Winter Birches at York Redoubt

This painting of Winter Birches at York Redoubt in Halifax, Nova Scotia reflects the grandeur and beauty of the historic site on which it sits and evacuates the fortification from it. York Redoubt, now a National Historic Park, was constructed in 1793 (just as war broke out between Britain and France) on a bluff at the narrowest point on the outer harbour. It overlooks the entrance to Halifax Harbour at Ferguson\u27s Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada

Winter Birches at York Redoubt

This painting of Winter Birches at York Redoubt in Halifax, Nova Scotia reflects the grandeur and beauty of the historic site on which it sits and evacuates the fortification from it. York Redoubt, now a National Historic Park, was constructed in 1793 (just as war broke out between Britain and France) on a bluff at the narrowest point on the outer harbour. It overlooks the entrance to Halifax Harbour at Ferguson\u27s Cove, Nova Scotia, Canada

Le Desir Dans L\u27oeuvre Romanesque De Marie-claire Blais (quebec)

In this thesis, we study the novels and short stories written by Marie-Claire Blais, beginning with La Belle Bete and ending with Pierre la guerre du printemps 81. We attempt to demonstrate that the characters\u27 desire is the very source of their actions and of artistic creation; this desire is therefore the centre and the essence of Marie-Claire Blais\u27s work.;In the first part of our thesis, we discuss the itinerary of desire from its inception through its diverse stages until its satisfaction or frustration and subsequent disappearance. This itinerary is cyclical, since the death of one desire is immediately followed by the birth of another.;In the second part, we discuss the interchangeable relationship between desire and life on the one hand, and the lack of desire and the spiritual death it represents on the other. We discuss the moral implications of this relationship within the context of Marie-Claire Blais\u27s novels and short stories.;In the third and last part we trace once again the itinerary of desire, this time as it manifests itself in the artist\u27s desire, namely in his pursuit of a work of art. We establish that this itinerary of creation presents similarities to the one we studied in the first part of the thesis.;We conclude that, within Marie-Claire Blais\u27s world, desire is the very essence of life and the main force behind each action and creation

Test-Time Training for Speech

In this paper, we study the application of Test-Time Training (TTT) as a solution to handling distribution shifts in speech applications. In particular, we introduce distribution-shifts to the test datasets of standard speech-classification tasks -- for example, speaker-identification and emotion-detection -- and explore how Test-Time Training (TTT) can help adjust to the distribution-shift. In our experiments that include distribution shifts due to background noise and natural variations in speech such as gender and age, we identify some key-challenges with TTT including sensitivity to optimization hyperparameters (e.g., number of optimization steps and subset of parameters chosen for TTT) and scalability (e.g., as each example gets its own set of parameters, TTT is not scalable). Finally, we propose using BitFit -- a parameter-efficient fine-tuning algorithm proposed for text applications that only considers the bias parameters for fine-tuning -- as a solution to the aforementioned challenges and demonstrate that it is consistently more stable than fine-tuning all the parameters of the model

TimbreTron: A WaveNet(CycleGAN(CQT(Audio))) Pipeline for Musical Timbre Transfer

In this work, we address the problem of musical timbre transfer, where the goal is to manipulate the timbre of a sound sample from one instrument to match another instrument while preserving other musical content, such as pitch, rhythm, and loudness. In principle, one could apply image-based style transfer techniques to a time-frequency representation of an audio signal, but this depends on having a representation that allows independent manipulation of timbre as well as high-quality waveform generation. We introduce TimbreTron, a method for musical timbre transfer which applies "image" domain style transfer to a time-frequency representation of the audio signal, and then produces a high-quality waveform using a conditional WaveNet synthesizer. We show that the Constant Q Transform (CQT) representation is particularly well-suited to convolutional architectures due to its approximate pitch equivariance. Based on human perceptual evaluations, we confirmed that TimbreTron recognizably transferred the timbre while otherwise preserving the musical content, for both monophonic and polyphonic samples.Comment: 17 pages, published as a conference paper at ICLR 201