Driving the Bow

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Perception and production of syllable structure and stress by adult Libyan Arabic speaker acquiring English in the UK

The field of second language (L2) phonology has recently addressed the related phonological acquisition question of to what extent exposure to native speaker L2 input following exposure to non-native accented L2 input, results in c~anges in the leamer's interlanguage phonology (Akita 2001). If such learners do show changes over time, what kind of changes are these in both perception and production? My study is a contribution to interlanguage studies on the acquisition of prosodic structure, and concentrates on the acquisition of English syllable structure and metrical stress by Arabic speaker. In this study the interlanguage phonology of 28 native Arabic speakers from Libya learning English in natural settings (The UK), was investigated. The average age of the participants was 32.5 years. All the subjects started learning English in school at an average age of 16.0 years. The primary source oflanguage input was the classroom, till an average age of25.0 years. The method of collecting data involved three types of test. The first test covered syllable structure in onset and coda with epenthesised forms and included 185 words. The second test covered metrical stress, and included two sub-tests. Test 2A included 28 words, and test 2B included 84 sentences with grammatical and ungrammatical forms of stress. The third test contained three sub-tests. Test 3A included 9 words, test 3B included four pictures, and test 3C included 28 sentences. Tests cover perception of syllable structure and metrical stress as well as production of syllable structure and metrical stress for each learner. In the perception test learners had to listen to a type and chose an answer from a paper in front of them whereas for production tests learners had to read words, sentences, and talk about pictures. Their production output was recorded and transcribed. Results show differences for the perception and production sub-tasks. There is also some parameter resetting and missetting at the level of metrical stress. These results mirror the findings of Archibald (1993) Pater (1997) and Mousa (1994).EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Introduction to computer image processing

Theoretical backgrounds and digital techniques for a class of image processing problems are presented. Image formation in the context of linear system theory, image evaluation, noise characteristics, mathematical operations on image and their implementation are discussed. Various techniques for image restoration and image enhancement are presented. Methods for object extraction and the problem of pictorial pattern recognition and classification are discussed

Synthesis of aesthetics for ship design

In the search for consensus on a definition of beauty, fitting the task of appreciating a ship’s design, this research revealed that other components of visual appraisal and 3d pattern analysis are required for a systemic approach. The model process presented is built around local adaptation and Gestalt psychology and uses retrospective case studies to categorise and calculate proportions, and recognisable patterns. The number of results from each type of vessel were found to be different, due to each ship or boats various geometries and anatomy, which illuminated the importance of standardising a procedure of categorisation in the appreciative approach.The categorisation of functions around the philosophy of functional beauty and the maths of summation series, it is suggested here, will allow a library of algebraic patterns and parameters to penetrate further into the impending or emulated integrated systems of ship design. The process to derive physical parameters via the culturally focussed narrative of functional beauty, is deemed as a manageable and novel addition to the naval architect's role. However, for the results to have a decisive impact on commercial design or education, variance and validation through further case studies is required

' "The Tale of the Tribe": The Twentieth-Century Alliterative Revival.'

This thesis studies the revival of Old English- and Norse-inspired alliterative versification in twentieth-century English poetry and poetics. It is organised as a chronological sequence of three case-studies: three authors, heirs to Romantic Nationalism, writing at twentieth-century intersections between Modernism, Postmodernism, and Medievalism. It indicates why this form attracted revival; which medieval models were emulated, with what success, in which modern works: the technique and mystique of alliterative verse as a modern mode. It differs from previous scholarship by advocating Kipling and Tolkien, by foregrounding the primacy of language, historical linguistics, especially the philological reconstruction of Germanic metre; and by, accordingly, methodological emphasis on formal scansion, taking account of audio recordings of Pound and Tolkien performing their poetry. It proposes the revived form as archaising, epic, mythopoeic, constructed by its exponents as an authentic poetic speech symbolising an archetypical Englishness—‘The Tale of the Tribe’. A trope emerges of revival of the culturally-‘buried’ native and innate, an ancestral lexico-metrical heritage conjured back to life. A substantial Introduction offers a primer of Old English metre and style: how it works, and what it means, according to Eduard Sievers’ (1850-1932) reconstruction. Chapter I promotes Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) as pioneering alliterative poet, his engagement with Old-Northernism, runes, and retelling of the myth of Weland. Chapter II assesses the impact of Anglo-Saxon on and through Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Scansions of his ‘Seafarer’ and Cantos testify to the influence of Saxonising versification in the development of Pound’s Modernist language and free verse. Chapter III exhibits the alliterative oeuvre of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892-1973), featuring close readings of verse from Lord of the Rings. The Conclusion contends that twentieth-century English poetry should be recognised as evincing an ambitious alliterative revival, impossible before, and that this ancient metre is likely to endure into the future

Investigating the build-up of precedence effect using reflection masking

The auditory processing level involved in the build‐up of precedence [Freyman et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 874–884 (1991)] has been investigated here by employing reflection masked threshold (RMT) techniques. Given that RMT techniques are generally assumed to address lower levels of the auditory signal processing, such an approach represents a bottom‐up approach to the buildup of precedence. Three conditioner configurations measuring a possible buildup of reflection suppression were compared to the baseline RMT for four reflection delays ranging from 2.5–15 ms. No buildup of reflection suppression was observed for any of the conditioner configurations. Buildup of template (decrease in RMT for two of the conditioners), on the other hand, was found to be delay dependent. For five of six listeners, with reflection delay=2.5 and 15 ms, RMT decreased relative to the baseline. For 5‐ and 10‐ms delay, no change in threshold was observed. It is concluded that the low‐level auditory processing involved in RMT is not sufficient to realize a buildup of reflection suppression. This confirms suggestions that higher level processing is involved in PE buildup. The observed enhancement of reflection detection (RMT) may contribute to active suppression at higher processing levels

Computational methods for percussion music analysis : the afro-uruguayan candombe drumming as a case study

Most of the research conducted on information technologies applied to music has been largely limited to a few mainstream styles of the so-called `Western' music. The resulting tools often do not generalize properly or cannot be easily extended to other music traditions. So, culture-specific approaches have been recently proposed as a way to build richer and more general computational models for music. This thesis work aims at contributing to the computer-aided study of rhythm, with the focus on percussion music and in the search of appropriate solutions from a culture specifc perspective by considering the Afro-Uruguayan candombe drumming as a case study. This is mainly motivated by its challenging rhythmic characteristics, troublesome for most of the existing analysis methods. In this way, it attempts to push ahead the boundaries of current music technologies. The thesis o ers an overview of the historical, social and cultural context in which candombe drumming is embedded, along with a description of the rhythm. One of the specific contributions of the thesis is the creation of annotated datasets of candombe drumming suitable for computational rhythm analysis. Performances were purposely recorded, and received annotations of metrical information, location of onsets, and sections. A dataset of annotated recordings for beat and downbeat tracking was publicly released, and an audio-visual dataset of performances was obtained, which serves both documentary and research purposes. Part of the dissertation focused on the discovery and analysis of rhythmic patterns from audio recordings. A representation in the form of a map of rhythmic patterns based on spectral features was devised. The type of analyses that can be conducted with the proposed methods is illustrated with some experiments. The dissertation also systematically approached (to the best of our knowledge, for the first time) the study and characterization of the micro-rhythmical properties of candombe drumming. The ndings suggest that micro-timing is a structural component of the rhythm, producing a sort of characteristic "swing". The rest of the dissertation was devoted to the automatic inference and tracking of the metric structure from audio recordings. A supervised Bayesian scheme for rhythmic pattern tracking was proposed, of which a software implementation was publicly released. The results give additional evidence of the generalizability of the Bayesian approach to complex rhythms from diferent music traditions. Finally, the downbeat detection task was formulated as a data compression problem. This resulted in a novel method that proved to be e ective for a large part of the dataset and opens up some interesting threads for future research.La mayoría de la investigación realizada en tecnologías de la información aplicadas a la música se ha limitado en gran medida a algunos estilos particulares de la así llamada música `occidental'. Las herramientas resultantes a menudo no generalizan adecuadamente o no se pueden extender fácilmente a otras tradiciones musicales. Por lo tanto, recientemente se han propuesto enfoques culturalmente específicos como forma de construir modelos computacionales más ricos y más generales. Esta tesis tiene como objetivo contribuir al estudio del ritmo asistido por computadora, desde una perspectiva cultural específica, considerando el candombe Afro-Uruguayo como caso de estudio. Esto está motivado principalmente por sus características rítmicas, problemáticas para la mayoría de los métodos de análisis existentes. Así , intenta superar los límites actuales de estas tecnologías. La tesis ofrece una visión general del contexto histórico, social y cultural en el que el candombe está integrado, junto con una descripción de su ritmo. Una de las contribuciones específicas de la tesis es la creación de conjuntos de datos adecuados para el análisis computacional del ritmo. Se llevaron adelante sesiones de grabación y se generaron anotaciones de información métrica, ubicación de eventos y secciones. Se disponibilizó públicamente un conjunto de grabaciones anotadas para el seguimiento de pulso e inicio de compás, y se generó un registro audiovisual que sirve tanto para fines documentales como de investigación. Parte de la tesis se centró en descubrir y analizar patrones rítmicos a partir de grabaciones de audio. Se diseñó una representación en forma de mapa de patrones rítmicos basada en características espectrales. El tipo de análisis que se puede realizar con los métodos propuestos se ilustra con algunos experimentos. La tesis también abordó de forma sistemática (y por primera vez) el estudio y la caracterización de las propiedades micro rítmicas del candombe. Los resultados sugieren que las micro desviaciones temporales son un componente estructural del ritmo, dando lugar a una especie de "swing" característico. El resto de la tesis se dedicó a la inferencia automática de la estructura métrica a partir de grabaciones de audio. Se propuso un esquema Bayesiano supervisado para el seguimiento de patrones rítmicos, del cual se disponibilizó públicamente una implementación de software. Los resultados dan evidencia adicional de la capacidad de generalización del enfoque Bayesiano a ritmos complejos. Por último, la detección de inicio de compás se formuló como un problema de compresión de datos. Esto resultó en un método novedoso que demostró ser efectivo para una buena parte de los datos y abre varias líneas de investigación

Visual Analysis of High-Dimensional Point Clouds using Topological Abstraction

This thesis is about visualizing a kind of data that is trivial to process by computers but difficult to imagine by humans because nature does not allow for intuition with this type of information: high-dimensional data. Such data often result from representing observations of objects under various aspects or with different properties. In many applications, a typical, laborious task is to find related objects or to group those that are similar to each other. One classic solution for this task is to imagine the data as vectors in a Euclidean space with object variables as dimensions. Utilizing Euclidean distance as a measure of similarity, objects with similar properties and values accumulate to groups, so-called clusters, that are exposed by cluster analysis on the high-dimensional point cloud. Because similar vectors can be thought of as objects that are alike in terms of their attributes, the point cloud\''s structure and individual cluster properties, like their size or compactness, summarize data categories and their relative importance. The contribution of this thesis is a novel analysis approach for visual exploration of high-dimensional point clouds without suffering from structural occlusion. The work is based on implementing two key concepts: The first idea is to discard those geometric properties that cannot be preserved and, thus, lead to the typical artifacts. Topological concepts are used instead to shift away the focus from a point-centered view on the data to a more structure-centered perspective. The advantage is that topology-driven clustering information can be extracted in the data\''s original domain and be preserved without loss in low dimensions. The second idea is to split the analysis into a topology-based global overview and a subsequent geometric local refinement. The occlusion-free overview enables the analyst to identify features and to link them to other visualizations that permit analysis of those properties not captured by the topological abstraction, e.g. cluster shape or value distributions in particular dimensions or subspaces. The advantage of separating structure from data point analysis is that restricting local analysis only to data subsets significantly reduces artifacts and the visual complexity of standard techniques. That is, the additional topological layer enables the analyst to identify structure that was hidden before and to focus on particular features by suppressing irrelevant points during local feature analysis. This thesis addresses the topology-based visual analysis of high-dimensional point clouds for both the time-invariant and the time-varying case. Time-invariant means that the points do not change in their number or positions. That is, the analyst explores the clustering of a fixed and constant set of points. The extension to the time-varying case implies the analysis of a varying clustering, where clusters appear as new, merge or split, or vanish. Especially for high-dimensional data, both tracking---which means to relate features over time---but also visualizing changing structure are difficult problems to solve

Implant technology and TFS processing in relation to speech discrimination and music perception and appreciation

Direct stimulation of the auditory nerve via a Cochlear Implant (CI) enables profoundly deaf subjects to perceive sounds. Many CI users find language comprehension satisfactory in quiet and accessible in the presence of noise. However, music contains different dimensions which need to be approached in different ways. Whilst both language and music take advantage of the modulation of acoustic parameters to convey information, music is an acoustically more complex stimulus than language, demanding more complex resolution mechanisms. One of the most important aspects that contributes to speech perception skills, especially when listening in a fluctuating background, is Temporal Fine Structure processing. TFS cues are pre-dominant in conveying Low Frequency (LF) signals. Harmonic (HI) and Disharmonic (DI) In-tonation are tests of pitch perception in the LF domain which are thought to depend on avail-ability of TFS cues and which are included in the protocol on this group of adult CI recipients. One of the primary aims of this thesis was the production of a new assessment tool, the Italian STARR test which was based on the measurement of speech perception using a roving-level adaptive method where the presentation level of both speech and noise signals varied between each sentence presentation. The STARR test attempts to reflect a better representation of real world listening conditions where background noise is usually present and speech intensity var-ies according to vocal capacity as well as the distance of the speaker. The outcomes for the Italian STARR in NH adults were studied to produce normative data, as well as to evaluate inter-list variability and learning effects. (Chapter 4). The second aim was to investigate LF pitch perception outcomes linked to availability of TFS cues in a group of adult CI recipients including bimodal users in relation to speech perception, in particular Italian STARR outcomes. Here it was seen that age had a significant effect on performance especially in older adults. Similarly, CI recipients (even better performers) showed abnormal findings in comparison to NH subjects. On the other hand, the significant effect of CI thresholds re-emphasized the sensitivity of the test to low intensity speech which a CI user can often encounter under everyday listening conditions. Statistically significant correlations between HI/DI and STARR performance were found. Moreover, bimodal benefit was seen both for HI/DI and STARR tests. Overall findings confirmed the usefulness of evaluating both LF pitch and speech perception in noise in order to track changes in TFS sen-sitivity for CI recipients over time and across different listening conditions which might be provided by future technological progress. (Chapter 5) Finally, the last and main aspect taken into account in this thesis was the study of the difficul-ties experienced by CI users when listening to music. An attempt was made to correlate find-ings resulting from the previous phases of this study both to Speech in Noise and to the com-plex subjective aspects of Music Perception and Appreciation: correlation analysis between HI/DI tests and the main dimensions of Speech in Noise (STARR and OLSA) and Music Ap-preciation was performed. (Chapter 6). Interestingly, positive findings were found for the two most complex types of Music (Classical, Jazz), whereas Soul did not seem to require particular competence in Pitch perception for the appreciation of the subjective variables taken into con-sideration by this study