Test and assessment of sound equipment of the School of Media of Oulu University of Applied Sciences

This project consists on an assessment of sound equipment in several predefined situations or conditions. It is conceived as a useful guidance for the tested material, more than a technical characteristics catalogue. Its purpose is to show how the equipment behaves under different test situations, specially chosen to approximate as closely as possible to real sound picking situations. Thereby, a person who is going to do a sound pick, can consult this project to decide which is the best audio equipment he can choose for his purpose, and also which is the best way to use the selected device, or perhaps, what assembly he should dispose to obtain a certain effect.Verdú Navarro, H. (2012). Test and assessment of sound equipment of the School of Media of Oulu University of Applied Sciences. Universitat Politècnica de València. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/17792Archivo delegad

A toolbox for animal call recognition

Monitoring the natural environment is increasingly important as habit degradation and climate change reduce theworld’s biodiversity.We have developed software tools and applications to assist ecologists with the collection and analysis of acoustic data at large spatial and temporal scales.One of our key objectives is automated animal call recognition, and our approach has three novel attributes. First, we work with raw environmental audio, contaminated by noise and artefacts and containing calls that vary greatly in volume depending on the animal’s proximity to the microphone. Second, initial experimentation suggested that no single recognizer could dealwith the enormous variety of calls. Therefore, we developed a toolbox of generic recognizers to extract invariant features for each call type. Third, many species are cryptic and offer little data with which to train a recognizer. Many popular machine learning methods require large volumes of training and validation data and considerable time and expertise to prepare. Consequently we adopt bootstrap techniques that can be initiated with little data and refined subsequently. In this paper, we describe our recognition tools and present results for real ecological problems

Database of audio records

Diplomka a prakticky castDiplome with partical part

Assistive Listening Devices: A Guide

Objective: The purpose of this research was to develop a guide on assistive listening devices (ALDs) describing the various types of ALDs, the basic underlying concepts, their advantages and disadvantages, the instrumentation and its components, and the setup and procedures for specification/evaluation of ALDs in accordance with national standards or guidelines issued by professional organizations in our field. This guide is intended for audiologists, hearing scientists, and audiology and hearing science students. Method: A thorough review of the previous ALD literature including national and international standards for set-up and installation, specification/evaluation and verification of ALDs; guidelines from professional audiology and acoustic and hearing sciences organizations for ALD set-up and installation, specification/evaluation and verification; peer-reviewed studies on ALDs; text-book chapters and books on ALDs; and ALD websites from professional organizations. Results: This guide was organized by ALD type, and was subcategorized by the basic underlying concepts, their advantages and disadvantages, the instrumentation and components, and the setup/installation and procedures for specification/evaluation and verification. A comparative analysis was also performed on the relative benefits of various ALDs in a real-word application setting. Discussion: This guide demonstrates that ALDs facilitate communicative efficiency in persons with hearing loss in adverse listening environments. Selection of an appropriate ALD should be based on the intended system use and the intended listening environment. Appropriately selected and fitted ALDs help individuals detect environmental sounds or improve their speech recognition in specific listening settings. Also, ALDs can enable higher levels of communicative performance would be obtained with just the use of individual hearing technology alone. Conclusion: The research findings demonstrate that ALDs improve audibility and overall listening benefit for individuals with hearing loss, especially those with compatible hearing technology. The guide can help one ensure optimal ALD performance to maximize communicative benefit; it serves as a resource for audiologists, hearing scientists, and audiology and hearing science students to develop a better understanding of topics related to ALDs; appropriate ALDs to recommend to persons with hearing loss for various listening situations; set-up and installation of ALDs; and evaluation and verification of ALD performanc

Position surveillance using one active ranging satellite and time-of-arrival of a signal from an independent satellite

Position surveillance using one active ranging/communication satellite and the time-of-arrival of signals from an independent satellite was shown to be feasible and practical. A towboat on the Mississippi River was equipped with a tone-code ranging transponder and a receiver tuned to the timing signals of the GOES satellite. A similar transponder was located at the office of the towing company. Tone-code ranging interrogations were transmitted from the General Electric Earth Station Laboratory through ATS-6 to the towboat and to the ground truth transponder office. Their automatic responses included digital transmissions of time-of-arrival measurements derived from the GOES signals. The Earth Station Laboratory determined ranges from the satellites to the towboat and computed position fixes. The ATS-6 lines-of-position were more precise than 0.1 NMi, 1 sigma, and the GOES lines-of-position were more precise than 1.6 NMi, 1 sigma. High quality voice communications were accomplished with the transponders using a nondirectional antenna on the towboat. The simple and effective surveillance technique merits further evaluation using operational maritime satellites

Deep Learning for Environmentally Robust Speech Recognition: An Overview of Recent Developments

Eliminating the negative effect of non-stationary environmental noise is a long-standing research topic for automatic speech recognition that stills remains an important challenge. Data-driven supervised approaches, including ones based on deep neural networks, have recently emerged as potential alternatives to traditional unsupervised approaches and with sufficient training, can alleviate the shortcomings of the unsupervised methods in various real-life acoustic environments. In this light, we review recently developed, representative deep learning approaches for tackling non-stationary additive and convolutional degradation of speech with the aim of providing guidelines for those involved in the development of environmentally robust speech recognition systems. We separately discuss single- and multi-channel techniques developed for the front-end and back-end of speech recognition systems, as well as joint front-end and back-end training frameworks

Telecommunications media for the delivery of educational programming

The technical characteristics of various telecommunications media are examined for incorporation into educational networks. FM radio, AM radio, and VHF and UHF television are considered along with computer-aided instruction. The application of iteration networks to library systems, and microform technology are discussed. The basic principles of the communications theory are outlined, and the operation of the PLATO 4 random access system is described