424 research outputs found

    'A hidden art form' the value of sound in UK television idents (1982-2022)

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    Television idents are hidden in plain sight. Their creativity is often undervalued by industry practitioners and viewers alike, designated a ‘hidden art form’ by creative executive Charlie Mawer (2020). The sound worlds of idents are doubly overlooked, often ignored in visually-centric discourse on idents in industry journals and in media and cultural studies. In the production process, composers are often peripheral to the project, involved only towards the end. This thesis inverts such hierarchies and adopts a sound-oriented perspective towards idents. The approach brings together previously disparate strands across musicology, art and design history, and media studies, aiming to highlight the value of sound in idents as well as the hitherto-neglected creative labour of composers in the promotion of television channels. The scope is confined mainly to the UK, examining idents produced for broadcasters and streaming platforms between 1982 and 2022. This thesis addresses a central question: What is the value of music and sound in television idents? To answer this question, it combines textual analyses of idents with evidence from practitioner interviews. Musicological concepts and theories are employed in the analysis of idents, highlighting the aesthetic character and functions of the music and sounds. The method of reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) applied to the interviews produced new insights into the working environments of the composers and their creative colleagues, exploring themes of identity, collaboration, creative process, and artistic value. The first three chapters set out the aim of this thesis, academic contexts, and methodological approach respectively. Chapter 4 contains a musicological analysis of idents, tracing transformations in the aesthetic character and roles of sound in connection with the changing experience of watching television between 1982 and 2022. Chapter 5 expands on the arguments set out in Chapter 4 by focussing on production contexts, unpacking themes derived from the qualitative analysis of the interviews. Chapter 6 synthesises the conclusions and findings from Chapters 4 and 5 and discusses the commercial, artistic, and cultural value of the music and sound of idents. This thesis culminates with an exploration of future avenues of research and the implications of this research for practitioners and educators. In sum, this thesis argues that the artistic labour of ident production and the valuable role of musical creativity within this commercial and temporally constraining context deserve greater recognition and attention

    Aging Experiments: Futures and Fantasies of Old Age

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    The sustained expansion of the life span and the attendant demographic changes in the West have fuelled the production of cultural texts that explore alternative representations of aging and old age. The contributors to this volume show how artists in science-fiction, fantasy and the avant-garde develop visions of late life transformation, improvisation and adaptation to new circumstances. The studies particularly focus on perspectives on aging that challenge the predominant narratives of decline as well as fantasies of eternal youth, as defined by neoliberal notions of health, able-bodiedness, agency, self-improvement, progress, plasticity and productivity

    The Ephemeral City : Songs for the Ghost Quarters

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    The towers of the Stockholm skyline twine with radio transmissions, flying out over the city, drifting down through the streets and sinking into the underground telephone system below. Stockholm has buildings that have been there for centuries, but is also full of modern and contemporary architectures, all jostling for their place in parallel collective memory. In taking the city up as a subject, this artistic PhD project in music expands allegories to these architectural instruments into the world of the mechanical and the electrical. By taking up and transforming the materials of the cityscape, this project spins ephemeral cities more subtle than the colossal forces transforming the cityscape. The aim is to empower urban dwellers with another kind of ownership of their city.The materials in the project are drawn around themes of urban memory and transformation, psychogeography and the ghosts of the imagined city. There are three questions the artistic works of this project reflect on and address. The first is about the ability of city-dwellers to regain or create some sense of place, history or belonging through the power of their imaginations. The second reflects on the possibility for imagined alternatives to re-empower a sense of place for the people who encounter them. The third seeks out the points where stories, memories, or alternative futures are collective, at what point are they wholly individual, and how the interplay between them plays out in listening.There is an improvisatory practice in how we relate to urban environments: an ever-transforming inter-play between the animate and inanimate. Each individual draws phantoms of memory and imagination onto the cityscape, and this yields subtle ways people can be empowered in their surroundings. The artistic works of this project are made to illuminate those subtleties, centering around a group of compositions, improvisations, artistic collaborations and sound installations in music and sound, utilizing modular synthesizers, field recordings, pipe organs, multi-channel settings; PureData and SuperCollider programs, string ensembles with hurdy-gurdy and nyckelharpa or violin, and sound installations. This choice of instruments is as an allegory to the architecture of Stockholm. The final result is a collection of music and sound works, made to illuminate the imagined city. Taken as a whole, the works of the project create an imaginary city–The Ephemeral City–in order to argue that this evocation of ephemeral space is a way to empower urban dwellers through force of imagination, immune to the vast forces tearing through the fabric of Stockholm life by virtue of the ghostly, transitory and mercurial, as compelling to the inner eye as brick and mortar to the outer life

    Exploring Animal Behavior Through Sound: Volume 1

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    This open-access book empowers its readers to explore the acoustic world of animals. By listening to the sounds of nature, we can study animal behavior, distribution, and demographics; their habitat characteristics and needs; and the effects of noise. Sound recording is an efficient and affordable tool, independent of daylight and weather; and recorders may be left in place for many months at a time, continuously collecting data on animals and their environment. This book builds the skills and knowledge necessary to collect and interpret acoustic data from terrestrial and marine environments. Beginning with a history of sound recording, the chapters provide an overview of off-the-shelf recording equipment and analysis tools (including automated signal detectors and statistical methods); audiometric methods; acoustic terminology, quantities, and units; sound propagation in air and under water; soundscapes of terrestrial and marine habitats; animal acoustic and vibrational communication; echolocation; and the effects of noise. This book will be useful to students and researchers of animal ecology who wish to add acoustics to their toolbox, as well as to environmental managers in industry and government

    Music at Central Washington University With Emphasis on the Years 1891-2000

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    This history deals primarily with the period before the year 2000. Only four professors on current faculty predate 2000. Most of those four are scheduled to retire by 2025. I trust one or more are willing to write a detailed history of their years at Central. Other than the bound and on-line books of concert programs there is very little available information after 1998. They must rely primarily on memory. It is very difficult to write anything about CWU Music in this century because so little written documentation is available. (See ”Sources”) Former Director of Bands Larry Gookin is retired and living in Ellensburg. Who better than Gookin and these few professors to chronicle their many years of combined experience

    Contingent Encounters

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    Contingent Encounters offers a sustained comparative study of improvisation as it appears between music and everyday life. Drawing on work in musicology, cultural studies, and critical improvisation studies, as well as his own performing experience, Dan DiPiero argues that comparing improvisation across domains calls into question how improvisation is typically recognized. By comparing the music of Eric Dolphy, Norwegian free improvisers, Mr. K, and the Ingrid Laubrock/Kris Davis duo with improvised activities in everyday life (such as walking, baking, working, and listening), DiPiero concludes that improvisation appears as a function of any encounter between subjects, objects, and environments. Bringing contingency into conversation with the utopian strain of critical improvisation studies, DiPiero shows how particular social investments cause improvisation to be associated with relative freedom, risk-taking, and unpredictability in both scholarship and public discourse. Taking seriously the claim that improvisation is the same thing as living, Contingent Encounters overturns long-standing assumptions about the aesthetic and political implications of this notoriously slippery term

    Social convergence in times of spatial distancing: The rRole of music during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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    Principled methods for mixtures processing

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    This document is my thesis for getting the habilitation à diriger des recherches, which is the french diploma that is required to fully supervise Ph.D. students. It summarizes the research I did in the last 15 years and also provides the short­term research directions and applications I want to investigate. Regarding my past research, I first describe the work I did on probabilistic audio modeling, including the separation of Gaussian and α­stable stochastic processes. Then, I mention my work on deep learning applied to audio, which rapidly turned into a large effort for community service. Finally, I present my contributions in machine learning, with some works on hardware compressed sensing and probabilistic generative models.My research programme involves a theoretical part that revolves around probabilistic machine learning, and an applied part that concerns the processing of time series arising in both audio and life sciences
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