The Music Relationships of Children Experiencing Homelessness

abstract: Over a million children who attend American public schools experience homelessness every year. This study investigates the musical lives of children experiencing homelessness through the lens of the ecological systems theory (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). Children encounter music in a variety of ways and develop their own lexicon of meaning that depicts the relationships they have in, through, and around music. Relationship connections in this study were depicted through a system of relationship networks (Neal & Neal, 2013). In this study I present and analyze the cases of nine participants who attended an after-school care program at a homeless shelter for families in the southwestern United States. Participants were 8 to 12 years old and represented diverse ethnicities and genders. Data were gathered over a period of two to eight months, depending on participant, via interviews, music and art making, and observations. Research questions in this study included: What are the relationships, as experienced in, through, and around music, in the lives of children experiencing homelessness; and, What do music experiences tell us about the lives of children experiencing homelessness? Some children experienced fractured music relationships and could not continue to engage with music in comparison to their lives before homelessness. Some children continued to make music regularly before and during their shelter stay. A few children discovered new connections through music interactions at the shelter and hoped to engage with music in new ways in their new homes. Multiple children faced barriers to music making in their respective school music programs. Children preferred to engage in music consistent with current popular culture, accessed through the radio, smart phone, and computer. Use of hands-on activities that fostered active engagement engendered the most participation and connection to music. Recommendations include examination of current procedures and practices to ensure alignment with the McKinney-Vento Homeless Act federal mandate, development of a supportive environment to foster social and emotional growth, facilitating communication with parents, and the inclusion of music from the child’s background in the classroom repertoire. Performance and interactive music opportunities can mitigate the effects of homelessness and restore a sense of dignity, relationship, and autonomy. All stakeholders in the wellbeing of children should include conversations about student experience of homelessness in current dialogue on educational policy and practice.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Music Education 201

Ageing Queer Embodiment, Audiences, and Empathy: “Intimate Karaoke” and The Material Conditions of Uterine Concert Hall

My research-creation dissertation asks how performance-based practices impact, affect, and intersect with a gendered, middle-ageing, queer body, how that body provokes, enacts, and personifies, and ultimately how the body is at stake in cisheteropatriarchy. I address representational and material concerns about identity and the status of the queer middle-ageing female body; intersubjective and performative concerns with materiality, practice, and collaboration; audience reception and participation; and my embodied method of performance as research. I do this by examining how I use my body in the sound-based, interactive performance installation Uterine Concert Hall (UCH). I track the development of UCH through its multiple iterations, and the knowledge that was generated through hands-on research and performance, knowledge which would not have been possible through non-practice-based methods. I examine how I use my body within this work as a representational concept and as a material object and observe the effects of particular representational strategies on the audience. I also consider age as it factors into modes of representation as well as how age contributes to the work’s aesthetic production. My thesis addresses a lack of critical engagement with what middle-ageing female bodies mean, how they are represented, and how they are valued in performance art studies and mainstream pop culture. I put UCH in conversation with other artists who use performance-based methods and explicit body practices in their artwork. The goal of this research is to study explicit body performance-based practices and artworks against the backdrop of normative mainstream culture, where the value of female bodies to seduce and reproduce is predicated on youthfulness. Research-creation methodologies that were developed in this dissertation include: “intimate karaoke” as a method of achieving empathy between audience members and between audiences and myself as performer; queer sociality as an affective method of engagement and embodiment to circulate intimacies, vulnerabilities, and empathies through consent; and performative strategies to de-centre essentialist renderings of gender and expectations of what people with uteri are to do under cisheteropatriarchy. How I developed a methodology to perform and stage my body in this work relies on my performance-based experience, which I address throughout my dissertation

Singing in Life's Twilight: Serious Karaoke as Everyday Aging Practice in Urban Japan

Being an avid karaoke singer, I was intrigued to come across what are known in Japan as karaoke classrooms and kissas (a bar/café hybrid), during my periods of fieldwork in Tokyo and Osaka in 2013 and 2016. In my visits to these places, I watched (and participated in) how regulars at these karaoke venues, mostly working-class men and women between 60 to 80 years old, sang over the microphone, and chatted and laughed with each other over drinks. Their vivacity and enthusiasm were far removed from the doom and gloom that characterized many media and academic accounts of elderly life in Japan (Coulmas 2007). To these elderly karaoke participants, music and leisure serve as important cultural resources that allow them to build and maintain identities and lifestyles as they age (Bennett 2012; Koizumi 2013). In this thesis, I explore how and why regular participation in the spaces and activities of the karaoke classroom and kissa enable the elderly participants to attain sense of well-being and ikigai, the commitment and direction which makes life worth living (Mathews 1996). To capture the unique modes of engagement that influence the individual and social aspects of these participants’ karaoke participation, I mobilize the conceptual lenses of “musicking” as constructed by Small (1998) and “serious leisure” as elaborated by Stebbins (2015), in analyzing the data I obtained from the intensive ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2013 and 2016. By detailing the karaoke regulars’ attainment of senses of well-being and ikigai through “serious” musical engagement, I paint a livelier picture of elderly life in urban Japan, by not treating old age simply as a crisis to be solved, but rather a period of life that can be negotiated proactively

E-karaoke learning for gender empowerment in rural India

A folksongs karaoke product has been created to increase usage of subtitled media to enhance literacy and technology use, particularly among girls in rural India. This entails generating and proliferating popular local folksongs with social and cultural themes of interest to girls, accompanied by the award-winning Same Language Subtitling (SLS) feature. In this paper, the prime goal is to discuss possible implications of this novel technology content on girls' socialization, education, and activism. Based on initial findings from a pilot test of this product in schools, private and public in rural India, I propose that this product has the potential to raise literacy among girls through musical enculturation and entertainment in rural India. By linking folksongs to computers, I argue that this association can shape, transform and/or (re)configure spaces for/by girls in rural India through interaction with technology in ways meaningful to them. Thereby, I problematize the transposition of "western" perspectives of gender and technology onto the rural terrain as understood within a development discourse

Motivational and demotivational factors, as well as identifying prominent strategies for adult English learners of the educational entity Fundación Intercultura Bogotá. D.C.

El presente estudio de investigación tiene como propósito determinar los factores que estimulan el aprendizaje en inglés para identificar estrategias comunicativas de interés para los estudiantes de la institución educativa Fundación Intercultura en Bogotá. A partir de su involucramiento, y de las relaciones que existen en correspondencia con la identificación de la motivación, enfatizando los factores intrínsecos, extrínsecos y distractores, se utilizaron los elementos principales para proponer un estudio que permitiera analizar y reflexionar sobre cómo resaltar el interés en las clases de inglés, así como formular una metodología y hacer recomendaciones. La investigadora Bilbao, C. (2017), destaca y reafirma lo postulado por otros autores respecto a la influencia de los factores motivacionales en el desarrollo de los currículos escolares y universitarios ya que tanto los docentes como los estudiantes de inglés están capacitados en el manejo de competencias. Está en línea con lo que se pretende reducir los impactos negativos de las emociones en el aprendizaje del inglés. En consecuencia, los docentes deben tomar conciencia del manejo de las emociones positivas para fortalecer la motivación en las clases de inglés. Deben promoverlos con didácticas y actividades diseñadas de acuerdo con los intereses y estilos de aprendizaje de los estudiantes para que los resultados de aprendizaje sean más efectivos. Esto nos permitirá transmitir recomendaciones para fortalecer el uso de las herramientas TIC para demostrar las ventajas que ofrecen a los estudiantes y docentes. Finalmente, serán conscientes de que los docentes pueden mejorar sus estrategias didácticas y pedagógicas. Palabras clave: Motivación, estrategias, aprendizaje, herramientas TIC, desmotivación.This exploratory study aims to identify communicative strategies of interest to the students of Fundación Intercultura in Bogota that stimulate learning in English. Based on their involvement and the relationships between them, emphasizing intrinsic, extrinsic, and distracting factors, the main elements were used to suggest a study that would analyze and reflect on how to raise interest in English classes, formulate a methodology, and make recommendations. The researcher Bilbao, C. (2017) highlights and reaffirms what has been postulated by other authors regarding the influence of motivational factors in the development of school and university curricula since both teachers and students of English are trained in managing competitions. She is in line with what is intended to reduce the negative impacts of emotions on learning English. Consequently, teachers must become aware of managing positive emotions to strengthen motivation in English classes. They must promote them with didactics and activities designed according to the interests and learning styles of the students so that the learning results are more effective. This allows us to transmit recommendations to strengthen the use of ICT tools to demonstrate the advantages they offer to students and teachers. Finally, they will be aware that teachers can improve their didactic and pedagogical strategies. Keywords: Motivation, demotivation, strategies, adult learning, ICT tools

Media masters and grassroot art 2.0 on Youtube

Communication in the Web 2.0 context mainly works through images. The online video platform YouTube uses this form of visual communication and makes art forms of Western societies visible through their online videos. YouTube, as cultural reservoir and visual archive of moving images, accommodates the whole range of visualising creative processes – from artistic finger exercises to fine arts. A general characteristic of YouTube is the publishing of small everyday gestures of the ‘big ones’ (politicians, stars), like small incidents and their clumsiness in everyday actions, e.g. Beyonce´s fall from the stage or Tom Cruise’s demonic pro-scientology interview. Through their viral distribution on different platforms, these incidents will never be covered up or disappear from the public view. At the same time big gestures and star images are replicated and sometimes reinterpreted by the ‘small people’ who present themselves in the poses and attitudes of the stars. Generally, a coexistence of different perspectives is possible. YouTube allows polysemic and polyvalent views on the everyday and media phenomena. This article relies on YouTube research 2 that started in 2006 at the New Media Department of the Goethe University of Frankfurt. The results of the research have already presented representative forms and basic patterns, that is to say, categories for the clips appearing here. These kinds of clips, recurring in the observation period, have an impact on the basic representation of art or artistic expression within moving images on this platform. Methodologically the focus leads to the investigation (which has to be adequate to the specifics of the medium, or ‘media adequate’) of new visual structures and forms which can create – consciously or unconsciously – an art form. After focusing on the media structures, it will be discussed whether any and, if so, which ‘authentic’ new forms were developed solely on YouTube and whether these forms are innovative and can be characterised as avant-garde. This article first takes a small step in evaluating how to get from a general communication through means of visuality in web 2.0, an often endless chatty cheesy visual noise 3 – to the special quality of a consciously created aesthetic. From where do innovative aesthetic forms emerge, related to their media structures? 4 Are they the products of ‘media amateurs’ 5 or do we have to find new specifications and descriptions for the producers? The definition of a ‘media amateur’ describes technically interested private individuals who acquire and develop technology before commercial use of the technology is even recognisable. Just as artists are developing their own techniques, according to Dieter Daniels, media amateurs are autodidacts who invent techniques, rather than just acquire knowledge about them (see for example the demo scene, the machinima, brickfilm producers as well as many areas of computer gaming in general 6). The media amateur directly intervenes in the production processes of the medium and does not just simply use the medium. What is fascinating is the media amateur’s process of self education – not the result – and the direct impact on the internal structure and the control of the medium. 7 Media amateurs open a previously culturally unformed space of experience. This only partially applies to most of the YouTube clips in the realms of the visual arts; it is here most important to look at the visual content. This article discusses all these concepts and introduces new descriptions for the different forms of production: the technically oriented media master, the do-it-yourselfer, the tinkerer, the amateur handicraftsman and the inventor. It outlines a basic research project on ‘visual media culture’ (a triangulation of research on media structure and iconography) of the presented online video platform. It is a product of the analysis of clips focusing on the media structure, analyzing the creative handling of images and the deviations and differences of pre-set media formats and stereotypes

Using sound to understand protein sequence data:New sonification algorithms for protein sequences and multiple sequence alignments

Funding: This work was supported by the UKRI Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) grant number BB/M010996/1.Background The use of sound to represent sequence data – sonification – has great potential as an alternative and complement to visual representation, exploiting features of human psychoacoustic intuitions to convey nuance more effectively. We have created five parameter-mapping sonification algorithms that aim to improve knowledge discovery from protein sequences and small protein multiple sequence alignments. For two of these algorithms, we investigated their effectiveness at conveying information. To do this we focussed on subjective assessments of user experience. This entailed a focus group session and survey research by questionnaire of individuals engaged in bioinformatics research. Results For single protein sequences, the success of our sonifications for conveying features was supported by both the survey and focus group findings. For protein multiple sequence alignments, there was limited evidence that the sonifications successfully conveyed information. Additional work is required to identify effective algorithms to render multiple sequence alignment sonification useful to researchers. Feedback from both our survey and focus groups suggests future directions for sonification of multiple alignments: animated visualisation indicating the column in the multiple alignment as the sonification progresses, user control of sequence navigation, and customisation of the sound parameters. Conclusions Sonification approaches undertaken in this work have shown some success in conveying information from protein sequence data. Feedback points out future directions to build on the sonification approaches outlined in this paper. The effectiveness assessment process implemented in this work proved useful, giving detailed feedback and key approaches for improvement based on end-user input. The uptake of similar user experience focussed effectiveness assessments could also help with other areas of bioinformatics, for example in visualisation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Creating Culturally Relevant Techonological Operas in an Urban School

The project described in this study developed due to the gap in achievement between African-American and white students. As music teacher I noticed my urban students could rap all the words of popular songs. Therefore I incorporated the use of technology with an authentic need to learn reading, writing, and lyric development for science and history content within a hip-hop opera . This study details the instructional sequence, in which students watched musical performances, learned songs with a karaoke machine, and wrote new lyrics for the songs based on history and science material. I combined the students\u27 lyrics into new versions of the songs, which they then learned and performed within a dramatic opera. The mixed method research study, conducted in grade 2 through 6 music classes, addressed three questions: How does the learning process differ between culturally relevant hip-hop operas and culturally non-relevant operas? What do children who create culturally relevant hip-hop operas learn about history and science content compared to an opera utilizing music from outside the students\u27 culture? How does creating a culturally relevant hip-hop opera impact students? desire to learn science and history? A case study revealed that both culturally relevant and non-relevant operas could sustain students\u27 involvement in history and science, but students were more eager to participate in instruction utilizing culturally relevant melodies. The quantitative analysis was limited by small numbers of participants with complete data, but some results were obtained. Learning outcome measures revealed gains on basic understanding of some history and science topics embedded in opera-based instruction, but the cultural relevance of the music did not impact the learning outcomes. A follow-up analysis revealed that involving the students in composition of lyrics based on any musical text, culturally relevant or non-relevant, led to greater learning gains than having students learn and perform texts written by the teacher. Analysis of interview results showed that some students increased their desire to learn history and science in school because of the opera instruction. The importance of research such as this aimed at improving urban education is stressed, and suggestions for further research are made