scholarly journals Moderate evidence for a Lombard effect in a phylogenetically basal primate

PeerJ ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. e2328 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Schopf ◽  
Sabine Schmidt ◽  
Elke Zimmermann
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Feedback ◽  
Background Noise ◽  
Vocal Communication ◽  
Lombard Effect ◽  
Voice Control ◽  
Mouse Lemurs ◽  
System Properties ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Grey Mouse Lemur

When exposed to enhanced background noise, humans avoid signal masking by increasing the amplitude of the voice, a phenomenon termed the Lombard effect. This auditory feedback-mediated voice control has also been found in monkeys, bats, cetaceans, fish and some frogs and birds. We studied the Lombard effect for the first time in a phylogenetically basal primate, the grey mouse lemur,Microcebus murinus. When background noise was increased, mouse lemurs were able to raise the amplitude of the voice, comparable to monkeys, but they did not show this effect consistently across context/individuals. The Lombard effect, even if representing a generic vocal communication system property of mammals, may thus be affected by more complex mechanisms. The present findings emphasize an effect of context, and individual, and the need for further standardized approaches to disentangle the multiple system properties of mammalian vocal communication, important for understanding the evolution of the unique human faculty of speech and language.

Scheming

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seán Damer
Keyword(s):  
Social Class ◽  
Housing Policy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Local Council ◽  
Housing Scheme ◽  
Post War ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Voice ◽  
House Building

This book seeks to explain how the Corporation of Glasgow, in its large-scale council house-building programme in the inter- and post-war years, came to reproduce a hierarchical Victorian class structure. The three tiers of housing scheme which it constructed – Ordinary, Intermediate, and Slum-Clearance – effectively signified First, Second and Third Class. This came about because the Corporation uncritically reproduced the offensive and patriarchal attitudes of the Victorian bourgeoisie towards the working-class. The book shows how this worked out on the ground in Glasgow, and describes the attitudes of both authoritarian housing officials, and council tenants. This is the first time the voice of Glasgow’s council tenants has been heard. The conclusion is that local council housing policy was driven by unapologetic considerations of social class.

scholarly journals Vocal plasticity in a reptile

2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1855) ◽  
pp. 20170451 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henrik Brumm ◽  
Sue Anne Zollinger
Keyword(s):  
Signal Detection ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Vocal Communication ◽  
Animal Communication ◽  
High Amplitude ◽  
Vocal Plasticity ◽  
Lombard Effect ◽  
Gekko Gecko ◽  
High Degree ◽  
Signalling Systems

Sophisticated vocal communication systems of birds and mammals, including human speech, are characterized by a high degree of plasticity in which signals are individually adjusted in response to changes in the environment. Here, we present, to our knowledge, the first evidence for vocal plasticity in a reptile. Like birds and mammals, tokay geckos ( Gekko gecko ) increased the duration of brief call notes in the presence of broadcast noise compared to quiet conditions, a behaviour that facilitates signal detection by receivers. By contrast, they did not adjust the amplitudes of their call syllables in noise (the Lombard effect), which is in line with the hypothesis that the Lombard effect has evolved independently in birds and mammals. However, the geckos used a different strategy to increase signal-to-noise ratios: instead of increasing the amplitude of a given call type when exposed to noise, the subjects produced more high-amplitude syllable types from their repertoire. Our findings demonstrate that reptile vocalizations are much more flexible than previously thought, including elaborate vocal plasticity that is also important for the complex signalling systems of birds and mammals. We suggest that signal detection constraints are one of the major forces driving the evolution of animal communication systems across different taxa.

scholarly journals Neuronal Mechanisms of Voice Control Are Affected by Implicit Expectancy of Externally Triggered Perturbations in Auditory Feedback

PLoS ONE ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. e41216 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oleg Korzyukov ◽  
Lindsey Sattler ◽  
Roozbeh Behroozmand ◽  
Charles R. Larson
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Feedback ◽  
Neuronal Mechanisms ◽  
Voice Control

Introducing multivariate Markov modeling within QFD to anticipate future customer preferences in product design

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 762-778 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katerina Gotzamani ◽  
Andreas Georgiou ◽  
Andreas Andronikidis ◽  
Konstantina Kamvysi
Keyword(s):  
Quality Function Deployment ◽  
Fuzzy Ahp ◽  
Markov Modeling ◽  
Design Decisions ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Customer Preferences ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Product Specifications

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide an enhanced version of quality function deployment (QFD) that captures customers’ present and future preferences, accurately prioritizes product specifications and eventually translates them into desirable quality products. Under rapidly changing environments, customer requirements and preferences are constantly changing and evolving, rendering essential the realization of the dynamic role of the “Voice of the Customer (VoC)” in the design and development of products. Design/methodology/approach The proposed methodological framework incorporates a Multivariate Markov Chain (MMC) model to describe the pattern of changes in customer preferences over time, the Fuzzy AHP method to accommodate the uncertainty and subjectivity of the “VoC” and the LP-GW-AHP to discover the most important product specifications in order to structure a robust QFD method. This enhanced QFD framework (MMC-QFD-LP-GW-Fuzzy AHP) takes into consideration the dynamic nature of the “VoC” captures the actual customers’ preferences (WHATs) and interprets them into design decisions (HOWs). Findings The integration of MMC models into the QFD helps to handle the sequences of customers’ preferences as categorical data sequences and to consider the multiple interdependencies among them. Originality/value In this study, a MMC model is introduced for the first time within QFD, in an effort to extend the concept of listening to further anticipating to customer wants. Gaining a deeper understanding of current and future customers’ preferences could help organizations to design products and plan strategies that more effectively and efficiently satisfy them.

Stutter and phenomena: The phenomenology and deconstruction of delayed auditory feedback

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-213
Author(s):  
Roshaya Rodness
Keyword(s):  
Auditory Feedback ◽  
The Self ◽  
Husserlian Phenomenology ◽  
Human Consciousness ◽  
Delayed Auditory Feedback ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Internal Division

Jacques Derrida’s early critique of Husserlian phenomenology discusses the production of the ‘phenomenological voice’ as the consummate model of human consciousness. Challenging Husserl’s conviction that consciousness is produced from the self-enclosed act of ‘hearing-oneself-speak’, Derrida points to vocality as the complex site of the self’s relationship to presence and exteriority. The internal division between hearing and speaking, he argues, introduces difference into the generation of conscious life. The use of delayed auditory feedback (DAF) as a prosthetic for stuttering provides an opportunity to engage Derrida’s insights on the connection between consciousness and voice with an ear to the speech of people who stutter. DAF, which may reduce or increase dysfluency depending on the speech of the user, introduces a series of delays, alterations and supplements to speech that underwrite the heterogeneous experience of conscious life. What can the philosophy of deconstruction add to conversations about the function of DAF, and what can theory about and experiences with DAF teach us about the self’s presence to itself and the role of alterity in shaping speech? What does stuttering teach us about the necessity of dysfluency for all speech? This article examines the relation between the voice and the phenomenological voice, and between stuttering and prosthetics. Concluding with an analysis of Richard Serra’s experimental recording, Boomerang (1974), it argues that voice is always already prostheticized with alterity, and that in hearing-oneself-speak we exist with voice in an expansive and unfinished conversation with our own mystery.

scholarly journals ‘This ‘Merikay War’: Poetic Responses in Lancashire to the American Civil War

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-143
Author(s):  
Simon Rennie
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Editorial Comment ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
American Civil War ◽  
Poetic Discourse ◽  
Historical View ◽  
Local Newspapers ◽  
The World ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Voice

Abstract This article examines Lancashire commentary on the American Civil War during the Cotton Famine of 1861–65 through poetry which has recently been recovered from local newspapers. The complexity and variety of the often labouring-class subjectivities figured in the texts works to further disrupt the conventional historical view of a region united in moral and political sympathy with the Union cause, as exemplified by discourses surrounding Lincoln’s letter to the region in 1863. Much of this poetry displays an acute awareness of its place in the world. Labouring-class Lancashire people were forced by economic circumstances to confront the nature of a Victorian globalization which had proved its instability, and many began to see themselves in terms of a global subjectivity for the first time. This poetic discourse may have been materially and culturally adjacent to journalistic comment on the crisis, but poetry’s imaginative freedom and ability to compress language and hence cultural meaning often represented an amplification, distortion, or even contradiction of implied editorial comment. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the sometimes febrile context of Lancashire commentary on the American Civil War and its domestic effects. Even when no particular resolution was offered as an option the ability of Lancashire poets to represent the voice of their fellow sufferers with some degree of authenticity served to reflect the ever more intimate relationship between the Victorian global and the local which the effects of the American war demonstrated in such stark terms.

Broadway Nights: John Reed and the City

Prospects ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 13 ◽  
pp. 273-294
Author(s):  
Christopher P. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War I ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
World War ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Big City ◽  
John Reed ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City ◽  
The Voice

Not so very long after John Butler Yeats prophesied that “fiddles” would be “tuning up” throughout American intellectual life in the years before World War I, the private musings of John Reed strike another, less hopeful set of notes. The lament emerges in an unpublished tale Reed wrote in 1913 entitled “Success,” about a poet named Alan Meredith, age twenty-two, who, like Reed, has just come from the country to New York to answer his vocation. “The whirling star of Literature revolves in the Big City,” Reed explains. “By force of gravitation the minor bards sooner or later fall within its orbit, and nine out of ten emit no sparks from that time forth.” Alan's project is an epic poem tentatively entitled New York, A Poem in Twelve Cantos-but he gets nowhere beyond his title. “You see,” Reed writes, “he was making the same mistake as you and I, when we heard the voice [of the city] for the first time and tried to translate it without knowing the language.” Reed elaborates:A poet writes about the things nearest to his heart-the things he does not actually know. As soon as he gains scientific knowledge of anything, the glamour is gone, and it is not mere stuff for the imagination. The bard of green fields and blossoms and running brooks is always a city man, and he who sings the Lobster Palaces and White Lights lives in Greenwich, Conn. Never do the stars seem so beautiful as to him who looks up between brownstone houses on a breathless night; all the magic of the city lies in the glow of lights on the sky seen thirty miles away.

A Detection System of Location and Direction Angle by a RF Tag Reader Using a Rotary Antenna

2008 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 189-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takashi Asakawa ◽  
◽  
Kazue Nishihara ◽  
Tadashi Yoshidome ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Turning Point ◽  
Detection System ◽  
Automatic Correction ◽  
Electric Wheelchair ◽  
Direction Angle ◽  
Voice Control ◽  
Moving Direction ◽  
Rf Tags ◽  
The Voice ◽  
Voice Instruction

This paper describes the method of presuming the angle of moving direction of an electric wheelchair by reading information of RF tags put on a floor using a rotary antenna, which is fixed underneath the wheelchair, revolving constantly above RF tags of the floor at a turning point. Our primary intention is to make a detection system of direction angle using RF tags for a voice controlled electric wheelchair. The voice instruction cannot give smooth nor detailed controls with ease unlike the joystick control. Because the voice control system can use only a few discrete instruction words. Thereby to assist smooth indoor motion, we proposed here a new method of automatic correction of the direction angle measured by the above rotary antenna and RF tags. We demonstrated experimentally to detect and correct the angle of moving direction when the wheelchair passes over the turning point, which was found to give accurate orientations.This paper is the full translation from the transactions of JSME Vol.73, No.729.

MEDIA-CAPITALISM: COLLOQUIAL MASS CULTURE AND NATIONALISM IN EGYPT, 1908–18

2010 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ziad Fahmy
Keyword(s):  
Mass Media ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Premature Death ◽  
Independence Movement ◽  
First Time ◽  
The Voice

In Egypt, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, older, fragmented, and more localized forms of identity were replaced with new, alternative concepts of community, which for the first time had the capacity to collectively encompass the majority of Egyptians. The activism of Mustafa Kamil (1874–1908) and the populist message of the Watani Party began the process of defining and popularizing urban Egyptian nationalism. After Kamil's premature death in 1908, there was more of an “urgent need,” as described by Zachary Lockman, for “tapping into and mobilizing new domestic constituencies in order to build a more broadly based independence movement.” This article argues that the eventual mobilization of the Egyptian urban masses, and their “incorporation into the Egyptian nation,” was due in large part to the materialization of a variety of mass media catering to a growing national audience. To be more specific, I will examine early Egyptian nationalism through the lens of previously neglected audiovisual colloquial Egyptian sources. This, I argue, is crucial to any attempt at capturing the voice of “ordinary” Egyptians. Finally, the article documents the role of early colloquial Egyptian mass culture as a vehicle and forum through which, among other things, “hidden transcripts” of resistance and critiques of colonial and elite authority took place.

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