Measuring Expressive Music Performances: a Performance Science Model using Symbolic Approximation

Music Performance Science (MPS), sometimes termed systematic musicology in Northern Europe, is concerned with designing, testing and applying quantitative measurements to music performances. It has applications in art musics, jazz and other genres. It is least concerned with aesthetic judgements or with ontological considerations of artworks that stand alone from their instantiations in performances. Musicians deliver expressive performances by manipulating multiple, simultaneous variables including, but not limited to: tempo, acceleration and deceleration, dynamics, rates of change of dynamic levels, intonation and articulation. There are significant complexities when handling multivariate music datasets of significant scale. A critical issue in analyzing any types of large datasets is the likelihood of detecting meaningless relationships the more dimensions are included. One possible choice is to create algorithms that address both volume and complexity. Another, and the approach chosen here, is to apply techniques that reduce both the dimensionality and numerosity of the music datasets while assuring the statistical significance of results. This dissertation describes a flexible computational model, based on symbolic approximation of timeseries, that can extract time-related characteristics of music performances to generate performance fingerprints (dissimilarities from an ‘average performance’) to be used for comparative purposes. The model is applied to recordings of Arnold Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment, Opus 47 (1949), having initially been validated on Chopin Mazurkas.1 The results are subsequently used to test hypotheses about evolution in performance styles of the Phantasy since its composition. It is hoped that further research will examine other works and types of music in order to improve this model and make it useful to other music researchers. In addition to its benefits for performance analysis, it is suggested that the model has clear applications at least in music fraud detection, Music Information Retrieval (MIR) and in pedagogical applications for music education

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma

Matchmakers or tastemakers? Platformization of cultural intermediation & social media’s engines for ‘making up taste’

There are long-standing practices and processes that have traditionally mediated between the processes of production and consumption of cultural content. The prominent instances of these are: curating content by identifying and selecting cultural content in order to promote to a particular set of audiences; measuring audience behaviours to construct knowledge about their tastes; and guiding audiences through recommendations from cultural experts. These cultural intermediation processes are currently being transformed, and social media platforms play important roles in this transformation. However, their role is often attributed to the work of users and/or recommendation algorithms. Thus, the processes through which data about users’ taste are aggregated and made ready for algorithmic processing are largely neglected. This study takes this problematic as an important gap in our understanding of social media platforms’ role in the transformation of cultural intermediation. To address this gap, the notion of platformization is used as a theoretical lens to examine the role of users and algorithms as part of social media’s distinct data-based sociotechnical configuration, which is built on the so-called ‘platform-logic’. Based on a set of conceptual ideas and the findings derived through a single case study on a music discovery platform, this thesis developed a framework to explain ‘platformization of cultural intermediation’. This framework outlines how curation, guidance, and measurement processes are ‘plat-formed’ in the course of development and optimisation of a social media platform. This is the main contribution of the thesis. The study also contributes to the literature by developing the concept of social media’s engines for ‘making up taste’. This concept illuminates how social media operate as sociotechnical cultural intermediaries and participates in tastemaking in ways that acquire legitimacy from the long-standing trust in the objectivity of classification, quantification, and measurement processes

General Course Catalog [January-June 2015]

Undergraduate Course Catalog, January-June 2015https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/undergencat/1121/thumbnail.jp

General Course Catalog [July-December 2014]

Undergraduate Course Catalog, July-December 2014https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/undergencat/1120/thumbnail.jp

General Course Catalog [January-June 2016]

Undergraduate Course Catalog, January-June 2016https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/undergencat/1123/thumbnail.jp

Collective Learning Beyond the Cluster

The co-location of industry in agglomerations of similar and related firms is one of the salient features of the contemporary global economy. Over the last thirty years, a large body of theory and case-literature has addressed this phenomenon and sought to understand the advantages that accrue when industries are spatially clustered. Contemporary scholars in this tradition have focused on the advantages of face-toface interaction and the access to spatially sticky information in the form of buzz available to cluster agents. They have further suggested that the development of local conventions and a local idiom facilitate knowledge circulation and collaboration within clusters while perhaps frustrating access to outsiders. The resultant learning views of agglomeration have become dominant within the field of economic geography. In the past decade, however, this dominant view has been challenged by a counterview challenging the idea that physical proximity is neither necessary nor sufficient for economic learning. First, it has been noted that much of the learning that occurs in clusters may actually be organized through various forms temporary proximity. Secondly, it has been argued that knowledge circulates not by virtue of spatial proximity, but through participation in knowledge communities that share a basic epistemological framework and common purpose. These communities may be spatially clustered or may be widely dispersed. The research presented in this dissertation aims to contribute to this debate on the relative importance of physical and relational proximity to processes of economic learning. It does so through a qualitative study of the European Animation Industry and its attempt to build supportive networks and institutions resembling those found in successful geographic clusters, but in the context of a spatially dispersed industry. It demonstrates how through the extensive use of temporary proximity in the form of conferences, market places, and workshops, European animation was able to create a dense social fabric supporting learning and collaboration among firms that were both geographically and culturally distant. The dissertation is developed in three distinct articles written for journal publication. These are followed by Appendix One discussing methodological issue related to the research, Appendix Two providing empirical introduction to European Animation, the object of the dissertation’s case study. They are followed by a brief conclusion discussing the dissertations findings

General Course Catalog [July-December 2015]

Undergraduate Course Catalog, July-December 2015https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/undergencat/1122/thumbnail.jp