Citing musicality: Performance knowledge in the Gardzienice archive

This article draws on previously published multimedia documents to explore the notion of musicality in the work of Włodzimierz Staniewski and the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices. In addition to offering a close analysis of several documented moments – including performances, work demonstrations, expeditions and gatherings – it tests the ability of multimedia documentation to capture performance knowledge, arguing that the work of Gardzienice is a paradigmatic example of ‘practice as research’. Taking the archive as a crucial dimension of the dissemination of knowledge, the article uses multimedia citation to examine the specific contributions of Gardzienice in the context of musicality as a relation between the theatrical and the musical. The article demonstrates that the stability of the archive allows for a detailed explication of performance knowledge in a way that is not possible from live performance alone

Sound archaeology: terminology, Palaeolithic cave art and the soundscape

This article is focused on the ways that terminology describing the study of music and sound within archaeology has changed over time, and how this reflects developing methodologies, exploring the expectations and issues raised by the use of differing kinds of language to define and describe such work. It begins with a discussion of music archaeology, addressing the problems of using the term ‘music’ in an archaeological context. It continues with an examination of archaeoacoustics and acoustics, and an emphasis on sound rather than music. This leads on to a study of sound archaeology and soundscapes, pointing out that it is important to consider the complete acoustic ecology of an archaeological site, in order to identify its affordances, those possibilities offered by invariant acoustic properties. Using a case study from northern Spain, the paper suggests that all of these methodological approaches have merit, and that a project benefits from their integration

Pop stars and idolatry: an investigation of the worship of popular music icons, and the music and cult of Prince.

Prince is an artist who integrates elements from the sacred into his work. He uses popular iconography to present himself as an icon of consumer culture, as a deified ‘rock god’ worshipped by his fans, and as a preacher leading his audience like a congregation. His personality cult mixes spirituality and sexuality, and deals with issues of ecstasy and liberation, a transgressional approach that draws both controversy and public interest. This paper investigates Prince’s work and the role of the pop star as an icon within contemporary culture, an icon that contains a physicality and sexuality not present in contemporary western religious traditions. It discusses to what extent popular musical culture operates as a form of religious practice within contemporary western culture, and the implications that this has. The paper investigates the construction of Prince’s public character, his manipulation of the star system, and how he uses popular iconography to blur the distinctions between spirituality and sexuality, the idealised performer and the real world, the sacred and the profane, and the human and the divine. It explores how he possesses and is possessed by the audience, who enter into the hollow vessel he offers up to his fans

Cultural Event Recognition with Visual ConvNets and Temporal Models

This paper presents our contribution to the ChaLearn Challenge 2015 on Cultural Event Classification. The challenge in this task is to automatically classify images from 50 different cultural events. Our solution is based on the combination of visual features extracted from convolutional neural networks with temporal information using a hierarchical classifier scheme. We extract visual features from the last three fully connected layers of both CaffeNet (pretrained with ImageNet) and our fine tuned version for the ChaLearn challenge. We propose a late fusion strategy that trains a separate low-level SVM on each of the extracted neural codes. The class predictions of the low-level SVMs form the input to a higher level SVM, which gives the final event scores. We achieve our best result by adding a temporal refinement step into our classification scheme, which is applied directly to the output of each low-level SVM. Our approach penalizes high classification scores based on visual features when their time stamp does not match well an event-specific temporal distribution learned from the training and validation data. Our system achieved the second best result in the ChaLearn Challenge 2015 on Cultural Event Classification with a mean average precision of 0.767 on the test set.Comment: Initial version of the paper accepted at the CVPR Workshop ChaLearn Looking at People 201

The 'Dark Continent' goes north: an exploration of intercultural theatre practice through Handspring and Sogolon Puppet Companies' production of Tall Horse

This essay explores the complexities of intercultural interaction, specifically in the context of globalization. These interactions involve not only contact with, but also negotiation of cultural representations. The debates about the processes involved in such encounters are complex and highlight tensions among aesthetics, ideology, the ethics of production, voice, and authorship. The essay begins by outlining some of the key debates and issues specifically for theatre; in particular, it looks at the tension between Brook’s transcultural approach to intercultural theatre and Rustom Bharucha’s insistence on contextualized and historicized interactions. These theoretical positions are explored against the specific example of Tall Horse (2005), an intercultural production by the South African Handspring Puppet Company, the Malian Sogolon Puppet Company, a choreographer from Benin, and a scriptwriter from New York. The essay examines both the ideological issues raised in the text and the practical issues of cross-cultural collaboration and interaction to suggest an approach that may mediate between binaries that seem to dominate cultural interaction

Interactive multimedia ethnography: Archiving workflow, interface aesthetics and metadata

Digital heritage archives often lack engaging user interfaces that strike a balance between providing narrative context and affording user interaction and exploration. It seems nevertheless feasible for metadata tagging and a "joined up" workflow to provide a basis for such rich interaction. After outlining relevant research from within and outside the heritage domain, we present our project, FINE (Fluid Interfaces for Narrative Exploration), an effort to develop such a system. Based on content from Wendy James' archive of anthropological research material from the Sudan/Ethiopian borderlands, the FINE project attempts to use structural and thematic metadata to drive exploratory interfaces which link video, images, audio, and text to relevant narrative units. The interfaces also benefit from the temporal and spatial variety of the collection to provide opportunities to discover contrasts and juxtaposition in the material across place and time. © 2012 ACM

Electronic Dance Music in Narrative Film

As a growing number of filmmakers are moving away from the traditional model of orchestral underscoring in favor of a more contemporary approach to film sound, electronic dance music (EDM) is playing an increasingly important role in current soundtrack practice. With a focus on two specific examples, Tom Tykwer’s Run Lola Run (1998) and Darren Aronofsky’s Pi (1998), this essay discusses the possibilities that such a distinctive aesthetics brings to filmmaking, especially with regard to audiovisual rhythm and sonic integration