connor wessel

Connor Wessel is a fourth-year PhD student on the Auditory Alarms project. He undertook his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Psychology at the University of Plymouth in England. His research focuses on how auditory alarms can be made to be more localisable, and how different levels of urgency can be more discriminable. He recently studied whether newly designed alarms are detrimental to performance on cognitive tasks (and vice versa), and whether digital bike bells can improve the safety and experience of cyclists and pedestrians. As a musician, Connor has played trumpet in Concert band and Orchestra, and has sung Tenor in various choral activities.

 

	Awards and Recognitions
	Council of Canadian Departments of Psychology Teaching Assistant Award (2026)
	Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2024-2026)
	American Society of Acoustics Best Student Poster Award (2024)
	Highest achievement in MSc Advanced Psychology (2022)
	Pam Jacobs Memorial Prize (2021)

 

	Publications
	Wessel, C. & Schutz, M. (in review). Amplitude Envelope and Loudness: Finding Perceived Equality between Flat and Percussive Tones. Auditory Perception & Cognition.
	Wessel, C., Agbolade, J., Elizondo Lopez, A., & Schutz, M. (in press). Investigating Amplitude Envelope’s Role in Auditory Alarm Masking. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.
	Wessel, C., Zhang, C., & Schutz, M. (2025). Amplitude envelope and subjective duration: Quantifying the role of decaying offsets in timing perception. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 88(1), 35. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-025-03186-4
	Wessel, C., Zhang, C., & Schutz, M. (2024). Adaptively Matching Perceptual Duration of Flat and Percussive Tones. Canadian Acoustics, 52(1), Article 1.
	Edworthy, J., Brown, R., & Wessel, C. (2023). Where’s that bike? Sounds and metrics for a smart bicycle bell. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 67(1), 2519-2524.
	Wessel, C., & Schutz, M. (2023). Improving the Detection of Melodic Sequences Through the Addition of Inharmonic Frequencies. Proceedings of Acoustics Week in Canada 2023, 51(3), 182-183.
	Burdick, K. J., Yang, S., Lopez, A. E., Wessel, C., Schutz, M., & Schlesinger, J. J. (2023). Auditory roughness: a delicate balance. British Journal of Anaesthesia, 131(4), 649-652.
	Edworthy, J., Reed, D., Wessel, C., Lawrence, L., & Edworthy, J. (2023). Designing, evaluating, and benchmarking auditory alarms for the chemical and oil processing industry. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 67(1), 1660-1664.
	Edworthy, J., Edworthy, J., Reed, D., Wessel, C., & Lawrence, L. (2021). Ergonomic Auditory Alarm signals for the Oil and Chemical Processing Industry. IISE Transactions on Occupational Ergonomics and Human Factors, 9(2), 86-95.

 

	Conference Presentations
	Wessel, C., Zhang, C., & Schutz, M. (2024, November). Adaptively equating perceived duration of flat and percussive tones (Poster). Presented at Neuromusic, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
	Wessel, C., Zhang, C., & Schutz, M. (2024, July). Equating perceived duration between flat and percussive tones through an adaptive staircase (Talk). Presented at The Society for Music Perception and Cognition Conference, Banff, Alberta, Canada.
	Wessel, C., Zhang, C., & Schutz, M. (2024, May). Adaptively matching the perceptual duration of flat and percussive tones (Poster). Presented at The Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
	Wessel, C. & Schutz, M. (2024, February). Measuring how perceptual binding influences discrimination of melodic sequences (Poster). Presented at The Lower Ontario Visionary Establishment Conference, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
	Zhang, C.,Wessel, C., & Schutz, M. (2024, February). Assessing the Perceived Duration of Percussive Tones (Poster). Presented at The Lower Ontario Visionary Establishment Conference, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.
	Wessel, C. & Schutz, M. (2024, January). Visualising differences between strikes on a cymbal (Poster). Presented at The Space Between, Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
	Wessel, C. & Schutz, M. (2023, November). Improving sound discrimination through Gestalt binding of inharmonic frequencies (Poster). Presented at Neuromusic, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
	Wessel, C. & Schutz, M. (2023, October). Improving the detectability of auditory alarms by adding high harmonics (Talk). Presented at Acoustics Week Canada, Montréal, Quebec, Canada.
	Edworthy, J., Wessel, C., & Brown, R. (2023, June). Developing sounds and metrics for a smart bicycle bell (Poster). Presented at The International Conference on Auditory Display, Norrköping, Sweden.
	Elizondo Lopez, A., Wessel, C. & Schutz, M. (2023, March). Improving the detection of auditory alarms by adding orchestral triangle frequencies (Talk). Presented at The York Graduate Symposium – Forward Motion, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
	Wessel, C. & Schutz, M. (2023, February). Improving the detectability of auditory alarms by adding high harmonics (Poster). Presented at The Lower Ontario Visionary Establishment Conference, Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada.