EMG-to-Speech: Direct Generation of Speech from Facial Electromyographic Signals

The general objective of this work is the design, implementation, improvement and evaluation of a system that uses surface electromyographic (EMG) signals and directly synthesizes an audible speech output: EMG-to-speech

"Sound Shaping" of East Slavic Zagovory

In this paper, the traditional devices that serve to create the "sound shaping" of a certain speech genre are examined. In particular, we are concerned with the performance of East Slavic zagovory, oral charms that are spoken by the practitioners of folk curing when healing a patient, bewitching water, or undertaking other tasks associated with folk medical practice

The Physio-Emotional Effects of Audio in the Global Christian Church

Audio, specifically as researched by the film industry specialists, has physical and emotional effects on those exposed to it. These effects follow from manipulation of sound’s characteristics in specific and measurable ways. The responsibility of the Christian is to share the gospel with others and support the kingdom of God with his or her skills. In light of these truths, Christian audio specialists should have a thorough knowledge of the physio-emotional effects of audio. Further, they should not shy away from applying strategies from secular audio research to benefit local churches across the globe

Aural Contract: Investigations at the Threshold of Audibility

There are many studies dedicated to speech politics, yet the politics of listening remains an underdeveloped area of research. The conditions by which judges, lawyers, police, legislators, and witnesses listen—especially given the increasing employment of forensic audio technologies— deserve closer inspection. This practice-based PhD thesis investigates the political and legal implications of radically new modes of listening, recording, and audio analysis that have emerged since the mid-1980s. It borrows strategies from forensic audio analysis and art to map out the contemporary thresholds of audibility—both human and machinic—as new cultural and political frontiers where issues of subjecthood, citizenship, and testimony are being defined. This thesis is situated at the intersection of art, science, and advocacy, and as such each of the three chapters, together with the methodological introduction, develop their argumentation through a variety of means. The written component develops a historical and theoretical analysis of the ways in which we listen, while in the practice portfolio I test these propositions through both audiovisual artworks and investigative sonic experiments. The textual and practical dimensions are thus mutually constitutive: the historical and theoretical enquiry feeds into the practice, while the practice interrogates and attempts to materially implement these critical assumptions as political audio investigations for human and civil rights. In analysing the thresholds of sound and voice, we recurrently encounter forms of border-crossing, be they material, juridical, sensorial, or conceptual. In Chapter 1 we see the ways in which the voice transgresses the borders between states, both national and ontological. Chapter 2 discusses the blur between foreground and background, sound and noise. In Chapter 3 the way sounds bleed through the walls of a building leads us to the seepage between sound, sight, and touch. The title Aural Contract refers to a shift from the oral to the aural, and from a contract between speaking subjects towards a new set of propositions for the conditions by which we listen to one another and can produce audible evidence. With this shift of analysis from speaking to listening, new modes of political subjectivity emerge; a new spectrum of sounds and silences by which we can make audible those at the threshold of politics—the political prisoner, the colonised, the ghettoised, and the migrant

Improving Statistical Language Model Performance with Automatically Generated Word Hierarchies

An automatic word classification system has been designed which processes word unigram and bigram frequency statistics extracted from a corpus of natural language utterances. The system implements a binary top-down form of word clustering which employs an average class mutual information metric. Resulting classifications are hierarchical, allowing variable class granularity. Words are represented as structural tags --- unique $n$-bit numbers the most significant bit-patterns of which incorporate class information. Access to a structural tag immediately provides access to all classification levels for the corresponding word. The classification system has successfully revealed some of the structure of English, from the phonemic to the semantic level. The system has been compared --- directly and indirectly --- with other recent word classification systems. Class based interpolated language models have been constructed to exploit the extra information supplied by the classifications and some experiments have shown that the new models improve model performance.Comment: 17 Page Paper. Self-extracting PostScript Fil

'Tell all the truth, but tell it slant': a poetics of truth and reconciliation

There is a voice that tries to speak the truth. This essay will suggest that the discourse on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has perhaps ignored this most invisible of things, and has looked for the truth of the Commission everywhere except where it might be found, if indeed it can be found at all. To the extent that it is possible to oppose the truth of the voice to another truth, it may be useful to make use of a notion of poetics; even a sublime poetics