AES Europe 2026

String ageing is a familiar; perceptually important
phenomenon for guitarists; players of other stringed
instruments. From the moment a new set of strings is
installed, the sound they produce when excited begins to
change due to a combination of chemical degradation,
corrosion,; mechanical wear arising from playing.
Musicians commonly report that aged strings sound dull,
lack sustain,; feel less responsive compared to new
strings. String ageing is a function of both elapsed time
; accumulated playing time, with repeated playing
accelerating degradation through contamination; repeated
mechanical stress.

Previous studies have investigated individual aspects of
string ageing by artificially accelerating wear;
performing controlled acoustic measurements, identifying
effects such as increased damping of higher partials;
increased inharmonicity. While these approaches provide
valuable physical insight, the tightly constrained
experimental conditions differ significantly from
real-world playing conditions.

This paper presents a dataset of audio recordings of guitar
playing over a four-week period, starting from the point of
new strings being installed.
Audio performance data from different sets of electric
guitar strings is recorded daily over a four-week period,
using strictly fixed musical exercises that are repeated
multiple times per session. By collecting many takes of
identical material at each stage of string age, the dataset
enables statistical analysis of ageing-related changes
while accounting for natural performance variability.

The dataset is intended to support exploratory machine
learning investigations into string ageing, including
questions of how ageing manifests over time; playing
duration, whether string age can be predicted from audio
alone,; which audio features or learned representations
capture perceptually relevant aspects of the ageing process.

The ability to objectively measure listener emotion is a
critical frontier for adaptive audio systems, healthcare,
; personalized music therapy. While music is a powerful
driver of affect, traditional self-reporting is often
intrusive or inaccessible for users in wellbeing settings
who may struggle to articulate their mood. This paper
introduces JoyCam, a multimodal system that estimates
subtle moments of joyful engagement by blending lightweight
brain-wave monitoring (wearable EEG) with facial-expression
sensing. By capturing physiological reactions that occur
below the threshold of conscious awareness, the system
creates a more stable emotional profile than
single-modality methods. In our system, Facial joy is
estimated via MediaPipe landmark analysis, focusing on
normalized mouth-width deviations. Simultaneously,
neurological engagement is tracked through Frontal Alpha
Asymmetry (FAA) using an OpenBCI Cyton system. To address
the sensitivity of EEG to movement, a dynamic artefact
index down-weights neural signals during high-frequency
interference. The system was tested in a pilot study with
five participants. Preliminary results indicate that
baseline-corrected physiological scores align closely with
self-reported music impact; valence ratings across
joyful; sad conditions. These findings suggest that
JoyCam offers a robust framework for responsive musical
companions that can adjust playlists or production
parameters based on a listener’s real-time physiological
state

Tinnitus has been described as `the conscious awareness of
a tonal or composite noise for which there is no
identifiable corresponding external sound source'; is
experienced by ~15% of the European population. Tinnitus
may be experienced in one ear, both ears, or perceived as
originating from within the head. It can present as tonal
sounds, noise-like sounds, or a combination of both. The
perception can lead to emotional;/or cognitive
dysfunction, autonomic arousal, behavioural changes,;/or
functional disability (DeRidder 2021, Biswas 2022, Jarach
2022). There is no standard test for tinnitus in the
medical literature; audiologists typically test pitch (to
within half an octave); perceived loudness of the tone
using standard clinical equipment for testing hearing loss.
The underlying causes of tinnitus are not yet fully
understood,; the most effective treatments not yet
identified. We present the first release of an extended
Tinnitus matching app that includes a highly
individualizable tinnitus tone-matching tool; a
comprehensive questionnaire for mobile health tracking. The
app facilitates large data collection on tinnitus sounds
across aetiologies, co-occurring symptoms,;
demographics. Our intentions are threefold; 1) to provide
those experiencing tinnitus with a way to communicate what
they hear more precisely, 2) understand how tinnitus sounds
vary across demographics, how these relate to co-occurring
symptoms,; eventually – 3) to provide a means of
individualising any sound-based approach to symptom
amelioration. We present the approach; validation of the
tinnitus matching tool against common clinical measures.

The application of binaural cue perception mechanisms to
multichannel audio compression technology can reduce
spatial parameter redundancy; effectively lower the
encoding bitrate. Binaural cues play a critical role in
sound source localization,; their frequency-dependent
characteristics yield varied perceptual localization
effects. However, current understanding of the specific
behavior of binaural cues at low frequencies, as well as
the similarities; differences between interaural time
difference (ITD); interaural level difference (ILD),
remains incomplete. To explore the relationship between
ITD-based; ILD-based azimuth perception, this study
non-uniformly selected nine ITD values; twelve ILD
values within the 300–1480 Hz frequency range to test ITD
; ILD perceptual azimuths, respectively. The experimental
method involved using fixed binaural cue stimuli while
varying the audio with known horizontal azimuth angles to
approach the target binaural cue stimulus. Test results
indicate that both ITD; ILD perceptual effects are
significantly influenced by frequency, with the minimum
perceptual azimuth values for both ITD; ILD observed at
700 Hz, suggesting that binaural cue perception azimuths
are closer to the median plane at this frequency.
Furthermore, surface fitting was applied to the perceptual
azimuths of ITD; ILD, revealing relatively similar
patterns. Based on experimental findings, this paper
analyzes the explorable perceptual correlation between
ITD-based; ILD-based azimuth perception. The application
of data in spatial audio coding contributes to the
efficient transmission; fidelity preservation of audio
signals. This study provides valuable insights for
optimizing binaural cue-based compression techniques,
ultimately supporting high-fidelity spatial audio
reproduction.

The authors proposed a stereo-width shrinkage method for
headphone reproduction, in
which crosstalk from loudspeaker reproduction is added to
the original stereo
sources. In this study, we investigate the sound quality of
stereo-width-shrunken
sources with different parameter settings. A Semantic
Differential method is
employed to quantify the subjective characteristics with
five adjective pairs,;
the naturalness of the stereo width shrunk sources is
evaluated in detail with
Scheffé’s paired comparison. The results of the Semantic
Differential method
comprehensively rank the sound sources. Interestingly, the
results of the paired
comparison are not reversed in the natural; unnatural
evaluations, whereas the
negative evaluation yields reasonable results. These
results provide valuable
insights for practical sound-quality evaluation.