Stair-climbing is an important skill for promoting independence and activities of daily life and is a key component of rehabilitation therapies for physically disabled children. This thesis describes the design and evaluation of an interactive musical stairs system for children engaged in stair-climbing physical therapies. The achievement of a targeted therapeutic goal, namely, use of reciprocal steps, was significantly increased by 6% [SD=7%] (p=0.007) with the presence of audio feedback. Levels of participant enjoyment and motivation increased as well. This led to the development of an automated system, using inertial sensors to detect initial contact (IC) events each time a child makes a step, to trigger audio feedback. A semi-generic algorithm was designed that was able to detect 96% [SD=3%] of IC events during stair-climbing therapy sessions. This thesis lays the groundwork for future longitudinal research investigating the efficacy of audio feedback in stair-climbing and other rehabilitation therapies as well.

ABSTRACT Powerful themes of physical and emotional isolation are found in the Saskatchewan radio plays stored in the CBC files of the Saskatchewan Archives Recorded Sound Collection. Based on the examination of a selection of these plays in their audio format, this thesis will explore themes of isolation and how they are developed in contemporary Saskatchewan radio drama as organized into the following three categories: Timescape, Landscape, and Bodyscape. The Timescape chapter deals with themes of isolation and history plays. The Landscape chapter explores isolation and landscape within three radio plays by James Quandt. The Bodyscape chapter is dedicated to plays with themes of isolation, health, and healthcare. It also highlights the abundance of playwriting by women on healthcare topics. In doing so, the thesis addresses two larger questions: 1. To what extent are themes of isolation and the struggle to relieve it developed by Saskatchewan playwrights on the radio? And 2. If the most acute geographic and demographic isolation experienced by Saskatchewan residents was historic, i.e. during the history of European settlement, why are there still strong thematic currents of isolation appearing throughout Saskatchewan radio plays written after 1980? The development of themes of isolation in this selection of plays often reinforces the value of community and the dangers of isolation. The critical framework of the thesis relies most heavily on the thoughts of Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, Kelley Jo Burke, and Carol Gilligan. Most of the plays discussed were produced during the period between 1978-1988. These were the first ten years of local, full time radio drama production at CBC Saskatchewan in Regina. An annotated bibliography of the plays studied en route to this thesis follows the text.

While some people enjoy reading full-length novels, most people have a difficult time concentrating on reading or even finding the time to do it. Audio books, especially abridged ones, may be a way for people to enjoy fiction without having to read the whole novel and they can listen to the text at the same time as they do other things. The purpose of this essay is to study whether the abridged audio books can be a valid replacement for the full novel in terms of genre. The essay compares Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë in its full length with three abridged audio books of the same novel. In these three audio versions the original text has been abridged in varying degrees so that the shortest version runs to fifty minutes, the second shortest to three hours and the longest to six hours. The three genres I focus on are the Romance, the Gothic novel and the female Bildungsroman. I present genre-specific features and then analyze how these characteristics are affected in the abridged versions of Jane Eyre.

The thesis project consists on developing an interface for a Nios II processor integrated in a board of Altera (UP3- 2C35F672C6 Cyclone II). The main goal is show how the Nios II processor can interact with the other components of the board.The Quartus II software has been used to create to vhdl code of the interfaces, compile it and download it into the board. The Nios II IDE tool is used to build the C/C++ files and download them into the processor. It has been prepared an application for the audio codec integrated in the board (Wolfson WM8731 24-bit sigma-delta audio CODEC). The line input of the audio codec receives an analog signal from a laptop, this signal is managed by the control interface of the audio codec. The converters ADCs and DACs are stereo 24-bit sigma delta and they are used with oversampling digital interpolation and decimation filters. The digital interface of the audio codec sends the digital signal to the Nios II processor and receives the data from the processor. After building the interfaces for the audio codec and the processor, it has been prepared an application in C++ language for the processor that modifies the volume of the signal. The signal come back to the audio codec and it is possible to check the results with headphones or speakers at the line output of the audio codec.

ABSTRACT Powerful themes of physical and emotional isolation are found in the Saskatchewan radio plays stored in the CBC files of the Saskatchewan Archives Recorded Sound Collection. Based on the examination of a selection of these plays in their audio format, this thesis will explore themes of isolation and how they are developed in contemporary Saskatchewan radio drama as organized into the following three categories: Timescape, Landscape, and Bodyscape. The Timescape chapter deals with themes of isolation and history plays. The Landscape chapter explores isolation and landscape within three radio plays by James Quandt. The Bodyscape chapter is dedicated to plays with themes of isolation, health, and healthcare. It also highlights the abundance of playwriting by women on healthcare topics. In doing so, the thesis addresses two larger questions: 1. To what extent are themes of isolation and the struggle to relieve it developed by Saskatchewan playwrights on the radio? And 2. If the most acute geographic and demographic isolation experienced by Saskatchewan residents was historic, i.e. during the history of European settlement, why are there still strong thematic currents of isolation appearing throughout Saskatchewan radio plays written after 1980? The development of themes of isolation in this selection of plays often reinforces the value of community and the dangers of isolation. The critical framework of the thesis relies most heavily on the thoughts of Northrop Frye, Margaret Atwood, Kelley Jo Burke, and Carol Gilligan. Most of the plays discussed were produced during the period between 1978-1988. These were the first ten years of local, full time radio drama production at CBC Saskatchewan in Regina. An annotated bibliography of the plays studied en route to this thesis follows the text.

Abstract Since parts of audio broadcasting channels were open, the audio broadcasting company of the business competes to tend the vehemence more, the marketing policy of the audio broadcasting company is also continuously innovative, each audio broadcasting company through the united broadcasting of the system, operate with consociation or the strategic alliance etc. method extends him to listen to the scope, rising the audience rating and popularity. New audio broadcasting company of the business make use of the idea of the Integrated Marketing Communication to be used as its main strategy to consider and the tactics is used as, and rising successful to grow in the commerce, led the tendency in this field. Integrated Marketing Communication to make use of and the result is a purpose of study of this research. The plan of this research aim at the ninth turn to open in the audio broadcasting company of the middle power, he make use of the actual situation of the Integrated Marketing Communication to take into the interview, record, investigate and inquire into, special choice of this research is among them biggest of the scale the syndication, the Sunshine United Broadcasting Network to an example, this research acquire of the conclusion is following: 1. It is very important that explicit audio broadcasting company position the management of the audio broadcasting company in present, for audio broadcasting company in the aspects of programming program strategy and selling, can provide to know of according to follow the principle, integrating the audio broadcasting company the inner part the resource, and announce the claim of the communication of the consistent, reaching the result of Integrated Marketing Communication. 2. Under limitedly of the resource the term, from make use of the tool of the marketing arbitrarily, turning into the Integrated Marketing Communication, and further investigate the analysis to be used as the resource the coordination the basis of the application. 3. Should enhance the publicity of the audio broadcasting company, with exaltation audio broadcasting company popularity, and establish the database of the audience, keep on renewing to maintain the usefulness of the database, from serve any consumer, change is serve particular consumer, support and audience of long-term relation. 4. The audio broadcasting company which counts on the advertisement revenue, should operate the relation of the consumer, provide diverse interactive ways to contact and communicate with consumers to build up permanent relationships, enhance the relationship network of each other, maintaining the benefits of each other. 5. Carry on Integrated Marketing Communication which is from outside in, regarding need of the audience and the customer of the advertisement as the core of the marketing policy, according to need of the audience and the customer of the advertisement, establish to order good and valid method of the marketing and ways, develop the strategy of the persuasion of the message, message that establish the audio broadcasting company and audience and the customer of the advertisement to give something back to and interact the relation, keeping on with consumer for direction of marketing policy. 6. The core marketing strategies of program quality, the celebrity hosts, activities, advertise and public relationships should be adopted and integrated with extended tactics. While asking for the customer of the advertisement, integrating the marketing communication strategies with plan of the program, the programming of the time and promotion project etc. To coordinate the actual need of advertises customers and resources of the audio broadcasting company.

MPEG audio compression techniques significantly reduces the storage and transmission requirements for high quality digital audio. However, compression complicates the processing of audio in many applications. If a compressed audio signal is to be processed, a direct method would be to decode the compressed signal, process the decoded signal and re-encode it. This is computationally expensive due to the complexity of the MPEG filter bank. This thesis deals with processing of MPEG compressed audio. The main contributions of this thesis are a) Extracting wavelet coefficients in the MPEG compressed domain. b) Wavelet based pitch extraction in MPEG compressed domain. c) Time Scale Modifications of MPEG audio. d) Watermarking of MPEG audio. The research contributions starts with a technique for calculating several levels of wavelet coefficients from the output of the MPEG analysis filter bank. The technique exploits the toeplitz structure which arises when the MPEG and wavelet filter banks are represented in a matrix form, The computational complexity for extracting several levels of wavelet coefficients after decoding the compressed signal and directly from the output of the MPEG analysis filter bank are compared. The proposed technique is found to be computationally efficient for extracting higher levels of wavelet coefficients. Extracting pitch in the compressed domain becomes essential when large multimedia databases need to be indexed. For example one may be interested in listening to a particular speaker or to listen to male female audio segments in a multimedia document. For this application, pitch information is one of the very basic and important features required. Pitch is basically the time interval between two successive glottal closures. Glottal closures are accompanied by sharp transients in the speech signal which in turn gives rise to a local maxima in the wavelet coefficients. Pitch can be calculated by finding the time interval between two successive maxima in the wavelet coefficients. It is shown that the computational complexity for extracting pitch in the compressed domain is less than 7% of the uncompressed domain processing. An algorithm for extracting pitch in the compressed domain is proposed. The result of this algorithm for synthetic signals, and utterances of words by male/female is reported. In a number of important applications, one needs to modify an audio signal to render it more useful than its original. Typical applications include changing the time evolution of an audio signal (increase or decrease the rate of articulation of a speaker),or to adapt a given audio sequence to a given video sequence. In this thesis, time scale modifications are obtained in the subband domain such that when the modified subband signals are given to the MPEG synthesis filter bank, the desired time scale modification of the decoded signal is achieved. This is done by making use of sinusoidal modeling [I]. Here, each of the subband signal is modeled in terms of parameters such as amplitude phase and frequencies and are subsequently synthesised by using these parameters with Ls = k La where Ls is the length of the synthesis window , k is the time scale factor and La is the length of the analysis window. As the PCM version of the time scaled signal is not available, psychoacoustic model based bit allocation cannot be used. Hence a new bit allocation is done by using a subband coding algorithm. This method has been satisfactorily tested for time scale expansion and compression of speech and music signals. The recent growth of multimedia systems has increased the need for protecting digital media. Digital watermarking has been proposed as a method for protecting digital documents. The watermark needs to be added to the signal in such a way that it does not cause audible distortions. However the idea behind the lossy MPEC encoders is to remove or make insignificant those portions of the signal which does not affect human hearing. This renders the watermark insignificant and hence proving ownership of the signal becomes difficult when an audio signal is compressed. The existing compressed domain methods merely change the bits or the scale factors according to a key. Though simple, these methods are not robust to attacks. Further these methods require original signal to be available in the verification process. In this thesis we propose a watermarking method based on spread spectrum technique which does not require original signal during the verification process. It is also shown to be more robust than the existing methods. In our method the watermark is spread across many subband samples. Here two factors need to be considered, a) the watermark is to be embedded only in those subbands which will make the addition of the noise inaudible. b) The watermark should be added to those subbands which has sufficient bit allocation so that the watermark does not become insignificant due to lack of bit allocation. Embedding the watermark in the lower subbands would cause distortion and in the higher subbands would prove futile as the bit allocation in these subbands are practically zero. Considering a11 these factors, one can introduce noise to samples across many frames corresponding to subbands 4 to 8. In the verification process, it is sufficient to have the key/code and the possibly attacked signal. This method has been satisfactorily tested for robustness to scalefactor, LSB change and MPEG decoding and re-encoding.

Die automatische Klassifikation von Musik in Genres wird seit einigen Jahren systematisch erforscht. In dieser Zeit wurden Genre-Klassifikationssysteme und ihre Komponenten immer weiter verbessert, wofür die verschiedensten Richtungen eingeschlagen wurden. Diese Arbeit gibt deshalb im ersten Teil einen umfassenden Überblick über das Forschungsgebiet der Genre-Klassifikation, von den grundlegenden Techniken bis zum aktuellen Forschungsstand. Im zweiten Teil der Arbeit wird ein neuartiger Ansatz vorgestellt, der das Ziel hat, die Genre-Klassifikation gegen eventuelle Störungen robuster zu machen. Dies soll durch die gezielte Erkennung und Ausfilterung von Bereichen, in denen das Musikstück einer Veränderung seiner Charakteristik unterliegt, realisiert werden. Eine Implementation dieses Ansatzes wird an einer Musikkollektion mit fünf Genres evaluiert und die Ergebnisse werden ausführlich analysiert.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 65-69).

Since 1987 Uddcomb Engineering has repaired pulps by their own developed overlay welding method even called Uddcomb method. Currently each welding machine is operated by two persons. To increase Uddcomb Engineering competitiveness the reduced number of operators is desired. An installation of a monitoring system which can aid humans in the welding quality control also helps to improve company’s position. A future goal would be to make this monitoring system automatic without a human operator in the loop. In this thesis, arc voltage, weld current and audio signals were collected and analyzed with aim on finding algorithms to monitor the quality of the welding process. The use of statistics tools is the basis for detecting variations in the voltage and current data, associated with welding process. It has been shown that voltage signal can be used as a part of the welding quality control. The audio signal from welding at low frequencies varies with the speed of the process. The signal can also be incorporated in the monitoring of the process. The use of filters, growing sums and statistics are key elements in the algorithms presented in this report.