644 research outputs found

    Imagining & Sensing: Understanding and Extending the Vocalist-Voice Relationship Through Biosignal Feedback

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    The voice is body and instrument. Third-person interpretation of the voice by listeners, vocal teachers, and digital agents is centred largely around audio feedback. For a vocalist, physical feedback from within the body provides an additional interaction. The vocalist’s understanding of their multi-sensory experiences is through tacit knowledge of the body. This knowledge is difficult to articulate, yet awareness and control of the body are innate. In the ever-increasing emergence of technology which quantifies or interprets physiological processes, we must remain conscious also of embodiment and human perception of these processes. Focusing on the vocalist-voice relationship, this thesis expands knowledge of human interaction and how technology influences our perception of our bodies. To unite these different perspectives in the vocal context, I draw on mixed methods from cog- nitive science, psychology, music information retrieval, and interactive system design. Objective methods such as vocal audio analysis provide a third-person observation. Subjective practices such as micro-phenomenology capture the experiential, first-person perspectives of the vocalists them- selves. Quantitative-qualitative blend provides details not only on novel interaction, but also an understanding of how technology influences existing understanding of the body. I worked with vocalists to understand how they use their voice through abstract representations, use mental imagery to adapt to altered auditory feedback, and teach fundamental practice to others. Vocalists use multi-modal imagery, for instance understanding physical sensations through auditory sensations. The understanding of the voice exists in a pre-linguistic representation which draws on embodied knowledge and lived experience from outside contexts. I developed a novel vocal interaction method which uses measurement of laryngeal muscular activations through surface electromyography. Biofeedback was presented to vocalists through soni- fication. Acting as an indicator of vocal activity for both conscious and unconscious gestures, this feedback allowed vocalists to explore their movement through sound. This formed new perceptions but also questioned existing understanding of the body. The thesis also uncovers ways in which vocalists are in control and controlled by, work with and against their bodies, and feel as a single entity at times and totally separate entities at others. I conclude this thesis by demonstrating a nuanced account of human interaction and perception of the body through vocal practice, as an example of how technological intervention enables exploration and influence over embodied understanding. This further highlights the need for understanding of the human experience in embodied interaction, rather than solely on digital interpretation, when introducing technology into these relationships

    Proceedings of the 8th Workshop on Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE 2023)

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    This volume gathers the papers presented at the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events 2023 Workshop (DCASE2023), Tampere, Finland, during 21–22 September 2023

    Iceberg: a loudspeaker-based room auralization method for auditory research

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    Depending on the acoustic scenario, people with hearing loss are challenged on a different scale than normal hearing people to comprehend sound, especially speech. That happen especially during social interactions within a group, which often occurs in environments with low signal-to-noise ratios. This communication disruption can create a barrier for people to acquire and develop communication skills as a child or to interact with society as an adult. Hearing loss compensation aims to provide an opportunity to restore the auditory part of socialization. Technology and academic efforts progressed to a better understanding of the human hearing system. Through constant efforts to present new algorithms, miniaturization, and new materials, constantly-improving hardware with high-end software is being developed with new features and solutions to broad and specific auditory challenges. The effort to deliver innovative solutions to the complex phenomena of hearing loss encompasses tests, verifications, and validation in various forms. As the newer devices achieve their purpose, the tests need to increase the sensitivity, requiring conditions that effectively assess their improvements. Regarding realism, many levels are required in hearing research, from pure tone assessment in small soundproof booths to hundreds of loudspeakers combined with visual stimuli through projectors or head-mounted displays, light, and movement control. Hearing aids research commonly relies on loudspeaker setups to reproduce sound sources. In addition, auditory research can use well-known auralization techniques to generate sound signals. These signals can be encoded to carry more than sound pressure level information, adding spatial information about the environment where that sound event happened or was simulated. This work reviews physical acoustics, virtualization, and auralization concepts and their uses in listening effort research. This knowledge, combined with the experiments executed during the studies, aimed to provide a hybrid auralization method to be virtualized in four-loudspeaker setups. Auralization methods are techniques used to encode spatial information into sounds. The main methods were discussed and derived, observing their spatial sound characteristics and trade-offs to be used in auditory tests with one or two participants. Two well-known auralization techniques (Ambisonics and Vector-Based Amplitude Panning) were selected and compared through a calibrated virtualization setup regarding spatial distortions in the binaural cues. The choice of techniques was based on the need for loudspeakers, although a small number of them. Furthermore, the spatial cues were examined by adding a second listener to the virtualized sound field. The outcome reinforced the literature around spatial localization and these techniques driving Ambisonics to be less spatially accurate but with greater immersion than Vector-Based Amplitude Panning. A combination study to observe changes in listening effort due to different signal-to-noise ratios and reverberation in a virtualized setup was defined. This experiment aimed to produce the correct sound field via a virtualized setup and assess listening effort via subjective impression with a questionnaire, an objective physiological outcome from EEG, and behavioral performance on word recognition. Nine levels of degradation were imposed on speech signals over speech maskers separated in the virtualized space through Ambisonics' first-order technique in a setup with 24 loudspeakers. A high correlation between participants' performance and their responses on the questionnaire was observed. The results showed that the increased virtualized reverberation time negatively impacts speech intelligibility and listening effort. A new hybrid auralization method was proposed merging the investigated techniques that presented complementary spatial sound features. The method was derived through room acoustics concepts and a specific objective parameter derived from the room impulse response called Center Time. The verification around the binaural cues was driven with three different rooms (simulated). As the validation with test subjects was not possible due to the COVID-19 pandemic situation, a psychoacoustic model was implemented to estimate the spatial accuracy of the method within a four-loudspeaker setup. Also, an investigation ran the same verification, and the model estimation was performed with the introduction of hearing aids. The results showed that it is possible to consider the hybrid method with four loudspeakers for audiological tests while considering some limitations. The setup can provide binaural cues to a maximum ambiguity angle of 30 degrees in the horizontal plane for a centered listener

    Financial reporting in Europe: Accounting for regulatory and technical challenges

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    This thesis explores the challenges facing financial reporting in Europe both regulatory and technical in nature. This has involved research into the background of European legislation and conducting face to face semi-structured interviews with senior elite actors from institutions governing the regulatory and technical arrangements of general-purpose financial reporting practice in Europe. European companies are required to disclose information about their financial affairs. The European legislation governing company financial reporting was delegated to the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) by the EU institutions via Regulation 1606/2002. This thesis argues that European agencies (represented by EFRAG) are caught in a devolved regulatory relationship where the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) has been able to assume a relatively strong self-regulatory position. This weakens the agency that European legislative institutions have over their own legislation with regards to financial reporting practice. This thesis argues this loss of agency by European institutions over their legislation governing accounting practice is not a fait accompli but is challenged and contested as European institutions seek and need a more co-regulated arrangement. A key argument developed in this thesis is that regulatory arrangements governing accounting practice are evolving in terms of the distribution of responsibilities and control over European financial reporting practice. To understand how the regulatory landscape governing European accounting practice is changing we employ an investigative lens that is grounded in accounting. This investigative lens employs three elements that are regarded in the literature review as significant technical challenges facing accounting practice in Europe. The first of these is retaining or not prudent accounting practice, the second is concerned with the development of non-financial reporting and the third, concerns with installing the public interest not just investor interests in financial disclosures. It is through this investigative lens that this thesis assesses the extent to which regulatory arrangements and agency governing accounting practice in Europe are shifting sands

    Data journeys in the sciences

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    This is the final version. Available from Springer via the DOI in this record. This groundbreaking, open access volume analyses and compares data practices across several fields through the analysis of specific cases of data journeys. It brings together leading scholars in the philosophy, history and social studies of science to achieve two goals: tracking the travel of data across different spaces, times and domains of research practice; and documenting how such journeys affect the use of data as evidence and the knowledge being produced. The volume captures the opportunities, challenges and concerns involved in making data move from the sites in which they are originally produced to sites where they can be integrated with other data, analysed and re-used for a variety of purposes. The in-depth study of data journeys provides the necessary ground to examine disciplinary, geographical and historical differences and similarities in data management, processing and interpretation, thus identifying the key conditions of possibility for the widespread data sharing associated with Big and Open Data. The chapters are ordered in sections that broadly correspond to different stages of the journeys of data, from their generation to the legitimisation of their use for specific purposes. Additionally, the preface to the volume provides a variety of alternative “roadmaps” aimed to serve the different interests and entry points of readers; and the introduction provides a substantive overview of what data journeys can teach about the methods and epistemology of research.European CommissionAustralian Research CouncilAlan Turing Institut

    The universe without us: a history of the science and ethics of human extinction

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    This dissertation consists of two parts. Part I is an intellectual history of thinking about human extinction (mostly) within the Western tradition. When did our forebears first imagine humanity ceasing to exist? Have people always believed that human extinction is a real possibility, or were some convinced that this could never happen? How has our thinking about extinction evolved over time? Why do so many notable figures today believe that the probability of extinction this century is higher than ever before in our 300,000-year history on Earth? Exploring these questions takes readers from the ancient Greeks, Persians, and Egyptians, through the 18th-century Enlightenment, past scientific breakthroughs of the 19th century like thermodynamics and evolutionary theory, up to the Atomic Age, the rise of modern environmentalism in the 1970s, and contemporary fears about climate change, global pandemics, and artificial general intelligence (AGI). Part II is a history of Western thinking about the ethical and evaluative implications of human extinction. Would causing or allowing our extinction be morally right or wrong? Would our extinction be good or bad, better or worse compared to continuing to exist? For what reasons? Under which conditions? Do we have a moral obligation to create future people? Would past “progress” be rendered meaningless if humanity were to die out? Does the fact that we might be unique in the universe—the only “rational” and “moral” creatures—give us extra reason to ensure our survival? I place these questions under the umbrella of Existential Ethics, tracing the development of this field from the early 1700s through Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel The Last Man, the gloomy German pessimists of the latter 19th century, and post-World War II reflections on nuclear “omnicide,” up to current-day thinkers associated with “longtermism” and “antinatalism.” In the dissertation, I call the first history “History #1” and the second “History #2.” A main thesis of Part I is that Western thinking about human extinction can be segmented into five distinction periods, each of which corresponds to a unique “existential mood.” An existential mood arises from a particular set of answers to fundamental questions about the possibility, probability, etiology, and so on, of human extinction. I claim that the idea of human extinction first appeared among the ancient Greeks, but was eclipsed for roughly 1,500 years with the rise of Christianity. A central contention of Part II is that philosophers have thus far conflated six distinct types of “human extinction,” each of which has its own unique ethical and evaluative implications. I further contend that it is crucial to distinguish between the process or event of Going Extinct and the state or condition of Being Extinct, which one should see as orthogonal to the six types of extinction that I delineate. My aim with the second part of the book is to not only trace the history of Western thinking about the ethics of annihilation, but lay the theoretical groundwork for future research on the topic. I then outline my own views within “Existential Ethics,” which combine ideas and positions to yield a novel account of the conditions under which our extinction would be bad, and why there is a sense in which Being Extinct might be better than Being Extant, or continuing to exist

    The invention of corruption: India and the License Raj

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    The word ‘corruption’ appears frequently in literature on India’s former policy of state planning, pejoratively referred to as the “License Raj.” In this literature, writers often consider corruption to be inherent to state planning and allege that corruption is a central reason behind the policy’s failure. I place these allegations in a history that starts with the arrival of the East India Company on the Indian subcontinent. In examining this history, I consider a number of claims that writers associate with corruption in India and the License Raj: for example, that corruption is economically inefficient, that it is a function of premodern loyalties, or that it is an outcome of monopolistic behavior. Through close reading of texts that allege corruption in the License Raj, I argue that these claims serve to discredit the policy of state planning while naturalizing the concept of ‘corruption’ as something technical and ahistorical. Further, I argue that the term ‘corruption’ in India has had contradictory meanings over the course of its trajectory. In other words, corruption in India has been portrayed both as something premodern as well as modern, something endemic to bureaucracy as well as something bureaucracy can reform, something both timeless as well as historically contingent. I conclude that these contradictions have been papered over by critics of state planning, however unwittingly, to argue for market liberalization. In demonstrating the importance of the colonial encounter in shaping how we often conceptualize ‘corruption,’ I suggest that the allegation of corruption in India’s License Raj is instructive as to how ‘corruption’ has been conceptualized more broadly. Namely, corruption is often believed to be a problem of putatively premodern societies with extensive state regulation of the economy. A closer examination of the literature reveals other, sometimes obscured ideas about corruption which challenge this prevalent view

    'Ane end of an auld song?': macro and micro perspectives on written Scots in correspondence during the union of parliaments debates

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    This thesis examines the relationship between political identity and variation from a diachronic perspective. Specifically, it explores the use of written Scots features in the personal correspondence of Scottish politicians active during the Union of the Parliaments debates. Written Scots by 1700 had steadily retreated from most text-types in the face of ongoing anglicisation, but simultaneously the Union debates sparked heated discussion around questions of nationality and Scotland's separate identity. I consider the extent to which the use of Scots features may have been influenced by such discourse, but also how they may have become indexical markers used to lay claim to these ideologies. Drawing from the frameworks of First, Second and Third Wave perspectives on variation, and combining quantitative, macro-social methods with micro-social analysis, broad socio-political factors are explored alongside plausible stylistic intentions in conditioning or influencing the linguistic behaviour of these writers. The first analysis examines variation in the corpus temporally, using the chronologically-organised clustering technique VNC - Variability-based Neighbor Clustering (Gries and Hilpert, 2008), to measure Scots features over time. The crucial years of the debates (1700-1707) are compared with correspondence either side, and the VNC analysis identifies heightened use of Scots falling within the key years of the debates. The following macro-social analysis explores the factors driving this variation quantitatively, using a number of different statistical models to examine the data from various perspectives. Probabilities of Scots are found to correlate with certain political factors, though in complex and multilayered ways that reflect the composite nature of the historical figures operating in the Scottish parliament. The third analysis focuses on the features of written Scots itself and how these pattern in aggregate and across the individual authors who comprise the corpus. Findings suggest the persistence of written Scots was not being driven by a singular feature or set of tokens, rather, authors varied widely in their range and proportion of different variants. Finally, the micro-analysis examines the intra-writer variation of four individuals representing different political interests, exploring their Scots use across various recipients. Close-up inspection of features within particular extracts and letters suggests the subtle social and stylistic functions Scots had acquired for these writers. Its occurrence was found to reflect but also constitute the macro-social patterns identified earlier. Taken together, results indicate the use of Scots features was both influenced by, and contributed to, the political and ideological loyalties these writers harboured. Moreover, they tentatively suggest a process of reinterpretation was underway, in which Scots features were becoming a resource that could be selectively employed for particular indexical and communicative purposes

    The influence of vision on the perceptual compensation for reverberation in simulated environments

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    In typical listening environments, auditory signals arrive at the ear as a fusion of the direct energy from sound sources and the indirect reflections via reverberation. The listener thus cannot directly access the source and reverberation components individually, highlighting that the perceptual separation of these components can be subject to ambiguity. Accurate expectations of reverberation have been shown to reduce such ambiguity. The visible features of the physical environment (e.g., spatial and surface properties) can reveal aspects of reverberation that inform such expectations, suggesting an inferential role of vision in disambiguating the source and reverberation components. The aim of this thesis was to evaluate the degree to which visual information from simulated environments can affect the expectations of reverberation to consequently improve judgements of sound sources. To investigate this aim, we conducted three behavioural studies that assessed perception in audiovisual environments via online simulations created from a database of real-world locations. Chapter 3 assessed whether visual cues to the environment could inform of the reverberant properties of physical locations in an audiovisual congruence task. The results indicated a greater impression of congruence when reverberant cues were identical or similar to those represented by the depicted environment, demonstrating a capacity for vision to inform meaningful expectations of reverberation. Chapter 4 evaluated the degree to which vision contributed to the identification of speech sources within reverberation by prior exposure to visual environments. We found that exposure to the visual environment had hardly any effect on improving the identification of reverberant speech sources in this context. Chapter 5 investigated if a concurrent visual depiction of the environment would affect the tendency for estimates of sound source duration to be consistent despite varying reverberation. The results showed that source duration estimates were influenced by the degree of reverberation present, and were seemingly unaffected by any visual exposure. Taken together, the findings of this thesis suggest that scene understanding from vision contributes to the overall spatial understanding of environments and their reverberant properties, but appears to contribute little to enhancing the perceptual separation of source and reverberation components used to improve judgements of auditory sources

    Understanding the acoustic implications of digital transmission on fricatives

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    The aim of this thesis is to provide a better understanding of the acoustic implications of digital transmission on fricatives relevant across research fields. This is motivated by the increasing amount of digital transmitted speech across the world, and the limited knowledge on the effects of digital transmission on consonants. The thesis investigates the fricatives /f/, /θ/, /s/, /ʃ/, /z/, /ð/ and [fj]. Fricatives were expected to be particularly affected by codec compression because of their noise-like and aperiodic structure, which might be mistaken for noise by the codecs. The thesis investigates the effects of the AMR-WB-, Opus-, and MP3 codec using three different bitrates and in live transmission. The acoustic implications were measured as the first four spectral moments, peak frequency, and via spectrographic analysis. These measures were compared between baseline uncompressed WAV files and each of the codec compressed versions. This resulted in three studies. The first two are in controlled conditions i.e. the WAV files are codec compressed via a computer, whereas the third study is live with the speech transmitted between two mobile phones with and without background noise. The findings indicate significant effects of the codec compressions on the spectral measures with segment, codec and bitrate dependent tendencies. The live transmission and background noise generally produced larger effects than the controlled conditions. Intensity played a key role in the magnitude of the effects of the codec compressions and live transmission. This has implications when using codec compressed speech as data, but especially in socio- and forensic phonetics with possible diffusion of sound changes and speaker comparisons. In addition, the results have implications beyond linguistics e.g. in psychology, where clarity of speech plays a role in perceived charisma, and in hearing aid and cochlear implant technology, which both approach speech digitally and incorporate noise reduction
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