WAVE workshop

Dear WAVE participants:
Thank you very much for your participation. The workshop was a great success. We will update this site shortly for the record of your participation.
( group photo (1 MB)) (Snap shots)

We appreciate, if you would send us some of photos of the WAVE workshop you shot. We will add then to the collection of snap shots. Thank you in advance for your help.

Wakayama workshop on Auditory and Vocal rEsearch

A specialized workshop on auditory aspects of speech perception and production will be held on the 10th and 11th April 2004. We hope to provide a comfortable setting for discussion between interested researchers in order to create and merge ideas towards a better understanding of this exciting and emerging research field. This can only be achieved by your time and participation in this workshop.

Organizer: Hideki Kawahara (Wakayama University, Japan)

Scope and format

Introduction of a very high-quality speech analysis/modification/synthesis method STRAIGHT and a new auditory computational theory based on stabilized wavelet-Mellin transform has opened up interesting research questions on the basis of our auditory and speech perception. This workshop is intended to disseminate our ideas and to induce discussions on how to approach these questions. Important topics to be discussed are on vowel normalization and temporal dynamics of speech. This workshop is also an extension to our previous workshops under CREST's Auditory Brain Project and our special session in ICA 2004 .

The workshop is currently scheduled to start at 13:30 on 10th April and completes discussions at 12:00 on 11th April. This will allow plenty of time for discussions and extra personal activities after the workshop.

Schedule

Tentative title (as suggested by the lecturers)

There are PDFs as advance reading materials. (Password protected.)

• "The perception of speaker size in speech and instrument size in music indicates that size is a natural and simple judgement for human listeners." ( PDF ) by Roy Patterson, David Smith, Tim Ives, Ralph van-Dinther, Richard Turner and Margot Mieskes
• "AGC, Envelope Fluctuations and Speech Intelligibility" by Brian Moore
• "The role of modulation filterbank in reverberantion-robust ASR" ( PDF ) by Guy Brown
• "The Uninvited Guest - Information's Role in Spoken Language" ( PDF ) by Steven Greenberg
• "The case of the missing delay lines: large delays produced by crosschannel interaction" ( Abstract in text ) By Alain de Cheveigne'
• "Searching for phonological processing in the human brain using functional MRI" by Stefan Uppenkamp, Roy Patterson, Ingrid Johnsrude, Alexis Hervais-Adelman, Dennis Norris ( PDF )
• "Exploring human speech production mechanisms by MRI" by Honda, K., Takemoto, H., Kitamura, T., Fujita, S., & Takano, S. ( PDF to be published on May in IEICE trans. Info. & Sys.)
• "Identification of Scale-Modulated Vowel Sequences: A Preliminary Experiment" by Minoru Tsuzaki, Toshio Irino, & Roy D. Patterson
• "Perception of 'Singing-ness' and its application to singing-voice synthesis from read speech" ( PDF ) by Masato Akagi
• Two short topics on preliminary works: "Scale perception in class room environment" ( PDF ) by Toshio Irino and Roy D. Patterson & "Perception of speech smeared in STRAIGHT spectrum" by Toshio Irino, Hideki Banno, Jiang Jin, and Hideki Kawahara.

Participants

Roy Patterson (CNBH, Cambridge University, UK), Brian C. J. Moore(Cambridge University, UK), Steven Greenberg (The Speech Institute, USA), Alain de Cheveigne (IRCAM, France), Elliot Saltzman (Boston University, USA), Guy Brown (Sheffield University, UK), Stefan Uppenkamp (University Oldenburg, Germany), Kiyoshi Honda (ATR, Japan) Minoru Tsuzaki (ATR, Japan) Masato Akagi (JAIST, Japan), Masashi Unoki (JAIST, Japan), Parham Zolfaghari (NTT, Japan), Keiichi Yasu (Sophia University, Japan)

Staff (Wakayama University)

Hideki Kawahara, Toshio Irino, Hideki Banno, Ryuichi Nishimura, Toru Takahashi, Akiko Fukuyasu , Kyoko Fujita

Venue

A resort accommodation called "Futago shima soh" (Twin Islands Villa), which is located next to a famous viewing park "Banndoko Teien" (Lookout Garden) , is reserved for isolation and concentration with some excursions.

• Local map around the workshop venue. (Map by Mapion Inc.)
• Wakayama prefecture
• Wakayama city information
  • Sightseeing
• Wakayama tourist guide

Transportation

Going to the venue:
A limited express "Super Kuroshio" leaves from JR Kyoto station at 9:34 AM and bound for Wakayama JR station. (Expected arrival time is 11:01.) A hotel shuttle bus will depart from EAST gate (The primary gate is west. EAST gate is the smaller one.) of JR Wakayama station at 12:30. (Please take a lunch at Wakayama station.)

Please note that the departing time from JR Kyoto station was changed from 10:32 to 9:34. Don't miss it.
Most of invited speakers are expected to get on the same train.

Leaving from the venue:

• Shuttle bus from JR Wakayama to Kansai airport

Information about the venue, Futagojima- So, and the reimbursement of expenses

1. Futagojima-So is a traditional Japanese Inn
   - All the guest rooms are Japanese style, and each room is shared by 2-3 person. (usually shared by 4 person)
   -We'll make room assignment according to your request, smoking or non-smoking.
2. Both of breakfast and dinner are Japanese dishes. In case if you have allergies to any particular foodstuffs or have any particular request, please let us know by the end of March.
3. The room rate will be around 15000 yen including breakfast and dinner. Please settle the bill either by cash in Japanese yen or credit card. VISA and Master cards are acceptable.
4. Please also settle the bill by yourself for the rest of any other accommodations we booked.
5. Although we try to finish the necessary paperwork for the reimbursement, it still takes long time. Your travel expenses will be paid most probably after returning home. We will let you know the method of payment when we got information from the accounting Dept. in Wakayama university. We apologize for the inconvenience.

About us and the workshop

Wakayama University established its Faculty of Systems Engineering on October 1995. A group of researchers working in auditory, speech and vision research fields were recruited from ATR, NTT, Kyoto University, Nagoya University and NAIST to form a COE project to lead its research and development activities. This workshop is one of the projects' activities expected to be held on a regular basis. For this first occasion, the acronym "WAVE" stands for "Wakayama workshop on Auditory and Vocal rEsearch". Depending on the topic, the name of the workshop can change. We are quite flexible in accepting your suggestions for topics of coming workshops. (This workshop is sponsored by Wakayama University.)

For further information, please send an e-mail to: