In an explorative study, the variation in listeners' judgments of the
emotionality of three performances of a Scriabinétude was investigated.
Three performances of the Scriabinétude were recorded. ...Video and/or audio
recordings were presented to 24 listeners who segmented the music in short phrases
and indicated their emotional engagement with the music using a slider. The relation
between the performance data and the listeners' responses was analysed as
well as the effects of musical training, medium and musical structure. The analyses
were done using multiple regression analyses and decision trees. The results
confirmed the hypothesized influence of the performer's interpretation, the
listener's background and the global phrase structure, though not always in
the expected way. In particular the dynamics of the performance correlated with
listeners' judgments of emotionality, while tempo correlated more strongly
with the indications of phrase structure. This was more clearly the case for
nonmusicians than for musicians. The movements of the pianist were related to the
dynamics of the performance and seemed to aid the communication of emotional intensity.
In the eighteenth century prosperous Dutch citizens possessed musical clocks that played melodies at fixed times of the day, using an automatic bell-playing mechanism. A large number of these clocks ...have survived, enabling us to research the repertoire of melodies in which Dutch eighteenth-century citizens were interested. This repertory has not been researched before. A major problem is the identification of the melodies. Sometimes titles are written on the clock, but in many cases these do not lead to identification. To find relationships among bell-clock melodies and between bell-clock melodies and other repertories in the Database of Dutch songs, which is hosted by the Meertens Institute (Amsterdam), we took a computational approach. The clock melodies are only available to us as recordings. To process a large amount of melodies, both automatic pitch recognition and a similarity measure of the melodies are necessary. Both problems have been researched within the field of Music Information Retrieval before. Until now no algorithm exists that is able to perform pitch and onset recognition in bell melodies. We developed an algorithm to transcribe a musical clock recording into a sequence of pitch-onset pairs. We analyzed a set of manually annotated bell sounds and developed a model for estimating the locations of the inharmonic bell partials based on positions of the fundamental and the fourth harmonic. Once the melodies were available as sequences of pitch-onset pairs, we computed the similarities between melodies using a variant of the Needleman-Wunsch sequence alignment algorithm. This algorithm finds an optimal alignment of two sequences of symbols according to a similarity measure for the symbols. In our case, we used the pitch-distance as a similarity measure for symbols. A score is computed for the alignment, which we interpreted as a similarity measure for melodies. This method enabled us to identify a large number of melodies and increased our insight in the musical clock repertoire. The repertory of the luxury clocks consists mainly of melodies which origin from lower social layers. An example of such a melody is the song Pierlala. On one of the musical clocks, the English title Dutch Skipper is used to indicate the Dutch melody Boerenballet. This shows that there was an exchange between the Netherlands and England in clock making, and that a Dutch song became popular in England, which was quite unusual. This study demonstrates how methods from music information retrieval successfully can be employed for historical musicological research.
We present a novel smart visibility system for visualizing crowded volumetric data containing many object instances. The presented approach allows users to form groups of objects through membership ...predicates and to individually control the visibility of the instances in each group. Unlike previous smart visibility approaches, our approach controls the visibility on a per-instance basis and decides which instances are displayed or hidden based on the membership predicates and the current view. Thus, cluttered and dense volumes that are notoriously difficult to explore effectively are automatically sparsified so that the essential information is extracted and presented to the user. The proposed system is generic and can be easily integrated into existing volume rendering applications and applied to many different domains. We demonstrate the use of the volume conductor for visualizing fiber-reinforced polymers and intracellular organelle structures.
In this paper, we present a novel approach to integrating virtual reality (VR) into a web-based medical visualization framework. The framework supports visualization of volumetric data, such as 3D ...scalar fields acquired by a CT, MRI or PET scanners. To improve users' perception, understanding and manipulation of 3D volumes, we adapted the traditional 2D screen representation with support for visualization of data in a VR environment. By providing complete visual immersion, VR can help users to gain better insights and understanding of the visualized data. Our main goal was to allow users to view the medical data in VR and interact with it with hand-held controllers for better immersion and spatial perception. In the paper, we present a novel approach to implementation of VR for medical imaging, which combines WebGL-based hardware accelerated web visualization with VR. This allows users to use the visualization framework with or without a VR headset by switching between "standard" and "VR" modes. Since visualization runs in a web browser, it is portable, easy to use on different devices and therefore accessible to a broad number of users. The visualization system was tested with real medical scans to assess its performance and usability.
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