A comparison of features for large population speaker identification

Bibliography: leaves 95-104.Speech recognition systems all have one criterion in common; they perform better in a controlled environment using clean speech. Though performance can be excellent, even exceeding human capabilities for clean speech, systems fail when presented with speech data from more realistic environments such as telephone channels. The differences using a recognizer in clean and noisy environments are extreme, and this causes one of the major obstacles in producing commercial recognition systems to be used in normal environments. It is the lack of performance of speaker recognition systems with telephone channels that this work addresses. The human auditory system is a speech recognizer with excellent performance, especially in noisy environments. Since humans perform well at ignoring noise more than any machine, auditory-based methods are the promising approaches since they attempt to model the working of the human auditory system. These methods have been shown to outperform more conventional signal processing schemes for speech recognition, speech coding, word-recognition and phone classification tasks. Since speaker identification has received lot of attention in speech processing because of its waiting real-world applications, it is attractive to evaluate the performance using auditory models as features. Firstly, this study rums at improving the results for speaker identification. The improvements were made through the use of parameterized feature-sets together with the application of cepstral mean removal for channel equalization. The study is further extended to compare an auditory-based model, the Ensemble Interval Histogram, with mel-scale features, which was shown to perform almost error-free in clean speech. The previous studies of Elli to be more robust to noise were conducted on speaker dependent, small population, isolated words and now are extended to speaker independent, larger population, continuous speech. This study investigates whether the Elli representation is more resistant to telephone noise than mel-cepstrum as was shown in the previous studies, when now for the first time, it is applied for speaker identification task using the state-of-the-art Gaussian mixture model system

From disappearing narrators to signs of the author: images of the subject in the short stories of Silvina Ocampo

Ph.D. University of Kansas, Spanish and Portuguese 2002This study proposes an in-depth study of subjectivity in Silvina Ocampo's short stories. In the first chapter of this study, I investigate the mechanisms by which self-generation paradoxically elicits the disappearance of the subject while the process of narration encounters repetition, coincidence, and cyclical movement. In these stories typical of the fantastic mode, we also observe the relinquishing of the narrating self's sense of physical and psychological density, a transformation that involves a radically changed as well as a muted, silenced self. A similar investigation of the problems of subjectivity continues in chapter two. This time, however, the focus is on the confrontation between the bourgeois, stable subject and the unstable, mutable subject. Though the bourgeois subject aligned with civilization presupposes a stable, discrete identify, while the barbaric other connotes a destabilized, irrational self, the semantic fields of the two poles, civilization and barbarism, overlap in Ocampo's stories. While undoing traditional dualisms, the physically and psychologically destabilized self challenges the social order, the public and private spaces of bourgeois life, and the relations of power specific to these spaces. A fluid and imprecise form of subjectivity also emerges in Ocampo's introspective work that investigates, while achieving in the process, the creation of authorial self. The contours of an authorial consciousness come into view in the interplay of the fictive metaphors of gestation, the elusive or lost masterpiece, mirrors, and the photograph. The recurring themes and images generated by these metaphors reveal signs of an authorial persona preoccupied with the complex properties of selfhood and reality and the pitfalls in their representations, as well as with the relation between the creator and her literary world

Pierre Schaeffers typo-morphology of sonic objects.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:D174501 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

The knowledge, a collection of poetry, and, The poem noir : film noir in contemporary poetry

This thesis consists of a collection of poetry, The Knowledge, and the first critical investigation into the ‘poem noir’, an unidentified and unexplored mode within contemporary poetry that exhibits thematic and visual echoes from the body of films known as film noir. Taking its title from the London taxi driver’s rigorous examination, The Knowledge’s key theme is displacement: from social class, education and from a sense of home. It echoes the quest of the doomed film noir protagonist, who, in a thirst for knowledge, is drawn into a psychological descent into a metaphorical underworld. Like the poems noir analysed in the critical section, these possess an anxious, pessimistic and obsessive engagement with the world, and are set within noirish locales to excavate the autobiographical and the imaginative. Inspired by film noir’s portrayal of individuals whose identity is called into conflict, the poems take the lid off the works of memory and place, to examine a personal and public moral compass, and to dramatize the past and the present. After providing a definition of film noir, the critical section outlines a model for reading a poem noir by analysing a selection of seminal American films noir of the classic 1941 to 1958 period, along with several neo-noir films produced from the 1970s onwards. It then provides close readings of Paul Muldoon’s hard-boiled Chandleresque poem, ‘Immram’ (1980), Deryn Rees-Jones’ book-length murder-mystery poem, Quiver (2004), and David Harsent’s nightmarish labyrinthine poem, ‘Elsewhere’ (2011), and introduces them as poems noir. In conclusion I consider how writing poetry is a noirish act, sharing a similarity with Seamus Heaney’s notion that the role of writing poetry is to unearth revelations about the self, and with Henrik Gustafsson’s thesis that film noir is concerned with taking the lid off the works to expose whatever truth lies beneath

Other voices: Argentine narrative during the military process (1976-83)

Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Kansas, Spanish and Portuguese, 1998

Dialogues of Negritude: An Analysis of the Cultural Context of Black Writing

This thesis undertakes to examine the full implications of Abiola !rele's statement in 'Negritude or Black Cultural Nationalism' that the roots of Negritude ' ......... lie far down in the total historical experience of the black man in contact with the white.' [Journal of Modem African Studies, 3, 3 (1965) pp321-348] The first part examines the place of Blacks in Western speculative thought by way of Hegel's comments on Africa and Africans and, the implications for the Negro of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic. The concept of the Negro in Western speculative thought is analysed generally as manifesting two essential aspects: the Negro is seen as either a negative savage threatening the values of Western civilization or, as heroic rebel. Certain modernist writers are discussed for their view of the Negro as an outsider challenging the comfortable oppressions of bourgeois humanism. These two views of Blacks are traced in the Western literary tradition in the works of Shakespeare, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Joseph Conrad, Michel Tournier. In Part Two while making extensive reference to Jean-Paul Sartre's 'Black Orpheus' I take issue with his thesis that Negritude represents a negation of White Culture. I argue that Negritude represents a dialogue which continues to the present, with the Other, and with the Western concept of the Negro. I trace the development of this dialogue in the work of the early exponents of Negritude (Leon Damas, Jacques Roumain) and its two most prominent theorists, Leopold Senghor and Aime Cesaire. The later development of Negritude in the work of James Baldwin and Richard Wright is discussed. I then examine the theoretical position of Wilson Harris as a critique of Negritude. Lastly I discuss the legacy of Negritude and its importance for the problems of modern Black writin

Interlitteraria : Tartu Ülikooli maailmakirjanduse õppetooli ja Eesti Võrdleva Kirjandusteaduse Assotsiatsiooni rahvusvaheline ajakiri = international refereed edition of the Chair of Comparative Literature of Tartu University and the Estonian Association of Comparative Literature

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1226153*es

The language of West African writing in English with special reference to Nigerian prose fiction.

Part One of this study consists of a survey of the changing relationship of the West African writer to English as the medium of literary creation throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The African writer is followed through the almost complete cultural and linguistic dispossession of the eighteenth century which by its dose showed signs of slackening. In Chapter Three the changing attitudes towards the African, his education in English, and the gradual re-establishment of his literary independence in the new medium during the nineteenth century are discussed. The process of the 'externalisation' of the African, the emergence of undeniable evidence of his cultural dignity and the final divergence from the British tradition which arose from the early nationalism are also considered as necessary background to the study of the later use of English in West African writing. In Chapter Four, the question of the choice of a language for literary expression in English-speaking West Africa is examined with reference to linguistic thinking. Part Two is a study of present-day attempts to adapt the English language for literary purposes. The various methods by which this adaption has been attempted are subjected to linguistic examination, and their varying success is discussed in the light of the writers' bilingualism, which provides a useful insight into the literary effort in West Africa. The study as a whole is an attempt to provide the foundation of objective preclinical criteria upon which a sounder criticism of the language of West African writing in English might be based