Lands i came to sing

Learning lyrics: to sing or not to sing?

According to common practice and oral tradition, learning verbal materials through song should facilitate word recall. In the present study, we provide evidence against this belief. In Experiment 1, 36 university students, half of them musicians, learned an unfamiliar song in three conditions. In the sung-sung condition, the song to be learned was sung, and the response was sung too. In the sun...

Osler came to Boston.

To Sing like a Mockingbird

Musical parody, i.e. the act of changing the lyrics of an existing and very well-known song, is a commonly used technique for creating catchy advertising tunes and for mocking people or events. Here we describe a system for automatically producing a musical parody, starting from a corpus of songs. The system can automatically identify characterizing words and concepts related to a novel text, w...

How I came up with the discrete cosine transform

During the late sixties and early seventies, there was a great deal of research activity related to digital orthogonal transforms and their use for image data compression. As such, there were a large number of transforms being introduced with claims of better performance relative to others transforms. Such comparisons were typically made on a qualitative basis, by viewing a set of “standard” im...

How Human Genetics Came to Sa

S33 June 2016, Vol. 106, No. 6 (Suppl 1) The massive strides made in human genetics in the last 10 years would not have been possible without the diligent and insightful work of the pioneers in human genetics. This is particularly true in South Africa (SA), where a small community of scientists and clinicians have been responsible for the application of scientific/ medical advances into the wid...