Thesis. 1976. M.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Ocean Engineering. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Engineering. / Includes bibliographical references. / M.S.

This dissertation is comprised of a pair of related compositions, Sadhana (2015) for viola and electronics, and k. tracing (2015), a violin concerto, and a thesis that outlines my approach, detailing the influences and derivation of some of the parameters of these works and my compositional process. I offer a clear approach to working in relative intonation, for which I’ve also developed a small device called the “Maya proportional scale tool.” In this essay, I trace the structure and inner-movement of each work with regard to the derivation of its harmony, melody, rhythm and orchestration.The discussion of Sadhana focuses on the derivation of its harmonies and melodic lines from the influence of a string, as well as the conception of the electronics part and the role electronics play in the formation of the composition, whereas the discussion of k. tracing focuses on the coordinating of many independent instrumental parts, and the adaptation of rhythm and orchestration.

The problem of the study was to identify stress arising in psychological counseling by identifying variations in the vocal pitch (fundamental frequency level) of clients' voices. Hypotheses were established to (1) determine the number of categories describing acoustically similar clients' responses within the counseling session and compare these categories with ratings of client stress, (2) determine the relationship between ratings of client stress and different fundamental frequency characteristics, and (3) compare fundamental frequency characteristics of in-session and repeated client verbalizations. Recommendations included (1) considering an improved acoustical analysis method capable of providing immediate feedback which could be used to study both moment-to-moment and longitudinal stress changes, (2) correlating vocal pitch variations with other physiological manifestations indicative of stress, (3) applying acoustical analysis to aid in counselor training, and (4) using acoustical analysis to study different specific types of populations.

Esta dissertação investiga o comportamento do acento nos compostos do idioma japonês. Os compostos do japonês falado em Tóquio apresentam apenas um acento, ou queda tonal H*L, por frase fonológica. Isso faz com que não se possa manter os acentos que estariam originalmente nas palavras simples. Apenas um acento sobrevive e seu local é de difícil determinação, porque, na maioria das vezes, não coincide com o local do acento anterior. Muitos linguistas já se debruçaram sobre esse tópico (McCAWLEY, 1965; SAITOU, 1997; KUBOZONO, 2001; TANAKA, 2001; LABRUNE, 2012) e com o auxílio dessas diferentes pesquisas, conseguimos estabelecer que diversos fatores influenciam no processo de acentuação dos compostos, especialmente aspectos morfológicos e fonológicos, como a fronteira de palavra e o pé fonológico. Assim, a acentuação do japonês não é determinada por cada membro do composto, mas pela distância em que a fronteira entre os membros está da margem direita da palavra. / This dissertation investigates the behavior of the accent of Japanese compounds. Compounds in Tokyo Japanese only have one accent, or pitch drop H*L, in a phonological phrase. Therefore, it cannot maintain the accent of the simple words which make it up. Only one accent survives and its location is hard to determine, because, most of the time, it does not coincide with the location of the previous accents. Many linguists have tackled this topic (McCAWLEY, 1965; SAITOU, 1997; KUBOZONO, 2001; TANAKA, 2001; LABRUNE, 2012) and with the help of these different analyses, we established that several factors influence the accentuation of a compound, especially morphological and phonological aspects, such as word boundary and phonological feet. Thus, the accentuation of Japanese compounds is not determined by each member of the compound in particular, but from the distance that the boundary between the compound \'s member is from the right margin of the word.

Southern pine beetle (SPB; Dendroctonus frontalis Zimmerman), a native insect that has historically affected pine ecosystems in the southeastern U.S., has recently expanded northward causing extensive tree mortality in pitch pine (Pinus rigida) and pitch pine-oak (Quercus spp.) forests across much of eastern Long Island, NY. Given the historic lack of SPB within these fire-dependent ecosystems, little is known regarding its impacts to forest composition, forest structure, or fuel loading. This study examined the short-term effects of SPB-induced tree mortality on the structure, composition, and fuel loading of pitch pine and pitch pine-oak communities to inform management recommendations and projections of future forest conditions and fire hazard. Overstory pine basal area declined following SPB infestation and infestation suppression management, particularly in pitch pine forests. These treatments did not impact the density or composition of seedlings and saplings, with hardwood species, including scarlet oak (Quercus coccinea), scrub oak (Quercus ilicifolia), and black gum (Nyssa sylvatica), making up the majority of species in this layer and pine representing <6% of stems. Likelihood of herbivory was influenced partly by species, with pitch pine less likely to be browsed than white oak and scarlet oak. SPB infestation significantly increased the snag component of both forest types, which largely became downed coarse woody debris (CWD) following suppression management. Treatments did not significantly influence understory species assemblages. Understory communities in pitch pine stands were characterized by Vaccinium angustifolium prior to SPB or suppression management, with these disturbances leading to an increase in the diversity of understory communities. In contrast, infestation decreased variation in understory species assemblages in pine-oak forests and encouraged regeneration of pitch pine and scarlet oak, while suppression increased diversity largely through increases in disturbance-adapted species, such as Smilax rotundifolia. SPB infestation decreased the biomass of live fuels and subsequently increased loading of dead fuels in both forest cover types. Suppression management felled preexisting and SPB-generated snags, especially in pitch pine forests, transforming vertical fuels into horizontal CWD. Collectively, results indicate SPB could functionally eliminate pitch pine without additional management intervention to maintain this species. Suppression efforts to reduce SPB impacts may accelerate succession towards hardwood dominance, particularly in pine-oak stand, leading to dramatic shifts in forest conditions across the Long Island Pine Barrens. SPB and suppression management significantly increase dead fuel loading and felling of snags during suppression served to decrease the density of ladder fuels effectively decreasing the risk of crowning. However, heavy CWD loading may also promote volatile fire behavior. Therefore, forest managers must weigh the expected potential impacts of SPB relative to changes to fuel structure and composition generated by suppression management activities. Our results demonstrate short-term effects of SPB and suppression management. Given the limited experience with SPB in these forests and the results of this study, further research on fire behavior effects and patterns of stand development over the long-term are needed.

Traditional telephony networks with their cumbersome and costly infrastructures are being replaced with voice being transmitted over the Internet. The Internet is a very commonly used technology that was traditionally used to transmit data. With the availability of large bandwidth and high data rates the transmission of data, voice and video over the Internet is gaining popularity. Voice is a real time application and the biggest problem it faces is the loss of packets due to network congestion. The Internet implements protocols to detect and retransmit the lost packets. However, for a real time application it is too late before a lost intermediate packet is retransmitted. This causes a need for reconstruction of the lost packet. Therefore, good reconstruction techniques are being researched. In this thesis a new concealment algorithm to reconstruct lost voice packets is reported. The algorithm is receiver based and its functionality is based on Time Scale Modifications of speech and autocorrelation of a speech signal. The new techniqhe is named the Modified Waveform Similarity Overlap Add , (WSOLA) technique. All simulations were performed in MATLAB.

Automatic age and gender recognition for speech applications is very important for a number of reasons. One of the reasons is that it can improve human-machine interaction. For example, the advertisements can be specialized based on the age and the gender of the person on the phone. It also can help identify suspects in criminal cases or at least it can minimize the number of suspects. Some other uses of this system can be applied for adaptation of waiting queue music where a different type of music can be played according to the person's age and gender. And also using this age and gender recognition system, the statistics about age and gender information for a specific population can be learned. Machine learning is part of artificial intelligence which aims to learn from data. Machine Learning has a long history. But due to some limitations, for ex. , the cost of computation and due to some inefficient algorithms, it was not applied to speech recognition tasks. Only for a decade, researchers started to apply these algorithms to some real world tasks, for ex., speech recognition, computer vision, finance, banking, robotics etc. In this thesis, recognition of age and gender was done using a popular machine learning algorithm and the performance of the system was compared. Also the dataset included real -life examples, so that the system is adaptable to real world applications. To remove the noise and to get the features of speech examples, some digital signal processing techniques were used. Useful speech features that were used in this work were: pitch frequency and cepstral representations. The performance of the age and gender recognition system depends on the speech features used. As the first speech feature, the fundamental frequency was selected. Fundamental frequency is the main differentiating factor between male and female speakers. Also, fundamental frequency for each age group is different. So in order to build age and gender recognition system, fundamental frequency was used. To get the fundamental frequency of speakers, harmonic to sub harmonic ratio method was used. The speech was divided into frames and fundamental frequency for each frame was calculated. In order to get the fundamental frequency of the speaker, the mean value of all the speech frames were taken. It turns out that, fundamental frequency is not only a good discriminator gender, but also it is a good discriminator of age groups simply because there is a distinction between age groups and the fundamental frequencies. Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) is a good feature for speech recognition and so it was selected. Using MFCC, the age and gender recognition accuracies were satisfactory. As an alternative to MFCC, Shifted Delta Cepstral (SDC) was used as a speech feature. SDC is extracted using MFCC and the advantage of SDC is that, it is more robust under noisy data. It captures the essential information in noisy speech better. From the experiments, it was seen that SDC did not give better recognition rates because the dataset did not contain too much noise. Lastly, a combination of pitch and MFCC was used to get even better recognition rates. The final fused system has an overall recognition value of 64.20% on ELSDSR [32] speech corpus.

The purpose of this study was to test a hypothesized model of wind-band intonation, using equipment, instruction and director and student attributes as components. Band directors (N= 5) and their students N= 200) were given a combination of published and researcher designed tests to measure equipment quality, experience, knowledge of instrument pitch tendencies and aural discrimination skills. In addition, each band was video recorded to observe their warm-up, tuning and rehearsal procedures and activities. Spectrum analysis using Praat phonetic analysis software (Boersma & Weenik, 2010) was used to measure wind-band intonation. Structural equation modeling (SEM) using AMOS (Arbuckle, 2008) was the method chosen to analyze and interpret the data. Although the hypothesized model could not be estimated, a model generating approach resulted in a three-factor model describing the effects of instruction and student attributes on wind-band intonation. Model fit was good (χ2 = 3.486, df = 7, p = .837, GFI = .994, CFI = 1.00, RMSEA = .000). The respecified model indicated that instruction and student attributes explain 99.3% of the variance in the dependent variable wind-band intonation. For each SD increase in the latent instruction variable, wind-band intonation increases by .95 a SD. Activities involving aural-based tuning strategies, tuning intervals and chords evidenced higher intonation scores. For each SD increase in the latent student attributes variable, wind-band intonation increases by .16 a SD. This suggests that instrument quality, experience in band and private lessons, and aural acuity combine to affect intonation scores, but these student attributes are less influential than instruction. A supplementary finding revealed that 72.5% of the students n = 145) made at least one error (M = 4.05, SD = 3.76) on the test measuring knowledge of their instrument’s pitch tendencies.

Thesis (D.M.E.)--Indiana University, 2006. / Computer printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 127-133) and abstract.

This paper discusses how focus changes prosodic structure in Tokyo Japanese. It is generally believed that focus blocks the intonational process of downstep and causes a pitch reset. This paper presents experimental evidence against this traditional view by looking at the prosodic behavior of Wh words, which receive focus lexically in Japanese as in other languages. It is demonstrated, specifically, that the focused Wh element does not block downstep although it receives a much higher pitch than its preceding element. This suggests that presence of lexical focus does not trigger pitch reset in Japanese.