removed by the detrending method. The signal amplitude is unified at the same time. Two practical bearing signals with inner-race and outer-race defects separately verify the effectiveness of proposed technique.     

Experimental studies of flow noise around a surfacing device

The wall pressure fluctuations in turbulent boundary layers play an important role in acoustic measurements carried out in moving media. Results of measuring the frequency spectra of wall pressure fluctuations around a surfacing device are presented. The spatial resolution achieved in measuring the wall pressure fluctuations is investigated. It is demonstrated that the results of hydrodynamic flow noise measurements strongly depend on the aperture size of the measuring acoustic transducer and its orientation in the turbulent boundary layer. The pseudosound pressure fluctuation spectra observed in a series of experiments with surfacing devices show that the resolution of the pressure receivers operating in the turbulent boundary layers considerably varies. On the basis of systematic measurements of wall pressure fluctuations by miniature and distributed receivers at high Reynolds numbers, the effect of the geometric dimensions of a pressure receiver on its resolution in the flow noise measurements is studied. An experimental method is proposed for estimating the receiver-induced distortions.     

Theoretical prediction of the yield of strong oxides under acoustic cavitation

Considering liquid viscosity, surface tension, and liquid compressibility, the effects of dynamical behaviors of cavitation bubbles on temperature and the amount of oxides inside the bubble are numerically investigated by acoustic field,regarding water as a work medium. The effects of acoustic frequency, acoustic pressure amplitude, and driving waveforms on bubble temperature and the number of oxides inside the bubbles by rapid collapse of cavitation bubbles are analysed.The results show that the changes of acoustic frequency, acoustic pressure amplitude, and driving waveforms not only have an effect on temperature and the number of oxides inside the bubble, but also influence the degradation species of pollution,which provides guidance for improving the degradation of water pollution.     

On the role of the amplitude envelope for the perception of [b] and [w]

This study investigated the role of the amplitude envelope in the vicinity of consonantal release in the perception of the stop-glide contrast. Three sets of acoustic [b-w] continua, each in the vowel environments [a] and [i], were synthesized using parameters derived from natural speech. In the first set, amplitude, formant frequency, and duration characteristics were interpolated between exemplar stop and glide endpoints. In the second set, formant frequency and duration characteristics were interpolated, but all stimuli were given a stop amplitude envelope. The third set was like the second, except that all stimuli were given a glide amplitude envelope. Subjects were given both forced-choice and free-identification tasks. The results of the forced-choice task indicated that amplitude cues were able to override transition slope, duration, and formant frequency cues in the perception of the stop-glide contrast. However, results from the free-identification task showed that, although presence of a stop amplitude envelope turned all stimuli otherwise labeled as glides to stops, the presence of a glide amplitude envelope changed stimuli labeled otherwise as stops to fricatives rather than to glides. These results support the view that the amplitude envelope in the vicinity of the consonantal release is a critical acoustic property for the continuant / noncontinuant contrast. The results are discussed in relation to a theory of acoustic invariance.     

Correlation of signals of thermal acoustic radiation

The spatial correlation function is measured for the pressure of thermal acoustic radiation from a source (a narrow plasticine plate) whose temperature is made both higher and lower than the temperature of the receiver. The spatial correlation function of the pressure of thermal acoustic radiation is found to be oscillatory in character. The oscillation amplitude is determined not by the absolute temperature of the source but by the temperature difference between the source and the receiver. The correlation function changes its sign when a source heated with respect to the receiver is replaced by a cooled one.     

声驻波场中空化泡的动力学特性

以水为工作介质, 考虑了液体的可压缩性, 研究了驻波声场中空化泡的运动特性, 模拟了驻波场中各位置处空化泡的运动状态以及相关参数对各位置处空化泡在主Bjerknes力作用下运动方向的影响. 结果表明: 驻波声场中, 空化泡的运动状态分为三个区域, 即在声压波腹附近空化泡做稳态空化, 在偏离波腹处空化泡做瞬态空化, 在声压波节附近, 空化泡在主Bjerknes 力作用下, 一直向声压波节处移动, 显示不发生空化现象; 驻波场中声压幅值增加有利于空化的发生, 但声压幅值增加到一定上限时, 压力波腹区域将排斥空化泡, 并驱赶空化泡向压力波节移动, 不利于空化现象的发生; 当声频率小于初始空化泡的共振频率时, 声频率越高, 由于主Bjerknes 力的作用将有更多的空化泡向声压波节移动, 不利于空化的发生, 尤其是驻波场液面的高度不应是声波波长的1/4; 当声频率一定时, 空化泡初始半径越大越有利于空化现象的发生, 但当空化泡的初始半径超过声频率的共振半径时, 由于主Bjerknes力的作用将有更多的空化泡向声压波节移动, 不利于空化的发生.     

Perceptual weighting of individual and concurrent cues for sentence intelligibility: frequency, envelope, and fine structure

The speech signal may be divided into frequency bands, each containing temporal properties of the envelope and fine structure. For maximal speech understanding, listeners must allocate their perceptual resources to the most informative acoustic properties. Understanding this perceptual weighting is essential for the design of assistive listening devices that need to preserve these important speech cues. This study measured the perceptual weighting of young normal-hearing listeners for the envelope and fine structure in each of three frequency bands for sentence materials. Perceptual weights were obtained under two listening contexts: (1) when each acoustic property was presented individually and (2) when multiple acoustic properties were available concurrently. The processing method was designed to vary the availability of each acoustic property independently by adding noise at different levels. Perceptual weights were determined by correlating a listener's performance with the availability of each acoustic property on a trial-by-trial basis. Results demonstrated that weights were (1) equal when acoustic properties were presented individually and (2) biased toward envelope and mid-frequency information when multiple properties were available. Results suggest a complex interaction between the available acoustic properties and the listening context in determining how best to allocate perceptual resources when listening to speech in noise.     

Perceptual weighting of the envelope and fine structure across frequency bands for sentence intelligibility: effect of interruption at the syllabic-rate and periodic-rate of speech

Listeners often only have fragments of speech available to understand the intended message due to competing background noise. In order to maximize successful speech recognition, listeners must allocate their perceptual resources to the most informative acoustic properties. The speech signal contains temporally-varying acoustics in the envelope and fine structure that are present across the frequency spectrum. Understanding how listeners perceptually weigh these acoustic properties in different frequency regions during interrupted speech is essential for the design of assistive listening devices. This study measured the perceptual weighting of young normal-hearing listeners for the envelope and fine structure in each of three frequency bands for interrupted sentence materials. Perceptual weights were obtained during interruption at the syllabic rate (i.e., 4 Hz) and the periodic rate (i.e., 128 Hz) of speech. Potential interruption interactions with fundamental frequency information were investigated by shifting the natural pitch contour higher relative to the interruption rate. The availability of each acoustic property was varied independently by adding noise at different levels. Perceptual weights were determined by correlating a listener's performance with the availability of each acoustic property on a trial-by-trial basis. Results demonstrated similar relative weights across the interruption conditions, with emphasis on the envelope in high-frequencies.     

The effects of external acoustic pressure fields on a free-running supercavitating projectile

Proliferation of supercavitating torpedoes has motivated research on countermeasures against them as well as on the fluid phenomenon which makes them possible. The goal of this research was to investigate an envisaged countermeasure, an acoustic field capable of slowing or diverting the weapon by disrupting the cavitation envelope. The research focused on the interactions between high pressure amplitude sound waves and a supercavity produced by a small free-flying projectile. The flight dynamics and cavity geometry measurements were compared to control experiments and theoretical considerations were made for evaluating the effects. Corrugations on the cavity/water interface caused by the pressure signal have been observed and characterized. Results also show that the accuracy of a supercavitating projectile can be adversely affected by the sound signal. This research concludes with results that indicate that it is acoustic cavitation in the medium surrounding the supercavity, caused by the high pressure amplitude sound, that is responsible for the reduced accuracy. A hypothesis has been presented addressing the means by which the acoustic cavitation could cause this effect.