A expressividade é um elemento chave para o transporte de emoções em música, e seu modelamento, vital para a concepção de sistemas de síntese mais realistas. Gestos musicais executados durante a interpretação usualmente portam a informação responsável pela expressividade percebida, e podem ser rastreados por meio de padrões sônicos a eles associados em diversas escalas de resolução. Um conjunto relevante de gestos musicais expressivos foi estudado através de uma análise em multiresolução utilizando-se a transformada wavelet. A escolha deve-se principalmente à capacidade natural desta ferramenta em realizar análises de tempo-escala/frequência, e suas semelhanças com o processamento dos estágios primários do sistema auditivo. Vinte e sete eventos musicais foram capturados em interpretações de violino e flauta, e analisados com o objetivo de avaliar a aplicabilidade desta ferramenta na identificação e segregação de padrões sônicos associados a gestos musicais expressivos. Os algoritmos wavelet foram implementados na plataforma MATLAB utilizando-se bancos de filtros organizados em esquema piramidal. Rotinas para análises gráfica e sônica e uma interface ao usuário foram também implementadas. Verificou-se que as wavelets permitem a identificação de padrões sônicos associados a gestos expressivos exibindo diferentes propriedades em níveis diferentes da análise. A técnica mostrou-se útil para isolar ruídos oriundos de fontes diversas, extrair transientes associados a gestos súbitos e/ou intensos, e para segregar a estrutura harmônica de tons musicais, entre outras potencialidades não menos importantes. Particularidades da técnica e efeitos secundários observados são discutidos, e os padrões sônicos observados nos níveis wavelets são correlacionados com os gestos musicais que lhes deram origem. São propostos trabalhos futuros objetivando a investigação de certos eventos musicais e fenômenos verificados, bem como o estudo de implementações alternativas. / Expressiveness is a key element for emotion transportation in music, and its modeling necessary to conceive more realistic synthesis systems. Musical gestures executed during a performance carry the information answering for expressiveness, and may be tracked by means of sonic patterns associated to them within several resolution scales. A relevant set of musical gestures was studied through a multiresolution analysis using the wavelet transform. The choice for this tool is mainly due to its natural ability to perform time-scale/frequency analysis, and for its similarities with early auditory processing stages. Twenty seven musical events were captured from violin and flute performances, and analyzed in order to evaluate the applicability of this tool for identification and segregation of sonic patterns associated with expressive musical gestures. The wavelet algorithms were implemented on the MATLAB platform, employing filter banks organized in a pyramidal scheme. Graphical and sonic analysis routines and a user interface were carried out over the same platform. It was verified that wavelets enable the identification of sonic patterns associated to musical gestures revealing different properties on different levels of the analysis. The technique showed up useful to isolate noise from different sources, extract transients associated to sudden and/or intense gestures, and segregate the tonal harmonic structure, among other important features. Particularities of the technique and secondary effects observed are discussed, and sonic patterns on wavelet levels are correlated with the musical gestures which produced them. Future works are proposed addressing further investigation of certain musical events and phenomena observed, as well as the study of alternative implementations.

SUTIS INVENÇÕES CURATORIAIS é uma montagem poética de acontecimentos colhidos na arte, na clínica e também onde elas se encontram e faíscam. Um maquinário estético-clínico que pretende dar a ver certos invisíveis, ilegíveis e indizíveis. Essa montagem reúne em três constelações curatoriais [CAIXA PRETA], [PONTO CEGO] e [SISMÓGRAFO] imagens, gestos e palavras, fabricações artesanais agitadas de um extremo ao outro, tremores na fronteira com a linguagem, segundo Deleuze. Invenções estéticas que constituem saberes, na forma de apreensão do mundo, na variação dos tempos e na apropriação das experiências, indagando o que essas imagens-gestos apresentam de um tempo e de uma força, na insistência em existir apesar de tudo, nas palavras de Didi-Huberman. Balizam esse trabalho os conceitos de inoperância proposto por Agamben com o intuito de nos ajudar a desmanchar a exigência de respostas na chave da eficiência/eficácia, funcionalidade ou completude e de rememoração, de Benjamin, convocado pelas narrativas menores, lacunas da história, que na opacidade podem cintilar devires. Uma montagem poético-curatorial que joga com a ideia de curadoria em arte e cuidadoria (do cuidado) em saúde, reunindo gestos, imagens e narrativas que surgem de uma sobrevivência a prescritivos modos de vida, resistindo aos ideais de cura e de protocolos existenciais normatizantes. / SUBTLE CURATORIAL INVENTIONS is a poetical assembly of events harvested from art, clinic and at points where art and clinic meet and sparkle. It is a aesthetic-clinic machinery created in order to show some invisibles, illegibles and unspeakables. This assembly reunites in three curatorial constellations [BLACK BOX], [BLIND SPOT] and [SEISMOGRAPH] images, gestures and words, artisanal manufactures wiggled from one end to the other, quivering at the edge of language, according to Deleuze. Aesthetical inventions that constitute knowledge, forms of world-apprehension, variation in time and appropriation of experiences, inquiring as to what these images gestures present from a time and a strength, insisting on existing in spite of everything, to quote Didi-Huberman. This work is constructed upon the concept of inoperability proposed by Agamben aiming at helping us to dismantle the demand for answers on the key efficiency/efficacy, functionality or completeness and the concept of remembrance, from Benjamin, evoked by smaller narratives, history gaps, that in opacity may twinkle becomings. A poetic-curatorial assembly which plays with the concepts of curatorship from art and careship from care in health, gathering gestures, images and narratives that come from surviving prescriptive ways of living, resisting ideals of cure and normalized existential protocols.

While recognizing some kinds of human motion patterns requires detailed feature representation and tracking, many of them can be recognized using global features. The global configuration or structure of an object in a frame can be expressed as a probability density function constructed using relational attributes between low-level features, e.g. edge pixels that are extracted from the regions of interest. The probability density changes with motion, tracing a trajectory in the latent space of distributions, which we call the configuration space. These trajectories can then be used for recognition using standard techniques such as dynamic time warping. Can these frame-wise probability functions, which usually have high dimensionality, be embedded into a low-dimensional space so that we can still estimate various meaningful probabilistic distances in the new space? Given these trajectory-based representations, can one learn models of signs in an unsupervised manner? We address these two fundamental questions in this dissertation. Existing embedding approaches do not extend easily to preserve meaningful probabilistic distances between the samples. We present an embedding framework to preserve the probabilistic distances like Chernoff, Bhattacharya, Matusita, KL or symmetric-KL based on dot-products between points in this space. It results in computational savings. We experiment with the five different probabilistic distance measures and show the usefulness of the representation in three different contexts - sign recognition of 147 different signs (with large number of possible classes), gesture recognition with 7 different gestures performed by 7 different persons (with person variations) and classification of 8 different kinds of human-human interaction sequences (with segmentation problems). Currently, researchers in continuous sign language recognition assume that the training signs are already available and often those are manually selected from continuous sentences. It consumes a lot of human time and is tedious. We present an approach for automatically learning signs from multiple sentences by using a probabilistic framework to extract the parts of signs that are present in most of its occurrences, and are robust to variations produced by adjacent signs. We show results by learning 10 signs and 10 spoken words from 136 sign language sentences and 136 spoken sequences respectively.

<p>This thesis tells the story of a design case creating an user interface for a MMORPG where the player are able control the body language of the avatar. By this the game can achieve a gameplay about drama and strong characterization. The thesis addresses considerations on what aspects of body language that can be important for computer games and other virtual environments. It also offers design considerations when designing interfaces for using gestures and other body signals to communicate emotions in virtual environments such as computer games. The main design consideration when creating the interface was to treat the player as an actor and the game world as a stage. The player needs to be in control of combinations of facial expressions, body posture and gestures as well as relative avatar positioning to other characters and objects. The interface was first tested as a paper prototype, re-designed, re-tested and then implemented into a computer prototype.</p>

<p>The purpose of this essay is to investigate how Joseph Conrad has used animal imagery and religious symbolism in “Heart of Darkness,” and determine if these tools are somehow linked to the theme of the story. Close reading has been applied in order to be able to go through the entire story in search of these often well-hidden tools. Considering the fact that the story in focus of the analysis is believed by some, including myself, to be a long short story rather than a short novel, this method of approach has proved to be highly useful. First a discussion about a possible theme in “Heart of Darkness” is presented, followed by a brief comment on Conrad’s personal life philosophy and view on the use of symbolic devices in literary works. In order to determine the differences between symbols and imagery, as well as theme, subject and topic, a short discussion of terminology has been included.</p><p>Much of the discussion in the analysis relies heavily upon articles and books by critics who have focused exclusively on symbolism and imagery in “Heart on Darkness” and other works by Conrad. The scholarly names worth mentioning in connection with the discussion about animal imagery are Olof Lagercrantz, John A. Palmer, and Samir Elbarbary. The critics Anthony Fothergill and Cedric Watts explore religious symbolism in general, whereas P.K. Saha and Rita A. Bergenholtz focus on particular aspects of it, such as Buddhism and Greek mythology.</p><p>The analysis section is for the most part a combination between my own personal interpretations of “Heart of Darkness” and those made by others. It is divided into two major sections, Animal Imagery and Religious Symbolism. The latter, furthermore, comprises two subgroups. The conclusion suggests that Conrad used symbolism and imagery as narratological tools in order to present us with the theme of morality in the story.</p>

The major objective of this thesis is to study the processes of traditionalisation that are being enacted in relation to both the external and internal production of the play "The Power and the Glory" that has been performed in Alvastra Abbey ruin since 1988. During three weeks in July the ruins and their environs are transformed into a rehearsal area, and a live stage, with lay actors performing different roles, a supporting staff and an audience. The thesis asks questions about how the staging of the play is impacted by a politics of culture, why this particular site or topography can be read as a story about a nation, what mediating connections there are between the yearly productions and, finally, how the rehearsals activate and reproduce the accumulated memory of the play and the place. The thesis connects with discussions on how "space" is charged with symbolic and cultural meanings, the use of history and cultural heritage, and story-telling. These approaches are combined with analysis of how participants in interaction use multiple resources (talk, spatial organisation, gestures, gazes, movements and postures) to invokethe spatial aspects of the play as well as to put the story of the play in place. The methodological approach of the thesis combines fieldwork (personal observations, videotaping and audio-recordings) with analysis of written material, press cuttings, archival material, and books and illustrations about the area and its history. In conclusion, this dissertation makes visible how Alvastra Abbey is associated with imagined cultural, political and social entities such as a nation, a province, and a local community. "The Power and the Glory", it appears, constitutes one agent among others in a long term meaning making process. One point made in this book is that although the story of the play is legitimised through references to a past that already has become meaningful in earlier processes of traditionalisation, the work of the Association of Alvastra Chronicle Play and the rehearsal process also creates a traditionalisation process of its own.

Das Bibliothekswesen steht vor der Herausforderung, die rasant wachsende und umfassende Verbreitung digitaler Medien in neue Nutzungskonzepte einzubinden, beispielsweise durch eine Steigerung der Aufenthaltsqualität. (vgl. Bonte, 2011) Begriffe wie digital library, hybrid library oder blended library versuchen, die Rolle der Bibliotheken im digitalen Zeitalter neu zu definieren. (vgl. Gläser, 2008) Die Sächsische Landes- und Universitätsbibliothek (SLUB) begegnet dieser Herausforderung unter anderem mit dem verstärkten Aufbau digitaler Bestände. Sie verfügt daher über umfangreiche digitale Kollektionen, die mit Hilfe eines geplanten öffentlichen interaktiven Systems für die Bibliotheksbesucher auf ansprechende Weise erfahrbar gemacht werden sollen. Die Exploration der digitalen Sammlungen steht dabei im Vordergrund, bereits existierende Katalogfunktionalität soll nicht ersetzt, sondern ergänzt werden. Zu diesem Zweck wird untersucht, wie durch öffentliche Interaktion das Interesse an digitalen Inhalten am Beispiel der Sammlung „Deutsche Fotothek“ gesteigert werden kann. Dabei wird besonders betrachtet, wie durch Embodied Interaction in Verbindung mit der Visualisierung des komplexen Informationsraumes der digitalen Sammlungen eine leicht erlernbare gestenbasierte Steuerung erreicht werden kann. (Dourish, 2004) Der Hauptbeitrag dieser Arbeit liegt in der Konzeption und Umsetzung eines Anwendungsprototypen, der im öffentlichen Bereich der SLUB installiert wird.

Composing or arranging for orchestra is a skill which is hard to learn and hard to teach. Literature on orchestration is comprehensive in terms of rules of thumb and these heuristic tools are sometimes called principles of orchestration. However, a study of the literature on orchestration revealed that these 'principles' are not theories about the outcomes and effects of specific decisions made by composers. An exception is the work of George McKay who does indeed establish principles of orchestration to some extent. Granting a few exceptions, literature on orchestration takes as point of departure recommendations about techniques of orchestration and illustrates these techniques with analyses of existing compositions for orchestra. In this study I invert the approach followed in the literature and take music analysis as a point of departure for my study. I used an existing and conventional analysis of Claude Debussy's Syrinx for solo flute from the book Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music by Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot (1976) as context for my own analysis of Syrinx in which the less familiar type of analysis – the analysis of musical gestures and musical forces – can be understood. This analysis formed the basis for my orchestral composition titled Ananke which is based upon musical gestures from Syrinx. A reinterpretation of Cogan and Escot's analysis of Debussy's Syrinx enabled me to identify the musical gestures I used as a basis for my orchestral composition. Musical gestures are understood in this dissertation in terms of the theory of musical forces by Steve Larson. The objective in composing Ananke, based upon material from Syrinx by Debussy, is to explore different ways in which the musical gestures can be orchestrated in order to amplify the three musical forces namely musical gravity, musical magnetism and musical inertia. This process of composing the orchestral composition enabled me to construe principles of orchestration concerning musical forces and the different ways in which musical forces can be amplified. I found that the approach I followed in this study can indeed be employed in order to investigate and construe principles of orchestration, taking music analysis as a point of departure. This new approach to the study of orchestration opens up new possibilities in teaching and learning orchestration, as well as in composing or arranging for orchestra. / Thesis (MMus (Composition))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

Composing or arranging for orchestra is a skill which is hard to learn and hard to teach. Literature on orchestration is comprehensive in terms of rules of thumb and these heuristic tools are sometimes called principles of orchestration. However, a study of the literature on orchestration revealed that these 'principles' are not theories about the outcomes and effects of specific decisions made by composers. An exception is the work of George McKay who does indeed establish principles of orchestration to some extent. Granting a few exceptions, literature on orchestration takes as point of departure recommendations about techniques of orchestration and illustrates these techniques with analyses of existing compositions for orchestra. In this study I invert the approach followed in the literature and take music analysis as a point of departure for my study. I used an existing and conventional analysis of Claude Debussy's Syrinx for solo flute from the book Sonic Design: The Nature of Sound and Music by Robert Cogan and Pozzi Escot (1976) as context for my own analysis of Syrinx in which the less familiar type of analysis – the analysis of musical gestures and musical forces – can be understood. This analysis formed the basis for my orchestral composition titled Ananke which is based upon musical gestures from Syrinx. A reinterpretation of Cogan and Escot's analysis of Debussy's Syrinx enabled me to identify the musical gestures I used as a basis for my orchestral composition. Musical gestures are understood in this dissertation in terms of the theory of musical forces by Steve Larson. The objective in composing Ananke, based upon material from Syrinx by Debussy, is to explore different ways in which the musical gestures can be orchestrated in order to amplify the three musical forces namely musical gravity, musical magnetism and musical inertia. This process of composing the orchestral composition enabled me to construe principles of orchestration concerning musical forces and the different ways in which musical forces can be amplified. I found that the approach I followed in this study can indeed be employed in order to investigate and construe principles of orchestration, taking music analysis as a point of departure. This new approach to the study of orchestration opens up new possibilities in teaching and learning orchestration, as well as in composing or arranging for orchestra. / Thesis (MMus (Composition))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

Every year, 12,000 people in Sweden are diagnosed with aphasia. Many people with aphasia supplement their logopedic treatment by participating in an aphasia group. Aphasia groups provide both social and linguistic stimulation. The aim of the present thesis was to study the social interaction between participants, and between participants and leaders in aphasia groups. In the present study, eleven persons with aphasia and four leaders participated divided into three aphasia groups. The groups were video recorded during sessions with a total of four sessions. Two hours of social interaction were recorded. The material was transcribed and analyzed according to Conversation Analytical principles. The study focuses specifically on the use of gestures and face-work. Both phenomena could be observed in all groups. The results of the present work showed that different gestures could enhance as well as reduce intelligibility. Individuals’ gesture use was consistent with their ability of expression, i.e. the better the expressive ability, the more acceptable and understandable gestures. Face-work that was analyzed in the present study showed that face-threatening as well as face-saving strategies occur in aphasia groups. / Varje år drabbas 12 000 personer i Sverige av afasi. Många kompletterar sin logopediska behandling genom att delta i afasigrupp. Afasigruppen ger både social och språklig stimulans. Syftet med föreliggande studie var att studera social interaktion mellan deltagare och mellan deltagare och ledare i afasigrupp.  I studien deltog elva personer och fyra ledare fördelat på tre afasigrupper. Grupperna filmades under pågående session. Sammanlagt filmades fyra tillfällen och totalt cirka två timmar social interaktion. Materialet transkriberades och analyserades enligt samtalsanalytiska principer. I studien fokuseras särskilt på användandet av gester och fasadarbete (face). Båda kategorierna kunde iakttas i samtliga grupper. Resultatet i föreliggande arbete visade att olika gester kunde stärka förståeligheten och andra minska förståeligheten. Individernas gestanvändande stämde överens med deras uttrycksförmåga: Ju bättre uttrycksförmåga, desto mer vedertagna och lättförståeliga gester. Fasadarbete som analyserades i föreliggande studie visade att ansiktshotande så väl som ansiktsräddande strategier förekommer i afasigrupper.