Acrimante non è Don Giovanni. Osservazioni su 'L’empio punito' di Alessandro Melani

Prima opera nella storia della musica basata sul soggetto di Don Giovanni, L’empio punito di Alessandro Melani andò in scena il 17 febbraio 1669 nel Teatro Colonna di Roma. L’azione si svolge in una Grecia immaginaria e i personaggi hanno nomi che evocano la tradizione letteraria italiana. Il personaggio principale, Acrimante, si allontana molto dai protagonisti dei testi basati sullo stesso soggetto. L’empio punito manca inoltre di molti topoi drammaturgici della tradizione legata a Don Giovanni: i legami familiari, l’onore, la richiesta di pentimento. Il libretto contiene alcuni topoi molto comuni nella tradizione teatrale europea, assenti nei testi precedenti su questo soggetto: il sogno, il sonno, il finto veleno, il patto col diavolo. Il nucleo drammaturgico della vicenda (l’oltraggio al morto sotto forma d’invito a cena) ha rappresentato solo il punto di partenza. Il risultato è che il libertinaggio, il disprezzo della morte e delle regole dell’onore sono come prosciugati per dare più spazio alla ostentazione spettacolare, al potere dell’impatto figurativo e alla seduzione della musica.The first opera in the history of music based on the Don Giovanni’s subject, L’empio punito of Alessandro Melani was staged on February 17, 1669, in the Teatro Colonna in Rome. The setting is in an imaginary Greece and the characters have names that evoke the Italian literary tradition. The main character - Acrimante - departs very far from the analogous ones of the texts based on the same subject. L’empio punito also lacks many dramaturgical topoi of Don Giovanni’s tradition:  family ties, honor, request for repentance. The libretto contains some topoi very common in the European theatrical tradition but missing in the previous texts on this subject: the dream, the sleeping, the false poison, the pact with the Devil. The dramaturgical core of the story (the disrespect to the dead in the form of a dinner invitation) represented the starting point, a reservoir from which to draw.  The result is that libertinism, contempt for death, and the rules of honor are dried up, as it were, to give more space to spectacular ostentation, the power of figurative impact, and the charm of music

CL-MASR: A Continual Learning Benchmark for Multilingual ASR

Modern multilingual automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems like Whisper have made it possible to transcribe audio in multiple languages with a single model. However, current state-of-the-art ASR models are typically evaluated on individual languages or in a multi-task setting, overlooking the challenge of continually learning new languages. There is insufficient research on how to add new languages without losing valuable information from previous data. Furthermore, existing continual learning benchmarks focus mostly on vision and language tasks, leaving continual learning for multilingual ASR largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, we propose CL-MASR, a benchmark designed for studying multilingual ASR in a continual learning setting. CL-MASR provides a diverse set of continual learning methods implemented on top of large-scale pretrained ASR models, along with common metrics to assess the effectiveness of learning new languages while addressing the issue of catastrophic forgetting. To the best of our knowledge, CL-MASR is the first continual learning benchmark for the multilingual ASR task. The code is available at https://github.com/speechbrain/benchmarks.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, 5 table

Resource-Efficient Separation Transformer

Transformers have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in speech separation. These models, however, are computationally demanding and require a lot of learnable parameters. This paper explores Transformer-based speech separation with a reduced computational cost. Our main contribution is the development of the Resource-Efficient Separation Transformer (RE-SepFormer), a self-attention-based architecture that reduces the computational burden in two ways. First, it uses non-overlapping blocks in the latent space. Second, it operates on compact latent summaries calculated from each chunk. The RE-SepFormer reaches a competitive performance on the popular WSJ0-2Mix and WHAM! datasets in both causal and non-causal settings. Remarkably, it scales significantly better than the previous Transformer-based architectures in terms of memory and inference time, making it more suitable for processing long mixtures.Comment: Accepted to ICASSP 202

Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment as support for bathing waters profiling

Profiling bathing waters supported by Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment (QMRA) is key to the WHO's recommendations for the 2020/2021 revision of the European Bathing Water Directive. We developed an areaspecific QMRA model on four pathogens, using fecal indicator concentrations (E. coil, enterococci) for calculating pathogen loads. The predominance of illness was found to be attributable to Human Adenovirus, followed by Salmonella, Vibrio, and Norovirus. Overall, the cumulative illness risk showed a median of around 1 case/10000 exposures. The risk estimates were strongly influenced by the indicators that were used, suggesting the need for a more detailed investigation of the different sources of fecal contamination. Area-specific threshold values for fecal indicators were estimated on a risk-basis by modelling the cumulative risk against E. coll. and enterococci concentrations. To improve bathing waters assessment, we suggest considering source apportionment locally estimating of pathogen/indicator ratios, and calculating site-specific indicators thresholds based on risk assessment

Functional MRI Studies in Friedreich's Ataxia: A Systematic Review

Friedreich's ataxia (FRDA) is an inherited neurodegenerative movement disorder with early onset, widespread cerebral and cerebellar pathology, and no cure still available. Functional MRI (fMRI) studies, although currently limited in number, have provided a better understanding of brain changes in people with FRDA. This systematic review aimed to provide a critical overview of the findings and methodologies of all fMRI studies conducted in genetically confirmed FRDA so far, and to offer recommendations for future study designs. About 12 cross-sectional and longitudinal fMRI studies, included 198 FRDA children and young adult patients and, 205 healthy controls (HCs), according to the inclusion criteria. Details regarding GAA triplet expansion and demographic and clinical severity measures were widely reported. fMRI designs included motor and cognitive task paradigms, and resting-state studies, with widespread changes in functionally activated areas and extensive variability in study methodologies. These studies highlight a mixed picture of both hypoactivation and hyperactivation in different cerebral and cerebellar brain regions depending on fMRI design and cohort characteristics. Functional changes often correlate with clinical variables. In aggregate, the findings provide support for cerebro-cerebellar loop damage and the compensatory mechanism hypothesis. Current literature indicates that fMRI is a valuable tool for gaining in vivo insights into FRDA pathology, but addressing that its limitations would be a key to improving the design, interpretation, and generalizability of studies in the future

Mycophenolate mofetil: What is its place in the treatment of autoimmune rheumatic diseases?

Q1 primo autore: punti 1