Corpus-Based Transcription as an Approach to the Compositional Control of Timbre

Timbre space is a cognitive model useful to address the problem of structuring timbre in electronic music. The recent concept of corpus-based concatenative sound synthesis is proposed as an approach to timbral control in both real- and deferred-time applications. Using CataRT and related tools in the FTM and Gabor libraries for Max/MSP we describe a technique for real-time analysis of a live signal to pilot corpus-based synthesis, along with examples of compositional realizations in works for instruments, electronics, and sound installation. To extend this technique to computer-assisted composition for acoustic instruments, we develop tools using the Sound Description Interchange Format (SDIF) to export sonic descriptors to OpenMusic where they may be further manipulated and transcribed into an instrumental score. This presents a flexible technique for the compositional organization of noise-based instrumental sounds

The Eyes of the Beholder: does responsibility for the lack of quality screenplays really lie at the door of inadequately trained screenwriters?

The relative lack of success for British films in the marketplace is often cited as being rooted in the lack of quality screenplays. As the primary strategic body for film in Britain, the UK Film Council subscribes to this broad analysis and has identified training as one of the key strategies for overcoming this weakness. In this article, I question this assumption and examine to what extent the decision-makers, and the processes of decision-making, themselves are a problem in the development of talent and quality British films

ProvablySecure Authenticated Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

Abstract: Authenticated key exchange protocols allow two participants A and B, communicating over a public network and each holding an authentication means, to exchange a shared secret value. Methods designed to deal with this cryptographic problem ensure A (resp. B) that no other participants aside from B (resp. A) can learn any information about the agreed value, and often also ensure A and B that their respective partner has actually computed this value. A natural extension to this cryptographic method is to consider a pool of participants exchanging a shared secret value and to provide a formal treatment for it. Starting from the famous 2-party Diffie-Hellman (DH) key exchange protocol, and from its authenticated variants, security experts have extended it to the multi-party setting for over a decade and completed a formal analysis in the framework of modern cryptography in the past few years. The present paper synthesizes this body of work on the provably-secure authenticated group DH key exchange. The present paper revisits and combines the full versions of the following four papers

The Total Filmmaker: thinking of screenwriting, directing and editing as one role

As screenwriting continues to establish itself as a discrete discipline in academia, either in alignment with creative writing departments or film and media practice departments, there is a danger that such developments may entrench a distancing of the craft from the cinematic form itself and that such a distancing may ultimately reinforce the screenplay's propensity for dramaturgy and the dramatic, rather than the sensory and experiential of the cinematic. Closely related creative stages in telling cinematic stories include directing and editing and this article seeks to argue, with reference to personal screen practice, that screenwriting, directing and editing are, in fact, three variations of the same thing. The article proposes the notion of the Total Filmmaker who embraces all three aspects of the cinematic storyteller. If the ultimate aim is to create a narrative that fully utilises the unique properties of the cinematic form in telling a story, rather than being dominated by the theatricality of dramatically driven classical narratives. How might one explore the relationship between screenwriting, directing and editing? Can an integrated approach to creating the cinematic blueprint change the way we think of pedagogy and screenwriting

Instrumental Radiation Patterns as Models for Corpus-Based Spatial Sound Synthesis: Cosmologies for Piano and 3D Electronics

The Cosmologies project aims to situate the listener inside a virtual grand piano by enabling computer processes to learn from the spatial presence of the live instrument and performer. We propose novel techniques that leverage mea- surements of natural acoustic phenomena to inform spatial sound composition and synthesis. Measured radiation pat- terns of acoustic instruments are applied interactively in response to a live input to synthesize spatial forms in real time. We implement this with software tools for the first time connecting audio descriptor analysis and corpus-based syn- thesis to spatialization using Higher-Order Ambisonics and machine learning. The resulting musical work, Cosmologies for piano and 3D electronics, explodes the space inside the grand piano out to the space of the concert hall, allowing the listener to experience its secret inner life

Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange Secure against Dictionary Attacks

Group Diffie-Hellman schemes for password-based key exchange are designed to provide a pool of players communicating over a public network, and sharing just a human-memorable password, with a session key (e.g, the key is used for multicast data integrity and confidentiality) . The fundamental security goal to achieve in this scenario is security against dictionary attacks. While solutions have been proposed to solve this problem no formal treatment has ever been suggested. In this paper, we define a security model and then present a protocol with its security proof in both the random oracle model and the ideal-cipher model

Manual engagement and automation in amateur photography

© 2017, © The Author(s) 2017. Automation has been central to the development of modern photography and, in the age of digital and smartphone photography, now largely defines everyday experience of the photographic process. In this article, we question the acceptance of automation as the default position for photography, arguing that discussions of automation need to move beyond binary concerns of whether to automate or not and, instead, to consider what is being automated and the degree of automation couched within the particularities of people’s practices. We base this upon findings from ethnographic fieldwork with people engaging manually with film-based photography. While automation liberates people from having to interact with various processes of photography, participants in our study reported a greater sense of control, richer experiences and opportunities for experimentation when they were able to engage manually with photographic processes

Nondestructive measurement of the roughness of the inner surface of hollow core-photonic bandgap fibers

We present optical and atomic force microscopy measurements of the roughness of the core wall surface within a hollow core photonic bandgap fiber (HC-PBGF) over the [3×10-2 µm-1 to 30 µm-1] spatial frequency range. A recently developed immersion optical profilometry technique with picometer-scale sensitivity was used to measure the roughness of air-glass surfaces inside the fiber at unprecedentedly low spatial frequencies, which are known to have the highest impact on HC-PBGF scattering loss and, thus, determine their loss limit. Optical access to the inner surface of the core was obtained by the selective filling of the cladding holes with index matching liquid using techniques borrowed from micro-fluidics. Both measurement techniques reveal ultralow roughness levels exhibiting a 1/f spectral power density dependency characteristic of frozen surface capillary waves over a broad spatial frequency range. However, a deviation from this behavior at low spatial frequencies was observed for the first time, to the best of our knowledge

Dynamic Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange under Standard Assumptions

Authenticated Diffie-Hellman key exchange allows two principals communicating over a public network, and each holding public /private keys, to agree on a shared secret value. In this paper we study the natural extension of this cryptographic problem to a group of principals. We begin from existing formal security models and refine them to incorporate major missing details (e.g., strong-corruption and concurrent sessions). Within this model we define the execution of a protocol for authenticated dynamic group Diffie-Hellman and show that it is provably secure under the decisional Diffie-Hellman assumption. Our security result holds in the standard model and thus provides better security guarantees than previously published results in the random oracle model