Michael Schutz - Dynamic sounds and perceptual processes: The surprising role of amplitude envelope in auditory perception
We perceive movie stars voices’ as originating on-screen, even though they actually project from off-screen speakers. Despite the conflicting spatial information, we experience unity as our perceptual system automatically binds related sights and sounds. My team researches the process by which information is integrated cross-modally, with a particular focus on the role of amplitude envelope – the “shape” of a sound over time. We have demonstrated that sounds with naturally decaying envelopes mimicking those produced by impact events integrate in ways at odds with previous findings and theories (Schutz, 2009). Despite the considerable body of research on audio-visual integration, this pattern went previously unnoticed as a great deal of auditory research focuses on sounds with amplitude invariant “flat” tones (Schutz & Vaisberg, 2014). These sounds have ambiguous sustain periods followed by rapid offsets. In contrast, sounds from natural events such as impacts exhibit offsets providing useful information about the event in question. In this talk I will review my lab’s growing body of work on this property, demonstrating amplitude envelope’s importance in audio-visual integration. Additionally, we will explore its role in making sound-object associations, as well as in shaping underlying strategies used to assess duration. Together, these findings clarify the degree to which theories and frameworks derived from experiments with flat sounds generalize to natural sounds with time-varying amplitude envelopes. For more information, please visit http://maplelab.net/overview/amplitude-envelope/.
Biography:
A prize-winning researcher, he has published on topics ranging from the role of visual information in music perception and parallels in the communication of emotion in language and music, to the computer aided analysis of post-tonal music. In addition to presentations at conferences in Illinois, Indiana, Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, Utah, Massachusetts, California, Ontario, and Québec, Michael has spoken abroad at the International Conference on Music and Gesture hosted by the Royal Northern College of Music (Manchester, UK), the International Conference on Music Perception and Cognition (Bologna, Italy), and the Acoustics '08/Acoustical Society of America Conference (Paris, France). Other conference presentations include the Association for Technology in Music Instruction, Acoustical Society of America, Vision Sciences Society, and Music Language and the Mind. His publications appear in both Percussive Notes and Percussive News, as well as the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, Attention, Perception & Psychophysics, Empirical Musicology Review, Canadian Acoustics, and Perception. Additionally, he has given invited lectures on his research at James Madison University, Radford University, Lynchburg University, Goucher College, Penn State University, as well as the Virginia/DC and Maryland Days of Percussion. Michael earned the MM in Percussion Performance and Music Technology from Northwestern University and the BMA in Percussion Performance along with a BS in Computer Science from Penn State University. Additionally, he holds an MA and Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology (Cognitive area) from the University of Virginia. His percussion teachers include marimba virtuoso Michael Burritt, Dan Armstrong, Gifford Howarth, Ken Harbison, and Randy Eyles.
