Baseline of the project. Where does the project work start Criteria/performance indicators Xxxxxx the integration of the European climate and Earth system modelling community - The ENES Consortium has been established in 2001 and has fostered EU projects - A first foresight was done within Euroclivar - Some training on ESMs, concentrating on specific models, has been done at a national, but not on the European level - Distributed conglomerate of web sites on ESM - Developing a European strategy in earth system modelling- Developing a strategy for ESM education with a first prototype summer school - Establishing the v.E.R.C. portal as a tool for the integration Xxxxxx the development of Earth System Models for the understanding of climate change - Collaborative work within EU FP projects - PRISM development of the OASIS coupler - open access to CDO and NEMO but no service activity - Smaller visibility of and more difficult access to European models compared to the US - Distributed information on model evaluation - Open a service activity on model components and tools - Increase visibility of European models through ESM documentation accessible from v.E.R.C. - Develop tools to ease distributed access to model results - Develop a web service on model evaluation Xxxxxx high-end simulations enabling to better understand and predict future climate change - Access to HPC on a national basis s - ENES letter of support to PRACE and DEISA2 - Limited performance of ESMs on highly parallel machines - Establish a unified HPC environment for ESMs - ENES strategy on HPC - Develop formal interactions between ENES and PRACE / DEISA2 - Improved ESM performance Xxxxxx the dissemination of Earth system model simulations to better predict and understand future climate change impacts - European IPCC Data Distribution Centre - Collaboration within EU FP projects with the impact community - User access to ENES data network - Develop a prototype of a web portal for impact studies - Develop the interface with policy makers: Executive meetings for 2 ENES policy papers
Baseline of the project. The SkAT-VG project starts from recent work by partners in the different subfields involved. This consor- tium “baseline” is here outlined: Vocal imitations – When no proper vocabulary is available to describe the sounds, vocal imitations facilitate the communication of an acoustic experience [19]. It has been recently shown that, even when there are appropriate words to describe a sound, vocal imitations are at least as effective as verbalizations [43]. Vocal imitations can therefore be thought of as a convenient device used by a speaker to highlight the properties of a sound, thus allowing identification of the source. Vocal imitations are hybrid linguistic devices, arbitrary and dependent on a linguistic system, yet related to the perceived acoustic properties of sounds. Some recent experiments [2, 19] suggest that the phonetic properties of the imitations of identifiable everyday sounds are more related to the mechanism causing the sounds than to the sound signal properties. Both in speech and in other vocalizations, there is a wide variability in the waveforms produced by persons who differ in size, age, or gender, even if the message is consistently received by all listeners. So, some form of normalization across the internal characteristics of the voice production system (e.g., vocal-tract length, glottal pulse rate, etc.), must occur in the auditory system [55]. This is consistent with both the motor theory of speech perception [46], and with recent insights into the causal perception of sound sources [42]. Perception and identification of sound sources – Recent results have shown that listeners of vocal imitations of sound sources can recover the type of sound source (mostly the action) that is being imitated [39]. They actually outperformed listeners listening to verbal descriptions of a large variety of sounds when required to recognize the sounds [43]. It was also shown that different speakers use similar articulatory mechanisms when required to imitate sources of the same kind and are also able to closely mimic some acoustical properties (fundamental frequency, spectral centroid) [3, 19]. In neuroscience, recent results showed that hearing a sound made by a manual action can actually prime the execution of that action [13, 64] and suggested that auditory perception may be more effective to recover actions’ than objects’ properties [40] and that the most accessible information is the gesture that created the sound [41]. Inferring the voice prod...
