327 research outputs found
Italian speakers learn lexical stress of German morphologically complex words
No full textItalian speakers tend to stress the second component of German morphologically complex words such as compounds and prefix verbs even if the first component is lexically stressed. To improve their prosodic phrasing an automatic pronunciation teaching method was developed based on auditory feedback of prosodically corrected utterances in the learners’ own voices. Basically, the method copies contours of F0, local speech rate, and intensity from reference utterances of a German native speaker to the learners’ speech signals. It also adds emphasis to the stress position in order to help the learners better recognise the correct pronunciation and identify their errors. A perception test with German native speakers revealed that manipulated utterances significantly better reflect lexical stress than the corresponding original utterances. Thus, two groups of Italian learners of German were provided with different feedback during a training session, one group with manipulated utterances in their individual voices and the other with correctly pronounced original utterances in the teacher’s voice. Afterwards, both groups produced the same sentences again and German native speakers judged the resulting utterances. Resynthesised stimuli, especially with emphasised stress, were found to be a more effective feedback than natural stimuli to learn the correct stress position. Since resynthesis was obtained without previous segmentation of the learners’ speech signals, this technology could be effectively included in Computer Assisted Language Learning software
Linguistically motivated parameter estimation methods for a superpositional intonation model
No full textThis paper proposes two novel approaches for parameter estimation of a superpositional intonation model. These approaches present linguistic and paralinguistic assumptions for initializing a pre-existing standard method. In addition, all restrictions on the configuration of commands were eliminated. The proposed linguistic hypotheses can be based on either pitch accents or lexical stress, which give rise to two different estimation methods. These two hypotheses were validated by comparison of the estimation performance relative to two standard methods, one manual and one automatic. The results of the experiments for German, English and Spanish corpora show that the proposed methods outperform the standard ones.Fil: Torres, Humberto Maximiliano. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo; ArgentinaFil: Gurlekian, Jorge Alberto. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Houssay. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Medicina. Instituto de Inmunología, Genética y Metabolismo; ArgentinaFil: Mixdorff, Hansjörg. Beuth University Berlin; AlemaniaFil: Pfitzinger, Hartmut. Pfitzinger Voice Design; Alemani
H.R. Pfitzinger Towards functional modelling of relationships between the acoustics and perception of vowels
No full textThis paper summarizes our research efforts in functional modelling of the relationship between the acoustic properties of vowels and perceived vowel quality. Our model is trained on 164 short steady-state stimuli. We measured F1, F2, and additionally F0 since the effect of F0 on perceptual vowel height is evident. 40 phonetically skilled subjects judged vowel quality using the Cardinal Vowel diagram. The main focus is on refining the model and describing its transformation properties between the F1/F2 formant chart and the Cardinal Vowel diagram. An evaluation of the model based on 48 additional vowels showed the generalizability of the model and confirmed that it predicts perceived vowel quality with sufficient accuracy. 1
Text-based and Signal-based Prediction of Break Indices and Pause Durations
No full textThe relation between symbolic and signal features of prosodic
boundaries is experimentally studied using prediction methods.
Text-based break index prediction turns out to be fairly good,
but signal-based prediction and pause duration prediction perform worse. A possible reason is that random signal feature
variations, as usually produced by humans, are hard to predict
The /i/-/a/-/u/-ness of Spoken Vowels
No full textThis paper investigates acoustic, phonetic, and phonological representations of spoken vowels. For this purpose four experiments have been conducted. First, by drawing the analogy between the spectral energy distribution of vowels and the vowel space concept of Dependency Phonology, we achieve a new phonologically motivated vowel quality representation of spoken vowels which we name the /i/-/a/-/u/-ness. As a second step, it is shown that the extension of this approach is connected with the work of Pols, van der Kamp & Plomp 1969 [1] who, among other things, predicted formant frequencies from the spectral energy distribution of vowels. Third, the vowel quality relating to the IPA vowel diagram is derived directly from the spectral energy distribution. Finally, we compare this method with a formant and fundamental frequency based approach introduced by Pfitzinger 2003 [2]. While both the /i/-/a/-/u/-ness of vowels as well as the perceived vowel quality prediction are quite robust and therefore useful for both signal pre-processing and vowel quality research, the formant prediction achieved the lowest accuracy for the mapping to the IPA vowel diagram
Fritz Schumacher & Heinrich Tessenow: Architecture, an Art or a Craft?
No full textThis booklet contains the inaugural lectures of Fritz Schumacher and Heinrich Tessenow given on the occasion of their appointment respectively as professors at the Technical University in Dresden and The Art Academy in Dresden.The lectures provide novel insights into their understanding of architecture and into their proposals for reform of architectural education. they are proceeded by an introductory essay of the guest editor architectural historian Hartmut Frank.History, Form & Aesthetic
Sociedades modernas, sociedades de obsolescência: a sociologia temporal de Hartmut Rosa / Modern societies, obsolescence societies: Hartmut Rosa's temporal sociology
No full textResenha de: ROSA, Hartmut. Aceleração: a transformação das estruturas temporais na modernidade. São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2019. Centrado na revisitação da modernidade a partir de uma perspectiva temporal, Hartmut Rosa sustenta o conceito de aceleração social como aspecto fundante do projeto moderno. Explorando diferentes variáveis causais para o conceito da aceleração social, a resenha examina as transformações das instituições morais, valorativas e políticas ocorridas ao longo do desenvolvimento histórico da modernidade como episódios induzidos pela obsolescência. Sendo esta um produto de campos de ação crescentemente cambiantes e acelerados, o autor mobiliza esse conceito para fundamentar inédita proposta de diferenciação entre a modernidade e a modernidade tardia como momentos históricos calcados em diferentes níveis de compressão espaço-temporal, estabilidade institucional e temporalização de projetos individuais e coletivos de futuro.***AbstractCentered on revisiting modernity from a temporal perspective, Hartmut Rosa supports the concept of social acceleration as a fundamental aspect of the modern project. Exploring different causal variables for the concept of social acceleration, the review examines the transformations of moral, valuative and political institutions that occurred during the historical development of modernity as episodes induced by obsolescence. As this is a product of increasingly changing and accelerated fields of action, the author mobilizes this concept to substantiate an unprecedented proposal for differentiation between modernity and late modernity as historical moments based on different levels of space-time compression, institutional stability and temporalization of individual and collective future projects
Intrinsic Phone Durations are Speaker-Specific
No full textThis study examines the speaker's influence on mean phone durations. As long as speech rate variation is present, the result of such a study would be trivial because every speaker has a particular speech rate that naturally modifies phone durations. Therefore, in order to eliminate its influence on phone duration, we developed a normalization procedure which evens out the local variability of speech rate, and then applied it to a large database of spoken German. As would be expected, general linear model statistical analysis (GLM) showed that speech rate normalization strongly reduced the variance explained by the factor `speaker'. Nevertheless, the variance explained by the interaction between `speaker' and `phone type' remained constant. Consequently, each speaker has individual intrinsic phone durations
Surveying silk fibre degradation by crystallinity determination: a study on the Tang-Dynasty silk treasure from Famen Temple, China
No full textWhen Chinese archaeologists opened an unknown vault under the collapsed pagoda of Famen Temple near Xian (Shaanxi Province, NW China) in 1987, they found a vast amount of valuable silk textiles. The degraded textiles were part of a treasure comprising hundreds of artifacts deposited by Tang dynasty (ad 618–907) emperors as a gift to the temple. Run as a bilateral German-Chinese project, the Roemisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Mainz established a textile conservation laboratory in Shaanxi´s provincial capital Xian in 2001, joining numerous other laboratories that have existed there since the early 1990s.This preliminary study represents part of an ongoing investigation programme that accompanies the conservation work. The Tang dynasty silk is generally in a very poor state of preservation as a result of its long burial period. Large sections have only survived as an amorphous brown mass of fibre debris. Some parts are better preserved, however, offering the unique opportunity to study the whole range of degradation stages on ancient silks.This preliminary scientific investigation focuses on the determination of the silk fibres’ crystallinity and its relation to the ageing process. As we know from modern material, silk is mainly crystalline, albeit in a somewhat amorphous state. The methods of investigation used were X-ray diffraction (XRD) using synchrotron radiation, which is a new way to determine crystallinity of ancient silk fibres; and polarized Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) for the determination of crystallite orientation. Both methods were specifically devised to gain information on small single fibres
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