Toward an ecological conception of timbre

This paper is part of a series in which we had worked in the last 6 months, and, specifically, intend to investigate the notion of timbre through the ecological perspective proposed by James Gibson in his Theory of Direct Perception. First of all, we discussed the traditional approach to timbre, mainly as developed in acoustics and psychoacoustics. Later, we proposed a new conception of timbre that was born in concepts of ecological approach. The ecological approach to perception proposed by Gibson (1966, 1979) presupposes a level of analysis of perceptual stimulated that includes, but is quite broader than the usual physical aspect. Gibson suggests as focus the relationship between the perceiver and his environment. At the core of this approach, is the notion of affordances, invariant combinations of properties at the ecological level, taken with reference to the anatomy and action systems of species or individual, and also with reference to its biological and social needs. Objects and events are understood as relates to a perceiving organism by the meaning of structured information, thus affording possibilities of action by the organism. Event perception aims at identifying properties of events to specify changes of the environment that are relevant to the organism. The perception of form is understood as a special instance of event perception, which is the identity of an object depends on the nature of the events in which is involved and what remains invariant over time. From this perspective, perception is not in any sense created by the brain, but is a part of the world where information can be found. Consequently, an ecological approach represents a form of direct realism that opposes the indirect realist based on predominant approaches to perception borrowed from psychoacoustics and computational approach

Classification of Triadic Chord Inversions Using Kohonen Self-organizing Maps

In this paper we discuss the application of the Kohonen Selforganizing Maps to the classification of triadic chords in inversions and root positions. Our motivation started in the validation of Schönberg´s hypotheses of the harmonic features of each chord inversion. We employed the Kohonen network, which has been generally known as an optimum pattern classification tool in several areas, including music, to verify that hypothesis. The outcomes of our experiment refuse the Schönberg´s assumption in two aspects: structural and perceptual/functional

As contribuições da ciência cognitiva à composição musical

This dissertation’s goal is to construct a detailed map of the principal branches of cognitive science and their methodological and epistemological contributions to the study music composition. We are concerned, firstly, with the contributions to the compositional techniques, and secondly, with their perception. The first chapter deals with the cognitivist paradigm by means of artificial intelligence. In the second chapter we relate the artificial intelligence with the music composition, investigating the cognitvist models of composition by the analysis of automatic compositional systems. The third chapter brings the artificial neural networks to the scene, within the so-called connectionist paradigm. In our fourth chapter we established the relation between the connectionism and music composition. In this sense, we describe implementations that model and/or simulate aspects of perception and composition. The fifth chapter leaves the computational perspective in the study of cognition and present alternative proposals in this sense, related to the music composition and musicology, as the ecological approach to auditory perception and the theories of emergentism applied to music

OpenLab ESEV: novas aventuras no desenvolvimento de software

OpenLab ESEV is the Free Software project of the School of Education - Polytechnic Institute of Viseu (ESEV). The project aims to establish a platform to aggregate activities that foster the use of Free/Libre and Open Source Software (F/LOSS), Free Culture and more flexible licenses for creative and educational purposes in the ESEV's domains of activity (education, arts, media). OpenLab exists since 2009. It emerged in an environment characterized by the lack of knowledge of the existing Libre alternatives and by work habits exclusively built around proprietary software. Today, OpenLab activities are implemented within four key areas of action: dissemination, training, support and production. This paper presents two of the most important ongoing projects: Ottographer and StudiozCollabPress. StudiozCollabPress is a customized version of a popular WordPress plugin for project management that was developed to support short movie projects management. We'll present its main features and results from real-case scenarios of use, specifically, finished and ongoing 3D animation students' projects. Ottographer is a webcam time-lapse tool for operating systems based on Debian GNU/Linux. Besides the main features, we'll present some examples and suggestions for educational settings as well as for creative and educational purposes. Both projects are distributed as F/LOSS, meaning that they can be used, studied, and modified without restrictions, as well as copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form. These projects might help us launch a new trend at our school community that we highly antecipate: the development and sharing of our own tools

Revisiting the Sequential Symbolic Regression Genetic Programming

Sequential Symbolic Regression (SSR) is a technique that recursively induces functions over the error of the current solution, concatenating them in an attempt to reduce the error of the resulting model. As proof of concept, the method was previously evaluated in one-dimensional problems and compared with canonical Genetic Programming (GP) and Geometric Semantic Genetic Programming (GSGP). In this paper we revisit SSR exploring the method behaviour in higher dimensional, larger and more heterogeneous datasets. We discuss the difficulties arising from the application of the method to more complex problems, e.g., overfitting, along with suggestions to overcome them. An experimental analysis was conducted comparing SSR to GP and GSGP, showing SSR solutions are smaller than those generated by the GSGP with similar performance and more accurate than those generated by the canonical GP

Reducing Dimensionality to Improve Search in Semantic Genetic Programming

Genetic programming approaches are moving from analysing the syntax of individual solutions to look into their semantics. One of the common definitions of the semantic space in the context of symbolic regression is a n-dimensional space, where n corresponds to the number of training examples. In problems where this number is high, the search process can became harder as the number of dimensions increase. Geometric semantic genetic programming (GSGP) explores the semantic space by performing geometric semantic operations—the fitness landscape seen by GSGP is guaranteed to be conic by construction. Intuitively, a lower number of dimensions can make search more feasible in this scenario, decreasing the chances of data overfitting and reducing the number of evaluations required to find a suitable solution. This paper proposes two approaches for dimensionality reduction in GSGP: (i) to apply current instance selection methods as a pre-process step before training points are given to GSGP; (ii) to incorporate instance selection to the evolution of GSGP. Experiments in 15 datasets show that GSGP performance is improved by using instance reduction during the evolution

Advanced oxidation processes for remediation of azo dyes used in the textile industry

O objectivo deste trabalho visa avaliar a degradação fotocatalitica dos corantes azo Remazol Amarelo Ouro, Azul e Carbon RGB. Para tal foram avaliados os seguintes parâmetros: concentração de TiO2, concentração do corante, efeito do H2O2, efeito do pH e da reciclagem de TiO2. TiO2 Degussa P25 foi testado em concentrações a partir de 0gL-1 a 1 gL-1. A concentração do corante foi de 30 mgL-1 a 120 mgL-1 e a concentração do peróxido de hidrogénio foi de 0.3x10-3 a 6x10-2 mol L-1. A variação do pH foi de 2 a 11 e de reciclagem de TiO2 foi feita com 5 ciclos. As amostras foram tratadas durante duas horas com irradiação artificial (lâmpada de vapor mercúrio, 125W) e as amostras foram recolhidas aos 0, 15, 30, 45, 60, 90 e 120 minutos. A fotodegradação das amostras foi seguida por espectroscopia UV-Vis. A eficiência da degradação fotocatalítica aumentou com o aumento da quantidade de TiO2. O efeito do H2O2 foi benéfico para a degradação dos 3 corantes. Os resultados indicam que a degradação fotocatalítica depende da concentração de corante, da quantidade de fotocatalisador utilizado, irradiação UV vs tempo, do pH da solução e da concentração de peróxido de hidrogénio adicionado

Non-extensivity Effects and the Highest Energy Cosmic Ray Affair

Recent measurements of the cosmic microwave background confirm that it is described by a Planckian distribution with high precision. It is non-extensivity bounded to be less than some parts in $10^5$, or to some parts in $10^4$ at most. This deviation may appear minuscule, but may have a non-negligible effect on a particle propagating through this background over the course of millions of years. In this paper we analyze the possible influence of such a slight deviation upon the propagation of nuclei and protons of ultra-high energy. These particles interact via photopion and photodisintegration processes which we examine taking into account a slight non-extensive background. We show that such a deviation does not exhibit a significant difference in the energy attenuation length of extremely high energy cosmic rays.Comment: Revised version, improvements per referee's suggestion

Law, State and telecommunications : the broadband gravitational force

O presente estudo figura como introdução à Revista de Direito, Estado e Telecomunicações do Grupo de Estudos em Direito das Telecomunicações da Universidade de Brasília, abordando sinteticamente a estrutura, conteúdo e política editorial da revista. Em acréscimo, o texto analisa os principais acontecimentos do setor no Brasil, bem como normas e julgados relativos ao ano de 2010, para registro das principais discussões jurídico-políticas do setor de telecomunicações brasileiro referentes ao ano anterior ao da publicação. ________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACTThis text introduces the Law, State, and Telecommunications Review, addressing, by way of an overview, its structure, contents and editorial policy. Besides that, this introduction defines the underpinnings of the journal’s regulatory approach. Statutes, administrative regulation and judicial decisions of 2010 pertaining to telecommunications are referred to in detail. It also addresses the main political and juridical discussions on the Brazilian telecommunications sector that took place in the previous year of this journal’s edition