3,540 research outputs found
Indie encounters: exploring indie music socialising in China
Indie music, a genre deeply rooted in rock and punk music, is renowned for its independence from major commercial record labels. It has emerged as a choice for music consumers seeking alternatives to mainstream popular music, catering to a niche music preference. The minority nature of indie music not only provides its lovers with a profound space for individual expression and a sense of collective belonging but also introduces other challenges into their social lives. Recently, the field of music sociology has proposed a more diverse perspective to observe and analyse the intricate role of music for individuals and society. In this context, regarding Chinese indie music lovers with niche music preferences, how their indie music practices integrate into their social lives and how they navigate their niche music tastes have become worthwhile topics of exploration.
Drawing on interviews with 31 Chinese indie music lovers and extensive online ethnography, this thesis investigates how Chinese indie music lovers comprehend and engage with indie music, and how the power of indie music shapes them and their social behaviours.
I employ the theoretical framework of âmusic in actionâ (Hennion, 2001; DeNora, 2011, 2016) and symbolic interactionism (Mead, 1934; Goffman, 1959; Blumer, 1969) to examine the dynamic and multifaceted roles of indie music in the social lives of Chinese indie music lovers. I develop a concept of âmusic socialisingâ to delve into several key aspects of music loversâ social practices. I contend that through various forms of musical activities such as music selection, live music attendance, and digital practices, indie music lovers exhibit strategic and reflexive characteristics in their music practices. These practices actively contribute to constructing and maintaining self and identity, negotiating social ties, and forming and mediating collectivity within a broader social landscape. It is through these processes that the music practices of Chinese indie music lovers are endowed with meanings, thereby shaping their social reality. This thesis presents a rich and nuanced picture of the social experiences of Chinese indie music lovers, uncovering the transformative power of their indie music practices. It presents a compelling argument for the significance of music as a social agency, highlighting the complex interactions between music, individuals, and society. By bridging theoretical insights with rich empirical data, this thesis contributes to our understanding of the socio-cultural dimensions of music, offering fresh perspectives on the role of indie music in contemporary Chinese society
The Sound of Bass Culture(s): Heaviness, Blackness, and Ubiquitous Bass
Bass culture describes the shared affinity for excessive low frequency aesthetics. During the 2000s and 2010s, discussion of the term first emerged within the context of bass-centric Afrodiasporic popular music genres such as hip-hop, EDM, dancehall, and reggaeton. In this thesis, I theorize sonic elements of bass prominence through the concept of heavinessâa multidimensional timbral definition that extends beyond mere prescriptions of lowness and loudness. Historicizing bass centricity, I discuss Jamaican music during the 1950s and â60s where sound system practices contributed to the codification of bass as a sign of Blackness. Looking to the future, I present the concept of ubiquitous bassâthe omnipresence of low-end frequencies now available in the latest developments of portable listening devices. Though a case study of Beats headphones, I argue that increased accessibility of heavy bass in virtual experiences marks a significant shift from established accounts of low-end theory
The Application of Data Analytics Technologies for the Predictive Maintenance of Industrial Facilities in Internet of Things (IoT) Environments
In industrial production environments, the maintenance of equipment has a decisive influence on costs and on the plannability of production capacities. In particular, unplanned failures during production times cause high costs, unplanned downtimes and possibly additional collateral damage. Predictive Maintenance starts here and tries to predict a possible failure and its cause so early that its prevention can be prepared and carried out in time. In order to be able to predict malfunctions and failures, the industrial plant with its characteristics, as well as wear and ageing processes, must be modelled. Such modelling can be done by replicating its physical properties. However, this is very complex and requires enormous expert knowledge about the plant and about wear and ageing processes of each individual component. Neural networks and machine learning make it possible to train such models using data and offer an alternative, especially when very complex and non-linear behaviour is evident.
In order for models to make predictions, as much data as possible about the condition of a plant and its environment and production planning data is needed. In Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) environments, the amount of available data is constantly increasing. Intelligent sensors and highly interconnected production facilities produce a steady stream of data. The sheer volume of data, but also the steady stream in which data is transmitted, place high demands on the data processing systems. If a participating system wants to perform live analyses on the incoming data streams, it must be able to process the incoming data at least as fast as the continuous data stream delivers it. If this is not the case, the system falls further and further behind in processing and thus in its analyses. This also applies to Predictive Maintenance systems, especially if they use complex and computationally intensive machine learning models. If sufficiently scalable hardware resources are available, this may not be a problem at first. However, if this is not the case or if the processing takes place on decentralised units with limited hardware resources (e.g. edge devices), the runtime behaviour and resource requirements of the type of neural network used can become an important criterion.
This thesis addresses Predictive Maintenance systems in IIoT environments using neural networks and Deep Learning, where the runtime behaviour and the resource requirements are relevant. The question is whether it is possible to achieve better runtimes with similarly result quality using a new type of neural network. The focus is on reducing the complexity of the network and improving its parallelisability. Inspired by projects in which complexity was distributed to less complex neural subnetworks by upstream measures, two hypotheses presented in this thesis emerged: a) the distribution of complexity into simpler subnetworks leads to faster processing overall, despite the overhead this creates, and b) if a neural cell has a deeper internal structure, this leads to a less complex network. Within the framework of a qualitative study, an overall impression of Predictive Maintenance applications in IIoT environments using neural networks was developed. Based on the findings, a novel model layout was developed named Sliced Long Short-Term Memory Neural Network (SlicedLSTM). The SlicedLSTM implements the assumptions made in the aforementioned hypotheses in its inner model architecture.
Within the framework of a quantitative study, the runtime behaviour of the SlicedLSTM was compared with that of a reference model in the form of laboratory tests. The study uses synthetically generated data from a NASA project to predict failures of modules of aircraft gas turbines. The dataset contains 1,414 multivariate time series with 104,897 samples of test data and 160,360 samples of training data.
As a result, it could be proven for the specific application and the data used that the SlicedLSTM delivers faster processing times with similar result accuracy and thus clearly outperforms the reference model in this respect. The hypotheses about the influence of complexity in the internal structure of the neuronal cells were confirmed by the study carried out in the context of this thesis
Litigating the Carceral Soundscape
Sound has always been a material issue in prisons, whether it be in connection with sonic surveillance, the âsilent cell,â or the insistence of sound (excessive noise, counter-carceral music making). This article asks: How and when does the carceral soundscape become a litigable issue? Our article opens with a discussion of the challenges involved in attempting to study the sonic ambiance of the penitentiary through the medium of written documents and proposes a methodology of âsensing between the linesâ by way of a solution. It goes on to analyze the âmoral architectureâ at the foundation of the modern prison in an effort to excavate the sonic dimensions of incarceration in the context of a system that was designed with silence at its core. Solitude and silence were presumed to have an âemancipatory effectâ on the prisoner by attuning the carceral subject to âthe inner voice of conscienceâ through forced withdrawal from the distractions of the senses. The next part considers the ways that, despite attempts to manage sound, its insistence has resisted these forms of control. It presents solitary confinement as a crucial site to explore the ways in which enforced silence, as an organizing principle, has undergone several contortions that gave rise to alternative rationales such as âstructured intervention,â yet has persisted. The article then explores how this enduring silence has figured in the contemporary case law, alongside other forms of acoustic violence, such as excessive noise and sonic resistance to the conditions of incarceration on the part of prison inmates (e.g., rapping to beat the rap). While some cases describe the experience of the prison as one of unbearable silence, others describe it as noise without respite. This research highlights the ways that sound in prison has remained an important site of discipline and contestation that reverberates through the case law, yet without being appreciated adequately by the courts. The article concludes with observations about the ways that probing the role of sound in the logic of incarceration can complement litigation efforts that question carceral logics
AI: Limits and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence
The emergence of artificial intelligence has triggered enthusiasm and promise of boundless opportunities as much as uncertainty about its limits. The contributions to this volume explore the limits of AI, describe the necessary conditions for its functionality, reveal its attendant technical and social problems, and present some existing and potential solutions. At the same time, the contributors highlight the societal and attending economic hopes and fears, utopias and dystopias that are associated with the current and future development of artificial intelligence
Of Fears and Bodies in Early Romantic Poetry
This thesis approaches psychophysical expressions of different and changing fears in the Romantic poetry of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This period was chosen because of the immediate and rapid effects of the French Revolution on the formation and perception of the English nation, along with the newfound need to search for meaning that many people felt within a rapidly changing world. The writings of the Romantic poets under question in this thesis, namely William Blake, William Wordsworth, Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Joanna Baillie, and Anne Bannerman, reflect this quest to understand personal and political fears, as well as the coping mechanisms that take fear as a dominant emotion of the times and turn it into a Gothic space for the exploration of personal and political anxieties through Gothic bodies and the interaction between bodies of fear and bodies in fear presented within the spectrum of terror and horror.
More specifically, I will explore the interaction between the self and Gothic bodies of fear in different psychophysical manifestations in a selection of Gothic poetic texts. For these writers, the fears generated through the contact with abject bodies that haunt self and nation can destabilise preconceived ideas of self and society and facilitate healing and re-evaluation. To this end, I will follow contemporary theorisations of varying fears to acknowledge the fact that fear comes in many shapes, degrees, and kinds for these writers, and so do the Gothic bodies that reside in their writings, from Blakeâs horror bodies to the spectral bodies that haunt the poetry of Baillie and Bannerman. The importance of fear as an emotion in this context is related to its strong physical impact and its relevance for the contemporary socio-political arena in matters of personal and political threat, safety and control. This thesis will focus on the various responses of early Romantic writers to these anxieties
Under construction: infrastructure and modern fiction
In this dissertation, I argue that infrastructural development, with its technological promises but widening geographic disparities and social and environmental consequences, informs both the narrative content and aesthetic forms of modernist and contemporary Anglophone fiction. Despite its prevalent material formsâroads, rails, pipes, and wiresâinfrastructure poses particular formal and narrative problems, often receding into the background as mere setting. To address how literary fiction theorizes the experience of infrastructure requires reading âinfrastructurallyâ: that is, paying attention to the seemingly mundane interactions between characters and their built environments. The writers central to this projectâJames Joyce, William Faulkner, Karen Tei Yamashita, and Mohsin Hamidâtake up the representational challenges posed by infrastructure by bringing transit networks, sanitation systems, and electrical grids and the histories of their development and use into the foreground. These writers call attention to the political dimensions of built environments, revealing the ways infrastructures produce, reinforce, and perpetuate racial and socioeconomic fault lines. They also attempt to formalize the material relations of power inscribed by and within infrastructure; the novel itself becomes an imaginary counterpart to the technologies of infrastructure, a form that shapes and constrains what types of social action and affiliation are possible
Subtitling Francophone World Cinema: Narratives of Identity, Alterity and Power in Audiovisual Translation
Cinematic representations of multilingualism raise questions about communication and mutual understanding not only between characters in films but also between films and their audiences, for whom it is typically necessary to facilitate access to foreign dialogues through different forms of translation. Where languages are pitted against one another, however, or juxtaposed in ways that serve to reveal and explore tensions and hierarchies between different linguistic, cultural and social groups, translation becomes entangled in issues of identity, alterity and power. This thesis untangles and explores these complex interactions between languages and translation as they arise in the practice of subtitling. Specifically, it asks questions about how subtitling can play an active part in the shaping of identity by mediating differences between the local, the national and the global, and how subtitles intersect with the relations of power that exist between different cultures. In turn, the thesis exposes the semiotic and narrative dynamics that subtitles add to films and considers the implications of these findings for the ways we think of audiovisual translation and of its relationship with creative processes and accessibility practices.
These questions are considered in the context of multilingualism, not only because issues of language, identity and power relations are inextricably involved in discussions thereof, but because multilingualism is an increasingly common experience for many subtitlers and film audiences alike. This is particularly true of francophone world cinema, from whose corpus the thesis analyses six films across three case studies: Bienvenue chez les Châtis (Dany Boon 2008), Lâesquive (Abdellatif Kechiche 2003), InchâAllah dimanche (Yamina Benguigui 2001), Dheepan (Jacques Audiard 2015), Le grand voyage (IsmaĂ«l Ferroukhi 2004) and Exils (Tony Gatlif 2004). Methodologically, the thesis combines semiotic, narrative, and linguistic analysis of the subtitled audiovisual texts, drawing on a range of perspectives within Audiovisual Translation Studies, Postcolonial Translation Studies, Film Studies, French and Francophone Studies and Cultural Studies
Vibes at the Village Vanguard: Hauntings, History, and the Construction of Jazz Place
There are ghosts that haunt the Village Vanguard. Or at least thatâs what people say.
This dissertation examines the role of the contemporary jazz club as a site of heritage and meaning making in jazz cultures. I take New Yorkâs revered jazz club, the Village Vanguard, as a case study, as it is the subject of many fanciful tales. These stories describe the clubâs history as alive; the spirits of the legendary musicians from a bygone era of jazz who once performed at the Vanguard are said to haunt the present clubâs soundwaves. Often described by writers as the clubâs âvibe,â the Village Vanguardâs history is said to be living and perceptible to musicians and audiences at the club. Discussions of the clubâs vibe in written discourse work to represent the club as a heritage place for jazz. Not merely a monument to a dead tradition, the Village Vanguardâs vibe offers those invested in the jazz tradition a validating place where they can experience a direct encounter with jazz historyâa seemingly unmediated, anachronistic moment of contact between past and present.
This dissertation examines the cyclical relationship between history and the social construction of jazz place. I present an analysis of written discourse from 1957âthe year the Village Vanguard established itself formally as a jazz clubâto the present that reveals how contemporary jazz clubs are represented as spatial realizations of a jazz tradition. As such, these places are infused with power dynamics, including the social, cultural, and aesthetic politics of jazz cultures. This use of history leverages the past to exert control over contemporary jazz place and establishes social structures that are both validating and exclusionary. I combine discourses of (ethno)musicology, popular music studies, and cultural geography to dissect the role of place in current expressions of jazz history and identity. My dissertation, ultimately, reveals how meaning making practices in jazz are spatialized and how the places of jazz participate in processes of jazz politics and identity
Literature, Development, and the Reaches of Literacy, 1979 to the Present
In this study, I examine the twentieth centuryâs vast history of large-scale literacy campaigns and the imprints and legacies of those campaigns in literary texts from the global South. Literary texts by Mahasweta Devi, Nuruddin Farah, J. M. Coetzee, M. G. Vassanji, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and others provide compelling examples of narratives that foreground literacy - particularly its acquisition, loss, or redistribution in the lives, communities, and emerging independent nations in which these narratives take place. The second half of the twentieth century represents a global effort at the realignment of reading, writing, and power. In this moment, the authors at the center of this study restore the nonliterate to the scene of development, globalization, and nationalism. In these postcolonial literacy narratives, both the literate and the nonliterate confront the historical, material, and cultural valences of literacy in their lives - and, through these, both the limits and the power of education
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