The House Detroit Built: House Music In Techno City

Although house music was invented in Chicago, the genre has flourished in Detroit. Legendary DJs like Ken “The Godfather” Collier and Stacey “Hotwaxx” Hale, helped pave the way for generations of house DJs and producers in Detroit, a city more known for producing techno. The genres of techno and house are related but distinct, the work of Detroit producers that worked in both styles proves as a useful case study for making distinctions between the two genres. This work examines the history and current practice of Detroit house music, contrasting it with Detroit techno and Chicago house. Using scholarly literature on house and techno, and consulting a range of print, audio, and visual sources, a focused picture of house in Detroit emerges

Movement: Journey of the Beat

Movement: Journey of the Beat addresses the trajectory and transition of popular culture through the modality of rhythm. It configures fresh narratives and new histories necessary to understand why auditory cultures have become increasingly significant in the digital age. Atomised and mobile technologies, which utilise sonic media through streaming, on-line radio and podcasts, have become ubiquitous in a post-work environment. These sonic media provide not merely the mechanisms of connection but also the contexts for understanding changing formations of both identity and community. This research addresses, through rhythm, how popular music culture, central to changing perceptions of ‘self’ and ‘others’ through patterns of production and consumption, must also be viewed as instrumental in shaping new platforms of communication that have resonance not only through the emergence of new social networks and cultural economies but also in the development of media literacies and pedagogic strategies. The shift to online technologies for cultural production and global consumption, although immersed in leisure practices, more significantly alludes to changing dynamics of power and knowledge. An online ecology represents a significant shift in the role of place and time in creative production and its subsequent access. Popular music invariably provides an entry point and subsequent platform for such shifts and this thesis looks to the rhythms within this popular culture in as much as they encode these transformations. This doctoral research builds on the candidate’s established career as music producer, broadcaster, journalist and teacher to construct an appropriate theoretical framework to indicate how the construction, transmission and consumption of popular music rhythms give an understanding of changing social contexts. The thesis maps the movement of commonly recognised popular rhythms from their places of construction to the spaces of reception within broader political, socio-economic and cultural frameworks. The thesis probes the contribution of place and time in transforming global cultures, via social geography and memory, positioning such changes within readings of mobility, stasis, modernity and technology. By consciously addressing multiple disciplines, from populist to academic, Movement provides evidence of how wider structural changes have become reified within the beat and how in turn rhythm provides an appropriate modality through which change can be negotiated and understood

From Disco to Electronic Music: Following the Evolution of Dance Culture Through Music Genres, Venues, Laws, and Drugs.

Electronic dance music is a genre that has been long in the making. Starting with disco in the 1970s, dance culture genres evolved into house, acid house, techno, garage, 2-step, hardcore, gabba, san frandisco, electro, and many others. This paper studies the transformation of electronic sound, and the contributing/impeding factors involved. Drug use is heavily related to the creation and enjoyment of music, and features prominently in the history of dance culture. Starting with the use of acid in the 1960s and progressing to the use of acid, Quaaludes, poppers, speed in the 1970s, with MDA featured in clubs toward the end of the decade. The 1980s began the recreational use of MDMA, but not until the late 80s in UK acid parties did it become known as the party drug that it is known as today. MDMA use then spread rampantly throughout the US as the UK culture was exported and emulated. UK acid parties were the precursor to raves, which were illegal, and the backlash from the law was incredible and organized. Slowly licensing laws became more relaxed, and permits became easier to obtain, making future raves more legal, but according to ravers, less fun, ending at 2am instead of 8am, and forcing the drugs scene underground, rather than having them openly solicited. Organized crime in the UK got much worse as gangs realized the potential profits of selling drugs, and the scene forever changed because of this in the early 90s. The raves of the early 90s in New York, the Midwest, and San Francisco, were paradise in comparison. San Francisco enjoyed the most freedom, and beach raves became common. The electronic dance culture found a home in large festivals, and perhaps because of this the future of electronic music remains uncertain, especially with the casualties that have recently happened relating to ecstasy use, and complications in organizing such massive events

The employment effects of the acquisition of Indian entrepreneurial firms – a mixed methods study

Despite the growing number of acquisitions of entrepreneurial firms, the evidence of employment change resulting from such acquisitions remains ambiguous. Researchers have primarily relied on econometric models, large datasets of public companies and firm-level characteristics to examine post-acquisition employment change. This thesis seeks to extend the knowledge of acquisition induced employment change in a sample of Indian entrepreneurial firms using a mixed-method approach. It uses a systematic review to identify the gaps in the acquisition literature, followed by a matched-pair regression analysis to examine the short-term employment effects on the acquired firm. In addition, it uses a multiple case study method to investigate the firm and individual level issues that lead to post-acquisition turnover, especially in the top management team. The study makes four contributions to the field of entrepreneurship. Firstly, the systematic literature review highlights the complexity and ambiguity of the empirical evidence on acquisition induced employment change and the lack of coverage of entrepreneurial firms in the literature. Secondly, using quarterly employment data from a novel proprietary database of Indian entrepreneurial firms, the study finds that acquisitions do not lead to short-term employment loss in the acquired entrepreneurial firms vis-à-vis their non-acquired counterparts. Instead, it finds that financial, and related acquisitions lead to short-term employment growth in the acquired firms. Thirdly, the case findings highlight the importance of the integration and human capital strategy in mitigating the post-acquisition employee turnover risk. The findings reinforce the centrality of the top management team in the acquisition of entrepreneurial firms and underline their retention as a necessary precursor to acquisition success. The study also extends the voluntary turnover model by highlighting the issues that lead to the turnover of the top management team in entrepreneurial firms. Finally, through a three-stage framework, the study underlines the importance of temporality in post-acquisition employment change

Creating partly autonomous expressive virtual actors for computer animation

Tese de doutoramento em Tecnologias e Sistemas de InformaçãoAutonomous digital actors represent the next stage in the animation industry in its search for novel processes for authoring character-based animations. In this research, we have conducted a literature review on the art of acting, to obtain an understanding of how apprentice actors learn their skills; this has enabled us to draw up a list of requirements for a proposed autonomous agent architecture for digital actors. The purpose of this was to suggest an improvement in the current technology on digital actors and the way \believable" characters are used by the game and animation industries. Our solution considers three main layers in terms of what skills autonomous actors should display: rst, they should be able to interpret script representations autonomously; second, there is a deliberation phase which aims at implementing an agent architecture to work out suitable ways of enacting the previously interpreted script and third, these enactments are translated into animation commands that are suitable for a given animation engine. We have outlined four versions for this virtual actors' framework, the third of which resulted in a prototype built using the Python language, for evaluation. The nal solution is a prototype that meets the list of requirements that were listed at the outset of the research. Although determining the best process for creating autonomous digital actors remains an open question, we believe that this thesis provides a better understanding of some of its components, and can lead towards the development of the rst fully functional autonomous digital actor.Atores Digitais Autónomos representam o próximo avanço para a indústria da animação, em sua busca por novos processos de autoria de animações baseadas em personagens. Nesta investigação, foi realizada uma revisão de literatura relativamente a arte da atuação cénica, afim de se obter uma melhor compreensão acerca de como atores aprendizes aprendem suas competências; isto nos permitiu produzir uma lista de requisitos para uma arquitetura para agentes autónomos que atuem como atores digitais. O objetivo disto era sugerir melhorias na tecnologia atual de atores digitais e na maneira como personagens \credíveis" são utilizados pelas indústrias de jogos e animações. Nossa solução considera três camadas principais em termos de quais habilidades os atores autónomos deveriam demonstrar: primeiramente, eles deveriam ser capazes de interpretar uma representação abstrata de um roteiro de forma autónoma; a seguir, existe uma etapa de deliberação cujo objetivo é implementar uma arquitetura de agentes para determinar maneiras adequadas de atuação para o roteiro previamente interpretado; e por ultimo, tais atuações são então traduzidas em comandos de animação reconhecíveis por uma dada ferramenta de animação. Foram desenvolvidas quatro versões para este modelo de atores virtuais, sendo que a terceira delas resultou em um protótipo construído na linguagem Python, para avaliação. A solução final é um protótipo que atende a todos os critérios previstos pela lista de requisitos inicialmente proposta por esta investigação. Apesar do fato de que encontrar as melhores práticas de construção de atores digitais autónomos permanecer como uma questão em aberto, acredita-se que esta tese fornece uma melhor compreensão sobre alguns de seus componentes, e com isso aponta caminhos em direção ao desenvolvimento do primeiro ator digital autónomo, plenamente funcional.Santa Catarina State University (UDESC)Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)Centro de Computação Gráfica (CCG

August 25, 1997

The Breeze is the student newspaper of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Virginia

DEMO 16

Alumni newsletter from Spring - Summer 2012 entitled DEMO16. This issue is 52 pages.https://digitalcommons.colum.edu/alumnae_news/1082/thumbnail.jp