Modeling the Internet of Things network for monitoring audio information on the Amazon platform

The subject of research is modeling the structure of the Internet of things (IoT) network for controlling audio information based on the IoT platform. The purpose of the article is to detail the process of modeling the audio information monitoring network based on the IoT platform. The authors proposed the structure of a multi-agent system (MAS) for monitoring audio information (MASAI). The structure of MASAI includes many agents of sound transformation, analysis of information received from them, and decision-making. It was decided to use the IoT network, which includes sound sensors, the IoT platform, the notification service, and the user’s application to simulate the MASAI. The structure of this network using the Amazon platform is proposed. An algorithm for modeling the Internet of things network for analyzing audio information based on the AWS platform is presented, including simulating audio sensors, transmitting this information to the platform, sensors authenticating, processing information according to certain rules, generating notifications to a user. Detailed structure of the AWS platform is provided with a description of the functions of its components such as: device gateway, rule machine, certificate block, device copy block, database, analytics block, notification service. The algorithm for connecting devices to the AWS platform is given: creating a device certificate on the platform, creating a security policy, rules for processing information received from devices, and testing the network. The features of the algorithm for modeling the readings of sound information sensors on a smartphone are shown, steps are given for organizing its communication with the platform, performing security procedures, sending data in the form of an MQTT message, and displaying the captured audio information.

Re-Imagining Westphalia

Chapter 5 focuses on a work from Karlheinz Stockhausen entitled Hymnen (Anthems). Stockhausen’s influence on the electronic music avant-garde, in classical and popular music domains, on those from his native Germany to the UK, the US, and elsewhere, is legendary. The techniques Stockhausen was refining were also being put to work by the Beatles, Miles Davis, and Frank Zappa, to name a few. Working with national anthems that are sampled and transformed, Hymnen is a landmark work that I argue is as much about “remembering” as it is a research-based experiment in the early years of electronic and acoustic sound transformation. This work, completed during 1960s, evokes the cold war years where space exploration, civil rights, and nuclear (dis)armament standoffs between the communist East and the capitalist West predominated. It is also the decade of Woodstock, political assassinations, civil rights, and antiwar movements in the US and around the world. Hymnen still has a lot to offer for contemporary explorations into the geopolitics of any music-politics nexus.

Computational Designing of Sonic Morphologies

Much electroacoustic music composition and sound art, and the commentary that surrounds them, is locked into a materialist sound-object mindset in which the hierarchical organisation of sonic events, especially those developed through abstraction, are considered antithetical to sounds ‘being themselves’. This article argues that musical sounds are not just material objects, and that musical notations, on paper or in computer code, are not just symbolic abstractions, but instructions for embodied actions. When notation is employed computationally to control resonance and gestural actuators at multiple acoustic, psychoacoustic and conceptual levels of music form, vibrant sonic morphologies may emerge from the quantum-like boundaries between them. In order to achieve that result, it is necessary to replace our primary focus of compositional attention from the Digital Audio Workstation sound transformation tools currently in vogue, with those that support algorithmic thinking at all levels of compositional design.

CHURCH SLAVONIC BORROWINGS IN THE LEXICAL SYSTEM OF UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE OF 16–17 CENTURIES

The article describes Church Slavonic loanwords' functioning and use in the lexical-semantic system of the Ukrainian written literary language of the XVI – first half of the XVII century. It discloses the concepts of «Church Slavonic language», «Church Slavonic loanwords». The composition and semantics of Slavonic loanwords in the language of various genres of Ukrainian memos (certificates, court documents, wills, diplomas, descriptions of castles, rounders Hetman of offices, documents of the Church and school fraternities, annals, works of religious polemic and imaginative literature, memos of scientific and educational literature, liturgical books etc.), walked to the source base of «Dictionary of the Ukrainian language of 16 – the first half 17 centuries» and its unique lexical card index are clarified. The study highlights specific features of the investigated borrowings in the Ukrainian language, specified time, set them apart from other words (Latinisms, Grecisms, Polonisms, and the like). These features are most active at the phonetic, word formation, and semantic levels of language. It is established that in the course of the historical development of the Church Slavonic language, some Church Slavonic loanwords, under the influence of the phonetic features of the Ukrainian language (the pronunciation of ancient etymological ы and и as a single sound in the front row and high raise [и]; use e in place of the stressed or unstressed ѣ; pronunciation of ѣ as i «new» ѣ at the place of the etymological e; writing e in place of Proto-Slavic ę; the alternation у/в; sound transformation in the individual prefixes and suffix; the softening of the ц; the transition in unstressed position у – о; loss of primary і; simplification in groups of consonants, etc.), changes in the sound structure of the word. Part of the Church Slavonic words, adapting to the semantic system of the Ukrainian language of 16 – the first half 17 centuries, changed to lexico-semantic level, particularly the expansion or narrowing semantics. Other old Church Slavonic lexemes are components of the diverse lexico-grammatical patterns of collocations and idioms connected with the Church ritual sphere. Keywords: adaptation, written memos, semantics, phrases, phonetic changes, Church Slavonicism.

Electroacoustic Feedback and the Emergence of Sound Installation: Remarks on a line of flight in the live electronic music by Alvin Lucier and Max Neuhaus

Reflecting upon Max Neuhaus’s and Alvin Lucier’s first electronic works on electroacoustic feedback, I will consider how their research into live electronic music, meant to be performed on stage, announced a whole other form of creation, which was paradoxically emancipated from the concert hall and essential to the emergence of sound art: sound installations. If both musicians first appropriated the electronic medium for its possibilities in sound transformation, it appears that these experimentations, and more precisely those using feedback, quickly extended into areas other than research on tone and the live dimension of electronic performances. Indeed, electroacoustic feedback, as a phenomenon of retroaction, goes beyond the mere relationship to the instrument: by manifesting itself in the looping of the electroacoustic chain (microphone-amplification-speakers), it straightaway inscribes the electronic device in a spatial dimension that is linked to the propagation of sound. By analysing Neuhaus’s and Lucier’s first experiments with feedback, the specificities of their apparatuses and the experiences they aimed to create and foster, this article wishes to question the role these experiments played in the emergence of both musicians’ concern with space, which is at the core of any understanding of their later works. We can then re-read their contribution to the history of live electronic music in the light of both bifurcations and lines of flight inherent in their respective bodies of work, in order to look into the emergence of a certain art of sound installation, in which the liveness of live electronic music, far from being pushed aside, seems to lead into other forms of creation and specific aesthetic questions.

The Effect of Automatic Speech Recognition EyeSpeak Software on Iraqi Students’ English Pronunciation: A Pilot Study

The use of technology, such as computer-assisted language learning (CALL), is used in teaching and learning in the foreign language classrooms where it is most needed. One promising emerging technology that supports language learning is automatic speech recognition (ASR). Integrating such technology, especially in the instruction of pronunciation in the classroom, is important in helping students to achieve correct pronunciation. In Iraq, English is a foreign language, and it is not surprising that learners commit many pronunciation mistakes. One factor contributing to these mistakes is the difference between the Arabic and English phonetic systems. Thus, the sound transformation from the mother tongue (Arabic) to the target language (English) is one barrier for Arab learners. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of using automatic speech recognition ASR EyeSpeak software in improving the pronunciation of Iraqi learners of English. An experimental research project with a pretest-posttest design is conducted over a one-month period in the Department of English at Al-Turath University College in Baghdad, Iraq. The ten participants are randomly selected first-year college students enrolled in a pronunciation class that uses traditional teaching methods and ASR EyeSpeak software. The findings show that using EyeSpeak software leads to a significant improvement in the students’ English pronunciation, evident from the test scores they achieve after using EyeSpeak software.

An Exact Algorithm Based on MaxSAT Reasoning for the Maximum Weight Clique Problem

Recently, MaxSAT reasoning is shown very effective in computing a tight upper bound for a Maximum Clique (MC) of a (unweighted) graph. In this paper, we apply MaxSAT reasoning to compute a tight upper bound for a Maximum Weight Clique (MWC) of a wighted graph. We first study three usual encodings of MWC into weighted partial MaxSAT dealing with hard clauses, which must be satisfied in all solutions, and soft clauses, which are weighted and can be falsified. The drawbacks of these encodings motivate us to propose an encoding of MWC into a special weighted partial MaxSAT formalism, called LW (Literal-Weighted) encoding and dedicated for upper bounding an MWC, in which both soft clauses and literals in soft clauses are weighted. An optimal solution of the LW MaxSAT instance gives an upper bound for an MWC, instead of an optimal solution for MWC. We then introduce two notions called the Top-k literal failed clause and the Top-k empty clause to extend classical MaxSAT reasoning techniques, as well as two sound transformation rules to transform an LW MaxSAT instance. Successive transformations of an LW MaxSAT instance driven by MaxSAT reasoning give a tight upper bound for the encoded MWC. The approach is implemented in a branch-and-bound algorithm called MWCLQ. Experimental evaluations on the broadly used DIMACS benchmark, BHOSLIB benchmark, random graphs and the benchmark from the winner determination problem show that our approach allows MWCLQ to reduce the search space significantly and to solve MWC instances effectively. Consequently, MWCLQ outperforms state-of-the-art exact algorithms on the vast majority of instances. Moreover, it is surprisingly effective in solving hard and dense instances.