Sharif Digital Repository

In this article we study the effects of emotion on brain activity through nonlinear processing of EEG. EEG was recorded from 19 sites (10-20systems) in different states of brain activity; induced by emotionally valance music stimulus and also during no-task resting states. Then, we compared the EEG complexity of the rest condition with each emotional states. After that we determined the locations in which correlation dimension was changed in different states through one-way ANOVA test. In this study four excerpts of music from both Iranian traditional music and Western classical music, two negative valance and two positive valance pieces, were selected according to the results of... 

Digital music is now widely used and a great number of digital music files are available on the Internet. Designing systems that can automatically index, search and retrieve the digital music is one of the active research fields. One of the requirements for design and evaluation of such systems is corpuses of digital music samples. A good corpus is expected to have a number of features such as including a great number of samples, have samples of different artists and also samples with different quality. Additionally, the regional music of different parts of the world uses local musical instruments which results in music that are acoustically different. So, corpuses of regional music are... 

Rapid growth of digital music data in the Internet during the recent years has led to increase of user demands for search based on different types of meta data. One kind of meta data that we focused in this paper is the emotion or mood of music. Music emotion recognition is a prevalent research topic today. We collected a database including 280 pieces of popular music with four basic emotions of Thayer's two Dimensional model. We used a two level classifier the process of which could be briefly summarized in three steps: 1) Extracting most suitable features from pieces of music in the database to describe each music song; 2) Applying feature selection approaches to decrease correlations... 

Introduction: It has shown that listening to Mozart music can potentiate spatial tasks in human; and reduce seizure attacks in epileptic patients. A few studies have reported the effects of prenatal plus postpartum exposure of mice to the Mozart music on brain-drived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in the hippocampus. Here we investigated the effect of postpartum exposure to The Mozart music on BDNF concentration in the hippocampus of rat. Methods: Thirty male one day old newborn Wistar rats divided randomly in two equal experimental and control groups. Experimental group exposed to slow rhythm Mozart music (Mozart Sonata for two pianos KV 448, 6 hour per day; sound pressure levels, between 80... 

Morus Alba or mulberry is a wood species that is broadly used in making musical instruments in Eastern countries. However, the mechanical and acoustical properties of this type of wood are not investigated properly. In this study a set of features, previously examined for other species, are applied to this wood and its acoustic quality is evaluated. Setar, a Persian musical instrument made of mulberry wood, is selected as the test case of this experiment. Different samples of wood are gathered and categorized based on their appropriateness for Setar construction. The quality of each sample is identified based on the Perceptual knowledge of professional Setar makers. The most effective... 

The root-MUSIC algorithm is a popular method to estimate Angle of Arrival (AoA) as an extension of multiple signal classification (MUSIC). In this paper, we have proposed a novel solution for the root-MUSIC algorithm. The new method exhibits a much lower computational complexity, while maintaining the same theoretical performance as the root-MUSIC. © 2019 IEEE  

In the last few years, there has been explosive growth in the application of Harmony Search (HS) in solving NP-complete problems in computer science. The success of the HS algorithm in finding relatively good solutions to these problems discriminates it as an affirmative alternative to other conventional optimization techniques. This chapter surveys the existing literature on the application of HS in combinatorial optimization problems. We begin by presenting HS based algorithms for solving problems such as Sudoku puzzle, music composition, orienteering problem, and vehicle routing. We then turn to solve a multicast routing problem with two constraints (i.e. bandwidth and delay constraints).... 

This article endeavors to present the impact of conducting robot-assisted music-based intervention sessions for children with low-functioning (LF) autism. To this end, a drum/xylophone playing robot is used to teach basic concepts of how to play the instruments to four participants with LF autism during nine educational sessions. The main findings of this study are compared to similar studies conducted with children with high-functioning autism. Our main findings indicated that the stereotyped behaviors of all the subjects decreased during the course of the program with an approximate large Cohen’s d effect size. Moreover, the children showed some improvement in imitation, joint attention,... 

This paper addresses a new approach to segmentation and classification of audio through analysis of a smaller set of selective frames, which are identified by temporal decomposition (TD). These frames are located at the most steady instants, or event centroids, within a given block of the signal, which yield the maximal diversity over the set of selected features. Based on this selection scheme, the number of frames used in the analysis is reduced by at least 40%, while the temporal resolution is doubled as compared to that in typical audio classifiers. By constructing a classification system to segment audio into speech, music, speech-music, and others, it is shown that the proposed method... 

Virtual Reality (VR) technology is a growing technology that has been used in various fields of psychology, education, and therapy. One group of potential users of VR are children with autism who need education and have poor social interactions; this technology could help them improve their social skills through real-world simulation. In this study, we evaluated the feasibility of conducting virtual music education programs with automatic assessment system for children with autism at treatment/research centers without the need to purchase a robot, resulting in the possibility of offering schedules on a larger scale and at a lower cost. Intervention sessions were conducted for five children... 

Multimedia files including audio, music and movies are important part of resources available on the Internet. With the expansion of personal computers and other digital devices such as digital cameras, ordinary people are also creating different multimedia files. Hence, there are huge amount of multimedia files in the Internet. Considering the volume of files available, we need automatic methods for indexing, classification and retrieval of multimedia files. But, there are a number of problems in processing multimedia files. Two important issues are the large size of multimedia files and different lengths of different files. In this PhD project, we want to develop a solution for these two... 

Digital music technologies enable users to create and use large collections of music. One of the desirable features for users is the ability to automatically organize the collection and search in it. One of the operations that they need is automatic identification of tracks' artists. This operation can be used to automatically classify new added tracks to a collection. Additionally, the user can use this operation to identify the artist of an unknown track. The artist name of a track can help the user find similar music. In this paper, we introduce a fast and scalable system that can automatically identify the artist of music tracks. This system is creating a signature for each track that is... 

This study aims to evaluate the amount of energy transfers through the bridge in Setar, a Persian long-necked lute, Stringed musical instruments are among the most complicated acoustical systems. When the string is plucked, its vibration distributes into the entire vibrating system (i.e. body, string, air enclosure) and produces sound. The resultant sound consists of three parts: the first is the string's direct sound; the second is that part of sound-box vibration being excited by string's direct sound, and the third is the part of sound-box vibration being excited by string force passing through bridge. The last part believed to have the major share and the others have minor effect. For... 

Music-based therapy is an appropriate tool to facilitate multisystem development in children with autism. The focus of this study is to implement a systematic and hierarchical music-based scenario in order to teach the fundamentals of music to children with autism through a social robot. To this end, we have programmed a NAO robot to play the xylophone and the drum. After running our designed robot-assisted clinical interventions on three high-functioning and one low functioning autistic children, fairly promising results have been observed. We indicated that the high-functioning participants have learned how to play the musical notes, short sentences, and simple rhythms. Moreover, the... 

In real world social networks, there are multiple cascades which are rarely independent. They usually compete or cooperate with each other. Motivated by the reinforcement theory in sociology we leverage the fact that adoption of a user to any behavior is modeled by the aggregation of behaviors of its neighbors. We use a multidimensional marked Hawkes process to model users product adoption and consequently spread of cascades in social networks. The resulting inference problem is proved to be convex and is solved in parallel by using the barrier method. The advantage of the proposed model is twofold; it models correlated cascades and also learns the latent diffusion network. Experimental...