Audio as medium for content distribution (providing access to knowledge)

Reaching and educating the masses to the benefit of all of mankind is the ultimate goal and through the use of this technology facility/tool many can be reached in their own language, in their own community, in their own time and at their own pace. Making this content available to those who will benefit from the information, is vital. These people who want to consume the content are not necessarily that interested in the qualification, they need the information. Making the content available in an auditory format may also help those who may not be as literate as others. The uses of audio/ recorded lessons have a number of uses and should not just be seen as a medium for content distribution to distant communities. Recording lectures makes it possible for a lecturer to present lectures to a vast number of students, while just presenting the lecture once.

ACCEDA y BUSTREAMING : Integración de audio y video en el proceso de autoarchivo del Repositorio de la ULPGC en acceso abierto

Presentació de les dues noves plataformes desenvolupades per la Biblioteca de la Universitat de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria: ACCEDA (documentació científica de la ULPGC en accés obert) i BUSTREAMING (documentació multimèdia). Aquestes són dues noves iniciatives de la Biblioteca Universitària emmarcades dins del moviment Open Access, que se sumen a la ja existent Memòria Digital de Canàries, que es va iniciar l'any 2003 amb molt d'èxit. Tot i que el programari utilitzat per al desenvolupament d'ACCEDA és DSpace, la Biblioteca Universitària ha implementat serveis als usuaris i administradors, com per exemple, la possibilitat de dipositar documents sense haver d'utilitzar l'autoarxivament i la incorporació de l'eina BUStreaming desenvolupada per la pròpia Biblioteca.

A versão simplificada do Therapeutic Intervention Scoring System e seu valor prognóstico

O estudo avalia a capacidade do Therapeutic Intervention Scoring System (TISS-28) de discriminar pacientes internados em UTI, prováveis de morrer daqueles possíveis de sobreviver e estabelecer a pontuação limiar para alta probabilidade de morte. Os resultados, obtidos da amostra de 200 pacientes internados em 14 UTIs do Município de São Paulo, mostraram que o TISS-28 apresentou associação com mortalidade (p=0,0001). O ponto de corte estabelecido foi 21. Encontrou-se que 80,88% dos que morreram tinham pontuação do TISS-28 maior ou igual, e 68,18% dos sobreviventes tinham pontuação menor que 21. Além disso, quanto ao valor prognóstico do TISS-28, constatou-se acurácia de 0,72.

A Musically aware system for browsing and interacting with audio music collections

In the context of the CompMusic project we are developing methods to automatically describe/annotate audio music recordings pertaining to various music cultures. As away to demonstrate the usefulness of the methods we are also developing a system to browse and interact with specific audio collections. The system is an online web application that interfaces with all the data gathered (audio, scores plus contextual information) and all the descriptions that are automatically generated with the developed methods. In this paper we present the basic architecture of the proposed system, the types of data sources that it includes,and we mention some of the culture specific issues that we are working on for its development. The system is in a preliminary stage but it shows the potential that MIR technologies can have in browsing and interacting with musiccollections of various cultures.

Focused time-lapse inversion of radio and audio magnetotelluric data

Geoelectrical techniques are widely used to monitor groundwater processes, while surprisingly few studies have considered audio (AMT) and radio (RMT) magnetotellurics for such purposes. In this numerical investigation, we analyze to what extent inversion results based on AMT and RMT monitoring data can be improved by (1) time-lapse difference inversion; (2) incorporation of statistical information about the expected model update (i.e., the model regularization is based on a geostatistical model); (3) using alternative model norms to quantify temporal changes (i.e., approximations of l(1) and Cauchy norms using iteratively reweighted least-squares), (4) constraining model updates to predefined ranges (i.e., using Lagrange Multipliers to only allow either increases or decreases of electrical resistivity with respect to background conditions). To do so, we consider a simple illustrative model and a more realistic test case related to seawater intrusion. The results are encouraging and show significant improvements when using time-lapse difference inversion with non l(2) model norms. Artifacts that may arise when imposing compactness of regions with temporal changes can be suppressed through inequality constraints to yield models without oscillations outside the true region of temporal changes. Based on these results, we recommend approximate l(1)-norm solutions as they can resolve both sharp and smooth interfaces within the same model. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

An approach for linking score and audio recordings in Makam music of Turkey

The main information sources to study a particular piece of music are symbolic scores and audio recordings. These are complementary representations of the piece and it isvery useful to have a proper linking between the two of the musically meaningful events. For the case of makam music of Turkey, linking the available scores with the correspondingaudio recordings requires taking the specificities of this music into account, such as the particular tunings, the extensive usage of non-notated expressive elements, and the way in which the performer repeats fragmentsof the score. Moreover, for most of the pieces of the classical repertoire, there is no score written by the original composer. In this paper, we propose a methodology to pair sections of a score to the corresponding fragments of audio recording performances. The pitch information obtained from both sources is used as the common representationto be paired. From an audio recording, fundamental frequency estimation and tuning analysis is done to compute a pitch contour. From the corresponding score, symbolic note names and durations are converted to a syntheticpitch contour. Then, a linking operation is performed between these pitch contours in order to find the best correspondences.The method is tested on a dataset of 11 compositions spanning 44 audio recordings, which are mostly monophonic. An F3-score of 82% and 89% are obtained with automatic and semi-automatic karar detection respectively,showing that the methodology may give us a needed tool for further computational tasks such as form analysis, audio-score alignment and makam recognition.

Etude par la méthode audio-magnétotellurique de la basse vallée du Rhône

Après une introduction géologique et un bref aperçu sur la méthode audio-magnétotellurique, les résultats de l'étude sont présentés sous forme de cartes de résistivités et de conductances, et de trois profils transversaux. Ceux-ci comprennent chacun 5 à 7 sondages AMT et permettent la comparaison directe ave les profondeurs obtenues par une campagne de sismique-réflexion. Les résultats sont en bon accord et les profondeurs maximums déduites de la géophysique, voisines de 800 m, sont nettement plus importantes que les estimations anciennes.

Introducción a la conversión de audio a texto

Este documento es una introducción a las herramientas Dragon Naturally Speaking y Audacity, especializadas en optimizar la transcripción de archivos sonoros.

Detection of Raga-characteristic phrases from Hindustani Classical Music Audio

Melodic motifs form essential building blocks in Indian Classical music. The motifs, or key phrases, providestrong cues to the identity of the underlying raga in both Hindustani and Carnatic styles of Indian music. Automatic identification and clustering of similar motifs is relevant in this context. The inherent variations in various instances of a characteristic phrase in a bandish (composition)performance make it challenging to identify similar phrases in a performance. A nyas svara (long note)marks the ending of these phrases. The proposed method does segmentation of phrases through identification ofnyas and computes similarity with the reference characteristic phrase.

High capacity audio watermarking using the high frequency band of the wavelet domain

This paper proposes a novel high capacity robust audio watermarking algorithm by using the high frequency band of the wavelet decomposition at which the human auditory system (HAS) is not very sensitive to alteration. The main idea is to divide the high frequency band into frames and, for embedding, to change the wavelet samples depending on the average of relevant frame¿s samples. The experimental results show that the method has a very high capacity (about 11,000 bps), without significant perceptual distortion (ODG in [¿1 ,0] and SNR about 30dB), and provides robustness against common audio signal processing such as additive noise, filtering, echo and MPEG compression (MP3).

Efficient self-synchronised blind audio watermarking system based on time domain and FFT amplitude modification

Many audio watermarking schemes divide the audio signal into several blocks such that part of the watermark is embedded into each of them. One of the key issues in these block-oriented watermarking schemes is to preserve the synchronisation, i.e. to recover the exact position of each block in the mark recovery process. In this paper, a novel time domain synchronisation technique is presented together with a new blind watermarking scheme which works in the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT or FFT) domain. The combined scheme provides excellent imperceptibility results whilst achieving robustness against typical attacks. Furthermore, the execution of the scheme is fast enough to be used in real-time applications. The excellent transparency of the embedding algorithm makes it particularly useful for professional applications, such as the embedding of monitoring information in broadcast signals. The scheme is also compared with some recent results of the literature.

High capacity FFT-based audio watermarking

Peer-reviewed

High capacity robust audio watermarking scheme based on FFT and linear regression

Peer-reviewed