Auditory masking based on automatic chord progressions using modulation conditions of critical bandwidth in diatonic chords for dental treatment sounds

The unpleasant noise is one of the important social problems because our quality of life is degraded by it. We have previously proposed the comfortable sound design method based on chord-forming with music theory for dental treatment sounds. The previously proposed method is difficult to apply various dental treatment sounds because that employs single chord progression. To solve this problem, we focus on the automatic generation of chord progression by using diatonic chords. In this paper, we propose an auditory masking method based on the automatic generation of chord progression using diatonic chords with the key determined from the peak frequencies of dental treatment sounds. The proposed method employs the modulation conditions of critical bandwidth in diatonic chords for comfort in the modulations. The proposed method can achieve suitable sound design for various dental treatment sounds by utilizing real-time key determination according to the peak frequency of dental treatment sounds. Finally, we confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method through evaluation experiments.