Two experiments measured listeners' abilities to detect facial expression in unfamiliar speech in normal and whisper registers. Acoustic differences between speech produced with neutral or marked facial expression were also assessed. Experiment 1 showed that in a forced-choice identification task, listeners could accurately select frowned speech as such, and neutral speech as happier sounding than frowned speech in the same speakers. Listeners were able to judge frowning in the same speakers' whispered speech. Relative to neutral speech, frowning lowers formant frequencies and increases syllable duration. In both registers, judgments of frowning and its relative happiness were significantly poorer for lip-rounded vowels, suggesting that listeners may recover lip protrusion in making judgments. Experiment 2 replicated the finding [V. Tartter, Percept. Psychophys. 27, 24-27 (1980)] that listeners can select speech produced with a smile as happier sounding than neutral speech in normal register, and extended the findings to whisper register. Relative to neutral, smiling increased second formant frequency. Results are discussed with respect to nonverbal auditory emotion prototypes and with respect to the direct realist theory of speech perception.

No abstract

PFS (Prime Focus Spectrograph), a next generation facility instrument on the 8.2-meter Subaru Telescope, is a very wide-field, massively multiplexed, optical and near-infrared spectrograph. Exploiting the Subaru prime focus, 2394 reconfigurable fibers will be distributed over the 1.3 deg field of view. The spectrograph has been designed with 3 arms of blue, red, and near-infrared cameras to simultaneously observe spectra from 380nm to 1260nm in one exposure at a resolution of ∼1.6−2.7Å. An international collaboration is developing this instrument under the initiative of Kavli IPMU. The project is now going into the construction phase aiming at undertaking system integration in 2017-2018 and subsequently carrying out engineering operations in 2018-2019. This article gives an overview of the instrument, current project status and future paths forward.

International audienceno abstrac

The Cobra fiber positioner is being developed by the California Institute of Technology (CIT) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) for the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS) instrument that will be installed at the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. PFS is a fiber fed multi-object spectrometer that uses an array of Cobra fiber positioners to rapidly reconfigure 2394 optical fibers at the prime focus of the Subaru Telescope that are capable of positioning a fiber to within 5µm of a specified target location. A single Cobra fiber positioner measures 7. 7mm in diameter and is l 15mm tall. The Cobra fiber positioner uses two piezo-electric rotary motors to move a fiber optic anywhere in a 9.5mm diameter patrol area. In preparation for full-scale production of 2550 Cobra positioners an Engineering Model (EM) version was developed, built and tested to validate the design, reduce manufacturing costs, and improve system reliability. The EM leveraged the previously developed prototype versions of the Cobra fiber positioner. The requirements, design, assembly techniques, development testing, design qualification and performance evaluation of EM Cobra fiber positioners are described here. Also discussed is the use of the EM build and test campaign to validate the plans for full-scale production of2550 Cobra fiber positioners schedul ed to begin in late-2014.