2,965 research outputs found
Affective Music Information Retrieval
Much of the appeal of music lies in its power to convey emotions/moods and to
evoke them in listeners. In consequence, the past decade witnessed a growing
interest in modeling emotions from musical signals in the music information
retrieval (MIR) community. In this article, we present a novel generative
approach to music emotion modeling, with a specific focus on the
valence-arousal (VA) dimension model of emotion. The presented generative
model, called \emph{acoustic emotion Gaussians} (AEG), better accounts for the
subjectivity of emotion perception by the use of probability distributions.
Specifically, it learns from the emotion annotations of multiple subjects a
Gaussian mixture model in the VA space with prior constraints on the
corresponding acoustic features of the training music pieces. Such a
computational framework is technically sound, capable of learning in an online
fashion, and thus applicable to a variety of applications, including
user-independent (general) and user-dependent (personalized) emotion
recognition and emotion-based music retrieval. We report evaluations of the
aforementioned applications of AEG on a larger-scale emotion-annotated corpora,
AMG1608, to demonstrate the effectiveness of AEG and to showcase how
evaluations are conducted for research on emotion-based MIR. Directions of
future work are also discussed.Comment: 40 pages, 18 figures, 5 tables, author versio
Room to Play: Exploring Process in Contemporary Ceramics
This practice-led research explores my changing
relationship with process in developing contemporary ceramic
artwork, where the development of artwork begins with process as
a means of driving a fixed outcome, to becoming an outcome
itself. The project is developed from studio practice which
investigates various making methodologies, such as using plaster
moulds, handbuilding, repetition in making, playing, and engaging
with the viewer. My research argues that by focusing on an
open-ended process-driven methodology in creating artwork, the
experimental process can provide a broader platform for
unexpected possibilities to emerge and mature. The research
outcome has resulted in handbuilding three groups of artwork,
each of which invite the viewer to engage and interact
Improving Automatic Jazz Melody Generation by Transfer Learning Techniques
In this paper, we tackle the problem of transfer learning for Jazz automatic
generation. Jazz is one of representative types of music, but the lack of Jazz
data in the MIDI format hinders the construction of a generative model for
Jazz. Transfer learning is an approach aiming to solve the problem of data
insufficiency, so as to transfer the common feature from one domain to another.
In view of its success in other machine learning problems, we investigate
whether, and how much, it can help improve automatic music generation for
under-resourced musical genres. Specifically, we use a recurrent variational
autoencoder as the generative model, and use a genre-unspecified dataset as the
source dataset and a Jazz-only dataset as the target dataset. Two transfer
learning methods are evaluated using six levels of source-to-target data
ratios. The first method is to train the model on the source dataset, and then
fine-tune the resulting model parameters on the target dataset. The second
method is to train the model on both the source and target datasets at the same
time, but add genre labels to the latent vectors and use a genre classifier to
improve Jazz generation. The evaluation results show that the second method
seems to perform better overall, but it cannot take full advantage of the
genre-unspecified dataset.Comment: 8 pages, Accepted to APSIPA ASC(Asia-Pacific Signal and Information
Processing Association Annual Summit and Conference ) 201
Using Peer-to-Peer Technology for Knowledge Sharing in Communities of Practices
Communities of Practices (CoPs) are informal structures within organizations that bind people together through informal relationships and the sharing of expertise and experience. As such, they are effective tools for the creation and sharing of organizational knowledge, and, increasingly, organizations are adopting them as part of their knowledge management strategies. In this paper, we examine the knowledge sharing characteristics and roles of CoPs and develop a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing architecture that matches the behavioral characteristics of the members of the CoPs. We also propose a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing tool called KTella that enables members of CoPs to voluntarily share and retrieve knowledge more effectively
Assessment of gene-covariate interactions by incorporating covariates into association mapping
The HLA region is considered to be the main genetic risk factor for rheumatoid arthritis. Previous research demonstrated that HLA-DRB1 alleles encoding the shared epitope are specific for disease that is characterized by antibodies to cyclic citrullinated peptides (anti-CCP). In the present study, we incorporated the shared epitope and either anti-CCP antibodies or rheumatoid factor into linkage disequilibrium mapping, to assess the association between the shared epitope or antibodies with the disease gene identified. Incorporating the covariates into the association mapping provides a mechanism 1) to evaluate gene-gene and gene-environment interactions and 2) to dissect the pathways underlying disease induction/progress in quantitative antibodies
Luteolin Suppresses Inflammatory Mediator Expression by Blocking the Akt/NFκB Pathway in Acute Lung Injury Induced by Lipopolysaccharide in Mice
Acute lung injury (ALI), instilled by lipopolysaccharide (LPS), is a severe illness with excessive mortality and has no specific treatment strategy. Luteolin is an anti-inflammatory flavonoid and widely distributed in the plants. Pretreatment with luteolin inhibited LPS-induced histological changes of ALI and lung tissue edema. In addition, LPS-induced inflammatory responses, including increased vascular permeability, tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-α and interleukin (IL)-6 production, and expression of inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) and cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2), were also reduced by luteolin in a concentration-dependent manner. Furthermore, luteolin suppressed activation of NFκB and its upstream molecular factor, Akt. These results suggest that the protection mechanism of luteolin is by inhibition of NFκB activation possibly via Akt
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