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Plasma spraying is a mature, efficient, and widely applied surface treatment technology. However, the high-energy consumption and harmful gas emissions are still obstacles to achieving clean production by plasma spraying. Considering that the various process parameters of plasma spraying have great impacts on both on coating performance and environmental impact, this study attempts to improve the greenness of plasma spraying including environmental and mechanical properties, through optimizing the process parameters. The greenness of plasma spraying means to achieve the balance of reducing environmental impact and improving the mechanical performance of coating. In this work, a Fe-based coating is prepared by plasma spraying on the basis of an L9 (34) orthogonal experiment with various process parameters, i.e., power, powder feeding speed, gun speed, and track pitch. A complete life cycle assessment (LCA) study is conducted to quantify and evaluate the environmental impact of plasma spraying. In addition, the microhardness and porosity of the Fe-based coating are investigated to evaluate the mechanical performance. Finally, grey relational analysis (GRA) is used to realize multiobjective decision-making and improve the greenness of plasma spraying. LCA results show that electricity contributes most to the environmental impact of plasma spraying. When hydropower is supplied, the environmental impacts can be significantly reduced by 46.65%. Based on the L9 (34) orthogonal experiment and GRA, five optimized plasma spraying schemes are proposed, i.e., microhardness optimality, porosity optimality, environmental optimality, greenness optimality, and enhanced greenness optimality. The verification shows that the enhanced greenness optimality of plasma spraying is improved by 11.83% compared with the greenness optimality. In this study, we propose a method to evaluate and improve the greenness of plasma spraying both in environmental and mechanical performance through the integration of LCA and GRA, which can be adopted to optimize the spraying process parameters in real sustainable production.

Background and Objectives: The current study investigates pitch coding using frequency following response (FFR) among vocalists, violinists, and non-musicians for Indian Carnatic transition music stimuli and assesses whether their listening biographies strengthen their F0 neural encoding for these stimuli.Subjects and Methods: Three participant groups in the age range of 18-45 years were included in the study. The first group of participants consisted of 20 trained Carnatic vocalists, the second group consisted of 13 trained violinists, and the third group consisted of 22 non-musicians. The stimuli consisted of three Indian Carnatic raga notes (/S-R2-G3/), which was sung by a trained vocalist and played by a trained violinist. For the purposes of this study, the two transitions between the notes T1=/S-R2/ and T2=/R2-G3/ were analyzed, and FFRs were recorded binaurally at 80 dB SPL using neuroscan equipment.Results: Overall average responses of the participants were generated. To assess the participants’ pitch tracking to the Carnatic music stimuli, stimulus to response correlation (CC), pitch strength (PS), and pitch error (PE) were measured. Results revealed that both the vocalists and violinists had better CC and PS values with lower PE values, as compared to non-musicians, for both vocal and violin T1 and T2 transition stimuli. Between the musician groups, the vocalists were found to perform superiorly to the violinists for both vocal and violin T1 and T2 transition stimuli.Conclusions: Listening biographies strengthened F0 neural coding, with respect to the vocalists for vocal stimulus at the brainstem level. The violinists, on the other hand, did not show such preference.

In the game of baseball, each pitcher throws various types of pitches, such as cutter, curve ball, slider, and splitter. Although the type of a given pitch may be inferred by audience and/or obtained from the TrackMan data, the actual pitch type (i.e., the pitch type declared by the pitcher) may not be known. Classification of pitch types is a challenging task, as pitched baseballs may have different kinematic characteristics across pitchers even if the self-declared pitch types are the same. In addition, there is a possibility that the kinematic characteristics of pitched baseballs are identical even if the self-declared pitch types are different. In this study, we aimed to classify TrackMan data of pitched baseballs into pitch types by applying the Variational Bayesian Gaussian Mixture Models technique. We also aimed to analyze the kinematic characteristics of the classified pitch types and indices related to batting performance while pitching each pitch type. The results showed that the pitch types could not be accurately classified solely by kinematic characteristics, but with consideration of the characteristics of the fastball the accuracy improves substantially. This study could provide a basis for the development of a more accurate automatic pitch type classification system.

In this article, we discuss the models of the 747 test, in particular, the 747 test taken over a range of linear densities. In a comparison study, we fit the 747 curves at three conditions, as well as different upper limits of the track pitch. Based on the comparison result, we present a general model for the 747 curves as a function of linear density. The new proposed model not only improves the accuracy but also extends the applicable scope of the fitting. With the model, we also demonstrate the optimal combinations of track density and linear density for maximizing the off-track-capability (OTC) and squeeze-to-death (S2D), as well as their maximums as a function of areal density.

Differences between heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) and conventional perpendicular magnetic recording at narrow track widths are compared. We can see that HAMR appears to have similar adjacent track interference, but increased readback signal from the adjacent tracks (side reading). This background interference signal appears to be a consequence of the media architecture, and can be decreased if the media soft underlayer spacing to the hard layer, and transducer is reduced. The impact is also reduced for very high linear densities, due to a smaller fraction of unbiased flux from the neighbor tracks reaching the test track. The use of two reader multiple sensor magnetic recording at high track density appears to address some of this issue, and we can demonstrate viable track writing for HAMR beyond 1M tracks per inch using this readback technique.

This chapter reviews ways of describing intonational contours expanding on the characteristics of boundaries and accents introduced in Chapter 11. It uses a simplified version of the Tones and Break Indices (ToBI) framework for capturing the fundamental meaning contrasts and functions conveyed through the manipulation of melody in English. In the skills building domain, the chapter’s activities strengthen the proficiency in reading and manipulating Praat’s pitch tracking and increase awareness of the difference between fundamental frequency and pitch.

This paper presents a new pitch tracking smoother based on deep neural networks (DNN). It leverages Long Short-Term Memories, a particular kind of recurrent neural network, for correcting pitch detection errors produced by state-of-the-art Pitch Detection Algorithms. The proposed system has been extensively tested using two reference benchmarks for English and exhibited very good performances in correcting pitch detection algorithms outputs when compared with the gold standard obtained with laryngographs.

Pitch is a critical cue for speech separation in humans’ auditory perception. Although the technology of tracking pitch in single-talker speech succeeds in many applications, it’s still a challenging problem to extract pitch information from speech mixtures in machine perception. In this paper, we aimed to combine speech separation and pitch tracking together to let them benefit from each other. A multi-task learning framework was proposed, in which a unified objective that considered both speech separation and pitch tracking was used, based on the utterance-level permutation invariant training (uPIT) as well as deep clustering (DPCL). In such framework, two tasks were optimized simultaneously and could benefit from each other through the sharing layers in the networks. Experimental results indicated the proposed multi-task framework outperformed the corresponding single-task framework, in terms of both speech separation and pitch tracking. The improvement was more significant for challenging same-gender mixtures.

Track misregistration (TMR) in ultra-high density bit-patterned media recording (BPMR) is one of the crucial problems, because it can severely degrade the overall system performance. In practical, TMR can be detected and adjusted by a servo control loop system. However, this paper proposes to utilize multiple readback signals obtained from the optimized positioning of the two side read head closer to the main read head to improve the TMR prediction process in a multitrack multi-head BPMR system with position jitter noise. In addition, we also propose the soft-information exchange and the bit-flipping techniques for the multitrack data detection, so as to improve the bit-error rate (BER) performance of all three data tracks simultaneously. Simulation results indicate that the proposed system is superior to the conventional system, especially, when the amount of TMR and position jitter is high. Furthermore, we also found that the upper and lower read heads, which are moved closer to the center track by 25% of a track pitch, will provide the best BER performance with and without position jitter noise.

Medial ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction is a common procedure performed on Major League Baseball pitchers. Variations in pitching mechanics before and after UCL reconstructive surgery are not well understood.Publicly available pitch tracking data (PITCHf/x) were compared for all Major League Baseball pitchers who underwent UCL reconstruction between 2008 and 2013. Specific parameters analyzed were fastball percentage, release location, velocity, and movement of each pitch type. These data were compared before and after UCL reconstructive surgery and compared with a randomly selected control cohort.There were no statistically significant changes in pitch selection or pitch accuracy after UCL reconstruction, nor was there a decrease in pitch velocity. The average pitch release location for 4-seam and 2-seam fastballs, curveballs, and changeups is more medial after UCL reconstruction (P .01). Four-seam fastballs and sliders showed decreased horizontal breaking movement after surgery (P .05), whereas curveballs showed increased downward breaking movement after surgery (P .05).Pitch selection, pitch velocity, and pitch accuracy do not significantly change after UCL reconstruction, nor do players who require UCL reconstruction have significantly different pitch selection, velocity, or accuracy than a randomly selected control cohort. Pitch release location is more medial after UCL reconstruction for all pitch types except sliders. Breaking movement of fastballs, sliders, and curveballs changes after UCL reconstruction.

Maximum unnoticeable added dynamics (MUAD) envelopes have been largely used to assess the adequacy of low-order equivalent systems (LOES) in handling qualities assessment and simulator validation. However, research has shown that more thorough verification of the adequacy of this method is required. This paper studies the influence of the baseline aircraft dynamics on the MUAD envelopes. The assessment is based on quantitative measures of pilot control behaviour obtained with the cybernetic approach. The measures were taken from a human-in-the-loop pitch tracking task experiment with compensatory display. The results are consistent with the MUAD envelopes and reveal no interaction effects of the baseline and added dynamics on the pilot control behaviour. This suggests that, under the considered conditions, the MUAD envelopes shall remain constant independently of the bandwidth of the baseline controlled dynamics.

Pitch tracking is one of the most important research topics in the recognition and identification area. This study concerns the effect of the pitch tracking technique used on the accuracy and speed of automatic dialect identification. This effort was carried out using the TIMIT database. The pitch tracking procedures investigated are the Boersma algorithm, the iterative adaptive inverse filtering approach, and the summation of residual harmonics method. All else being equal, the summation of residual harmonics provided the highest accuracy as well as the fastest performance of the three methods.

Mini aerial vehicles have gained a lot of significance in the past five decades. The future defense strategies mainly rely upon mini aerial vehicles. In maneuvering a mini aerial vehicle, control of parameters like pitch angle, roll angle, side slip angle, etc., are very crucial and important. Due to geometry and weight constraints, controlling a mini aerial vehicle is very difficult. Mini aerial vehicles also gets easily disturbed from its path because of slight disturbance of wind. As weight constraint is imposed on mini aerial vehicle, low cost sensors are adopted. Low cost sensors gives noisy feedback, which still makes a challenging task to design a controller to track pitch angle for a mini aerial vehicle. The present work attempts to develop a flight simulator for Black Kite mini aerial vehicle and to design a proportional-integral controller to track pitch angle by taking feedback from an observer, which takes consideration of noisy sensor inputs.

Pitch tracking, or the continuous extraction of fundamental fre- quency from speech waveforms, is of vital importance to many applications in speech analysis and synthesis. Many existing trackers, including conventional ones such as Praat, RAPT and YIN, and newly proposed neural-network-based ones such as DNN-CLS, CREPE and RNN-REG, have conducted an exten- sive investigation into speech pitch tracking. This work devel- oped a different end-to-end regression model based on neural networks, where a voice detector and a newly proposed value estimator work jointly to highlight the trajectory of fundamen- tal frequency. Experiments on the PTDB-TUG corpus showed that the system surpasses canonical neural networks in terms of gross error rate. It further outperformed conventional track- ers under clean condition and neural-network classifiers under noisy condition by the NOISEX-92 corpus.

Speaker segmentation is an essential part of any diarization system. Applications of diarization include tasks such as speaker indexing, improving automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance and making single speaker-based algorithms available for use in multi-speaker environments. This paper proposes a multiple hypothesis tracking (MHT) method that exploits the harmonic structure associated with the pitch in voiced speech in order to segment the onsets and end-points of speech from multiple, overlapping speakers. The proposed method is evaluated against a segmentation system from the literature that uses a spectral representation and is based on employing bidirectional long short term memory networks (BLSTM). The proposed method is shown to achieve comparable performance for segmenting overlapping speakers only using the pitch harmonic information in the MHT framework.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present the autopilot design for the missile under various disturbances. Design/methodology/approach In this study, model predictive control (MPC) method has been used for autopilot design for each axis. The aim of autopilot is that to keep the roll angle value around the zero degree and to track pitch/yaw acceleration commands. This three-axes control methodology also takes into consideration the interaction between pitch, yaw and roll motions. Findings The purpose of using MPC method for three-axes of the autopilot is to decrease the control effort and to make the close-loop system insensitive against modeling uncertainties and stochastic effects. Originality/value This study shows that the missile is able to reach to the desired target with good robustness, low control effort and little miss-distance under disturbances such as aerodynamic uncertainties, thrust misalignment and gust affect by using this alternative control method.

The ultimate user storage-area density for heat-assisted magnetic recording is an important consideration both from research and commercial perspectives. We propose two new algorithms to accelerate recording simulations based on general-purpose computing graphics processing units. We predict user areal density with current technologies and those expected to be available in the near future. Micromagnetic simulation predicts a user areal density of 1.8 Tb/in2. Optimization of track pitch in the absence of track misregistration increases the density to 5 TBit/in2 for perfect recording.

Music acoustics is an interdisciplinary field and mathematics is the basis in the music art form. Music and mathematics correlation exist since the inception of music. Various philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and musicians have expressed their views about this relationship. This paper attempts to explore this association with focus on melodic pattern identification. Mathematics in Indian Classical music with raga as the basis and just intonation tuning system is discussed. Indian vocal music clips are used for different pitch estimation algorithms in the experimentation. Harmonic product spectrum and auto-correlation algorithms are tested for accurate pitch estimation. Enhanced auto-correlation function using audio segmentation is compared with other approaches for effective pitch extraction. Results indicate pitch extraction with enhanced auto-correlation function provides accurate results as compared with other approaches tested.

Speaker-independent multi-pitch tracking has been a long-standing problem in speech processing. In this study, we extend a recurrent neural network - factorial hidden Markov model (RNN-FHMM) framework, and use the utterance-level permutation invariant training (uPIT) criterion for multi-pitch tracking. Separated speech and label permutations from a speech separation uPIT-RNN have been further incorporated to improve pitch tracking performance. We evaluate our methods on the GRID database. Results indicate that the proposed speech separation - pitch tracking system with matched uPIT label permutations outperforms all other gender-dependent and speaker-independent multi-pitch trackers. The improvement is more significant for challenging same-gender mixtures.

To increase a density in hard disk drive, bit patterned media recording (BPMR) is regarded as a promising candidate for the next generation storage system. Reduction of spacing between bit islands is essential to increase the density in BPMR but causes inter-symbol interference (ISI) and inter-track interference (ITI). Islands can be arranged on a rectangular pattern (regular array) or packed in a staggered pattern (hexagonal lattice), depending upon the lithography approach adopted in BPMR. Since the staggered pattern can mitigate the effect of the ITI due to the presence of adjacent tracks, bit error rate (BER) performance of staggered pattern is better than that of rectangular pattern in previous study. In another work of channel modeling for staggered pattern, the staggered pattern with bit-aspect ratios (BAR $) =$ Track Pitch $(T_{z}) /$ Bit Length $(T_{x})$ of 2 performs better than the staggered pattern with BAR of 1. In this paper, we investigate the performance of BPMR island patterns according to the distances of track pitch and bit length, respectively. Fig. 1 presents BER performance of island arrangement according to areal densities of 2 Tb/in 2 and 3 Tb/in 2. When the areal density is 2 Tb/in 2, $(T_{x} \quad =15.5$ nm, $T_{z} \quad =21.0$ nm) provides best performance. Also, when the areal density is 3 Tb/in 2, $(T_{x} \quad =13.0$ nm, $T_{z} \quad =17.0$ nm) shows best performance. Fig. 2 illustrates BER performance in accordance with island arrangements. Case (1) represents the arrangement of islands that distributed over a rectangular array at $T_{x}$ of 18.0nm and $T_{z}$ of 18.0nm in 2 Tb/in 2 and $T_{x}$ of 14.5nm and $T_{z}$ of 14.5nm in 3 Tb/in 2. Case (2) represents the arrangement of islands that distributed over a staggered pattern at $T_{x}$ of 21.0nm and $T_{z}$ of 15.5nm in 2 Tb/in 2 and $T_{x}$ of 17.0nm and $T_{z}$ of 13.0nm in 3 Tb/in 2. Case (3) represents the arrangement of islands that distributed over a staggered pattern at $T_{x}$ of 18.0nm and $T_{z}$ of 18.0nm in 2 Tb/in 2 and $T_{x}$ of 14.5nm and $T_{z}$ of 14.5nm in 3 Tb/in 2. Case (4) represents the arrangement of islands that distributed over a staggered pattern at $T_{x}$ of 15.5nm and $T_{z}$ of 21.0nm in 2 Tb/in 2 and $T_{x}$ of 13.0nm and $T_{z}$ of 17.0nm in 3 Tb/in 2. Since the influence of adjacent tracks of Case (4) is less than that of Case (1), Case (2), and Case (3), i.e., the effect of ITI is reduced, Case (4) shows the best performance in both 2 Tb/in 2 and 3 Tb/in 2.

In this research work HVOF WC–12Co coatings were deposited on C45 steel (1.0503) substrates. Unfavorable residual stresses can lead to delamination and spallation and thus have to be avoided by optimizing the handling parameters. This study investigates the influence of the following handling parameters: substrate temperature, number of overruns, stand-off distance, track pitch, and gun velocity on the residual stress and hardness. Additionally, the effect of post-treating the coating by means of surface grinding was determined. For the HVOF spraying experiments, fine agglomerated and sintered WC–12Co powders (2–10 μm) with WC particles in the submicron range (400 nm) were chosen. It was determined that alterations of these handling parameters had significant effects on the residual stress and the hardness.

The paper depicts a systematic procedure using pitch tracking and pitch smoothing methods-based statistical approach for exploring the singers’ melody of voice for a set of songs of poet Rabindranath Tagore sung by different renowned singers. The medium category (Mudara) of songs started with vowel ‘aa’ has been incorporated in the data set of songs. Index of melody has been estimated numerically based on semitones of different singers for a particular duration of the first vocal phrase. The value of probability of significance calculated by one-way ANOVA has been considered for the comparative study of the index of melody of the singers of particular song, and the results show the significant difference among the singers of same song of Tagore.

To accurately describe the vehicle vibration, the vibration response of the vehicle operation system affected by the track was studied. Through the analysis of the topological structure of vehicle operation system, the flexible track model and the rigid track model was built up. The track circuit model was established by simplifying the rigid track, and its inherent vibration was calculated by eigenvalue analysis. Power spectrum method was used to compare the dynamic model of flexible track and the dynamic model of rigid track and verify the effect of track on the vibration of vehicle. The results show that the effect of track on the vibration of vehicle mainly include the inherent vibration of track circuit and the high frequency vibration related to track pitch; the computing result provides a reference basis for describing the effect of track quantitatively.

Background: Medial ulnar collateral ligament (UCL) reconstruction is a common procedure performed among Major League Baseball (MLB) pitchers. The etiology of UCL injury is complex and is not entirely understood. Hypothesis: To better understand risk factors for requiring UCL reconstruction, we hypothesized that pitchers who eventually undergo the procedure will exhibit different throwing mechanics as measured by pitch-tracking data points, such as velocity and release location. Study Design: Case-control study; Level of evidence, 3. Methods: Pitch-tracking and demographic data were gathered for 140 MLB pitchers who had undergone UCL reconstruction between the 2010 and 2017 seasons. Pitch type, release location, and velocity were compared between the surgical cohort and a matched-control cohort. Results: When compared with controls, the mean pitch release location for pitchers who required UCL reconstruction was 12.2 cm more lateral in the year immediately preceding surgery ( P = .001). Furthermore, within the surgical cohort, the horizontal release location was 3.4 cm more lateral immediately preceding surgery compared with 2 years earlier ( P = .036). Binary logistic regression indicated an odds ratio of 0.51, suggesting a roughly 5% increased odds of UCL reconstruction for every 10 cm of increased lateral release location ( P = .048). Both the surgical and the control cohorts threw similar rates of fastballs and had similar mean pitch velocity and fastball velocity. Control pitchers displayed a significant decrease over time in mean pitch velocity ( P = .005) and mean fastball velocity, while pitchers in the UCL reconstruction cohort did not ( P = .012). Conclusion: Pitch tracking indicates that the mean release point is more lateral in pitchers preceding UCL reconstruction as compared with controls, suggesting that a more lateral pitch release location is an independent risk factor for UCL injury and reconstruction.