"for what has not yet been heard": Sonic Resistance in Women’s Experimental Film Culture

This chapter explores how experimental women filmmakers mobilise sound as a site of resistance within moving-image culture, focusing on practices that destabilise conventional audiovisual synchrony. Through the lens of Abigail Child’s Mutiny (1982–3), it develops the concept of “sonic elongation”: the process by which sound stretches away from its visual anchor to become unfamiliar, ambiguous, and interpretive. Sonic elongation unsettles cinematic expectation by dislocating sound from image, creating moments of rupture that expose film’s materiality and demand new, active forms of listening. Tracing its genealogy through musique concrète, feminist film theory, and interdisciplinary histories of art and music, the chapter situates this technique as a crucial aesthetic and political strategy for women artists. In challenging synchronicity, filmmakers contest the patriarchal structures embedded in cinematic traditions, foregrounding labour, embodiment, and marginalised voices. Sonic elongation provides a connective tissue between experimental film, the sonic arts, and feminist practice: it is both a compositional technique and a feminist gesture that resists the normalisation of sound, image, and gendered representation. By privileging noise, rupture, and dissonance, women’s experimental film cultures cultivate an oppositional audiovisuality that renders audible what Child describes as “what has not yet been heard.

An unsupervised feature selection approach for finding diverse emotional-semantic representations in sonic branding music

Discovering the emotional–semantic dimensions underlying music description is central to music psychology and widely applied in sonic branding practice. Academic work typically relies on dimension reduction approaches such as principal components analysis (PCA), which (i) require subjective reinterpretation of latent components, (ii) often yield uneven component importances when a fixed number of dimensions is imposed, and (iii) offer limited guidance for selecting practically manageable subsets of descriptors. Addressing this gap, we evaluate whether an existing feature-selection algorithm — Diversity-Induced Self-Representation (D-ISR; Liu et al. [2017]) — can serve as an objective and scalable alternative for identifying concise yet representative sets of emotional–semantic attributes. Using a large real-world dataset (NParticipants = 55,593; NResponses = 5,820,188; NAudioTracks = 251), we compare D-ISR and PCA within a unified experimental framework. D-ISR selects 14 core attributes from an industry-scale pool of 212 attributes and reconstructs the original 212-dimensional space with good accuracy. Direct comparison with PCA demonstrates how D-ISR provides a more balanced trade-off between interpretability, reconstruction fidelity, and the need for a practically small set of descriptors. Our findings (i) document and analyse a large-scale emotional–semantic music dataset rarely accessible in the public domain, (ii) demonstrate a principled framework for comparing feature-selection and component-extraction methods for music-descriptor research, and (iii) illustrate how large attribute sets can be reduced to flexible, task-appropriate representations of the emotional–semantic music space. This contributes a clear methodological foundation for both scientific studies of musical meaning and applied work such as sonic branding

Fabulating as mothers: the curious story of the girl with a bird in her mouth

In 1968, the skeleton of a young girl was excavated in a cave in Poland with the bones of a chaffinch in her mouth. Fifty years later, with the help of DNA sampling and historical research, archaeologist Malgorzata Kot traced the remains back to Finland. Not only were Finnish soldiers and their families deployed in that area in the late 17th Century, but Finnish folklore describes the concept of ‘soul birds’ being placed with the dead. The details surrounding the burial, however, remain elusive. In the summer of 2023, Hilevaara travelled to Poland to meet Kot and learn more. She was able to see the girl’s bones (currently being held in two archival boxes at Warsaw University); and visit the site of her excavation, crawling on hands and knees inside the cliffs of the Ojkow National Park. She was able to see the barracks that most likely housed the girl’s family. In Krakow, she saw the skull of the finch that was found in the girl’s mouth, and another one that had been found a few centimetres away, on the dusty cave floor. The fragile cranial bones of the two adolescent finches replace the girl's own head, which is now missing, probably swept away by a flood that destroyed much of the archive in the Eighties. Inspired by this strange archaeological find and the mysteries that continue to surround it, Hilevaara and Orley propose a series of speculative fabulations (as defined by Donna Haraway) as they try to make sense of it. Through a collaborative writing exercise they will experiment with a method of call-and-response to explore ideas to do with motherhood, raising girls, grief and biopolitical symbiosis. They will enact a practice of possibility: what if the bones discovered, human and bird, told a different story? One which revealed a different way of inhabiting the earth? A way which involved a much closer coexistence that we assume now? When to be bird, to be human, to sing, to fly, and to expire were experiences that were shared? A past Symbiocene, that got lost? Where did the birds come from? Who placed them there? What acts of care transpired? And whose acts were they? Those of a grieving parent, willing their daughter’s soul to be transported back to her homeland, or those of a charm of chaffinches? Who died first? What happens if we blur the role of the human and bird here, as we think about what it means to be a parent and lose a daughter? What happens when we think about caring for and letting go of our children afresh? What if the girl and the birds were not buried, but found somewhere to set their bodies aside as they learnt how to fly? What if parenting was about teaching your children to fly? About learning to fly? Did the girl ever have a human skull

Emotional Anatomy of Fake News: Leveraging Sentiment and Explainable AI for Misinformation Detection

The emotional dimension of fake news plays a pivotal role in shaping how misinformation spreads and influences public perception. This study explores the emotional anatomy of fake news by re-annotating the widely used LIAR dataset, creating the Emotion-Labelled Fake News Dataset (ELFND). By leveraging advanced NLP methods, with a focus on VADER sentiment analysis, the dataset categorizes news articles according to emotions tone conveyed. Ensemble machine learning models, Random Forest and Gradient Boosting are employed to detect fake news by analyzing its emotional content. Furthermore, AI explainability methods, including LIME and SHAP, are utilized to offer a deeper understanding of how the model generates predictions, shedding light on how specific emotions contribute to the classification of news as fake. The findings reveal that emotions are crucial in the structure of fake news, and the use of XAI enhances transparency in misinformation detection, offering a clearer understanding of the emotional drivers behind fake news

‘What Is It That We’re Doing Here?’: Pedagogical Tensions, Uncertainties and Reflexivity in Higher Popular Music Education

This chapter focuses on a specific sector within the contemporary music ecosystem; music education. This has been suggested to be of particular importance given its conceptualisation as part of ‘the talent pipeline’ in producing both artists and wider music industry professionals. Presenting new empirical data, we reveal how a sample of Higher Popular Music Education (HPME) academics in the United Kingdom reflexively negotiate pedagogical uncertainties experienced working in this dynamic but relatively immature scholarly discipline. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, alongside the personal reflections of authors both working in the same field, interviewees are seen to ask themselves fundamental questions and confront profound pedagogical challenges: What should we teach this highly diverse and technologically astute cohort? How can we or should we assess the learning and the creativity of students? Even, at times, there was an existential questioning of the role of HPME is in the context of a contemporary employability agenda in HE, and uncertainty over how to best articulate the value of this kind of creative education. In response, we will articulate potential new avenues for consideration in the realm of HPME teaching, assessment, curriculum design, and industry-institution relations, and reflect on how this key domain can and should relate to other spheres of activity within the music ecosystem going forward