It’s not all about the music:online fan communities and collecting Hard Rock Café pins

Previous studies of music fan culture have largely centered on the diverse range of subcultures devoted to particular genres, groups, and stars. Where studies have moved beyond the actual music and examined the fashion, concerts, and collecting ephemera such as vinyl records and posters, they have tended to remain closely allied to notions of subcultural distinction, emphasizing hierarchies of taste. This paper shifts the focus in music fan studies beyond the appreciation of the music and discusses the popular fan practice of collecting souvenir pins produced and sold by the Hard Rock Café (HRC) within a framework of fan tourism. Traveling to and collecting unique pins from locations across the globe creates a fan dialogue that centers on tourism and the collecting practices associated with souvenir consumption. Collectors engage in practices such as blogging, travel writing, and administration that become important indicators of their particular expression of fandom: pin collecting. Membership requires both time and money; recording visits around the world and collecting unique pins from every café builds fans' cultural capital. This indicates an internationalization of popular fandom, with the Internet acting as a connective virtual space between local and national, personal and public physical space. The study of HRC pin collecting and its fan community suggests that HRC enthusiasts are not so because they enjoy rock music or follow any particular artist but due to the physical ephemera that they collect and the places and spaces they visit

Resonances: The sound of performance

It is a hot summer night in August 2013, as the audience gathers near the entrance of the large Gray Hall at the south side of the former coal mine Göttelborn (Germany). The sun has set, and there is only the gray light of dusk in the performance space inside, streaming through the large glass façade, falling onto a small array of stones laid out on the floor. Additional light from a video projector streams over the stones, and a tiny figure of a dancer is seen crawling over rocks, moving in the strange, a-syncopated rhythm of jump cuts. Slowly the sound of rocks scratching against a stone surface begins to be heard, it will remain the only sound for a while, then Japanese instrumentalist Emi Watanabe steps into the empty space with her flute

Vibrating instruments in virtual reality: A cohesive approach to the design of virtual reality musical instruments

This thesis presents the design, implementation and findings of a Virtual Reality Musical Instrument (VRMI). The project was done under the direction of the Sound and Physical Interaction (SOPI) research group. The project was made following an iterative design methodology and the metaphors and design patterns used in Ubiquitous Music Systems. In contrast with the fast adoption of Virtual Reality as a platform for new entertainment productions, it is noticeable that the area of new interfaces for musical expression (NIME) has been disbelieving towards this technology. At the same time, previous projects under the category of VRMI have made a clear distinction between the instrument, an external 3D model, and the user. Thereby, this thesis presents a project that focuses on how VR can enhance individual musical interaction? In order to do so, this project is directed to blurry the lines between performer, instrument and environment by creating immersion through 3D audio, audiovisual feedback, bodily and spatial interaction, the performer and the system's autonomous responses. As a final result, this thesis reaches to provide the NIME community with a purposeful use of Virtual Reality as an interactive musical platform

Building an Ethical Small Group (Chapter 9 of Meeting the Ethical Challenges of Leadership)

This chapter examines ethical leadership in the small-group context. To help create groups that brighten rather than darken the lives of participants, leaders must foster individual ethical accountability among group members, ensure ethical group interaction, avoid moral pitfalls, and establish ethical relationships with other groups. In his metaphor of the leader\u27s light or shadow, Parker Palmer emphasizes that leaders shape the settings or contexts around them. According to Palmer, leaders are people who have an unusual degree of power to create the conditions under which other people must live and move and have their being, conditions that can either be as illuminating as heaven or as shadowy as hell. 1 In this final section of the text, I\u27ll describe some of the ways we can create conditions that illuminate the lives of followers in small-group, organizational, global, and crisis settings. Shedding light means both resisting and exerting influence. We must fend off pressures to engage in unethical behavior while actively seeking to create healthier moral environments

The Physio-Emotional Effects of Audio in the Global Christian Church

Audio, specifically as researched by the film industry specialists, has physical and emotional effects on those exposed to it. These effects follow from manipulation of sound’s characteristics in specific and measurable ways. The responsibility of the Christian is to share the gospel with others and support the kingdom of God with his or her skills. In light of these truths, Christian audio specialists should have a thorough knowledge of the physio-emotional effects of audio. Further, they should not shy away from applying strategies from secular audio research to benefit local churches across the globe

The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Tangible user interfaces : past, present and future directions

In the last two decades, Tangible User Interfaces (TUIs) have emerged as a new interface type that interlinks the digital and physical worlds. Drawing upon users' knowledge and skills of interaction with the real non-digital world, TUIs show a potential to enhance the way in which people interact with and leverage digital information. However, TUI research is still in its infancy and extensive research is required in or- der to fully understand the implications of tangible user interfaces, to develop technologies that further bridge the digital and the physical, and to guide TUI design with empirical knowledge. This paper examines the existing body of work on Tangible User In- terfaces. We start by sketching the history of tangible user interfaces, examining the intellectual origins of this field. We then present TUIs in a broader context, survey application domains, and review frame- works and taxonomies. We also discuss conceptual foundations of TUIs including perspectives from cognitive sciences, phycology, and philoso- phy. Methods and technologies for designing, building, and evaluating TUIs are also addressed. Finally, we discuss the strengths and limita- tions of TUIs and chart directions for future research