Mapping the Klangdom Live: Cartographies for piano with two performers and electronics

The use of high-density loudspeaker arrays (HDLAs) has recently experienced rapid growth in a wide variety of technical and aesthetic approaches. Still less explored, however, are applications to interactive music with live acoustic instruments. How can immersive spatialization accompany an instrument already with its own rich spatial diffusion pattern, like the grand piano, in the context of a score-based concert work? Potential models include treating the spatialized electronic sound in analogy to the diffusion pattern of the instrument, with spatial dimensions parametrized as functions of timbral features. Another approach is to map the concert hall as a three-dimensional projection of the instrument’s internal physical layout, a kind of virtual sonic microscope. Or, the diffusion of electronic spatial sound can be treated as an independent polyphonic element, complementary to but not dependent upon the instrument’s own spatial characteristics. Cartographies (2014), for piano with two performers and electronics, explores each of these models individually and in combination, as well as their technical implementation with the Meyer Sound Matrix3 system of the Su ̈ dwestrundfunk Experimentalstudio in Freiburg, Germany, and the 43.4-channel Klangdom of the Institut fu ̈ r Musik und Akustik at the Zentrum fu ̈ r Kunst und Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. The process of composing, producing, and performing the work raises intriguing questions, and invaluable hints, for the composition and performance of live interactive works with HDLAs in the future

Piezo-electromechanical smart materials with distributed arrays of piezoelectric transducers: Current and upcoming applications

This review paper intends to gather and organize a series of works which discuss the possibility of exploiting the mechanical properties of distributed arrays of piezoelectric transducers. The concept can be described as follows: on every structural member one can uniformly distribute an array of piezoelectric transducers whose electric terminals are to be connected to a suitably optimized electric waveguide. If the aim of such a modification is identified to be the suppression of mechanical vibrations then the optimal electric waveguide is identified to be the 'electric analog' of the considered structural member. The obtained electromechanical systems were called PEM (PiezoElectroMechanical) structures. The authors especially focus on the role played by Lagrange methods in the design of these analog circuits and in the study of PEM structures and we suggest some possible research developments in the conception of new devices, in their study and in their technological application. Other potential uses of PEMs, such as Structural Health Monitoring and Energy Harvesting, are described as well. PEM structures can be regarded as a particular kind of smart materials, i.e. materials especially designed and engineered to show a specific andwell-defined response to external excitations: for this reason, the authors try to find connection between PEM beams and plates and some micromorphic materials whose properties as carriers of waves have been studied recently. Finally, this paper aims to establish some links among some concepts which are used in different cultural groups, as smart structure, metamaterial and functional structural modifications, showing how appropriate would be to avoid the use of different names for similar concepts. © 2015 - IOS Press and the authors

Summarizing Product Reviews Using Dynamic Relation Extraction

The accumulated review data for a single product on Amazon.com could po- tentially take several weeks to examine manually. Computationally extracting the essence of a document is a substantial task, which has been explored pre- viously through many different approaches. We explore how statistical predic- tion can be used to perform dynamic relation extraction. Using patterns in the syntactic structure of a sentence, each word is classified as either product fea- ture or descriptor, and then linked together by association. The classifiers are trained with a manually annotated training set and features from dependency parse trees produced by the Stanford CoreNLP library. In this thesis we compare the most widely used machine learning algo- rithms to find the one most suitable for our scenario. We ultimately found that the classification step was most successful with SVM, reaching an FS- core of 80 percent for the relation extraction classification step. The results of the predictions are presented in a graphical interface displaying the relations. An end-to-end evaluation was also conducted, where our system achieved a relaxed recall of 53.35%

Dynamic problems for metamaterials: Review of existing models and ideas for further research

Metamaterials are materials especially engineered to have a peculiar physical behaviour, to be exploited for some well-specified technological application. In this context we focus on the conception of general micro-structured continua, with particular attention to piezoelectromechanical structures, having a strong coupling between macroscopic motion and some internal degrees of freedom, which may be electric or, more generally, related to some micro-motion. An interesting class of problems in this context regards the design of wave-guides aimed to control wave propagation. The description of the state of the art is followed by some hints addressed to describe some possible research developments and in particular to design optimal design techniques for bone reconstruction or systems which may block wave propagation in some frequency ranges, in both linear and non-linear fields. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

aflow.org: A Web Ecosystem of Databases, Software and Tools

To enable materials databases supporting computational and experimental research, it is critical to develop platforms that both facilitate access to the data and provide the tools used to generate/analyze it - all while considering the diversity of users' experience levels and usage needs. The recently formulated FAIR principles (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) establish a common framework to aid these efforts. This article describes aflow_org, a web ecosystem developed to provide FAIR - compliant access to the AFLOW databases. Graphical and programmatic retrieval methods are offered, ensuring accessibility for all experience levels and data needs. aflow_org goes beyond data-access by providing applications to important features of the AFLOW software, assisting users in their own calculations without the need to install the entire high-throughput framework. Outreach commitments to provide AFLOW tutorials and materials science education to a global and diverse audiences will also be presented.Comment: 32 pages, 8 figure

A unifying perspective: the relaxed linear micromorphic continuum

We formulate a relaxed linear elastic micromorphic continuum model with symmetric Cauchy force-stresses and curvature contribution depending only on the micro-dislocation tensor. Our relaxed model is still able to fully describe rotation of the microstructure and to predict non-polar size-effects. It is intended for the homogenized description of highly heterogeneous, but non polar materials with microstructure liable to slip and fracture. In contrast to classical linear micromorphic models our free energy is not uniformly pointwise positive definite in the control of the independent constitutive variables. The new relaxed micromorphic model supports well-posedness results for the dynamic and static case. There, decisive use is made of new coercive inequalities recently proved by Neff, Pauly and Witsch and by Bauer, Neff, Pauly and Starke. The new relaxed micromorphic formulation can be related to dislocation dynamics, gradient plasticity and seismic processes of earthquakes. It unifies and simplifies the understanding of the linear micromorphic models