R. Murray Schafer's soundscape, predicated on a schizophonic engagement with sound, and Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète, based on an acousmatic relationship, have for some time been the dominant approaches for those who wish to compose with sounds sourced from the environment. Following Brian Kane and Timothy Morton, this paper critiques the ideologies behind these systems, instead suggesting an approach that uses Deleuze and Guattari's rhizome as a generative metaphor. The Garden of Adumbrations, a multi-channel electroacoustic piece, is used to illustrate several compositional possibilities: the tracing of place through subjectivity, the machinic phylum as emergent intelligence, the interplay between Katharine Norman's self-intended and composer-intended listening, and the encouragement of accidents of listening. Also discussed are Antonin Artaud's Body without Organs, conceptions of Nature and the garden, and Luc Ferrari's Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer. The goal is to develop an integrated and sustainable model of sonic practice that addresses the acousmatic while supporting an embedded and non-hierarchical relationship with our ecological milieu.

The history of sonic arts is charged with transgressive practices that seek to expose the social, aural and cultural thresholds across various listening experiences, posing new questions in terms of the dialogue between listener and place. Recent work in sonic art exposes the need for an experiential understanding of listening that foregrounds the use of new personal technologies, environmental philosophy and the subject–object relationship. This paper aims to create a vocabulary that better contextualises recent installations and performances produced within the context of everyday life, by researchers and artists at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast.

A purely aesthetic approach may be problematic when artists wish to deal with the external world as part of their work. The work of R. Murray Schafer in formulating soundscape studies is described, as well as the author's extension of that work within a communicational framework. Soundscape composition is situated within a continuum of possibilities, each with its own practice of mapping or representing the world. Current technological possibilities as well as ethical issues involved in the production process are discussed, along with the author's work in creating a multi-channel imaginary soundscape. The evolving nature of the listener's relationship to acoustic space over the last century is discussed in comparison to developments in soundscape composition.

John Luther Adams's The Place Where You Go to Listen (2006), a permanent sound-and-light installation at the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska, resonates strongly with the geography and ecology of the composer's place of residence. The audiovisual experience is generated through a computer programme that translates real-time data streams from geophysical events into sound and colour signals. The Place functions as an artistic mirror, absorbing data from natural phenomena and reflecting it back to the listener in a deliberately allusive way. As a result, those present are invited to raise their awareness to the ‘unheard vibrations’ of the natural world.

Upon entering the installation, the listener perceives an ongoing, harmonically dense hum. Through immersion, he or she notices change in both the location from which sounds project and the properties of audio and visual signals. Drawing on information theory, this article investigates the process whereby Adams renders scientific data into an audiovisual presentation as well as the role the composer and audience play in attributing meaning to this environmentally driven work. By examining the communicative layers of the installation and exploring the perceptual tendencies of the listener, we can better understand how The Place raises environmental awareness.

This article addresses the place of music in the Western worldview, arguing for a greater appreciation of music in a modern eco-cosmology which embraces environmental priorities as central to human prosperity, while contextualising defensible connections between music, sound and environment potentially useful for electroacoustic musical practice. Precise analytical terminology is established, and the methodology of environmental history is used to assess Western understandings about the role and place of music. Origins and ideas regarding immersive space, emotive power and the development of dualistic ‘nature–culture’ schemas are explored. Impacts of key developments in twentieth-century technology and environmental thought are examined as they relate to electroacoustic research. Biomusicology is reviewed for insights into innate musical structures and possibilities, and a recent linguistic study is analysed from a musical perspective to advance a cross-disciplinary argument: music may represent a form of mitigational behaviour used to balance the evolutionary tradeoff that enabled modern language. This argument suggests that if music in itself represents an environment critical for human mental health, then the contribution of electroacoustic music is vital for fresh eco-critical debate and awareness, and that an increased musical practice, especially in participatory contexts, may be essential for the human project.

This article argues that the state of spatial awareness engendered by the art of soundscape composition can be productively extended to the act of listening while looking in the cinema. Central to my argument is how Katharine Norman's concept of reflective listening in soundscape composition can be adapted to reflective audioviewing in the audiovisual context of film. Norman begins the process of intersecting film theory and the discourse of soundscape composition by appealing to famed Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's theories of montage to illustrate how soundscape composition enables active listener engagement. I extend her discussion of Eisenstein to demonstrate how this filmmaker's thinking about sound/image synchronisation in the cinema – and R. Murray Schafer's own predilection for Eisensteinian dialectics – can be understood as a means towards the practice of reflective audioviewing. I illustrate my argument with an analysis of how the soundscape compositions of Hildegard Westerkamp have been incorporated into Gus Van Sant's film Elephant. Attention to the reflective qualities of Westerkamp's work open up new dimensions in our experience of the audiovisual construction of space in the film. Ultimately I argue that the reflective audioviewing prompted by Elephant can be carried into considerations of all films that make use of sound design for spatial representation.

This paper describes the background and development of a sound installation which, over a period of time, brings together site-specific field recordings, and acoustic and amplified sounds in a complex of natural and technological sources. During the installation diverse genres of recording and territories of sound become potentially, transiently available as local birdsong, background noises and the sounds of recordings and audio technologies are realised through enculturated experiences of recordings and ambient modes of listening. The work has closely evolved out of an existing field recording practice and the version described here remains a proposal – at the time of writing – to be completed in spring 2011. The way in which the installation has contingently emerged has become a critical part of the work which – instead of being conceived of as a untransferable ‘new reality’ essentially related to a site – will be used to open and connect recorded sound to the prolific wider circulation of mediated sound and – across different milieux – to the world ‘itself’.

This article investigates the essential association between location and sound, mediated and represented by the process of recording and the subsequent creation of an artwork. The basic argument this article would like to develop is that location-specific sound recording, as practised by artists and phonographers, is basically an exercise in disembodiment of sound from environment, whether it is observational or immersive in approach; if the purpose of this mediation by recording is artistically reconstructive, the location-specificity of the recorded sound is displaced by the further mediation of the creative process. By developing the argument from an experimental angle, in relation to an audio art project Landscape in Metamorphoses, this article will try to examine how the discourse of acoustic ecology becomes reconfigured in the shift from environmental sound content recorded at location to production of soundscape composition as audio artwork. Today, the application of digital media to artistic practice has become integral – in the case of audio art via creation of auditory art works (for both spatial diffusion and live interaction); this can bring about a reconfiguration of environmental aesthetics. The article will find relevance in redesigning the ecological discourse in the digital realm of ‘soundscaping’ through the practice of mediation, as composing of the sound of location, or ‘place’.

The answer determines the success of a Question-Answering (QA) system. In redundancy-based QA systems, a common approach is to extract the candidate answers from the information sources and select the most frequent answers as the final answers. However, this strategy has some pitfalls. For instance, if a system is not able to detect equivalences between the candidate answers, their frequencies might be erroneously calculated. Moreover, the user who posed the question should also be taken into account when answering: different persons require different (correct) answers. This can involve the use of suitable vocabulary and/or information details. In these situations, the generation of a response can be a more suitable strategy, instead of the extraction and direct retrieval of the answer from the information sources. The present survey targets the state of the art in the answering task in QA under three different lines of research. First, we present several works that focus on relating candidate answers. Then, we recover the concept of cooperative answer – a correct, useful, and non-misleading answer – and we bring up attempts to address cooperative answering. Finally, we investigate the research community endeavors on response generation. We will also present our perspective on each of these three topics throughout this paper.

This paper presents TrendStream, a versatile architecture for very large word n-gram datasets. Designed for speed, flexibility, and portability, TrendStream uses a novel trie-based architecture, features lossless compression, and provides optimization for both speed and memory use. In addition to literal queries, it also supports fast pattern matching searches (with wildcards or regular expressions), on the same data structure, without any additional indexing. Language models are updateable directly in the compiled binary format, allowing rapid encoding of existing tabulated collections, incremental generation of n-gram models from streaming text, and merging of encoded compiled files. This architecture offers flexible choices for loading and memory utilization: fast memory-mapping of a multi-gigabyte model, or on-demand partial data loading with very modest memory requirements. The implemented system runs successfully on several different platforms, under different operating systems, even when the n-gram model file is much larger than available memory. Experimental evaluation results are presented with the Google Web1T collection and the Gigaword corpus.

Robotic-assisted surgery is a continuously developing field because robots have demonstrated clear benefits in operating rooms. Until now, vast majority of robots used in surgery had serial structures. This paper presents the kinematic modelling of a 5-degree of freedom hybrid parallel architecture in two slightly different variants. The kinematics of this structure is determined, and following the analysis of singularities, the best variant is chosen. The robot workspace is computed and finally the experimental model and some simulation results are presented.

This paper reports on the development of a prototype tool which shows how learners can be helped to reflect upon the accuracy of their writing. Analysis of samples of freely written texts by intermediate and advanced learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) showed evidence of weakness in the use of tense and aspect. Computational discourse modelling techniques were applied to the data to generate semantic models of fragments of the narratives with particular focus on their temporal structure. These models have been converted into dynamic graphical representations of the temporal relationships between discourse events as the narratives are written. The system also provides access to the ontology devised to model individual events and this offers learners insights into the events’ semantic properties. These techniques provide the basis for a stimulating learning tool capable of capturing key elements of written narratives, and prompting learners’ awareness of language use, particularly tense and aspect.

This study adopts a case study approach to investigate the impacts of synchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC) learning environments on learners’ perception of social presence. The participants were twelve French as a foreign language (FFL) beginners in a Taiwanese university. Divided into three groups, they conducted some tasks in three different learning environments (video/audio, audio and face-to-face) during an academic semester. Before each oral task, all the participants had to conduct the same task in synchronous text chat. The participants’ interview transcriptions, learning journals and the instructor's observation journal provided information about the impacts of each environment on their perception of social presence. The results of the study suggested that the differences in the environments are reflected in the learners’ perception of social presence.