This bachelor thesis aims to research how, and in what way, the creative process of composing music and improvising can be helped by the use of external methods. The thesis researches the subject from a mostly synesthetic point of view, to explore how visual association and perception can be a source of inspiration and contribute with material when composing and improvising. The thesis also deals with existing research about synesthesia, visual association, multi-stimuli correspondences and the relation between different parts of the conscious. I’ve formed methods using visual material sprung from my own synesthetic sensations, and used these when composing music for vocal, piano and string quartet. The material forming the methods consists of paintings, photos, colored texts and color-associated chord charts.  By incorporating these methods in my own composing, I’ve found that the use of external methods is beneficial to the process and, in that sense, can help its development. I´ve gained a deeper understanding for how my own creative process is affected by the creative element in the visually associative work, such as painting and working perceptually with lyrics and storytelling. I’ve further reflected on how the visual association can be a source for composing, and by doing so, I’ve become more aware of the meaningfulness of allowing myself to use all sides of my conscious in the process of composing and improvising. / <p><strong>Repertoar:</strong></p><p>Yellow Sky, Black Sea</p><p>Above Clouds</p><p>Blue</p><p>About Red</p><p>Story Of A Tree</p><p>Time Goes Too Slow (So Watch My Running Heart) </p><p>Samtliga kompositioner är skrivna av Selma Pinton.  </p><p></p><p><strong>Medverkande musiker:</strong></p><p>Selma Pinton - sång</p><p>Max Agnas - piano</p><p>Clara Lindström - violin I</p><p>Sara Nyman Stjärnskog - violin II </p><p>Ragnhild Kvist - viola </p><p>Hillevi Rasmusson Klingberg - cello </p>

Background: Assessment of dementia in adults with intellectual disabilities poses specific challenges. Firstly, there is a paucity of validated, standardised and appropriate neuropsychological assessments of memory for adults with intellectual disabilities. Secondly, there are difficulties determining whether performance on neuropsychological assessments are attributable to preexisting intellectual disabilities, ‘normal’ ageing or part of a dementing process. A systematic review was therefore carried out to examine if there are memory changes associated with ‘normal’ ageing in the Down syndrome population. Following this an exploratory empirical research project was undertaken to examine one aspect of construct validity (i.e. convergent validity) of an associative memory test in a sample of adults with intellectual disabilities. This research project is presented as a journal article titled ‘Convergent validity of the Visual Association Test (VAT) in adults with intellectual disabilities’. Methods: 40 participants aged between 18-45 years were recruited from Community Learning Disability Teams. Participants completed the VAT and subtests of the modified Cambridge Cognitive Examination (CAMCOG-DS). IQ was assessed using the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, Fourth Edition (WAIS-IV). Correlational analysis of the test variables were carried out. Participants with a diagnosis of dementia were excluded from the study. Results: All participants performed well on the VAT irrespective of age, gender or IQ. It was well received by participants. No significant correlations were found between the VAT and the subtests of the CAMCOG-DS or with the subtests of the WAIS-IV. Therefore, there was no evidence of convergent validity with this test in this sample of participants. Conclusions: While the VAT was found to be an easy, quick test to use with people with intellectual disabilities and all participants scored above ‘floor’ level, it was not found to have convergent validity with the CAMCOG-DS. Further research is needed to determine if the VAT represents a useful tool for assessment with this population.

M.A., Faculty of Humanities, University of the University, 2011 / With the increasing prevalence of autism on a worldwide scale, new teaching methodologies need to be explored in order to educate children with autism helping them to achieve their maximum potential. It has previously been established that many individuals with autism use visual opposed to verbal modes of thinking and learning. In this study action research was used to examine if high imagery instructional methods of teaching could be used as a teaching tool for autistic children attending a special needs school. This study examined whether there was a change in the classroom performance of three autistic children after a 5 month period of high imagery instruction, as compared against a baseline of response to previous instruction, as well as the pattern of verbal and non verbal abilities manifested at time of intake into the programme. Analysis of the results of initial cognitive, language and perceptual tests was thus undertaken for diagnostic purposes, combined with analysis of initial response to teaching prior to high imagery intervention. Once this base-line had been established, analysis of school readiness and scholastic tests was then undertaken pre and post intervention, combined with in-depth interviews with the children’s teacher, analysis of developmental diaries and analysis of work done as part of the school programme followed by each child over a five month period of intervention. At baseline all three children were found to have phonological weaknesses, as evidenced by difficulties isolating onset sounds in words, difficulties with rhyming and difficulties in skills such as blending sounds into words. Two of the children in the sample showed little to no response to the high imagery instruction, and continued to have difficulties with reading and pre-reading tasks involving working with the sound structure of the English language. The third child in the sample showed an increase in phonological skills and in reading, writing and spelling abilities in response to high imagery instruction, as well as an increase in both vocabulary and the non-verbal abilities involved in drawing . It was noted at base-line as well as throughout the study that visual memory was an area of strength for this child, but not for the other two children in the sample. The child who made progress was also able to use his visual strengths to develop associations between sounds and letters. The conclusions from this exploratory study are that not all children with autism learn through use of visual strategies in teaching. The success of high imagery teaching strategies when used with a child with well developed visual memory abilities would suggest that high imagery instruction could be a useful and successful teaching strategy where children with autism exhibit well developed visual modes of thought. Strengths in visual memory and in visual association may be indicators of the likelihood that a child with autism will respond positively to high imagery instruction.

This dissertation documents the research performed on the topics of localization, diarization and indexing in meeting archives. It surveys existing work in these areas, identifies opportunities for improvements and proposes novel solutions for each of these problems. The framework resulting from this dissertation enables various kinds of queries such as identifying the participants of a meeting, finding all meetings for a particular participant, locating a particular individual in the video and finding all instances of speech from a particular individual. Also, since the proposed solutions are computationally efficient, require no training and use little domain knowledge, they can be easily ported to other domains of multimedia analysis. Speaker diarization involves determining the number of distinct speakers and identifying the durations when they spoke in an audio recording. We propose novel solutions for the segmentation and clustering sub-tasks, based on graph spectral clustering. The resulting system yields a diarization error rate of around 20%, a relative improvement of 16% over the current popular diarization technique which is based on hierarchical clustering. The most significant contribution of this work lies in performing speaker localization using only a single camera and a single microphone by exploiting long term audio-visual co-occurence. Our novel computational model allows identifying regions in the image belonging to the speaker even when the speaker's face is non-frontal and even when the speaker is only partially visible. This approach results in a hit ratio of 73.8% compared to an MI based approach which results in a hit ratio of 52.6%, which illustrates its suitability in the meeting domain. The third problem addresses indexing meeting archives to enable retrieving all segments from the archive during which a particular individual speaks, in a query by example framework. By performing audio-visual association and clustering, a target cluster is generated per individual that contains multiple multimodal samples for that individual to which a query sample is matched. The use of multiple samples results in a retrieval precision of 92.6% at 90% recall compared to a precision of 71% at the same recall, achieved by a unimodal unisample system.