Africa: a Lecture Series, Spring 2012

Olufemi Vaughan Bowdoin College February 23, 2012 Africa and Globalism: State Crisis, Transnationalism, and Social Reconstruction in A New Century audio recording Rebecca Warne Peters Syracuse University March 8, 2012 Civil War and Development in Angola: ‘Local’ Actors/International Interests audio recording PowerPoint slideshow Mohammed Ben-Abdallah University of Ghana, Legon, / UNH Resident Playwright April 12, 2012 Challenges of Educational Reform in Post-Colonial Ghana audio recording UNH International Educator articl

A joint separation-classification model for sound event detection of weakly labelled data

Source separation (SS) aims to separate individual sources from an audio recording. Sound event detection (SED) aims to detect sound events from an audio recording. We propose a joint separation-classification (JSC) model trained only on weakly labelled audio data, that is, only the tags of an audio recording are known but the time of the events are unknown. First, we propose a separation mapping from the time-frequency (T-F) representation of an audio to the T-F segmentation masks of the audio events. Second, a classification mapping is built from each T-F segmentation mask to the presence probability of each audio event. In the source separation stage, sources of audio events and time of sound events can be obtained from the T-F segmentation masks. The proposed method achieves an equal error rate (EER) of 0.14 in SED, outperforming deep neural network baseline of 0.29. Source separation SDR of 8.08 dB is obtained by using global weighted rank pooling (GWRP) as probability mapping, outperforming the global max pooling (GMP) based probability mapping giving SDR at 0.03 dB. Source code of our work is published.Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 201

EFL Young Learners’ Perceptions About the Benefits and Challenges of Doing Individual Audio Recording Tasks in Their Oral Fluency

This study was conducted to investigate the EFL young learners’ perceptions about the benefits of individual audio recording tasks in their oral fluency and find out their challenges on how to do individual audio recording tasks. Twenty young learners coming from an English center in Vinh Long province took part in the research. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected by using a questionnaire and semi-structured interviews. The findings implicate that young learners highly perceived the benefits of doing individual audio recording tasks in improving their oral fluency, attitude and motivation. However, they encountered some challenges while doing individual audio recording tasks as regards linguistic problems and personal background. Keywords: Audio recording tasks, oral fluency, benefits and challenges of audio recording tasks DOI: 10.7176/JEP/13-30-07 Publication date:October 31st 202

Plasmon-Assisted Audio Recording

We present the first demonstration of the recording of optically encoded audio onto a plasmonic nanostructure. Analogous to the ‘‘optical sound’’ approach used in the early twentieth century to store sound on photographic film, we show that arrays of gold, pillar-supported bowtie nanoantennas could be used in a similar fashion to store sound information that is transferred via an amplitude modulated optical signal to the near field of an optical microscope. Retrieval of the audio information is achieved using standard imaging optics. We demonstrate that the sound information can be stored either as time-varying waveforms or in the frequency domain as the corresponding amplitude and phase spectra. A ‘‘plasmonic musical keyboard’’ comprising of 8 basic musical notes is constructed and used to play a short song. For comparison, we employ the correlation coefficient, which reveals that original and retrieved sound files are similar with maximum and minimum values of 0.995 and 0.342, respectively. We also show that the pBNAs could be used for basic signal processing by ablating unwanted frequency components on the nanostructure thereby enabling physical notch filtering of these components. Our work introduces a new application domain for plasmonic nanoantennas and experimentally verifies their potential for information processing.University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaig

Oral History Interview with Low Kee Yang: Conceptualising SMU

This is an abridged version of the original interview. Please contact the Library at [email protected] for access to the full version of the transcript and/or audio recording.</p

Oral History Interview with Leong Kwong Sin: Conceptualising SMU

This is an abridged version of the original interview. Please contact the Library at [email protected] for access to the full version of the transcript and/or audio recording.</p

Oral History Interview with Hwang Soo Chiat: Conceptualising SMU

This is an abridged version of the original interview. Please contact the Library at [email protected] for access to the full version of the transcript and/or audio recording.</p

Oral History Interview with Pang Yang Hoong: Conceptualising SMU

This is an abridged version of the original interview. Please contact the Library at [email protected] for access to the full version of the transcript and/or audio recording.</p

Oral History Interview with Arnoud De Meyer: Conceptualising SMU

This is an abridged version of the original interview. Please contact the Library at [email protected] for access to the full version of the transcript and/or audio recording.</p

Oral History Interview with Tony Tan Keng Yam: Conceptualising SMU

This is an abridged version of the original interview. Please contact the Library at [email protected] for access to the full version of the transcript and/or audio recording.</p