SEARCH · Engineering Papers

Results for “MUSiC”

Search indexed NASA NTRS and DOE OSTI research on propulsion, heat transfer, battery materials and energy systems. Follow report and document links to the original sources.

SourceResearch connectionFrom yearThrough year

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 145 records · Page 8

All sources NASA NTRS DOE OSTI

NASA NTRS1996

Space Age Training

Teledyne Brown developed a computer-based interactive multimedia training system for use with the Crystal Growth Furnace in the U.S. Microgravity Laboratory-2 mission on the Space Shuttle. Teledyne Brown commercialized the system and customized it for PPG Industries Aircraft Products. The system challenges learners with role-playing scenarios and software-driven simulations engaging all the senses using text, video, animation, voice, sounds and music. The transfer of this technology to commercial industrial process training has resulted in significant improvements in effectiveness, standardization, and quality control, as well as cost reductions over the usual classroom and on-the- job training approaches.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2002

Conference Summary: First International Conference on Global Warming and the Next Ice Age

The First International Conference on Global Warming and the Next Ice Age was convened in Halifax, Nova Scotia, August 19-24, 2001. The conference program began each day with a 30 minute live classical music performances of truly international quality before the beginning business. Ample time for panel discussions was also scheduled. The general public was invited to attend and participate in a special evening panel session on the last day of the conference. The unusual and somewhat provocative title of the conference was designed to attract diverse views on global climate change. This summary attempts to accurately reflect the tone and flavor of the lively discussions which resulted. Presentations ranged from factors forcing current climate to those in effect across the span of time from the Proterozoic "snowball Earth" epoch to 50,000 years in the future. Although, as should be expected, attendees at the conference arrived with opinions on some of the controversial issues regarding climate change, and no-one openly admitted to a 'conversion' from their initial point of view, the interdisciplinary nature of the formal presentations, poster discussions, panels, and abundant informal discourse helped to place the attendees' personal perspectives into a broader, more diversified context.

Wetzel, Peter J.↗

NASA NTRS1990

Space-Spurred Metallized Materials

Spurred R&D toward improved vacuum metallizing techniques led to an extensive line of commercial products, from insulated outdoor garments to packaging for foods, from wall coverings to window shades, from life rafts to candy wrappings, reflective blankets to photographic reflectors. Metallized Products, Inc. (MPI) was one of the companies that worked with NASA in development of the original space materials. MPI markets its own metallized products and supplies materials to other manufacturers. One of the most widely used MPI products is TXG laminate. An example is a reflective kite, the S.O.S. Signal Kite that can be flown as high as 200 feet to enhance radar and visual detectability. It offers a boon to campers, hikers, mountain climbers and boaters. It is produced by Solar Reflections, Inc. The company also markets a solar reflective hat. Another example is by Pro-Tektion, Inc. to provide protection for expensive musical equipment that have sensitive electronic components subject to damage from the heat of stage lights, dust, or rain at outdoor concerts. MP supplied the material and acceptance of the covers by the sound industry has been excellent.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS1976

Tool for Movable Ceiling

The Bendix Corp., with the help of NASA's Kennedy Space Center, developed a tool to equalize tensions in the 150 cables of the ceiling. This inexpensive tool used in concert halls was developed first for elevator and crane cables used to lift heavy space vehicles. University of Akron's performing arts hall has been developed to shrink and expand to accommodate audiences as large as 3,000 and as small as 900. Once the hall has been sound tuned, various positions of this ingenious ceiling and related acoustic curtains may be called into play immediately by pushing buttons on a control console programmed previously. With the touch of a finger before an event, a technician may condition the hall for chamber music, symphony, or theater.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2003

Enough Is Enough

The spacecraft was nearly integrated and had passed some of its early mechanical and electrical testing. One of its instruments, the Proportional Counter Array (PCA), had a gas leak in one of the five proportional counter modules that made up the array. The science division where the instrument was being developed wanted a gas replenishment system added to assure the PCA would last for the entire mission. Adding a gas replenishment system would mean interrupting spacecraft integration and testing; developing a new subsystem and integrating it onto the spacecraft; modifying all the PCA modules; including a complex integration of the instrument onto the spacecraft; and implementing a more complex performance and environmental test process. It was the wrong answer because it made a simple design more complex and added little value to the mission at a major cost in time and dollars. Our mission couldn't afford the additional budget and schedule risks. XTE was the latest of a long line of projects being managed by my Explorer Program Office, but it was unique in being the first project we had agreed to do for a fixed price. NASA HQ agreed, in return, to provide us with the funding profile we needed to make it happen. We were both trying to break the unhealthy spiral in the Explorer program that saw current missions overrunning and pushing subsequent missions downstream to the point where their science was becoming marginal. The science community was upset and wanted better performance from NASA. I summarized my arguments to the director. The Engineering Directorate had taken responsibility for the spacecraft development when we established XTE as an in-house project at Goddard Space Flight Center, and also was supporting the PCA development. "It adds complexity," I reiterated. "It's a significant cost impact for only a marginal reliability increase". His response was music to my ears, "Jim, I won't stand in your way, but you'll have to convince the scientists and engineers."

Barrowman, James↗

NASA NTRS2004

Sounds Clear Enough

I'm a vice president at Line6, where we produce electronics for musical instruments. My company recently developed a guitar that can be programmed to sound like twenty-five different classic guitars - everything from a 1928 National 'Tricone' to a 1970 Martin. It is quite an amazing piece of technology. The guitar started as a research project because we needed to know if the technology was going to be viable and if the guitar design was going to be practical. I've been in this business for about twenty years now, and I still enjoy starting up projects whenever the opportunity presents itself. During the research phase, I headed up the project myself. Once we completed our preliminary research and made the decision to move into development, that's when I handed the project off - and that's where this story really begins.

Zak, Alan↗

NASA NTRS1996

Shape deformation of the organ of Corti associated with length changes of outer hair cell

Cochlear outer hair cells (OHC) are commonly assumed to function as mechanical effectors as well as sensory receptors in the organ of Corti (OC) of the inner ear. OHC in vitro and in organ explants exhibit mechanical responses to electrical, chemical or mechanical stimulation which may represent an aspect of their effector process that is expected in vivo. A detailed description, however, of an OHC effector operation in situ is still missing. Specifically, little is known as to how OHC movements influence the geometry of the OC in situ. Previous work has demonstrated that the motility of isolated OHCs in response to electrical stimulation and to K(+)-gluconate is probably under voltage control and causes depolarisation (shortening) and hyperpolarization (elongation). This work was undertaken to investigate if the movements that were observed in isolated OHC, and which are induced by ionic stimulation, could change the geometry of the OC. A synchronized depolarization of OHC was induced in guinea pig cochleae by exposing the entire OC to artificial endolymph (K+). Subsequent morphometry of mid-modiolar sections from these cochleae revealed that the distance between the basilar membrane (BM) and the reticular lamina (RL) had decreased considerably. Furthermore, in the three upper turns OHC had significantly shortened in all rows. The results suggest that OHC can change their length in the organ of Corti (OC) thus deforming the geometry of the OC. The experiments reveal a tonic force generation within the OC that may change the position of RL and/or BM, contribute to damping, modulate the BM-RL-distance and control the operating points of RL and sensory hair bundles. Thus, the results suggest active self-adjustments of cochlear mechanics by slow OHC length changes. Such mechanical adjustments have recently been postulated to correspond to timing elements of animal communication, speech or music.

Non-NASA Center↗

NASA NTRS2004

NASA Technology Takes Center Stage

In today's fast-paced business world, there is often more information available to researchers than there is time to search through it. Data mining has become the answer to finding the proverbial "needle in a haystack," as companies must be able to quickly locate specific pieces of information from large collections of data. Perilog, a suite of data-mining tools, searches for hidden patterns in large databases to determine previously unrecognized relationships. By retrieving and organizing contextually relevant data from any sequence of terms - from genetic data to musical notes - the software can intelligently compile information about desired topics from databases.

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2004

Constructing an Educational Mars Simulation

January 14th 2004, President George Bush announces his plans to catalyst the space program into a new era of space exploration and discovery. His vision encompasses a robotics program to explore our solar system, a return to the moon, the human exploration of Mars, and to promote international prosperity towards our endeavors. We at NASA now have the task of constructing this vision in a very real timeframe. I have been chosen to begin phase 1 of making this vision a reality. I will be working on creating an Educational Mars Simulation of human exploration of Mars to stimulate interest and involvement with the project from investors and the community. GRC s Computer Services Division (CSD) in collaboration with the Office of Education Programs will be designing models, constructing terrain, and programming this simulation to create a realistic portrayal of human exploration on mars. With recent and past technological breakthroughs in computing, my primary goal can be accomplished with only the aid of 3-4 software packages. Lightwave 3D is the modeling package we have selected to use for the creation of our digital objects. This includes a Mars pressurized rover, rover cockpit, landscape/terrain, and habitat. Once we have the models completed they need textured so Photoshop and Macromedia Fireworks are handy for bringing these objects to life. Before directly importing all of this data into a simulation environment, it is necessary to first render a stunning animation of the desired final product. This animation with represent what we hope to capture out of the simulation and it will include all of the accessories like ray-tracing, fog effects, shadows, anti-aliasing, particle effects, volumetric lighting, and lens flares. Adobe Premier will more than likely be used for video editing and adding ambient noises and music. Lastly, V-Tree is the real-time 3D graphics engine which will facilitate our realistic simulation. Additional information is included in the original extended abstract.

Henke, Stephen A.↗

NASA NTRS2006

Learning User Preferences for Sets of Objects

Most work on preference learning has focused on pairwise preferences or rankings over individual items. In this paper, we present a method for learning preferences over sets of items. Our learning method takes as input a collection of positive examples--that is, one or more sets that have been identified by a user as desirable. Kernel density estimation is used to estimate the value function for individual items, and the desired set diversity is estimated from the average set diversity observed in the collection. Since this is a new learning problem, we introduce a new evaluation methodology and evaluate the learning method on two data collections: synthetic blocks-world data and a new real-world music data collection that we have gathered.

preferences↗

NASA NTRS2006

Affordable Space Tourism: SpaceStationSim

For over 5 years, people have been living and working in space on the International Space Station (ISS), a state-of-the-art laboratory complex orbiting high above the Earth. Offering a large, sustained microgravity environment that cannot be duplicated on Earth, the ISS furthers humankind s knowledge of science and how the body functions for extended periods of time in space all of which will prove vital on long-duration missions to Mars. On-orbit construction of the station began in November 1998, with the launch of the Russian Zarya Control Module, which provided battery power and fuel storage. This module was followed by additional components and supplies over the course of several months. In November 2000, the first ISS Expedition crew moved in. Since then, the ISS has continued to change and evolve. The space station is currently 240 feet wide, measured across the solar arrays, and 171 feet long, from the NASA Destiny Laboratory to the Russian Zvezda Habitation Module. It is 90 feet tall, and it weighs approximately 404,000 pounds. Crews inhabit a living space of about 15,000 cubic feet. To date, 90 scientific investigations have been conducted on the space station. New results from space station research, from basic science to exploration research, are being published each month, and more breakthroughs are likely to come. It is not all work on the space station, though. The orbiting home affords many of the comforts one finds on Earth. There is a weightless "weight room" and even a musical keyboard alongside research facilities. Holidays are observed, and with them, traditional foods such as turkey and cobbler are eaten, with lemonade to wash them down

Source record↗

NASA NTRS2007

Communication system with adaptive noise suppression

A signal-to-noise ratio dependent adaptive spectral subtraction process eliminates noise from noise-corrupted speech signals. The process first pre-emphasizes the frequency components of the input sound signal which contain the consonant information in human speech. Next, a signal-to-noise ratio is determined and a spectral subtraction proportion adjusted appropriately. After spectral subtraction, low amplitude signals can be squelched. A single microphone is used to obtain both the noise-corrupted speech and the average noise estimate. This is done by determining if the frame of data being sampled is a voiced or unvoiced frame. During unvoiced frames an estimate of the noise is obtained. A running average of the noise is used to approximate the expected value of the noise. Spectral subtraction may be performed on a composite noise-corrupted signal, or upon individual sub-bands of the noise-corrupted signal. Pre-averaging of the input signal's magnitude spectrum over multiple time frames may be performed to reduce musical noise.

Kozel, David↗

NASA NTRS2008

Best Buy: Planning for Disaster

When a 1981 tornado in Minnesota revolutionized the retail approach of Sound of Music, which later changed its name to the now very familiar Best Buy, those who founded the company never imagined that a series of hurricanes twenty years later would also help give it a cutting-edge lead in customer service and disaster planning. That original "Tornado Sale'' introduced low prices in a "no-frills" environment that gave the company higher sales than the industry average and paved the way to a new business model. But before Best Buy could find the silver lining of these new storm clouds., it needed to survive them by planning for the destructive weather that plagued Florida during the summer of 2004. Having seen the power of listening to its employees and customers, Best Buy now seeks to capture their thoughts and feedback about other elements of the business.

Sachs, Adam↗

NASA NTRS2009

Tuning a Tetrahertz Wire Laser

Tunable terahertz lasers are desirable in applications in sensing and spectroscopy because many biochemical species have strong spectral fingerprints at terahertz frequencies. Conventionally, the frequency of a laser is tuned in a similar manner to a stringed musical instrument, in which pitch is varied by changing the length of the string (the longitudinal component of the wave vector) and/ or its tension (the refractive index). However, such methods are difficult to implement in terahertz semiconductor lasers because of their poor outcoupling efficiencies. Here, we demonstrate a novel tuning mechanism based on a unique 'wire laser' device for which the transverse dimension w is much much less than lambda. Placing a movable object close to the wire laser manipulates a large fraction of the waveguided mode propagating outside the cavity, thereby tuning its resonant frequency. Continuous single-mode redshift and blueshift tuning is demonstrated for the same device by using either a dielectric or metallic movable object. In combination, this enables a frequency tuning of approximately equal to 137 GHz (3.6%) from a single laser device at approximately equal to 3.8 THz.

Qin, Qi↗

NASA NTRS2010

Fast and Flexible Multivariate Time Series Subsequence Search

Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) are ubiquitous, and are generated in areas as disparate as sensor recordings in aerospace systems, music and video streams, medical monitoring, and financial systems. Domain experts are often interested in searching for interesting multivariate patterns from these MTS databases which often contain several gigabytes of data. Surprisingly, research on MTS search is very limited. Most of the existing work only supports queries with the same length of data, or queries on a fixed set of variables. In this paper, we propose an efficient and flexible subsequence search framework for massive MTS databases, that, for the first time, enables querying on any subset of variables with arbitrary time delays between them. We propose two algorithms to solve this problem (1) a List Based Search (LBS) algorithm which uses sorted lists for indexing, and (2) a R*-tree Based Search (RBS) which uses Minimum Bounding Rectangles (MBR) to organize the subsequences. Both algorithms guarantee that all matching patterns within the specified thresholds will be returned (no false dismissals). The very few false alarms can be removed by a post-processing step. Since our framework is also capable of Univariate Time-Series (UTS) subsequence search, we first demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithms on several UTS datasets previously used in the literature. We follow this up with experiments using two large MTS databases from the aviation domain, each containing several millions of observations. Both these tests show that our algorithms have very high prune rates (>99%) thus needing actual disk access for only less than 1% of the observations. To the best of our knowledge, MTS subsequence search has never been attempted on datasets of the size we have used in this paper.

Bhaduri, Kanishka↗

NASA NTRS2004

Effects of Vestibular Loss on Orthostatic Responses to Tilts in the Pitch Plane

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which vestibular loss might impair orthostatic responses to passive tilts in the pitch plane in human subjects. Data were obtained from six subjects having chronic bilateral vestibular loss and six healthy individuals matched for age, gender, and body mass index. Vestibular loss was assessed with a comprehensive battery including dynamic posturography, vestibulo-ocular and optokinetic reflexes, vestibular evoked myogenic potentials, and ocular counterrolling. Head up tilt tests were conducted using a motorized two-axis table that allowed subjects to be tilted in the pitch plane from either a supine or prone body orientation at a slow rate (8 deg/s). The sessions consisted of three tilts, each consisting of20 min rest in a horizontal position, tilt to 80 deg upright for 10 min, and then return to the horizontal position for 5 min. The tilts were performed in darkness (supine and prone) or in light (supine only). Background music was used to mask auditory orientation cues. Autonomic measurements included beat-to-beat recordings of blood pressure (Finapres), heart rate (ECG), cerebral blood flow velocity in the middle cerebral artery (transcranial Doppler), end tidal CO2, respiratory rate and volume (Respritrace), and stroke volume (impedance cardiography). For both patients and control subjects, cerebral blood flow appeared to exhibit the most rapid adjustment following transient changes in posture. Outside of a greater cerebral hypoperfusion in patients during the later stages of tilt, responses did not differ dramatically between the vestibular loss and control subjects, or between tilts performed in light and dark room conditions. Thus, with the 'exception of cerebrovascular regulation, we conclude that orthostatic responses during slow postural tilts are not substantially impaired in humans following chronic loss of vestibular function, a result that might reflect compensation by nonvisual graviceptor inputs (e.g., somatosensory) or other circulatory reflex mechanisms.

Wood, Scott J.↗

NASA NTRS2010

Fast Multivariate Search on Large Aviation Datasets

Bhaduri, Kanishka↗

NASA NTRS2014

Development of the RANCOR Rotary-Percussive Coring System for Mars Sample Return

A RANCOR drill was designed to fit a Mars Exploration Rover (MER) class vehicle. The low mass of 3 kg was achieved by using the same actuator for three functions: rotation, percussions, and core break-off. Initial testing of the drill exposed an unexpected behavior of an off-the-shelf sprag clutch used to couple and decouple rotary-percussive function from the core break off function. Failure of the sprag was due to the vibration induced during percussive drilling. The sprag clutch would back drive in conditions where it was expected to hold position. Although this did not affect the performance of the drill, it nevertheless reduced the quality of the cores produced. Ultimately, the sprag clutch was replaced with a custom ratchet system that allowed for some angular displacement without advancing in either direction. Replacing the sprag with the ratchet improved the collected core quality. Also, premature failure of a 300-series stainless steel percussion spring was observed. The 300-series percussion spring was ultimately replaced with a music wire spring based on performances of previously designed rotary-percussive drill systems.

Paulsen, Gale↗