Masaki Matsubara

Colorscore -- Visualization and Condensation of Structure of Classical Music

It is not always easy to quickly understand musical structure of orchestral scores for classical music works, because these works contain many staves of instruments. This paper presents Color score, a technique for visualization and condensation of musical scores. Color score supports two requirements for composers, arrangers and players: overview and arrangement. Color score divides each track of the score into note-blocks, and determines their roles. Color score then displays all the note-blocks in one display space to provide the overview, so that novice people can quickly understand the musical structures. In addition, Color score supports vertical condensation which reduces the number of displayed tracks, and horizontal condensation which saves the display space. It is especially useful as hints to rearrange music for smaller bands.

Thoracoscopic treatment of chylothorax after patch repair of congenital diaphragmatic hernia

Chylothorax is a highly morbid complication that may occur after congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) repair. The incidence of chylothorax in this setting has been reported to be 7% to 27% [1-4]. Factors associated with the development of chylothorax include prenatal diagnosis, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation use, and patch repair [2-4]. In other words, patients with severe CDH are more likely to develop chylothorax. Because of recent advances in perinatal care, there has been an increase in the number of patients with severe CDH who would undergo repair. Accordingly, it can be predicted that the number of cases of chylothorax after CDH repair will increase. Management of chylothorax after CDH repair is controversial. Prolonged chest tube drainage for chylothorax can be done; but there is an infection risk, especially in the presence of a sutured prosthetic patch. We present a case of chylothorax after patch closure for CDH, which was successfully treated through the thoracoscopic approach. A newborn who had been prenatally diagnosed with left CDH at 20 weeks gestational age (GA) was delivered by cesarean birth at 37 weeks GA with a birth weight of 2434 g. The baby was intubated immediately after birth, and intensive respiratory care using high-frequency oscillatory ventilation and inhaled nitric oxide was started. After 1 week of stabilization using gentle ventilation and permissive hypercapnea, CDH repair was performed. A small extralobar pulmonary sequestration was found at the edge of the defect and removed. The large defect containing herniated stomach, intestines, spleen, and left lobe of the liver was repaired using a prosthetic Gore-Tex (WL Gore and Associates, Flagstaff, AZ) patch. The patch was sutured using horizontal mattress sutures with pledgets. Postoperatively, the patient had an improved cardiopulmonary status; and inhalation of nitric oxide was terminated on postoperative day 11. After feeding of maternal milk via a nasogastric tube was started on postoperative day 19, an expanding pleural effusion was noted in the left thorax. Aspiration of the pleural effusion revealed chylothorax.

Wearable Auditory Biofeedback Device for Blind and Sighted Individuals

This study discusses the feasibility of a reference-tracking task of ankle-joint exercise with interactive sonification for sighted and blind individuals in terms of both objective and subjective evaluations via our wearable auditory biofeedback device using the instrumented ankle-foot orthosis (AFO) called GaitEcho. Our experimental results suggest it offers similarly adequate functionality for both blind and sighted participants.

Efficient Pipeline Processing of Crowdsourcing Workflows

This paper addresses the pipeline processing of sequential workflows in crowdsourcing. Sequential workflows consisting of several subtasks are ubiquitous in crowdsourcing. Our approach is to control the budget distribution to subtasks in order to balance the execution speed of the subtasks and to improve throughput of overall sequential workflows. As we cannot control the price for earlier steps retrospectively in the stepwise batch execution, we explore pipeline processing schemes. Our experimental results show that our pipeline processing scheme with price control achieves significantly higher throughput of sequential workflows.

CrowdSheet: An Easy-To-Use One-Stop Tool for Writing and Executing Complex Crowdsourcing

Developing crowdsourcing applications with dataflows among tasks requires requesters to submit tasks to crowdsourcing services, obtain results, write programs to process the results, and often repeat this process. This paper proposes CrowdSheet, an application that provides a spreadsheet interface to easily write and execute such complex crowdsourcing applications. We prove that a natural extension to existing spreadsheets, with only two types of new spreadsheet functions, allows us to write a fairly wide range of real-world applications. Our experimental results indicate that many spreadsheet users can easily write complex crowdsourcing applications with CrowdSheet.

Comparative Effects of Auditory Electromyographic Biofeedback for Participants Who Are Blind and Sighted

This study examined differences in auditory electromyographic biofeedback (AEB) effects between participants who were sighted and blind. Past research makes clear that AEB is effective for people who are blind, particularly because of their reported superiority in auditory processing, but no study has directly compared AEB efficacy between participants who are sighted and blind. A total of 11 participants who were sighted and 10 who were blind performed a motor task requiring 20 nonfatiguing muscle contractions at 20% maximal voluntary contraction (MVC) with or without AEB. AEB reduced the error (calculated as the absolute difference of two consecutive contractions) among both participant groups, and the error for the group without biofeedback was greater for the participants who were blind than that for the sighted participants (5.20% ± 2.05% MVC and 3.30% ± 1.26% MVC, respectively; p < .05). This finding was consistent with subjective rating data, also indicating a trend toward greater difficulty for participants who were blind when performing without biofeedback. Moreover, the AEB/no biofeedback condition showed fewer errors for the participants who were blind than for the participants who were sighted during the last part of the task (p = .036), indicating that participants who were blind were better at maintaining the AEB effect. These data suggest that the poor motor performance of participants who were blind was greatly improved with AEB, suggesting important applications of AEB for assistive technologies, adapted sports, and activities of daily living.

The sound of smile: Auditory biofeedback of facial EMG activity

Abstract In this paper, a real-time interactive system for smile detection and sonification using surface Electromyography (sEMG) signals is proposed. When a user smiles, a sound is played. The surface EMG signal is mapped to pitch using a conventional scale. The timbre of the sound is a synthetic sound that mimics bubbles. In a user testing of smiling tasks, 14 participants underwent the system and are required to produce smiles under three conditions, i.e., auditory feedback with sonification, visual feedback with mirror, and no feedback. The impression of the system is evaluated through questionnaires and interviews with the participants. In addition, we analyzed the total amount of muscular activity and temporal envelope patterns of the sEMG during smiling. The questionnaire and interview showed that users felt that (1) the sonification system well reflects their facial expressions, and (2) the sonification system was enjoyable. The users also expressed that the auditory feedback condition is easier to smile with, as compared to the visual feedback or no feedback conditions. However, the analysis of sEMG did not provide a quantitative difference among the three conditions, which is most likely due to the experiment design, which lacks socially engaging settings.

Harmonic analysis based on Tonal Pitch Space

The theory of Tonal Pitch Space (TPS) enables us to quantify the distance between chords. In this paper, we present a harmony analysis based on TPS in which the metrical distance of chords reflects the difference of keys and functions. Given a sequence of Berklee chord names, our analysis system assigns possible keys with degree names for each chord and the sequence results in a complicated network of chord progression. Then, the system selects the shortest path in terms of chord distance, that is regarded the most plausible interpretation.

Revisiting Cadential Retention in GTTM

In GTTM, “Cadential Retention” grants the egg symbol to combine into one cadence (V-I). However, criteria for the cadential retention are ambiguous. In this paper, we propose a harmonic theory that the chord symbol has been limited on the basis of the musical scale, and formulate a cadence finding algorithm by adapting to the TPS theory. As a result, the candidate of the chord having a function of V is increased, it has facilitated cadence discovery. In addition, it can determine local cadence and the half cadence.

Discrimination and identification of environmental sounds among people with hearing impairment

We report that people with hearing impairment (HI) can better discriminate environmental sounds than identifying the same sounds. In order to investigate the perception/recognition of environmental sounds by people with HI, researchers often choose identification task as a measurement tool. However, since identification ability is developed upon discrimination ability, the discrimination ability should be studied too. We used 9 environmental sounds as stimuli for both discrimination and identification tasks, and 16 participants with HI joined the experiment. In the discrimination task, the participants listened to the paired short stimuli, and reported the perceived difference. In the identification task, the participants listened to each stimulus and reported the name of the sound source. The order of discrimination and identification tasks is counterbalanced among the participants, and we also tested 10 people with normal hearing for comparison. The results showed a clear contrast between the discrimina...