Monomodal and multimodal salient events included features such as loudness, pitch variations, and sound effects (aural cues); contrast, intensity, motion, color (visual cues), and combined audiovisual events, artificial or not.
In earlier research, Braida and his colleague Nathaniel Durlach had discovered a similar pattern in people's sensitivity to variations in loudness.
Although slight variations in loudness and timbre, or tone colour, can be obtained by differences in the firmness with which the harpsichordist depresses the keys, no sustained crescendos are obtainable by the action of the fingers alone.
They also paid particular attention to variations in loudness and speed.
The normalized amplitude variations of loudness in angry mode are expected to be higher because of sudden rise and falls in the utterance.
The term spectral envelope refers to the normalized amplitude variations of loudness that arise from the emotional differences of successive frames.
That is, it appears that the emotional response elicited by a (very) unexpected harmony can be enhanced when perceived in a musical context played with emotional expression (using variations in loudness and tempo).
Five vocal parameters were analyzed: mean F0 (an acoustic correlate of vocal fold size), F0 variation, intensity (loudness), utterance duration, and formant dispersion (D f, an acoustic correlate of vocal tract length).
Thus, using a well-controlled set of stimuli in terms of loudness, duration, and temporal variation, we did not replicate previous results showing larger activity for female than male voices, suggesting that these differences reflected more low-level differences than gender processing per se.
For this reason, electronic sound-level meters used to measure noise levels take into account the variations of perceived loudness with pitch.
