Music, Myth and Motherland: Culturally Centered Music & Imagery

This study assessed ethnic identity in adults of Indian origin through Culturally Centered Music & Imagery (CCMI), a music-centered, psychotherapeutic technique that emphasizes socio-cultural context, identity and meaning. The purpose was to examine how participants’ native music, in the context of CCMI, could evoke identity-based imagery and assess ethnic identity in a globalized context. Five cisgender Indian men and women from Hindu backgrounds participated in one CCMI session each, including an interview and follow up discussions. The qualitative methodology of portraiture (Lawrence-Lightfoot, 1997) was used in this study. The results reveal how CCMI can access the cultural and ethnic unconscious, a relatively new area of consciousness in Jungian and GIM paradigms. The study also shows how CCMI can highlight the fluid and multiple nature of ethnic identity, revealing its intersection with other identities such as gender, sexual orientation, caste and religion. In addition, the data support the use of contextual and identity-based music selections in assisting participants to explore, recreate or gain a deeper understanding of their ethnic identity through image and metaphor. Major findings include new categories of ethnic identity such as Aesthetic, Ancestral, Philosophical, Mythological, Spiritual and Core Indian identities. Subthemes include experiences of Rebirth, Disconnection, Unconscious Divide, as well as other socio-cultural identities such as Kaleidoscopic, World Citizen and Global Nomad. These and other themes relate to American, global, spiritual, queer, socio-economic, caste, gendered, and individual contexts. The research also suggests that this technique may be effective in emotionally and psychologically supporting adults who are going through the process of immigration or acculturation

Learning sparse representations of depth

This paper introduces a new method for learning and inferring sparse representations of depth (disparity) maps. The proposed algorithm relaxes the usual assumption of the stationary noise model in sparse coding. This enables learning from data corrupted with spatially varying noise or uncertainty, typically obtained by laser range scanners or structured light depth cameras. Sparse representations are learned from the Middlebury database disparity maps and then exploited in a two-layer graphical model for inferring depth from stereo, by including a sparsity prior on the learned features. Since they capture higher-order dependencies in the depth structure, these priors can complement smoothness priors commonly used in depth inference based on Markov Random Field (MRF) models. Inference on the proposed graph is achieved using an alternating iterative optimization technique, where the first layer is solved using an existing MRF-based stereo matching algorithm, then held fixed as the second layer is solved using the proposed non-stationary sparse coding algorithm. This leads to a general method for improving solutions of state of the art MRF-based depth estimation algorithms. Our experimental results first show that depth inference using learned representations leads to state of the art denoising of depth maps obtained from laser range scanners and a time of flight camera. Furthermore, we show that adding sparse priors improves the results of two depth estimation methods: the classical graph cut algorithm by Boykov et al. and the more recent algorithm of Woodford et al.Comment: 12 page

Musical patterns in William H. Gass's "A Fugue" and The Pedersen Kid

International audienceThis article aims to investigate musico-literary intermediality in William H. Gass's works by examining both "A Fugue", a passage from The Tunnel (1995) and his novella The Pedersen Kid (1961). The paper focuses on Gass's conception and use of language, musicality and musicalization. One of the questions raised is to what extent texts that do not necessarily present a direct link to music can be given a musical reading. By analyzing Gass's novella the article demonstrates that the intermedial context conveys semiotic meanings that may allow a better understanding of the contents relating to initiation and rites of passage that the story draws upon, thus providing a new reading of Gass's text. On a more general level, the article reflects upon the textual effects produced by musico-literary intermediality and their impact on time structures in fiction