The HIEMPA (Hybrid Instruments from Electroacoustic Manipulation And Models of Pütorino and Aquascape) project combined a team of people with technical, artistic, environmental and cultural expertise toward the artistic outcome of extending the New Zealand sonic art tradition. The project involved collecting audio samples from the aquascape of the Ruakuri Caves and Nature Reserve in Waitomo, So...

The HIEMPA project combined a team of people with technical, artistic, environmental and cultural expertise towards an artistic outcome aiming to extend the New Zealand sonic art tradition. The work involved collecting audio samples from the aquascape of the Ruakuri Caves and Nature Reserve in Waitomo, South Waikato, New Zealand; and samples of a variety of pütorino – a New Zealand Mäori wind i...

The automatic summarization of multimedia sources is an important task that facilitates the understanding individual by condensing source while maintaining relevant information. In this paper we focus on audio based features and probability distribution divergence. Our method, extractive approach, aims to select most segments until a time threshold reached. It takes into account segment’s lengt...

Audio information retrieval is a difficult problem due to the highly unstructured nature of the data. A general labeling system for identifying audio patterns could unite research efforts in the field. This paper introduces 42 distinct labels, the “noisemes”, developed for the manual annotation of noise segments as they occur in audio streams of consumer captured and semiprofessionally produced...

We present a sound synthesizer dedicated to particle-based environmental effects, for use in interactive virtual environments. The synthesis engine is based on five physically-inspired basic elements which we call sound atoms, that can be parameterized and stochastically distributed in time and space. Based on this set of atomic elements, models are presented for reproducing several environment...

Numerous projects have investigated assistive navigation technologies for the blind community, tackling challenges ranging from interface design to sensory substitution. However, none of these have successfully integrated what we consider to be the three factors necessary for a widely deployable system that delivers a rich experience of one’s environment: implementation on a commodity device, u...

environmental protection has become one of the main concerns in developed economies, which is why an increasing degree of commitment in the field is required from all public and private bodies. environmental protection in firms must cease to be a secondary, barely profitable objective, involving the performance of sporadic remedial actions, and become just one more element of their organization...

The relationship between South American precipitation and cross-equatorial flow over the western Amazon is examined using the 15-yr (1979–93) European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) reanalysis dataset. A meridional wind index, the V index, is constructed to represent the variability of the crossequatorial flow, based on area-averaged (58S–58N, 658–758W) daily 925-hPa meridion...

Lake Taihu is a shallow lake located in the Yangtze River delta region in eastern China. Lake breezes and their interactions with urban heat islands are of great importance to air quality andweather forecasting. In this study, surface observations at a dense network and Wind Profile Radar measurements were utilized to characterize the lake breezes at Lake Taihu and assess the impact of geophysi...