Abstract
Computer programming plays a relevant role in the digital age as a key competency for project leverage and a driver of innovation for today's modern societies. Despite its importance, this domain is also well known for their higher learning failure rates. In this context, the study of how computer programming is taught is fundamental to clarify the teaching-learning process and to ensure the sharing of the best practices. This paper presents a survey on computer programming teaching in the first-year courses of Portuguese Universities, more precisely, what is taught and how it is taught. The study focuses essentially on the following facets: The class characterization, the methodologies used and the languages/technologies taught. Based on these criteria, a survey was done which gathers information of 59 courses included in a wide range of Universities spread across Portugal. The results were collected and analyzed. Based on this analysis a set of conclusions were taken revealing some interesting results on the teaching methods and languages used which can be useful to support a discussion on this subject and, consequently, to find new paths to shape the future of programming teaching. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Social and professional topics ! Computer science education.

Abstract
Chord progressions are core elements of Western tonal harmony regulated by multiple theoretical and perceptual principles. Ideally, objective measures to evaluate chord progressions should reflect their tonal fitness. In this work, we propose an objective measure of the fitness of a chord progression within the Western tonal context computed in the Tonal Interval Space, where distances capture tonal music principles. The measure considers four parameters, namely tonal pitch distance, consonance, hierarchical tension and voice leading between the chords in the progression. We performed a listening test to perceptually assess the proposed tonal fitness measure across different chord progressions, and compared the results with existing related models. The perceptual rating results show that our objective measure improves the estimation of a chord progression’s tonal fitness in comparison with existing models. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.

Abstract
We present a novel physics-based concatenative sound synthesis (CSS) methodology for congruent interactions across physical, graphical, aural and haptic modalities in Virtual Environments. Navigation in aural and haptic corpora of annotated audio units is driven by user interactions with highly realistic photogrammetric based models in a game engine, where automated and interactive positional, physics and graphics data are supported. From a technical perspective, the current contribution expands existing CSS frameworks in avoiding mapping or mining the annotation data to real-time performance attributes, while guaranteeing degrees of novelty and variation for the same gesture.

Abstract
In tonal music, musical tension is strongly associated with musical expression, particularly with expectations and emotions. Most listeners are able to perceive musical tension subjectively, yet musical tension is difficult to be measured objectively, as it is connected with musical parameters such as rhythm, dynamics, melody, harmony, and timbre. Musical tension specifically associated with melodic and harmonic motion is called tonal tension. In this article, we are interested in perceived changes of tonal tension over time for chord progressions, dubbed tonal tension profiles. We propose an objective measure capable of capturing tension profile according to different tonal music parameters, namely, tonal distance, dissonance, voice leading, and hierarchical tension. We performed two experiments to validate the proposed model of tonal tension profile and compared against Lerdahl's model and MorpheuS across 12 chord progressions. Our results show that the considered four tonal parameters contribute differently to the perception of tonal tension. In our model, their relative importance adopts the following weights, summing to unity: dissonance (0.402), hierarchical tension (0.246), tonal distance (0.202), and voice leading (0.193). The assumption that listeners perceive global changes in tonal tension as prototypical profiles is strongly suggested in our results, which outperform the state-of-the-art models.

Abstract
Background: The occurrence of an orofacial trauma can originate health, social, economic and professional problems. A 13-year boy suffered the avulsion of tooth 11 and 21, lost at the scenario. Methods: Three intraoral appliances were manufactured: A Hawley appliance with a central expansion screw and two central incisors (1), trumpet edentulous anterior tooth appliance (2) and a customized splint (3) were designed as part of the rehabilitation procedure. Objectively assessing the sound quality of the trumpet player with these new devices in terms of its spectral, temporal, and spectro-temporal audio properties. A linear frequency response microphone was adopted for precision measurement of pitch, loudness, and timbre descriptors. Results: Pitch deviations may result from the different intra-oral appliances due to the alteration of the mouth cavity, respectively, the area occupied and modification/interaction with the anatomy. This investigation supports the findings that the intra-oral appliance which occupies less volume is the best solution in terms of sound quality. Conclusions: Young wind instrumentalists should have dental impressions of their teeth made, so their dentist has the most reliable anatomy of the natural teeth in case of an orofacial trauma. Likewise, the registration of their sound quality should be done regularly to have standard parameters for comparison.

Abstract
In this paper, we advance an enhanced method for computing Harte et al.’s (2006) Harmonic Change Detection Function (HCDF), which aims to detect harmonic transitions in musical audio signals. Each of the HCDF component blocks is revisited in light of recent advances in harmonic description and transformation. To evaluate our proposal, we compute an exhaustive grid search to compare the multiple proposed algorithms and a large set of parameterizations across four large style-specific musical datasets. Our results show that the newly proposed methods and parameter optimization improve the detection of harmonic changes by 5.57% (f-score) with respect to previous methods. Furthermore, while guaranteeing recall values at >99%, our other method improves precision by 6.28%.