• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.1
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• pp.18-30
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• 2021

The ultimate goal of the present study is to establish the acoustical performance standards of classroom for the elderly who are incomplete hearing people. As a pilot survey, the present study was conducted to investigate the listening environment and the actual condition of speech perception performance of education facilities for elderly, Acoustic performances of two education facilities for elderly in Cheongju were measured and questionnaire survey was done to elderly people. Also, speech intelligibility tests were undertaken by Consonant Vowel Consonant (CVC) and Phonetically Balanced Words (PBW) methods. The questionnaire survey showed that the elderly were satisfied with the listening environment of the educational facilities in general. Also, it was found that acoustical performances satisfy with the acoustic criteria of general classrooms in Korea. However, the results of the speech intelligibility test showed that the scores of elderly were significantly lower than twenties with normal hearing. It was also revealed that the scores are reduced as the age increases. Thus, it was concluded that the acoustical performance standards of educational facilities for the normal hearing were not suitable for educational facilities for the elderly.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.40 no.3
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• pp.201-212
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• 2021

The present study was conducted as a pilot investigation to suggest the standards of acoustic performance for classrooms suitable for incomplete hearing people such as children under 9 years of age. Subjective evaluations such as questionnaire and speech intelligibility test were conducted to 264 students at two elementary schools in Cheong-ju in order to analyze the characteristics of the listening environment in the classrooms of the lower grades in elementary school. The survey was undertaken with a total of 264 students at two elementary schools in Cheong-ju, and investigated their satisfaction with the classroom listening environment. As a result, students responded that the most helpful information type for understanding class content is the voice of teacher. In addition, the volume of the current teacher's voice is normal, and the level of clarity is highly satisfactory. As for the acoustic performance of the classroom, the opinion that the noise was normal and the reverberation was very short was found to be dominant in overall satisfaction with the listening environment. Meanwhile, as a result of speech intelligibility test using the word list selected for the lower grade students of elementary school, it could be inferred that the longitudinal axis distance from the sound source in the case of 8-year-olds is a factor that affects speech recognition.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.1
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• pp.25-31
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• 2023

In order to estimate the radial speed of an underwater object so-called target with active sonar, Continuous Wave (CW) pulse is generally used, but if a target is slow and at near distance, it is not easy to estimate the radial velocity of the target due to acoustic reverberation in the ocean. In 2017, Wang et al. utilized broadband signal of two Hyperbolic Frequency Modulation (HFM) pulses, which is known as a doppler-invariant pulse, with equal frequency band and in opposite sweep directions to overcome this problem and successfully estimate the radial speed of slow-moving nearby target. They demonstrated the estimation of the radial velocity with computer simulation using the parameters of two HFM starting time differences and receiving times. However, for it uses two HFM pulses with equal frequency, cross-correlation between the two pulses negatively affect the detection performance. To mitigate this cross-correlation effect, we suggest using two different band HFM with the opposite sweep directions. In this paper, a method of radial velocity estimation is derived and simulated using two HFM pulses with the pulse length of 1 second and bandwidth of 400 Hz. Applying the suggested method, the radial velocity was estimated with approximately 6 % of relative error in the simulation.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.4
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• pp.320-328
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• 2023

Underwater active target detection is vital for defense systems, requiring accurate detection and estimation of distance and velocity. Sequential transmission is necessary at each beam angle, but divided pulse length leads to range ambiguity. Multi-frequency transmission results in time-bandwidth product losses when bandwidth is divided. To overcome these problem, we propose a novel method using Generalized Sinusoidal Frequency Modulation (GSFM) for rapid target detection, enabling low-correlation pulses between subpulses without bandwidth division. The proposed method allows for rapid updates of the distance and velocity of target by employing GSFM with minimized pulse length. To evaluate our method, we simulated an underwater environment with reverberation. In the simulation, a linear frequency modulation of 0.05 s caused an average distance estimation error of 50 % and a velocity estimation error of 103 % due to limited frequency band. In contrast, GSFM accurately and quickly tracked targets with distance and velocity estimation errors of 10 % and 14 %, respectively, even with pulses of the same length. Furthermore, GSFM provided approximate azimuth information by transmitting highly orthogonal subpulses for each azimuth.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.572-583
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• 2023

Demand for wood in construction is increasing worldwide. In Korea, technical reviews of high-rise Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) buildings are under way. In this paper, Floor Impact Sound Insulation Performance (FISIP) and Transmission Loss (TL) of 150 mm thick CLT floor panels made of two domestic species, Larix kaempferi and Pinus densiflora, are investigated. The CLT slabs were tested in reverberation chambers connected vertically. When comparing Single Number Quantity (SNQ) of FISIP of the bare panels, the Larix CLT is 3 dB lower in heavy-weight and 1 dB in light-weight than the Pinus CLT. However, there was no difference when concrete toppings were added to improve the performance. As the concrete toppings became thicker, the heavy-weight was reduced by 9 dB ~ 20 dB, and the light-weight by 20 dB ~ 30 dB. And the analysis of these results with area density has confirmed that the area densities are highly correlated (R² = 0.94 ~ 0.99) to the FISIP of the CLT. The types of CLT didn't affect the TL. Comparison of theoretical TL values with measured TL values has shown that the frequency characteristics are similar but 8 dB ~ 12 dB lower in measured values. The relationship between the TL and frequency characteristics of the tested CLT slabs was derived by using the correction value.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.2
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• pp.225-233
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• 2024

Active sonar transmits sound waves to detect covertly maneuvering underwater objects and detects the signals reflected back from the target. However, in addition to the target's echo, the active sonar's received signal is mixed with seafloor, sea surface reverberation, biological noise, and other noise, making target recognition difficult. Conventional techniques for detecting signals above a threshold not only cause false detections or miss targets depending on the set threshold, but also have the problem of having to set an appropriate threshold for various underwater environments. To overcome this, research has been conducted on automatic calculation of threshold values through techniques such as Constant False Alarm Rate (CFAR) and application of advanced tracking filters and association techniques, but there are limitations in environments where a significant number of detections occur. As deep learning technology has recently developed, efforts have been made to apply it in the field of underwater target detection, but it is very difficult to acquire active sonar data for discriminator learning, so not only is the data rare, but there are only a very small number of targets and a relatively large number of non-targets. There are difficulties due to the imbalance of data. In this paper, the image of the energy distribution of the detection signal is used, and a classifier is learned in a way that takes into account the imbalance of the data to distinguish between targets and non-targets and added to the existing technique. Through the proposed technique, target misclassification was minimized and non-targets were eliminated, making target recognition easier for active sonar operators. And the effectiveness of the proposed technique was verified through sea experiment data obtained in the East Sea.

• The Journal of the Acoustical Society of Korea
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• v.43 no.1
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• pp.9-18
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• 2024

The importance of active sonar systems is emerging due to the quietness of underwater targets and the increase in ambient noise due to the increase in maritime traffic. However, the low signal-to-noise ratio of the echo signal due to multipath propagation of the signal, various clutter, ambient noise and reverberation makes it difficult to identify underwater targets using active sonar. Attempts have been made to apply data-based methods such as machine learning or deep learning to improve the performance of underwater target recognition systems, but it is difficult to collect enough data for training due to the nature of sonar datasets. Methods based on mathematical modeling have been mainly used to compensate for insufficient active sonar data. However, methodologies based on mathematical modeling have limitations in accurately simulating complex underwater phenomena. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a sonar signal synthesis method based on a deep neural network. In order to apply the neural network model to the field of sonar signal synthesis, the proposed method appropriately corrects the attention-based encoder and decoder to the sonar signal, which is the main module of the Tacotron model mainly used in the field of speech synthesis. It is possible to synthesize a signal more similar to the actual signal by training the proposed model using the dataset collected by arranging a simulated target in an actual marine environment. In order to verify the performance of the proposed method, Perceptual evaluation of audio quality test was conducted and within score difference -2.3 was shown compared to actual signal in a total of four different environments. These results prove that the active sonar signal generated by the proposed method approximates the actual signal.