Manga Vision

Manga Vision examines cultural and communicative aspects of Japanese comics, drawing together scholars from Japan, Australia and Europe working in areas as diverse as cultural studies, linguistics, education, music, art, anthropology, and translation, to explore the influence of manga in Japan and worldwide via translation, OEL manga and fan engagement. This volume includes a mix of theoretical, methodological, empirical and professional practice-based chapters, examining manga from both academic and artistic perspectives. Manga Vision also provides the reader with a multimedia experience, featuring original artwork by Australian manga artist Queenie Chan, cosplay photographs, and an online supplement offering musical compositions inspired by manga, and downloadable manga-related teaching resources

Subtitling for the Deaf and the Hard-of-hearing: A Reception Study in the Turkish Context

This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of subtitling for people with hearing impairments and to improve the accessibility to audiovisual material for hearing-impaired viewers in Turkey. It starts by providing a detailed general overview of the current state of accessibility and includes a detailed discussion on existing legislation, an outline of the limited practice of subtitling for the deaf and the hard-of-hearing (SDH) in Turkish and a profile of the assumed target audience. The ultimate goal of this research is to create a set of guidelines that can be used in the production of quality SDH in Turkey. In order to achieve these aims, the study adopts a product-oriented descriptive approach and first investigates the guidelines applied in countries where SDH has long been established as a professional practice in an attempt to reveal some of the shared values of good practice as well as potential divergences. Following this descriptive analysis, some of the key contradicting practices in the guidelines – speaker identification, reading speed, indication of sound and paralinguistic information – are tested on an audience of (37) Turkish hearing-impaired viewers so as to unveil their needs and preferences within the framework of Audience Reception Theory. Quantitative data on the preferences of Turkish viewers was collected by means of questionnaires filled in by the participants after they had watched different sets of subtitles, each of them testing a different feature. Further qualitative data was obtained through interviews conducted with four participants who took part in the experiment so as to generate more in-depth information regarding their preferences. The results yielded by the statistical analysis of the quantitative data and the interpretive phenomenological analysis of the qualitative data culminated in the drafting of a set of guidelines that can be used in the production of SDH in Turkey

Semantic Sound Similarity with Deep Embeddings for Freesound

Freesound is an online platform where people using sounds for various purposes can share or download audio clips. In such platforms, it is crucial that the users are provided with accurate sound recommendations, which becomes challenging due to the large size of the audio collection, complexity of the sound properties, and the human aspect of the recommendations. To provide sound recommendations, Freesound features a "similar sounds" function. However, this function primarily relies on creating a digital representation of audio clips that assesses the acoustic characteristics of sounds, which proves to be insufficient for accurately capturing their semantic properties. This limitation reduces the content-based retrieval capa-bilities of Freesound users. Moreover, the audio representation is created by hand-picking features that were engineered using domain knowledge. Today, in various fields related to audio, this approach has been replaced by using neural networks as feature extractors. In this work, we search for pretrained general-purpose neural net-works that can be used to represent the semantic content of audio clips. We choose 8 such models and compare their semantic sound similarity performances both ob-jectively and subjectively. During the integration of deep embeddings in the sound similarity system, we explore numerous design choices and share valuable insights. We use the FSD50K evaluation set for all experiments and report various objective metrics using the sound class hierarchy to perform multi-level analysis, including class- and family-level. We find out that most of the neural networks outperform the hand-made representation subjectively and objectively. Specifically, the multi-modal representation learning model CLAP that uses natural language and audio as modalities outperforms other models by a significant margin, while the models that attempt to leverage the CLIP model for creating tri-modal representations fail

Manga Vision

Manga Vision examines cultural and communicative aspects of Japanese comics, drawing together scholars from Japan, Australia and Europe working in areas as diverse as cultural studies, linguistics, education, music, art, anthropology, and translation, to explore the influence of manga in Japan and worldwide via translation, OEL manga and fan engagement. This volume includes a mix of theoretical, methodological, empirical and professional practice-based chapters, examining manga from both academic and artistic perspectives. Manga Vision also provides the reader with a multimedia experience, featuring original artwork by Australian manga artist Queenie Chan, cosplay photographs, and an online supplement offering musical compositions inspired by manga, and downloadable manga-related teaching resources

Evidence of Pedagogical Content Knowledge Among High School Band Directors and University Applied Music Teachers in the Context of Student Self-Evaluation

The purpose of this study was threefold: (a) to seek evidence of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) in high school band directors’ (generalists) and applied music teachers’ (specialists) evaluations of musical performance; (b) explore the similarities and differences between generalists’ and specialists’ perspectives on PCK; and (c) compare the evidences of PCK to student musicians’ self-evaluations of same performances. A basic interpretive qualitative approach with data collected through a think-aloud procedure applied to evaluation of solo music performance videos revealed four themes indicative of PCK—Aural Concept, Conveying Information, Effecting Change, and Uncertainty—and attendant sub-themes. Generalists and specialists provided a rich trove of evidence of PCK. Several findings appear to be unique to PCK in music, among them teacher uncertainty and the sheer variety of pedagogical means available to experienced teachers. Generalists and specialists were remarkably the same in their verbalizations about student performance, casting doubt on whether the generalist/specialist dichotomy is real relative to experienced teachers’ dealings with PCK in music. Apparent differences in educational and performance background did not result in actual differences in the way that teachers responded to the same evaluative tasks and the ways they thought from the perspective of PCK. The difference in verbalizations between teachers and students, not surprisingly, was wide. The magnitude of the gap, indicative of students’ pedagogical needs, was striking

WebQuest investigation to acquire internet usage skills

The purpose of this project was to develop a WebQuesst investigation that would facilitate student Internet usage. A WebQuest investigation is an inquiry-oriented activity in which most or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the Internet

AudioVisual Collage: A computational Framework For Audiovisual Composition and Computational Art

This thesis proposes a novel system for audiovisual composition called AudioVisual Collage. It consists of a screen-based interactive system, which contains a series of algorithms responsible for automating the tasks of image segmentation, inpainting, virtual camera motion, 3D lighting, visual transitions and visual motion generated from data extracted from audio files. With the merging of theory and practice, this research project investigates new possibilities, new approaches, and alternative examples of what can be explored in the field of computational art so as to offer a computational framework embodying a set of conceptual principles for digital fine arts practice. The set of algorithms that constitute the AudioVisual Collage framework embody a collection of digital design techniques and artistic concepts created through an iterative, collaborative process with other artists, in which I acted as the sole computational practitioner. The two collaborative projects presented in this thesis, Surround Sounds and Interactive Art Gallery, are part of an on-going creation of case studies, which have allowed me to better understand a series of approaches and methods, leading to the design of a framework to successfully communicate and apply specific creative ideas. AudioVisual Collage is a framework that allows other artists and designers to create their own audiovisual aesthetic experiences, generating rich media outcomes constructed by software in real time. That is, the system incorporates approaches from traditional media, such as sound recording and cinema, in order to generate new computational media based on a set of clear design principles. It also proposes an art vocabulary for audiovisual composition in the digital domain, which aims to deliver something unique in terms of the inherent potential of digital work that is not possessed by other media. AudioVisual Collage demonstrates an approach for manipulating the temporal structure and spatial organisation of visual elements so as to reflect their content, and also, a method for combining visual artworks and sound in the creation of algorithmic screen based aesthetic experiences. Equally important, it is in itself a statement of what could be possibly developed in terms of algorithms for audiovisual composition in the filed of computational art