Evaluating the use of lecture capture using a revealed preference approach

This article discusses the introduction of lecture capture technology on a large undergraduate module with diverse student cohorts. Literature has so far relied on surveying students to discover their use of the technology or attempted to quantify the impact of watching lecture recordings on assessment performance. Alternatively, the principal contribution of this article is an evaluation of the use of the recorded lectures using a revealed preference approach. Specifically we identify to what extent students watched lecture recordings, rather than simply claimed to watch them when asked to provide comments on the technology. Data indicates the number of distinct students who watched recordings, the frequency with which they watched recordings, the average length of viewings as well as the time of day when lectures were viewed. We monitored viewings over two academic years, identifying ‘spikes’ in the number of viewings in the days before tests, as well as regularities in the viewing patterns across the two years. We analyse the data to assess the extent to which students used the recordings, how and when they watched the recordings. We conclude that the students value lecture recordings, making more extensive use of the recordings than has been identified in the literature to date. Ultimately, lecture recordings are suggested to offer valuable support for students’ independent study

Woefully Arrayed: Sacred and Secular Choral and Polychoral Works of Jonathan David Little (b.1965) ["Woefully Arrayed", Op.13; "Kyrie", Op.5; "Gloria", Op.18; “Wasted and Worn”, Op.6; “That Time of Year", Op.2]

“A music redolent of the past and the future” Several of the works in this collection feature intricate, a cappella, polychoral-inspired techniques. These include multi-part, multi-divisi, and unusual spatial effects (or cori spezzati – literally “split choirs” – as the technique was referred to in the Renaissance and early Baroque periods). Therefore different sections of the choir, or different “sub-choirs” and/or vocal soloists, are sometimes placed in various arrangements around and above the audience: this ancient technique being pioneered in modern form in “Kyrie”, Op.5, for 21 individual vocal lines – where some singers are stationed in a gallery, and at a distance. Some works also feature echo effects, as well as isorhythmic fragments, melodic and rhythmic hocket, while cross-rhythms and cross-textuality may additionally be involved. Due to the incorporation of such “polychoral”-derived techniques (in addition to some derived from Medieval music), a striking extra dimension is added both to recordings and to live performances (where the aural “spatial” interest creates a quasi-theatrical effect). The harmonic language is largely built on the composer’s personalised modal foundations, frequently complemented by very subtle use of rhythm and ornament, which can sometimes involve quite elaborate – but always delicate – “filigree”-like patterns. All but the Kyrie are world première recordings (including the first recording of the choral version of That Time of Year), and were recorded over five separate sessions in the UK and US. Includes an additional historical and contextual essay by Renaissance and Baroque scholar, Hugh Keyte, leading expert on early polychoralism: "Polychorality: Some Observations". (NOTE: Opus numbers in the composer’s œuvre are apportioned according to date of initial conception, rather than by date of completion.) “WOEFULLY ARRAYED”: Sacred and Secular Choral and Polychoral Works of JONATHAN DAVID LITTLE (b.1965) INCLUDES WORLD PREMIÈRE RECORDINGS Vox Futura, Boston (USA) Directed by Andrew Shenton; Organ: Heinrich Christensen ‡Stanbery Singers, Cincinnati (USA) Directed by Paul John Stanbery †Thomas Tallis Society Choir, Greenwich (UK) Directed by Philip Simms SACRED WORKS: 1. “Woefully Arrayed”, Op.13 (Anthem for Triple Choir: AATTBB + SSA + SSA) [attrib. to John Skelton] (with Organ) (ca.26:00) 2. †Kyrie, Op.5 (SATB Double Choir with Soloists) (from Missa Temporis Perditi) (ca.4:50) * * * ROYAL PHILHARMONIC SOCIETY / BBC RADIO 3 “ENCORE Choral” Award Winner * * * 3. Gloria, Op.18 (SATB Double Choir with Soloists) (from Missa Temporis Perditi) (ca.12:00) SECULAR WORKS: 4. ‡“Wasted and Worn”, Op.6 (Part Song for SSAATTBB Choir with Soloists) [Lord de Tabley] (ca.12:10) 5. ‡“That Time of Year”, Op.2 (SATBarB Choir) [Shakespeare] (ca.4:45) 6. “Woefully Arrayed”, Op.13 [Reprise – abridged version] (ca.12:30) This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body (Individual International Arts Project Award 2015-17: UK-USA-Australia). Invaluable support has also been provided by the Royal Philharmonic Society (UK), through its “ENCORE Choral” Award scheme. The support and advice of music publishers Anne Keats, OAM, and Brennan Keats, OAM, Directors of Wirripang Pty Ltd (Australia), of Ben Hall and staff at the University of Chichester (UK), of Professor Craig De Wilde of the University of Singapore, of music copyist David Turner (UK), of Bob Lord and all his team at PARMA Recordings (USA), and of James M. Kendrick (Director and Treasurer of ASCAP, USA), is gratefully acknowledged

Detection of abnormal recordings in Irish milk recorded data

peer-reviewedThe objective of this study was to detect abnormal recordings of milk yield, fat concentration and protein concentration in Irish milk-recorded data. The data consisted of 14,956 records from both commercial and experimental herds with 92% of the recordings recorded manually and the remainder recorded electronically. The method used in this paper was a modified version of the method employed by the Animal Improvement Programs Laboratory in Maryland, USA and conformed with the guidelines outlined by the International Committee of Animal Recording. The results illustrate the effectiveness of detecting abnormal recordings in Irish milk records. The method described in this paper, defines the upper and lower limits for each production trait and these limits along with the slope parameters were used to determine if a recording was abnormal or not. Three percent of milk yield recordings, 5% of fat concentration recordings and less than 1% of protein concentration recordings were found to be abnormal. The proportion of values declared abnormal in manually recorded and electronically recorded data were examined and found to be significantly different for fat concentration

Unsupervised decoding of long-term, naturalistic human neural recordings with automated video and audio annotations

Fully automated decoding of human activities and intentions from direct neural recordings is a tantalizing challenge in brain-computer interfacing. Most ongoing efforts have focused on training decoders on specific, stereotyped tasks in laboratory settings. Implementing brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) in natural settings requires adaptive strategies and scalable algorithms that require minimal supervision. Here we propose an unsupervised approach to decoding neural states from human brain recordings acquired in a naturalistic context. We demonstrate our approach on continuous long-term electrocorticographic (ECoG) data recorded over many days from the brain surface of subjects in a hospital room, with simultaneous audio and video recordings. We first discovered clusters in high-dimensional ECoG recordings and then annotated coherent clusters using speech and movement labels extracted automatically from audio and video recordings. To our knowledge, this represents the first time techniques from computer vision and speech processing have been used for natural ECoG decoding. Our results show that our unsupervised approach can discover distinct behaviors from ECoG data, including moving, speaking and resting. We verify the accuracy of our approach by comparing to manual annotations. Projecting the discovered cluster centers back onto the brain, this technique opens the door to automated functional brain mapping in natural settings

Response to actual and simulated recordings of conventional takeoff and landing jet aircraft

Comparability between noise characteristics of synthesized recordings of aircraft in flight and actual recordings were investigated. Although the synthesized recordings were more smoothly time-varying than the actual recordings and the synthesizer could not produce a comb-filter effect that was present in the actual recordings, results supported the conclusion that annoyance response is comparable to the synthesized and actual recordings. A correction for duration markedly improved the validity of engineering calculation procedures designed to measure noise annoyance. Results led to the conclusion that the magnitude estimation psychophysical method was a highly reliable approach for evaluating engineering calculation procedures designed to measure noise annoyance. For repeated presentations of pairs of actual recordings, differences between judgment results for identical signals ranged from 0.0 to 0.5 db

Multi-label Ferns for Efficient Recognition of Musical Instruments in Recordings

In this paper we introduce multi-label ferns, and apply this technique for automatic classification of musical instruments in audio recordings. We compare the performance of our proposed method to a set of binary random ferns, using jazz recordings as input data. Our main result is obtaining much faster classification and higher F-score. We also achieve substantial reduction of the model size

The Opie Recordings: What’s Left to be Heard?

This chapter presents an analysis of selected recordings from the Opie Collection of Children's Games in the National Sound Archive. It contextualises them with an account of the Opies' research approach, and identifies three themes emerging from the recordings which are not found in published work by the Opies. These are: the strong rleatinoship between children's media cultures and traditional play cultures; more extensive variation of words and music in the singing games; and more extreme examples of obscene and scatological rhymes