̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Alan Blackwell

̽��ֱ��codemakers

ps748 — Fri, 24 Jan 2025 11:58:18 +0000

̽��ֱ��2025 Darwin Lecture series looks at codes, be they computational, mathematical, biological, linguistic or even musical.

̽��ֱ��future of flying

skbf2 — Thu, 16 Feb 2023 14:46:49 +0000

Cambridge and Boeing have been working together for 20 years. Today they are combining their research strengths and industry know-how to speed aviation towards a carbon-neutral future.

̽��ֱ��business of social networking

lw355 — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:58:44 +0000

Social networking (SN) sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter have taken communication in the 21st century by storm. As businesses increasingly embrace the technology to connect individuals and share information, a new study funded by Boeing is developing methods to measure its value to organisations.

‘SN technologies are seen by companies as a major opportunity for improving collaboration, managing knowledge, connecting with clients, and generally helping individuals to feel part of a business,’ says project leader Dr David Good in the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology. ‘But, there is little understanding of how SN technologies evolve, what impact they have in practice and therefore how one can best deploy them for business efficiency.’

In the past, SN structures were studied without much regard to the individuals that form them. However, Dr Good, PhD student Michal Kosinski, together with Dr Alan Blackwell from the Computer Laboratory and collaborators at Boeing believe that successful collaboration depends on the interaction of the SN structure and the individual characteristics of its members.

To investigate this problem requires the amassing of vast amounts of information on collaboration efficiency, SN structures and individual traits of network members, and then analysing the data using an interdisciplinary approach.

To understand individual traits, Michal Kosinski, working with David Stillwell from the ̽��ֱ�� of Nottingham, has developed a Facebook application that allows its users to complete a psychometric test and receive feedback. More than four million people have now taken the my Personality test, providing a huge dataset that links SN data with such traits as personality, life satisfaction, interests, education and demographic profile.

Results of the Facebook study will assist the team in evaluating the use of an in- house SN tool available to Boeing’s 160,000 employees and its relation to collaboration efficiency and tactical decision making.

SN services are predicted to replace email as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communication for 20% of business users by 2014. With such escalating use in mind, Boeing collaborator Dr Anthony Majoros comments on the widespread benefits of this new research: ‘For businesses to develop an effective culture around SN that places the technology at the centre of collaborative and communication activities, it’s important to develop the qualitative and quantitative measures that this project aims to do.’

For more information, please contact Dr David Good (dg25@cam.ac.uk) or Dr Alan Blackwell (afb21@cam.ac.uk).

A new study is examining the value of social networking technologies to business collaboration.

Social networking technologies are seen by companies as a major opportunity for improving collaboration, managing knowledge, connecting with clients, and generally helping individuals to feel part of a business.

Dr David Good

WebTreats ETC, on flickr

154 Blue Chrome Rain Social Media Icons

Boeing

Boeing is the world’s largest aerospace company and leading manufacturer of commercial aeroplanes and defence, space and security systems. ̽��ֱ��company strives to work with the best technical talent in developing new aerospace-related technologies and has established multi-year collaborative research relationships with several UK universities, including Cambridge.
With the future of aerospace being driven by developments in technology, Boeing is continually looking globally for new ideas and innovations. To help achieve this, the US-based company has established strategic relationships with universities around the world.

In the UK, Boeing is collaborating through multi-year agreements to conduct research and technology programmes with the ̽��ֱ�� of Sheffield, Cranfield ̽��ֱ�� and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Not only are these programmes helping to expand Boeing’s technical reach and business concepts, but they also have long-lasting benefits in helping to stimulate British aerospace innovation.

Boeing’s framework agreement with Cambridge to conduct collaborative research began in 2003 and has recently been extended to 2014. Currently, nine projects are running, involving research teams in the Department of Engineering, the Computer Laboratory and the Department of Social and Developmental Psychology.

̽��ֱ��principal focus has been to conduct research and development in areas such as automated reasoning, intelligent systems, natural language and information processing, information manipulation and information security, new materials for high-end engineering, and the interface between humans and computers.

Professor Cardwell, from the Department of Engineering and the lead principal investigator in the collaboration, explains why the relationship with Boeing has proved such an extraordinarily healthy example of industrial collaboration with academia: ‘Boeing facilitate – they make it easy for us to do the academic research that we think is relevant, while keeping in mind the best interests of the company. It’s a very productive, very supportive way of doing research. Their open-minded attitude makes it possible for new objectives to be set as new discoveries are made.’

Applications of the research are as varied as developing new materials for energy-storage systems, assessing the potential of social networking technologies to improve knowledge management and communication in businesses (see above), and improving the operation and security of airports.

For more information about Boeing, please visit www.boeing.com/

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Virtual violins

tdk25 — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Violins crafted 300 years ago by the master violin-maker Antonio Stradivari sell for millions of pounds on the rare occasion they reach auction; what is it about their quality of sound that makes them prized above all others? Indeed, is their sound actually discernibly different? Any experienced violinist knows that some violins respond to their bow better than others: what determines which violins are difficult and which are easy to play? Questions such as these have fascinated musicians and scientists since the 19th century.

To get to the heart of the riddle there is an added complication: sound is in the ‘ear of the beholder’. In fact, although much is now known about the acoustics of the violin, and how this is influenced by the way it is made, virtually nothing is known about how human capacities for perceiving, discriminating and judging violin sounds match up to their acoustical features. This is a very significant gap, as perceptual judgements obviously define what makes a violin different from, say, a cello, just as it makes one violin different from another, for listeners, performers and violin-makers alike.

A three-year project funded by the Leverhulme Trust that is reaching completion at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has been intent on filling this gap. ̽��ֱ��approach has involved collaboration between four departments – Professor Jim Woodhouse from the Department of Engineering, Dr Claudia Fritz and Dr Ian Cross from the Faculty of Music, Professor Brian Moore from the Department of Experimental Psychology and Dr Alan Blackwell from the Computer Laboratory.

Strings and body

̽��ֱ��tone, pitch and loudness of a violin are the product of many components: drawing a bow across tightly stretched violin strings forces them into complex harmonic vibration; a significant fraction of this acoustical energy is transmitted, via a structure called the bridge, into the violin body. Here, the sound is amplified by the vibration of the wooden box and the air inside it.

̽��ֱ��team’s approach relies on the fact that the acoustical behaviours of the strings and the violin body can be treated separately, and that it is the latter that distinguishes different violins. In fact, on its own, a string makes hardly any sound and the acoustical behaviour is much the same from one instrument to another. ̽��ֱ��main acoustical feature that ‘colours’ the sound in ways that are unique for each violin is the way in which the violin body responds to the different frequencies input from the bridge and radiated from the body. This characteristic transformation is known as the violin’s ‘frequency response characteristic’.

Virtual violins

̽��ֱ��first stage of the project was to create a ‘virtual violin’. To carry out any comparative study of musical instruments it is important to rule out variations caused by the player. Instead of achieving this by using a robotic violinist that repeats the same piece on a variety of real violins, in this project the tests themselves are virtual.

Sensors on a violin bridge record the string waveforms arising as a player performs normally. ̽��ֱ��recordings are stored as standard force functions, which can then be applied to different violins to hear how they sound without having to worry about any complications caused by variations in playing. So, by ‘playing’ these recordings through computer models of different violins’ frequency response characteristics using digital filters, a prediction of the sound of the violin can be created. This makes it possible to ‘play’ exactly the same performance on different ‘virtual violins’. ̽��ֱ��frequency response characteristics can be derived from empirical measurements made on a range of real violins.

̽��ֱ��psychoacoustics of the violin

Once the violin response is represented in digital filter form, it becomes very easy to make controlled variations of a kind that would be almost impossible to achieve by physical changes to a violin. This gave the researchers an opportunity to focus on what features of violins’ response characteristics determine how listeners discriminate between different violins. In particular, the psychoacoustical experiments looked at just-noticeable differences of alterations made to the acoustical response characteristics of two violins: an excellent violin made by David Rubio and a mass-produced student violin that was informally rated as low quality. Psychoacoustical test methods can be used to find the threshold for detection of any particular change, and also to obtain statistically significant data on quality judgements made by the listeners.

Using groups of listeners that spanned expert string players, expert non-string-playing musicians and non-musicians, it was found for both instruments that the alteration of individual low-frequency resonances needs to be fairly large in order to be perceptible. Even for the listeners who were expert players, a resonance needed to be shifted (in terms of frequency) by about a semitone to be perceptibly different. However, if several resonances are shifted simultaneously, a smaller shift becomes audible.

Testing timbre

̽��ֱ��sound of an instrument is not just about pitch and resonance but is also about a somewhat elusive quality known as timbre. It is, in effect, the richness of the sound. Similar to the manner in which a wine taster conveys the flavour and aroma of a fine wine, there are many different descriptors for the timbre of an instrument: from ‘warm’, ‘sonorous’, ‘clean’ and ‘free’, to ‘unbalanced’, ‘heavy’, ‘dull’ and ‘dead’. In fact, a data-mining exercise from ̽��ֱ��Strad, a classical music magazine covering string instruments, came up with a list of 61 words that are commonly used by players, critics, makers and listeners to describe the quality of the sound.

This list of descriptors was used as the basis for a series of experiments in which players located the words in two-dimensional spaces, the results being analysed by multidimensional scaling methods (MDS) to produce maps of families of terms. Some relevant descriptors can therefore be selected on the basis of their distribution in the MDS spaces. This is now allowing the team to test timbre in a more methodical way than has been possible before, asking questions such as: does an increase of amplitude in the frequency range between 650 Hz and 1300 Hz really make the violin sound more ‘nasal’?

Probing the mysteries of music

̽��ֱ��aim is to provide researchers, violin-makers and repairers with an evidence-based means of assessing what it is necessary to adjust on a violin to achieve improved sound. This rigorous analysis of descriptors and their relations will not only be useful to specialists in discussions with performers, but will also have pedagogical value and might lead to new ways for composers and arrangers to annotate musical scores. Perhaps one day, when describing how one violin sounds different to another, we will be able to say exactly why.

For more information, please contact the author Dr Claudia Fritz (cf291@cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Music.

Why does one violin sound different to another? Investigating this question has brought together researchers from music, engineering, experimental psychology and computer science.

̽��ֱ��aim is to provide researchers, violin-makers and repairers with an evidence-based means of assessing what it is necessary to adjust on a violin to achieve improved sound.

firepile on flickr

Violin

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Yes