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Objective Depression is highly prevalent and associated with increased hospitalisations and mortality among patients with heart failure (HF). This study will evaluate the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of an online wellbeing program for patients discharged from hospital with acute decompensated heart failure (ADHF) in (i) improving emotional and physical wellbeing, and (ii) decreasing healthcare utilisation. Methods Two-arm randomised controlled trial. Eligible patients with ADHF will be recruited pre-discharge from two hospitals. Five hundred and seventy participants will be randomised to receive the intervention (online enhanced care program for HF: ‘Enhanced HF Care’) or usual care. Enhanced HF Care includes health education (11 micro-learning modules) and monitoring of depression and clinical outcomes via fortnightly/monthly surveys for 6 months, with participants offered tailored advice via video email and SMS. Cardiac nurses track real-time patient data from a dashboard and receive automated email alerts when patients report medium- or high-risk levels of depression or clinical symptoms, to action where needed. General practitioners also receive automated alerts if patients report medium- or high-risk survey responses and are encouraged to schedule a patient consultation. Results Sixty-five participants enrolled to-date. Co-primary outcomes (‘Minnesota Living with Heart Failure Questionnaire’ Emotional and Physical subscales) and healthcare utilisation (secondary outcome) at 1- and 6-month post-recruitment will be compared between treatment arms using linear mixed effects regression models. Conclusions This study has the potential to reduce the burden of depression for patients with HF by prioritising urgent mental health needs and clinical symptoms while simultaneously empowering patients with self-care knowledge. Trial registration The trial was prospectively registered via the Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry: ACTRN12622001289707. Issue date: 4 October 2022.

INTRODUCTION: Virtual Reality (VR) provides new possibilities for interaction, immersiveness, and audiovisual combination, potentially facilitating novel aesthetic experiences. OBJECTIVES: In this project we created a VR AudioVirtualizer able to generate graphics in response to any sound input in a visual style similar to a body of drawings by the first author. METHODS: In order to be able to make the system able to respond to any given musical input we developed a Unity plugin that employs real-time machine listening on low level and medium-level audio features. The VR deployment utilized SteamVR to allow the use of HTC Vive Pro and Oculus Rift headsets. RESULTS: We presented our system to a small audience at PROTO in Gateshead in September 2019 and observed people’s preferred ways of interacting with the system. Although our system can respond to any sound input, for ease of interaction we chose four previously created audio compositions by the authors of this paper and microphone input as a restricted set of sound input options for the user to explore. CONCLUSION: We found that people’s previous experience with VR or gaming influenced how much interaction they used in the system. Whilst it was possible to navigate within the scenes and jump to different scenes by selecting a 3D sculpture in the scene, people with no previous VR or gaming experience often preferred to just let the visuals surprise them. They used mainly head movement to change their point of view, whereas people with previous VR or gaming experience quickly learned inherent capabilities of the system. The AudioVirtualizer system is most suited to respond to electronic soundscapes and microphone input.

This research undertakes a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) to determine the climate change potential of a typical newly built steel detached dwelling in Palmerston North, New Zealand (NZ) and assesses its results concerning the 2 °C and 1.5 °C 2050 Paris Agreement targets. The proposed, upcoming policy and actions of the NZ government relating to its residential building and construction sector, which are set with an overarching aim to allow NZ to progress towards meeting the 2050 Paris Agreement targets, are also discussed in this paper. The results of the LCA demonstrate that the projected stock of steel-framed detached houses significantly exceeds the calculated climate budget and eventual 2050 Paris Agreement targets. For both the 2 °C and 1.5 °C scenarios, the magnitude of exceedance of the climate budget is 5.2 and 7.3 times more than the acceptable limit, correspondingly. These findings suggest that the sector will need to undergo a significant transition in order to fulfil the 2050 Paris Agreement targets. In the meanwhile, the sector’s upcoming policies and regulations must be achievable while progressing toward achieving net-zero carbon emissions.

A corpus of 1878 recorded works of historic electronic music from 1950–1999 has been collated. This novel data set empowers chronological study of variation over time, and the answering of research questions based on associated annotated metadata, such as art music versus popular music or comparing female and male composers. We describe the challenges of building our new corpus, audio analysis over all the works in it carried out via the SuperCollider Music Information Retrieval code library, and results of tackling two example research questions. The article involves some discussion of the material, but also accompanies release of the data itself.

This article surveys some new directions in algorithmic composition, with a special focus on the mass scale of content generation now within reach. Interest in algorithmic composition has recently flourished, including a fashion for deep learning, and commercial offshoots in apps and browser software. Whilst there is much to be excited about in recent developments, we critically survey some current directions, and likely future initiatives, of the field. In particular, the influence of and potential within music information retrieval research is highlighted, corresponding to attempts to bridge between audio machine listening and large corpus training for algorithmic composition. The scenario of mass generation is further considered, including a practical experiment in creating a billion melody data set with accompanying source code.

This article discusses responses to an online survey on the topic of musical influence. 119 participants took part, answering both quantitative (five point Likert scale) and qualitative questions. A rich set of data was collected, which is summarized and analyzed in this paper. The primary research aim was to discover a good opinion base concerning issues of musical influence, to help illuminate some existing theories of influence, and in turn to inform further research directions. General trends observed included variation in attitudes to influences over time, the role of non- musical influences, and a usually positive attitude towards influences amongst participants.