Speaker Position Research Articles

A Tale of Two Eastwoods: Iconographic Persona and Rhetorical Ethos in Clint Eastwood's “Halftime in America” and RNC 2012 Address

In 2012, actor-director Clint Eastwood was twice the special focus of attention in America, not for his acting or directing accomplishments but for a pair of uniquely prominent and instantly memorable televised ideological statements. His scripted appearance in a two-minute Super Bowl XLVI halftime commercial for the Chrysler Group was widely lauded while his address to the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida, later that year remains to this day an object of pointed criticism and widespread ridicule. This essay uses side-by-side rhetorical analyses of the two examples - this tale of two Eastwoods - to demonstrate the import of expectation and rhetorical persona in an age of modern, national, and global celebrity. The comparison illustrates how a massively famous speaker whose mediated public image has achieved highly symbolically status may both benefit from and struggle with what I call “iconographic persona.” The essay argues that celebrity speakers and spokespersons in modern societies must seek congruence between iconographic persona and rhetorical ethos. In Eastwood's case, the expectations and associations met and solidified by the Chrysler ad went unmet in the RNC address, and thus two appeals by the same speaker resulted in two very different receptions. In conversation with Amossy, Halloran, and Butterworth in “connecting” contemporary discussions of rhetoric, celebrity, nationalism, and sport, this essay sheds light on the unique rhetorical position of the celebrity speaker in the political or activist spheres.

Framing forest conservation in the global media: An interest-based approach

The aim of this paper is to understand if analytical theory as used in forest policy analysis can contribute to explaining how global media reports about a contested issue like forest conservation are framed. It therefore takes an actor and interest-based approach on framing. The empirical study is based on 129 media articles on forest conservation published in international print media, TIME and International Herald Tribune between 1990 and 2004. The results indicate that journalists are in a prime position: on the one hand, dominantly framing problems and, on the other hand, acting like a gatekeeper deciding on the visibility and standing of other actors. In their framing, journalists have assigned the role of causers mainly to the political-administrative system (PAS) and enterprises and the role of the helper as well to the PAS but furthermore to NGOs and individuals. Attention paid to media stars addressing forest conservation issues appears as a strategy to increase the news value of the articles. Except for journalists, actors with standing use the chance to present themselves in the role of helper only to a limited extend and they make even more seldom use of the speaker position to point towards a specific causer.

Do Infants Recognize Engagement in Social Interactions? The Case of Face‐to‐Face Conversation

This study explores 12‐month‐olds' understanding of face‐to‐face conversation, a key contextual structure associated with engagement in a social interaction. Using a violation‐of‐expectations paradigm, we habituated infants to a “face‐to‐face” conversation, and in a test phase compared their looking times between “back‐to‐back” (conceptually novel) and “face‐to‐face” (conceptually familiar) conversations, while simultaneously manipulating perceptual familiarity in a 2 × 2 factorial design. We also analyzed dynamic changes in pupil dilation, which are considered a reliable measure of cognitive load that may index processing of social interactions. Infants looked relatively longer at perceptual changes (new speaker positions) but not at conceptual change (back‐to‐back conversation), suggesting that face‐to‐face conversation may not elicit particular expectations, and so may not carry any particular conceptual significance. Moreover, on the first test trial, larger pupil dilation was observed for familiar conditions, suggesting that familiarity with perceptual features could enhance processing of conversations. Thus, this study undermines assertions regarding infants' conceptual understanding of the social signals underlying engagement. Infants may rather recognize such signals through their perceptual familiarity and associated positive feelings. This may then increase their engagement when observing and participating in others' collaborative activities, in turn allowing for the development of knowledge regarding others' intentions.

Distributed IMM-Unscented Kalman Filter for Speaker Tracking in Microphone Array Networks

In this paper, we first propose a distributed unscented Kalman filter (DUKF) to overcome the nonlinearity of measurement model in speaker tracking. Next, for the different motion dynamics of a speaker in the in-door environment, we introduce the interacting multiple model (IMM) algorithm and propose a distributed interacting multiple model-unscented Kalman filter (IMM-UKF) for estimating time-varying speaker's positions in a microphone array network. In the distributed IMM-UKF based speaker tracking method, the time difference of arrival (TDOA) of the speech signals received by a pair of microphones at each node is estimated by the generalized cross-correlation (GCC) method, then the distributed IMM-UKF is used to track a speaker whose position and speed significantly vary over time in a microphone array network. The proposed method can estimate speaker's positions globally in the network and obtain a smoothed trajectory of the speaker's movement robustly in noisy and reverberant environments, and it is scalable for speaker tracking. Simulation and real-world experiment results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed speaker tracking method.

Effects of age on electrophysiological correlates of speech processing in a dynamic "cocktail-party" situation.

Successful speech perception in multi-speaker environments depends on auditory scene analysis, comprising auditory object segregation and grouping, and on focusing attention toward the speaker of interest. Changes in speaker settings (e.g., in speaker position) require object re-selection and attention re-focusing. Here, we tested the processing of changes in a realistic multi-speaker scenario in younger and older adults, employing a speech-perception task, and event-related potential (ERP) measures. Sequences of short words (combinations of company names and values) were simultaneously presented via four loudspeakers at different locations, and the participants responded to the value of a target company. Voice and position of the speaker of the target information were kept constant for a variable number of trials and then changed. Relative to the pre-change level, changes caused higher error rates, and more so in older than younger adults. The ERP analysis revealed stronger fronto-central N2 and N400 components in younger adults, suggesting a more effective inhibition of concurrent speech stimuli and enhanced language processing. The difference ERPs (post-change minus pre-change) indicated a change-related N400 and late positive complex (LPC) over parietal areas in both groups. Only the older adults showed an additional frontal LPC, suggesting increased allocation of attentional resources after changes in speaker settings. In sum, changes in speaker settings are critical events for speech perception in multi-speaker environments. Especially older persons show deficits that could be based on less flexible inhibitory control and increased distraction.

Global Coherence Field and Distributed Particle Filter-Based Speaker Tracking in Distributed Microphone Networks

Based on the combination of global coherence field (GCF) and distributed particle filter (DPF) a speaker tracking method is proposed for distributed microphone networks in this paper. In the distributed microphone network, each node comprises a microphone pair, and its generalized cross-correlation (GCC) function is estimated. Based on the average over all local GCC observations, a global coherence field-based pseudo-likelihood (GCF-PL) function is developed as the likelihood for a DPF. In the proposed method, all nodes share an identical particle set, and each node performs local particle filtering simultaneously. In the local particle filter, the likelihood GCF-PL for each particle weight is computed with an average consensus algorithm. With an identical particle set and the consistent estimate of GCF-PL for each particle weight, all individual nodes possess a common particle presentation for the global posterior of the speaker state, which is utilized by each node for an estimated global speaker position. Employing the GCF-PL as the likelihood for DPF, no assumption is required about the independence of nodes observations as well as observation noise statistics. Additionally, only local information exchange occurs among neighboring nodes; and finally each node has a global estimate of the speaker position. Simulation results demonstrate the validity of the proposed method.

A multichannel beamforming-based framework for speech extraction

This work proposes a new framework for multichannel speech extraction (MCSE) of one target speaker from mixtures of multiple speakers. In this framework, a beamforming technique that is based on a prior knowledge of the desired speaker's position is used. The car environment is a good example of an application where the position of the desired speaker (the driver) is known in advance. The proposed method is an optimum spatial filter with a structure inspired by the minimum variance distortionless response (MVDR) beamformer and its practical realisation through generalised side lobe canceller (GSC). The performance of the proposed method through different experiments form the 'multichannel in-car speech and noise database' must be tested and evaluated. Simulative experiments include one desired speaker (driver) and one interferer speaker (co-driver) who talked simultaneously in car environment. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides satisfactory performance.

In Wolf’s Clothing: A Psychoanalytic Reading of the Lycaon Episode in Ovid, Metamorphoses 1

Scholars of Ovid's Lycaon episode in Metamorphoses 1 have long been aware of text's focus on Augustan power, even as they remain divided on issue of text's or poet's allegiance. (1) In particular, much has been made of Jupiter's key role as narrator of episode, (2) and rightfully so, since surely position of speaker represents a significant locus of power; yet power is not omnipotence, even in case of Jupiter (and perhaps especially not in his case, since this is after all Ovid's Jupiter). (3) The assumption that Jupiter is master of his discourse, whether he uses it to reveal or to conceal, is challenged by a new wave of Ovidian scholarship that concentrates on essentially split nature of (speaking) subject as delineated in work of Freud, Lacan, and their disciples. (4) The divided psychoanalytic subject's discourse cannot help but betray its ambivalence, its schizoid nature, and its desire, however many lies he or she may decide to spin out (an insight shared by deconstructionist and poststructural criticism in general). One might here recall stereotypical figure of analyst dealing with a resistant patient, and her confidence that she need only sit back and let 'false' story unravel into truth. This is not to deny importance of interpretive approaches based on such considerations as narrative voice or focalization; a great deal of very good work on epistemologically troubling Lycaon episode begins with questions about speakers, witnesses, and their motivations. (5) Nor is it a plea to discard hermeneutics of suspicion. Rather, this paper attempts to demonstrate, first, that locus of suspicion can be shifted to good effect--from suspicion over individual events within narrative (that is, accepting some as 'real' and rejecting others as 'false' or 'biased') to suspicion at level of narrative discourse itself (and thus acceptance of all narrative episodes, not because they are 'real' but because they all contribute to characterizing that discourse); and second, that such a shift represents a methodologically rigorous alternative that does not sacrifice a careful regard for context. My method here will in orientation be basically Lacanian, since that psychoanalytic approach is most engaged with language. But it bears remembering that Lacan insisted that he himself was no Lacanian, but a Freudian, and that his own method was developed through an uncompromising return to Freudian text. I shall follow suit in having recourse to Freud's Totem and Taboo in a later section, though in Lacanian reinterpretation of that text as a myth of origins of personality, rather than as any kind of genuine memory of beginnings of civilization. Furthermore, in spirit of suspicion and Lacan's work on psychoanalysis and detective fiction in his Seminar on 'Purloined Letter,' it seems best to start with a Lacanian analyst's remarks on crime fiction, not least because of obvious fact that if text is taken at face value, somebody was murdered (the hostage, at first, and slightly later bulk of humankind). But first one final clarification: days of psychoanalyzing literary characters, on one hand, and authors based on their works, on other, have long been over. I am concerned here with drawing out anxieties of text as a document written at a crucial moment in Roman history; Jupiter is a fiction text gives us, and I begin by taking up that fiction. But in end this can be neither about Jupiter, who does not exist, nor about Ovid, whom we cannot reach. Turning, then, to crime at hand: Those who would, through their suspicion, outwit a wily character like Ovid's Jupiter run a risk, one summed up admirably well in Slavoj Zizek's discussion of psychoanalytic method in terms of detective fiction. (6) Zizek (1991, 53) describes how the scene of crime with which detective is confronted is also, as a rule, a false image put together by murderer in order to efface traces of his act. …

The Advocacy of the Previously Inconceivable: A Discourse Analysis of the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth at Rio+20

The proposal to adopt the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth (UDRME) sought to challenge the hegemony of green economy at Rio+20. The essence of this proposal is the recognition of nature as a subject holding rights. Adopting a discourse analytical perspective, this article analyzes the advocacy activities for the UDRME at Rio+20 and critically reconstructs the arguments in favor of the Rights of Nature, which condense deliberations about value, humans’ role on Earth, the planet’s physical characteristics, indigenous and traditional people’s wisdom, and the evolution of legal systems. The most prominent aspects of this argumentative endeavor are discussed to assess how a previously unthinkable international environmental normative framework became conceivable. The article contends that connections with long-standing environmental discourses and the enactment of the indigenous speaker position by UDRME advocates are central for understanding how this proposal has become part of contemporary environmental politics.

Duty of Care, Safety, Normalisation and the Mental Capacity Act: A Discourse Analysis of Staff Arguments about Facilitating Choices for People with Learning Disabilities in UK Services

AbstractThe benefits of having choice and control for people with learning disabilitiesare well documented, and front‐line carers often make efforts ensuring that these are facilitated. However, despite this, government policy reports that disempowerment within learning disability services in the UK is a persistent problem. Using critical discursive psychology, 15 interviews with support workers about empowering people with learning disabilities were analysed. Interpretative repertoires about ‘duty of care’, ‘safety’ and ‘normalisation’ and discursive strategies involving ‘comparative evaluations’ were found, which opened speaker positions of granting or withholding choice, assuming responsibility for those in care and constructing service users as lacking capacity. These resources also allowed speakers to regulate the choices of service users and to normalise limited choice in ways that undermined taking up more empowering practices. The findings may explain the persistence of disempowerment within services by indicating how such discourses are deeply entrenched in service talk and are invoked to justify disempowering practices. This is discussed in view of the implications for empowerment and also current legislative frameworks such as the Mental Capacity Act. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Evaluation methods for sound source localization systems of speakers in a meeting room

The employing of sound source localization methods allows to evaluate location and head orientation of a speaker in a room. At present such systems are popular at development of intelligent support systems for smart meeting rooms. In this paper, a set of the metrics for performance evaluation of sound source localization systems as well as their integration with video monitoring systems are analyzed. Accuracy estimation of speaker positions, located on 32 chairs was carried out in the developed smart meeting room

3D Joint Speaker Position and Orientation Tracking with Particle Filters

This paper addresses the problem of three-dimensional speaker orientation estimation in a smart-room environment equipped with microphone arrays. A Bayesian approach is proposed to jointly track the location and orientation of an active speaker. The main motivation is that the knowledge of the speaker orientation may yield an increased localization performance and vice versa. Assuming that the sound produced by the speaker is originated from his mouth, the center of the head is deduced based on the estimated head orientation. Moreover, the elevation angle of the head of the speaker can be partly inferred from the fast vertical movements of the computed mouth location. In order to test the performance of the proposed algorithm, a new multimodal dataset has been recorded for this purpose, where the corresponding 3D orientation angles are acquired by an inertial measurement unit (IMU) provided by accelerometers, magnetometers and gyroscopes in the three-axes. The proposed joint algorithm outperforms a two-step approach in terms of localization and orientation angle precision assessing the superiority of the joint approach.

The Rhetorics of Hafez al Assad

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion as opposed to a simple communication of information. The aim of rhetoric is not to spread truth and present it plainly and openly but to convince an audience to accept a speaker's position - one which not necessarily congruent with that of the audience. The arguments alone cannot persuade, but when presented in a certain way, they become acceptable to the audience. Language is a device that enables us to understand the world. Speech is the expression of understanding (Sophia) which lets us explain situations, construct dialogue, and clarify and investigate the world. The word is the most powerful expression of human ability; without it human beings would have accomplished no more than animals intellectually. Communication is the essential activity that links the various parts of society together and allow them to function as n integrated whole. Rhetoricians understand the importance and power of words. They use strategies that rely on words, which they see as a tool to be use to effect, often in sophisticated ways. They seek to fashion a new reality, which the audience can accept as genuine. Rhetoricians generally do this by eliciting a sense of agreement with the listener and once that feeling of understanding has been established, the task of persuasion can begin.

The Position of Strategy and Speakers' Positive Attitudes(Theoretical Studies and Experimental Studies,The 43rd CELES Conference in Toyama)

The Position of Strategy and Speakers' Positive Attitudes(Theoretical Studies and Experimental Studies,The 43rd CELES Conference in Toyama)

Computational Audiovisual Scene Analysis in Online Adaptation of Audio-Motor Maps

For sound localization, the binaural auditory system of a robot needs audio-motor maps, which represent the relationship between certain audio features and the position of the sound source. This mapping is normally learned during an offline calibration in controlled environments, but we show that using computational audiovisual scene analysis (CAVSA), it can be adapted online in free interaction with a number of a priori unknown speakers. CAVSA enables a robot to understand dynamic dialog scenarios, such as the number and position of speakers, as well as who is the current speaker. Our system does not require specific robot motions and thus can work during other tasks. The performance of online-adapted maps is continuously monitored by computing the difference between online-adapted and offline-calibrated maps and also comparing sound localization results with ground truth data (if available). We show that our approach is more robust in multiperson scenarios than the state of the art in terms of learning progress. We also show that our system is able to bootstrap with a randomized audio-motor map and adapt to hardware modifications that induce a change in audio-motor maps.

Acoustic Parts in Vehicle Sound Transmission Loss Test Method Research

The sound transmission loss (STL) of the acoustic parts in the vehicle was proposed to be computed using the Sound Pressure Level measured at the several locations inside the vehicle and the transmitted Sound Intensity Level on the vehicles exterior panel, which the acoustic treated vehicle passenger compartment is assumed as a small reverberation room. The necessary parts retrofits and acoustic treatments for Sound transmission loss tests of the acoustic parts in the vehicle were listed. The values of the appropriate number and positions of the loud speakers, microphones and sound intensity probes for Sound transmission loss of the acoustic parts in the vehicle were recommended. The in vehicle sound transmission loss tests of the acoustic parts such as the doors, carpets, wheel house etc. were achieved in the semi-anechoic room. Based on the door system, the correlation work has been done among the methods of the proposed in vehicle STL test, the reverberation - semi-anechoic chamber buck STL test and SEA analysis.

A Combined Approach for Channel Decorrelation in Stereo Acoustic Echo Cancellation Exploiting Time-Varying Frequency Shifting

Multichannel acoustic echo cancellers are used in teleconferencing systems in order to reduce undesired echoes and to introduce better performance in terms of sound localization in the presence of more than one participant. Already stereophonic systems obtain realistic performance, since listeners have spatial information that helps to identify the speaker position. Unfortunately, the correlation between the two channels prevents a correct identification of the echo paths and signal decorrelation is needed. In this letter, a decorrelation approach is proposed, combining the missing-fundamental theory with frequency shifting. Therefore, the proposed approach is based on the computation of an adaptive parameter related to the fundamental frequency that is also used for controlling the desired frequency shift value. Experiments confirm that high performance in terms of magnitude squared coherence reduction and convergence speed increase can be obtained, also comparing it with other approaches of the state of the art and outperforming previous results.

Subjective Evaluation of Directional Properties of Loudspeaker Systems with the Analog and Digital Crossover Networks

The aim of this study was to determine the way in which loudspeaker systems with the analog and digital crossover networks were subjectively evaluated. The object of the study were two loudspeaker systems, di ering in both the position of speakers on the front panel of enclosure and con guration of the crossover networks: 2.5-way and 3-way systems with the slope of frequency response of 12 dB/octave in the cut-o regions. The investigations were conducted for 5 angles from the front hemisphere in the horizontal plane. Test signals were fragments of music and speech. The recordings of these signals were conducted in an anechoic chamber using an arti cial head and then presented to the listeners through headphones. Five normally-hearing listeners aged 18 50 years took part in the experiment. Listening tests were carried out in two stages. In the rst stage listeners were listening to test signals grouped in triads and their task was to identify pairs of signals the most and the least similar to each other. In the second stage a parametric evaluation was performed. It consisted in assigning ve numbers, corresponding to the intensity of the attribute of perception space (evaluated on a scale of 0 10) to each of test signals. The attributes of perception space included: sharpness, clearness, fullness, lack of distortions and loudness. Using the method of multidimensional scaling and correlation analysis it was possible to relate a particular dimension of the multidimensional space to the attributes of the perception space. It was found that the intrinsic attributes responsible for the subjective evaluation of loudspeaker systems with the analog and digital crossover network were sharpness, clearness and loudness.

Perceptual equalization of artifacts of sound reproduction via multiple loudspeakers

Several techniques for reproducing spatial sounds via multiple loudspeakers have been developed in recent years. A key problem for such techniques are comb filter effects caused by the uncertainty of the receiver position when playing coherent sounds from multiple loudspeakers (spatial aliasing). Here we studied if panning between two closely spaced loudspeakers can create a virtual source that resembles that of a true source. This requires not only that panned direction and speaker position correspond, but also that source width, loudness, timbre, and temporal aspects are reproduced without perceptual error. A listening experiment in an anechoic chamber showed that panned sources differ primarily in loudness and timbre from a real source at the panned location. The artifacts are caused by effects of the head, and we investigated if they can be compensated by filtering the sounds. Compensation filters were derived from simulations of the sound field at the ears. Listening tests showed that compensation filters reduced panning errors to be nearly inaudible and level roving or reflections in the reproduction room made errors inaudible. We conclude that a simple equalization is sufficient to render panned sources from nearby speakers perceptually equivalent to real sources.

Generation of Isolated Wideband Sound Fields Using a Combined Two-stage Lasso-LS Algorithm

The prohibitive number of speakers required for the reproduction of isolated soundfields is the major limitation preventing solution deployment. This paper addresses the provision of personal soundfields (zones) to multiple listeners using a limited number of speakers with an underlying assumption of fixed virtual sources. For such multizone systems, optimization of speaker positions and weightings is important to reduce the number of active speakers. Typically, single stage optimization is performed, but in this paper a new two-stage pressure matching optimization is proposed for wideband sound sources. In the first stage, the least-absolute shrinkage and selection operator (Lasso) is used to select the speakers' positions for all sources and frequency bands. A second stage then optimizes reproduction using all selected speakers on the basis of a regularized least-squares (LS) algorithm. The performance of the new, two-stage approach is investigated for different reproduction angles, frequency range and variable total speaker weight powers. The results demonstrate that using two-stage Lasso-LS optimization can give up to 69 dB improvement in the mean squared error (MSE) over a single-stage LS in the reproduction of two isolated audio signals within control zones using e.g. 84 speakers.