Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

In The Beginning... A Legacy Of Computing At Marshall University, Jack L. Dickinson, Arnold R. Miller Ed.E

Manuscripts

This book provides a brief history of the early computing technology at Marshall University, Huntington, W.Va., in the forty years: 1959-1999. This was before the move to Intel and Windows based servers. After installation of an IBM Accounting Machine in 1959, which arguably does not fit the modern definition of a computer, the first true computer arrived in 1963 and was installed in a room below the Registrar’s office. For the next twenty years several departments ordered their own midrange standalone systems to fit their individual departmental requirements. These represented different platforms from different vendors, and were not connected to …

Analyzing And Organizing The Sonic Space Of Vocal Imitation, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd, D. Rocchesso

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

The sonic space that can be spanned with the voice is vast and complex and, therefore, it is difficult to organize and explore. In order to devise tools that facilitate sound design by vocal sketching we attempt at organizing a database of short excerpts of vocal imitations. By clustering the sound samples on a space whose dimensionality has been reduced to the two principal components, it is experimentally checked how meaningful the resulting clusters are for humans. Eventually, a representative of each cluster, chosen to be close to its centroid, may serve as a landmark in the exploration of the …

Growing The Practice Of Vocal Sketching, S. Delle Monache, D. Rocchesso, S. Baldan, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

Sketch-thinking in the design domain is a complex representational activity, emerging from the reflective conversation with the sketch. A recent line of research on computational support for sound design has been focusing on the exploitation of voice, and especially vocal imitations, as effective representation strategy for the early stage of the design process. A set of introductory exercises on vocal sketching, to probe the communication effectiveness of vocal imitations for design purposes, are presented and discussed, in the scope of the research-through-design workshop activities of the EU project SkAT-VG.

Self-Organizing The Space Of Vocal Imitations, Davide Rocchesso, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

The human voice is a powerful instrument for producing sound sketches. The sonic space that can be spanned with the voice is vast and complex and, therefore, it is difficult to organize and explore. In this contribution, we report on our attempts at extracting the principal components from a database of 152 short excerpts of vocal imitations. We describe each excerpt by a set of statistical audio features and by a measure of similarity of the envelope to a small number of prototype envelopes. We apply k-means clustering on a space whose dimensionality has been reduced by singular value decomposition, …

Further Evidence Of The Contribution Of The Ear Canal To Directional Hearing: Design Of A Compensating Filter, Andrea Martelloni, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd, Antonio Mancuso

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

It has been proven, and it is well documented in literature, that the directional response in HRTFs comes largely from the effect of the pinnae. However, few studies have analysed the contribution given by the remaining part of the external ear, particularly the ear canal. This work investigates the directionally dependent response of the modelled ear canal of a dummy head, assuming that the behaviour of the external ear is sufficiently linear to be approximated by an LTI system. In order to extract the ear canal's transfer function, two critical microphone placements (at the eardrum and at the beginning of …

On Binaural Spatialization And The Use Of Gpgpu For Audio Processing, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

3D recordings and audio, namely techniques that aim to create the perception of sound sources placed anywhere in 3 dimensional space, are becoming an interesting resource for composers, live performances and augmented reality. This thesis focuses on binaural spatialization techniques.

We will tackle the problem from three different perspectives. The first one is related to the implementation of an engine for audio convolution, this is a real implementation problem where we will confront with a number of already available systems trying to achieve better results in terms of performances. General Purpose computing on Graphic Processing Units (GPGPU) is a promising …

Head In Space : A Head-Tracking Based Binaural Spatialization System, Luca A. Ludovico, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd, Dario Pizzamiglio

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

This paper discusses a system capable of detecting the position of the listener through a head-tracking system and rendering a 3D audio environment by binaural spatialization. Head tracking is performed through face recognition algorithms which use a standard webcam, and the result is presented over headphones, like in other typical binaural applications. With this system users can choose an audio file to play, provide a virtual position for the source in an euclidean space, and then listen to the sound as if it is coming from that position. If they move their head, the signal provided by the system changes …

Sound And The City: Multi-Layer Representation And Navigation Of Audio Scenarios, Luca A. Ludovico, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

IEEE 1599-2008 is an XML-based standard originally intended for the multi-layer representation of music information. Nevertheless, it is versatile enough to describe also information different from traditional scores written according to the Common Western Notation (CWN) rules. This paper will discuss the application of IEEE 1599-2008 to the audio description of paths and scenarios from the urban life or other landscapes. The standard we adopt allows the multilayer integration of textual, symbolical, structural, graphical, audio and video contents within a unique synchronized environment. Besides, for each kind of media, a number of digital objects is supported. As a consequence, thanks …

Puremx: Automatic Transcription Of Midi Live Music Performances Into Xml Format, Stefano Baldan, Luca A. Ludovico, Davide Andrea Mauro Phd

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

This paper addresses the problem of the real-time automatic transcription of a live music performance into a symbolic format based on XML.

The source data are given by any music instrument or other device able to communicate with Pure Data by MIDI. Pure Data is a free, multi-platform, real-time programming environment for graphical, audio, and video processing. During a performance, music events are parsed and their parameters are evaluated thanks to rhythm and pitch detection algorithms. The final step is the creation of a well-formed XML document, validated against the new international standard known as IEEE 1599.

This work will …

Language Modeling Approaches To Information Retrieval, Protima Banerjee, Hyoil Han

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

This article surveys recent research in the area of language modeling (sometimes called statistical language modeling) approaches to information retrieval. Language modeling is a formal probabilistic retrieval framework with roots in speech recognition and natural language processing. The underlying assumption of language modeling is that human language generation is a random process; the goal is to model that process via a generative statistical model.

In this article, we discuss current research in the application of language modeling to information retrieval, the role of semantics in the language modeling framework, cluster-based language models, use of language modeling for XML retrieval and …