Sine wave speech

I quote Robert E. Remez:

Sine-wave speech is an intelligible synthetic acoustic signal composed of three or four time-varying sinusoids. Together, these few sinusoids replicate the estimated frequency and amplitude pattern of the resonance peaks of a natural utterance (Remez et al., 1981). The intelligibility of sine-wave speech, stripped of the acoustic constituents of natural speech, cannot depend on simple recognition of familiar momentary acoustic correlates of phonemes. In consequence, proof of the intelligibility of such signals refutes many descriptions of speech perception that feature canonical acoustic cues to phonemes. The perception of the linguistic properties of sine-wave speech is said to depend instead on sensitivity to acoustic modulation independent of the elements composing the signal and their specific auditory effects.

The ability of listeners to integrate asynchronously varying, harmonically unrelated tones into a single perceptual stream also has posed a strong challenge to accounts of auditory perceptual organization. Perceptual organization is the function by which auditory experience is resolved into individual sensory streams, each issuing from a distinct source. In standard accounts, stream formation occurs by grouping similar auditory sensory elements into streams, a proposal that owes much to the Gestalt principles of figural organization (Wertheimer, 1923). Although sine-wave speech is coherent perceptually, neither sine-wave components nor their respective sensory properties are similar to each other at the fine acoustic grain described in the Gestalt-based account. For this reason, sine-wave speech requires an alternative account of perceptual organization that depends instead on sensitivity to coordinate variation, transcending the details of elementary signal properties and their isolated auditory effects. Research has exploited these properties of sine-wave speech to examine perceptual organization of a spoken auditory scene, perceptual analysis of the linguistic properties of utterances, and the perceptual identification of individual talkers.

Although numerical methods of automatic estimation have been used to derive frequency and amplitude values for synthesizing sine-wave speech, these techniques are prone to error and the estimates they provide require extensive correction before they are suitable for use as synthesis parameters. Accordingly, old fashioned practices of acoustic analysis are often used in which a phonetician inspects a spectral display and picks frequency and amplitude values by hand for this form of copy synthesis.

What on earth is up with the word 'asynchronously'? It is brilliant. This text is not only highly informative, its lyrical value is priceless. Let us all feast on literacy and embrace this new sonorific vocabulary. Who else to celebrate vocality with than Julie Andrews. That is a picture speaking for itself, in all senses of the word.

This summer, while I was undergoing the torture of imposed silence for three weeks, I made a song about muteness. I hope you enjoy my musical expression of laconism. The voice sample is pre morbus.(Intense synonyms all the way.)

Voce  by  seyna

L.A.

By my close friend, a memory eternalized. I love disposable cameras.

Athos Burez

I halted my breath as I beheld the momentary beauty of these snap shots. It is a journey into the magic of the night lit prairie, the enchanting scenery of graceful nymphs and human size faux water lilies.

I emotionally thank the artist, for capturing the intensity of the turf under the moonlight.

The City

Kazuhiko Kawahara, Amanda-Clearcreek Elementary School and terrifying japanese factory sites.

One morning, you inspired me.

"Because I love the City..."

The dub  by  seyna

Maths and art part 2: Golden Rectangles

I would like to copy-paste this article as I found it. One does not retouch/edit a classic.

I could not help myself to add one comment.

Enjoy.

Golden Rectangles

The golden rectangle R, constructed by the Greeks, has the property that when a square is removed a smaller rectangle of the same shape remains. Thus a smaller square can be removed, and so on, with a spiral pattern resulting. (Mondrian, hey?)

 

The Greeks (the Geeks. Full stop.) were thus able to see geometrically that the sides of R have an irrational ratio, 1 : x. The smaller rectangle has sides with ratio 1-x : 1; since this is the same as the ratio for the big rectangle, one finds that x^2 = x+1 and thus x = (1+Sqrt(5))/2 = 1.618033989....

The golden rectangle was considered by the Greeks to be of the most pleasing proportions, and its shape figures in ancient architecture.

The same motif is used in modern architecture such as the buildings of Le Corbusier (whose only work in North America is the Carpenter Center at Harvard).

Maths and art part 1: Hexponentials, Maskit slices and cascades

Whoever thought their maths teacher was delusional for handing out poems about logarithms after math class is bound to be stunned by this post. 

Yes, maths can be art. 

As I browsed through the wild wild web today I came across the website of the Harvard maths department. 'Freaks are us', they have a whole section on "graphs and such" that could easily be considered as artistic oeuvres.

The question I ask myself now is whether I have reached artistic perversion or if maths can really be aesthetically pleasing. 

I think they can.

Hiroshige

My owl flies by the waterfall at midnight. 

Ten times he flies by the cascade, 

coming quite close 

for his mind from the splashing, 

will get a refreshing dose 

I love you.

Silk

Silk  by  seyna

Venus Landscape

I love your pale complexion

While being one of the most recognized female artists of China, Lin Tianmiao never fails to wrap the beholder in a visual silken veil of threads and rounded objects. Using often human hair and grey and white soft tones, the purpose of her art work is to reflect the "ever-present tension between tradition and modernization in today’s China.” The strings in many of her works are metaphors for all the habits and customs that make up culture; the imaginary attachment to society from which one desires to set himself free.

I 

feel

very

light

.

Cai Guo-Qiang

Well known for his gun powder art shows, this artist never fails to shoot a new amazing collection upon the artistic audience. Born in 1957 in the Fujian Province in China, Guo-Qiang's installation works draw upon feng shui, philosophy, Chinese medicine and history, browsing through diverse mediums such as drawing, painting, video and performance art. His most recent exhibition featured in the Taipei museum of contemporary art, entitled 'Hanging Out in The Museum', is a life scale tale about existentialism, the search for the self in contemporary society through artistic forms. Have a look at a previous and quite similar expose' at the Guggeheim Museum of Bilbao.

'Intaglio prints' and salty immigrants

'Intaglio prints'. New York City born Liz Shepherd uses a particular printing technique where a photo sensitive film emulsion is applied to copper plates, exposing the plate to UV light, etching the plate in ferric chloride acid and printing the plate on an etching press. Tight. 

The artist comes from a graphic design background which she claims to be very contaminating to her art work in general. Moreover, Shepherd feels she is constantly fighting against the need to “fix”, the impulse to overly refine and resolve. That said, one can notice her print work to be very simplistic and elegant, and clearly architecturally influenced. Shepherd has the tendency to print mostly the outline of objects, adapting, perhaps, the idea of a blue print of a building to a salt shaker or incorporating bits of furniture or snapshots of a building site into the silhouette of a man.

The throat doctor is an artist

This is what you get when you visit the Ear Nose and Throat Clinic. It was far better than the private doctor who tried to give me antibiotics which are known to cure bladder infections and anthrax. I do believe there is a slight difference between singers nodules and a deadly virus. However, today I got a breakthrough man of medicine, a man able to combine in holy artistic matrimony: the body, illustration and James Joyce. My doctor is an artist. Got to love it.

Baggelboy

Eugene Andolsek

A carpet of pearls, impeccably drawn geometrical shapes, a feast of colors. Eugene Andolsek fuses jewelry, carpet weaving and drawing into a frame bursting with energy. It is no art for whoever suffers from daltonism as the the combination of twisted patterns and a rich warm explosion of colors provoke a visual orgasm, an emotional cry to have the same experience over and over. And you can. Andolsek's range of drawings on graph paper and compass are never ending, so please do feel an urge to explore the wide wide wold of art to find more pictures of this craftsman.

Hot Springs

...and wandering through the forest we stumbled upon...

Randy Taguchi

I was desperately trying to find the cover artist for this book by Japanese fiction writer Randy Taguchi but alas, I could not find anything. It is the single most beautiful cover I have ever seen. The book is a reflection of Mount Fuji through four different stories that involve the giant of nature and a quest to find the meaning of life. To the bookstore, I say...

Kazumasa Nagai

As the golden gleams of the two setting suns cover the enchanted territories, 

the creatures of the night prepare their rituals to each moon, 

for they reside 

in a land which has not one but five. 

You can shadow them at midnight 

while they sip from the river of cristaline water 

made into a silver stream 

by the bright bright moonlight.

The inversion of war images

Overkill  by  seyna

Cityscape heartbeats

The city is chaos. If I were to be blessed with the talent of putting down movement in ink, this is how I would recreate the City of London. A stormy 'tea party' of all kind of shapes, lines and blank spots. It is almost as if every object has its own heart beat, creating a movement sometimes simultaneous and sometimes opposite. The dynamism of the objects would open and close passageways on different times. This way, the inhabitants of the illustration would only be able to hope for the gates to be open, for if not, they would have to go around another shaped angle to find an alternative way to reach their destination.

Midland made Hokusai

If Katsushika Hokusai were to be born in the nineteen eighties, his name would have been Stephen Larder. Similarly to the Japanese print master's works, the delicate lines and sculptural depiction of nature and landscape are remarkably detailed in the works of this young english illustrator. Instead of dragons, japanese emperors and courtesans, Larder depicts a group of 'punkers' sitting in the grass of what could be one of the city parks of London. I am not sure if the artist was influenced by the style of Hokusai , but when I first looked at the piece I imagined the figures to be japanese warriors resting in 'the greensward'.

Intensely artistically confusing. Genius.