This dissertation is basically a reading the book of Lamentation as a literary whole in a sense of a text-centred approach, which aims to interpret the Scripture as divine communicative action. The major philosophical resources that I employ in this study are the Speech-Act theory developed by J. Austin and J. Searle, and the concepts particularly exemplified in the work of K. Vanhoozer. I look at repetition and literary techniques in Lamentations as a clue to its structural unity. In the body of the dissertation, Instead of historical-critical approaches, I claim that the meaning exists not ‘behind the text,’ but ‘in the text itself as a whole.’ One of the most important literary approaches to understanding the book of Lamentations is to note the poetic voices, which interweave in the text. The poetic voices are my main focus of understanding the book of Lamentations. I explain the literary meaning reading the text and demonstrate that we must find the canonical level of the meaning which supervenes on the literary level. The meaning of a text at a literary level must be carefully studied and modified by the ‘fuller sense (or meaning)’ derived from the canonical context. The ‘fuller sense’ of Scripture associated with divine authorship emerges only at the level of the whole canon. Here for the canonical meaning of the text, I focus on Vanhoozer’s assertion, having proposed the suitability of speech act theory for the various tasks of biblical interpretation and theological hermeneutics. When we read the text, there is no utterance from God in Lamentations. It is the missing voice. The main theme of Lamentations is "Where is the true comfort?". The text presents no comfort. In the literary context, God keeps silent (non-speaking). Canonically, however, Christian readers as God’s people read the Bible, connecting it to Jesus Christ. Within the canonical context, we can indeed find an answer and God’s answering speech (that is, His act), because Jesus is their true comforter acting as God’s response. We can find this response in his teaching (e.g. Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount) and in his mission (e.g. presenting his body as the temple, being Immanuel, God-with-us). / Dissertation (MA(Theology))--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Old Testament Studies / unrestricted

Syftet med detta arbete har varit att undersöka om berättelsen kan fungera som katalysator för elevernas reflektion över sig själva och deras situation i ett postmodernt samhälle. Väsentliga frågor i sammanhanget blev dels huruvida de själva kunde bli medvetna om och reflektera över sina egna och andras strategier i en sådan omfattande social omvandling. Ett sådant fenomen som kom i fokus var vårt behov av ytliga statussymboler.Det i grunden kvalitativa arbetet bygger på tre synvinklar och tillika källor. För det första, mig själv som oundvikligt subjektivt filter; för det andra eleverna och för det tredje, mediala källor som på olika sätt har kunnat användas i sammanhanget.Under arbetets lopp har jag kommit fram till att arbetets informativa, reflektiva och diskursiva processer i sig utgjorde ett lika intressant material som slutsatserna. / The purpose of this work has been to examine the function of storytelling as an induct-ive way to develop self reflection and environmental awareness of the students. Key subjects have been if they could be attentive to the very reflective process itself and to the strategies we apply, when to cope with dynamic changes as those of the postmodern society. Also the possibility to find basic explanations, to specially one of these strategies – one that has been more and more frequently used – became a pursuit in this work. The phenomenon in mind is our seemingly growing demand for “superficial valuables”.This work is basically qualitative. Three perspectives – as well as sources of inform-ation – have been developed through the process of this work: firstly, the inevitably subjective experiences of my own; secondly, the students; and thirdly, different forms of applicable public media. Especially the contribution from the students can’t be overstated. Initially it was them who made me aware of the phenomenon, described above. Moreover they gave input, partly through the literature seminar and the related discussion, partly through a minor enquiry consisting of a few but fundamental questions connected to the matter of “wealth” and “ability”.Quite early during the progression of this work I came to an understanding that the informative, the introspective and the communicative processes of the work itself constituted a most interesting substance. Hence, I made a more careful attempt to describe this development and my thoughts connected to it, rather than giving too much focus on the aftermath. Retrospectively seen, it presents somewhat self-evident answers of the two initial questions above. Yes, storytelling might work as a complement to more radical experiences of the real life. It can be used as a key to existential reflection in an urban security-devoting postmodern society. Also obviously, there seem to be more profound explanations to our quest for superficial valuables – needs beyond the very appeal. They could be connected to the natural instinct of individual survival through real or “illusory” acceptance and irreplaceability within one or more collective social orders – in short, the importance of being important.

Cette thèse étudie des modèles de séquences de haute dimension basés sur des réseaux de neurones récurrents (RNN) et leur application à la musique et à la parole. Bien qu'en principe les RNN puissent représenter les dépendances à long terme et la dynamique temporelle complexe propres aux séquences d'intérêt comme la vidéo, l'audio et la langue naturelle, ceux-ci n'ont pas été utilisés à leur plein potentiel depuis leur introduction par Rumelhart et al. (1986a) en raison de la difficulté de les entraîner efficacement par descente de gradient. Récemment, l'application fructueuse de l'optimisation Hessian-free et d'autres techniques d'entraînement avancées ont entraîné la recrudescence de leur utilisation dans plusieurs systèmes de l'état de l'art. Le travail de cette thèse prend part à ce développement. L'idée centrale consiste à exploiter la flexibilité des RNN pour apprendre une description probabiliste de séquences de symboles, c'est-à-dire une information de haut niveau associée aux signaux observés, qui en retour pourra servir d'à priori pour améliorer la précision de la recherche d'information. Par exemple, en modélisant l'évolution de groupes de notes dans la musique polyphonique, d'accords dans une progression harmonique, de phonèmes dans un énoncé oral ou encore de sources individuelles dans un mélange audio, nous pouvons améliorer significativement les méthodes de transcription polyphonique, de reconnaissance d'accords, de reconnaissance de la parole et de séparation de sources audio respectivement. L'application pratique de nos modèles à ces tâches est détaillée dans les quatre derniers articles présentés dans cette thèse. Dans le premier article, nous remplaçons la couche de sortie d'un RNN par des machines de Boltzmann restreintes conditionnelles pour décrire des distributions de sortie multimodales beaucoup plus riches. Dans le deuxième article, nous évaluons et proposons des méthodes avancées pour entraîner les RNN. Dans les quatre derniers articles, nous examinons différentes façons de combiner nos modèles symboliques à des réseaux profonds et à la factorisation matricielle non-négative, notamment par des produits d'experts, des architectures entrée/sortie et des cadres génératifs généralisant les modèles de Markov cachés. Nous proposons et analysons également des méthodes d'inférence efficaces pour ces modèles, telles la recherche vorace chronologique, la recherche en faisceau à haute dimension, la recherche en faisceau élagué et la descente de gradient. Finalement, nous abordons les questions de l'étiquette biaisée, du maître imposant, du lissage temporel, de la régularisation et du pré-entraînement. / This thesis studies models of high-dimensional sequences based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and their application to music and speech. While in principle RNNs can represent the long-term dependencies and complex temporal dynamics present in real-world sequences such as video, audio and natural language, they have not been used to their full potential since their introduction by Rumelhart et al. (1986a) due to the difficulty to train them efficiently by gradient-based optimization. In recent years, the successful application of Hessian-free optimization and other advanced training techniques motivated an increase of their use in many state-of-the-art systems. The work of this thesis is part of this development. The main idea is to exploit the power of RNNs to learn a probabilistic description of sequences of symbols, i.e. high-level information associated with observed signals, that in turn can be used as a prior to improve the accuracy of information retrieval. For example, by modeling the evolution of note patterns in polyphonic music, chords in a harmonic progression, phones in a spoken utterance, or individual sources in an audio mixture, we can improve significantly the accuracy of polyphonic transcription, chord recognition, speech recognition and audio source separation respectively. The practical application of our models to these tasks is detailed in the last four articles presented in this thesis. In the first article, we replace the output layer of an RNN with conditional restricted Boltzmann machines to describe much richer multimodal output distributions. In the second article, we review and develop advanced techniques to train RNNs. In the last four articles, we explore various ways to combine our symbolic models with deep networks and non-negative matrix factorization algorithms, namely using products of experts, input/output architectures, and generative frameworks that generalize hidden Markov models. We also propose and analyze efficient inference procedures for those models, such as greedy chronological search, high-dimensional beam search, dynamic programming-like pruned beam search and gradient descent. Finally, we explore issues such as label bias, teacher forcing, temporal smoothing, regularization and pre-training.

Magistro baigiamasis darbas „Rašymo polimorfija Ričardo Gavelio prozoje“ yra bandymas pristatyti naujus Gavelio kūrybos analizės taškus, kurie padėtų nustatyti šio autoriaus vietą lietuvių literatūros istorijoje. Darbe daugiausia remiamasi postruktūralistine literatūros ir kultūros teorija (Rolando Barthes‘o esė „Nulinis rašymo laipsnis“ ir Julijos Kristevos studija „Maišto prasmė ir beprasmybė. Psichoanalizės galios ir ribos“). Pirmoje darbo dalyje „Kas yra rašymas?“ analizuojama „bartiškoji“ rašymo koncepcija. Pabrėžiama, kad rašymas pirmiausia reiškia ne prasmės reprezentavimą, bet jos reiškimo būdą. Šis procesas yra neatsiejamas nuo formos problemos. Forma visada suponuoja tam tikrą sąmonės situaciją: vientisa forma signalizuoja vientisą, klasikinę sąmonę, susiskaidžiusi, chaotiška forma kalba apie heterogenišką sąmonę. Pirmoje darbo dalyje be rašymo problemos daug dėmesio skiriama rašymo-subjekto ryšių analizei. Šiame darbe remiamasi Barthes‘o rašymo ir formos koncepcija, tačiau manoma, kad Gavelio rašymas neišvengiamai liečia ir subjektą psichoanalitine prasme. Kalbėdami apie rašymo polimorfiją, neišvengiamai turime kalbėti ir apie subjektyvumo signifikaciją (subjektyvų tikrovės reikšminimą). Rašymo polimorfija šiame darbe reiškia rašymo sugebėjimą įgyti vis kitokią formą. Polimorfija reiškia, kad nebėra jokio centrinio naratyvo, kuris reguliuotų reikšmes. Kiekvienas tekstas – nauja, savita realybės forma. Kadangi kiekvienas Gavelio romanas yra vis kitoks realybės... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / POLYMORPHY OF WRITING IN RICARDAS GAVELIS‘ FICTION ‘The Polymorpy of Writing in Ricardas Gavelis‘ Fiction‘ focuses on the analysis of Ricardas Gavelis’ fiction and discusses how the situation of a human being is outlined in the context of a changing cultural situation. The idea has been developed that Gavelis‘ fiction tries to rebel against all mental forms that suppresses identity. This author creates a polymorphous writing which can be described as alogic, nihilistic and sensual narration that destroys socialistic ideology, provincial patriotism or metaphysical stagnation of culture and with the variety of writing’s forms helps to ‘defend’ free and plural consciousness. The main theoretical ideals are taken from Roland Barthes and Julia Kristevas‘ concepts of writing. It is though that synthesis of these concepts helps to reveal the real variety of Gavelis‘ writing. The first part of the research focuses on the analysis of Barthes’ concept of writing and it’s connection to Kristeva’s concept. It is discussed how formalistic-structuralistic concept of subject and writing can be seen in the light of psychoanalytical ideas. Forms, signification, polymorphy – these are the object of the analyses in the first part. The polymorphy of writing means than Gavelis uses different ways to express the meaning in each novel. The second part of the research focuses on analyses the polymorphy writing in of Gavelis’ fiction. The aim of the analyses is to show how the variety of writing... [to full text]

The Abstract The Hymn and its Tradition in Late Medieval Bohemia Veronika Mráčková, Charles University, Prague The present thesis concerns the monophonic and polyphonic office hymns preserved in late medieval Bohemian sources. The author is mainly focused on the repertoire of the hymns written in Strahov Codex from around 1467. This manuscript of uncertain provenance contains an enormous collection of three- and four- voice polyphonic hymns which show plenty of the local characteristics. These domestic traits may be identified not only through texts devoted to indigenous Saints, but also through the melodies which form the cantus firmus in the upper voice of the hymns. The identification of these monophonic tunes in other plainchant sources could help us to determine the origin of Strahov Codex. Additionally, it is clear that this mensural manuscript contains not only music of a high artistic standard, but also a number of less polished compositions, and that it is thus an important witness to the existence of a wide range of daily musical activities in late medieval Bohemia. A crucial part of this dissertation is a critical edition of the monophonic hymn tunes preserved in Roudnice Psalter, as well as an edition of the selected polyphonic hymns written in Strahov Codex.

Recently, Deep Learning has revolutionized many fields, where one such area is Voice Activity Detection (VAD). This is of great interest to sectors of society concerned with detecting speech in sound signals. One such sector is the police, where criminal investigations regularly involve analysis of audio material. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have recently become the state-of-the-art method of detecting speech in audio. But so far, understanding the impact of noise and sampling rates on such methods remains incomplete. Additionally, there are evaluation metrics from neighboring fields that remain unintegrated into VAD. We trained on four different sampling rates and found that changing the sampling rate could have dramatic effects on the results. As such, we recommend explicitly evaluating CNN-based VAD systems on pertinent sampling rates. Further, with increasing amounts of white Gaussian noise, we observed better performance by increasing the capacity of our Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU). Finally, we discuss how careful consideration is necessary when choosing a main evaluation metric, leading us to recommend Polyphonic Sound Detection Score (PSDS).

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:23:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 3419.pdf: 1908813 bytes, checksum: 00e2359e53f73b176da4dec0219ba4aa (MD5) Previous issue date: 2010-09-10 / The film Pink Floyd The Wall, adaptation to the cinema of the Pink Floyd´s concept album, tells the Pink´s story, a musician, that was born in England during the World War II final years, he had his father died in a battle and this fact start a process of depression and melancholy that culminate in his total apathy towards life. This research has its focus on the literary content of the songs from the original album, the aim is study the film formal structure, its differences, similarities and complementarities comparing to the album narrative, observing the translation and artistic recreation process from the album to the movie and also confirming the dialogical relations between the different problems, contextualization, languages and representations explored in this art piece. / O filme Pink Floyd The Wall, adaptação para o cinema do álbum conceitual da banda Pink Floyd, narra a história, desde a infância até sua completa alienação, do protagonista Pink, um músico nascido na Inglaterra nos anos finais da Segunda Guerra Mundial, cuja morte do pai durante a guerra lhe desencadeia um processo de depressão e melancolia que culmina em sua total apatia diante da vida. A presente pesquisa, tendo como foco o teor literário das canções do álbum original, tem por objetivo o estudo da estrutura formal do tecido fílmico, suas diferenças, semelhanças e complementaridades com a narrativa musical contida no álbum, observando e constatando os processos de tradução e recriação de uma obra para outra, além das relações dialógicas entre as diferentes problemáticas, contextualizações, linguagens e representações exploradas na obra.