Audio Engineering Society Convention Paper 8308 Presented at the 129th Convention 2010 November 4–7 San Francisco, CA, USA The papers at this Convention have been selected on the basis of a submitted abstract and extended precis that have been peer reviewed by at least two qualified anonymous reviewers. This convention paper has been reproduced from the author's advance manuscript, without editing, corrections, or consideration by the Review Board. The AES takes no responsibility for the contents. Additional papers may be obtained by sending request and remittance to Audio Engineering Society, 60 East 42 nd Street, New York, New York 10165-2520, USA; also see www.aes.org. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this paper, or any portion thereof, is not permitted without direct permission from the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society. Parametric Modeling of Human Response to a Sudden Tempo Change Nima Darabi 1 , U. Peter Svensson 1 , Jon Forbord 1 1 Centre for Quantifiable Quality of Service in Communication Systems * , NTNU, Trondheim, O.S. Bragstads plass 2E, NO-7491, Norway darabi@q2s.ntnu.no, nima@ccma.stanford.edu svensson@q2s.ntnu.no jonf@samfundet.no ABSTRACT A human-computer interactive subjective test was arranged in which 12 users took part in a sensorimotor synchronization experiment. Their task was to follow a suddenly changing metronome by hand-clapping and finger- tapping, trying to adopt to the suddenly changing tempo. Up-sampled recorded trials with different interpolation methods were used to measure their internal timekeeper's tempo in response to each tempo change. An iterative prediction error minimization method was applied to the step response signals, to identify the underlying human users’ phase correction process related to these sensorimotor synchronization tasks. Experimental data indicated that the identified system is stimuli-dependent as well as individual, while not varying considerably by the task of hand clapping or finger tapping. We concluded that the sensory and cognitive process was dominant in this experiment comparing to the motion process, i.e. the mean of generating impulses. Fit-ratio comparisons showed that a delayed second order underdamped system (P2DU) could fit all the observations very well, while adding a third real pole or a zero, into P3DU or P3DUZ, would only slightly improve the model, at the cost of complexity. Concluding, the P2DU model constitutes the best trade-off between complexity and accuracy of the model. The related parameters for different stimuli (step size) and both tasks were extracted and reported. * Centre for Quantifiable Quality of Service in Communication Systems, Centre of Excellence appointed by The Research Council of Norway, funded by the Research Council, NTNU, and UNINETT. http://www.ntnu.no/Q2S/