MU_PSYC : Algorithmic music composition with a music-psychology enriched genetic algorithm

Recent advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques have impacted the field of algorithmic music composition, and that has been evidenced by live concert performances wherein the audience reportedly often could not tell whether music was composed by machine or by human. Among the various AI techniques, genetic algorithms dominate the field due to their suitability for both creativity and optimization. Many attempts have been made to incorporate rules from traditional music theory to design and automate genetic algorithms. Another popular approach is to incorporate statistical or mathematical measures of fitness. However, these rules and measures are rarely tested for their validity. This thesis is aimed at addressing the above limitation and hence paving the way to advance the field towards composing human-quality music. The basic idea is to look beyond this constrained set of traditional music rules and statistical/mathematical methods towards a more concrete foundation. We look to a field at the intersection of musicology and psychology, referred to as music-psychology. To demonstrate our proposed approach, we implemented a genetic algorithm exclusively using rules found in music-psychology. An online survey was conducted testing the quality of our algorithm’s output compositions. Moreover, algorithm performance was analyzed by experimental study. The initial results are encouraging and warrant further research. The societal implications of our work and other research in the field are also discussed

Uneven Encounters

In Uneven Encounters, Micol Seigel chronicles the exchange of popular culture between Brazil and the United States in the years between the World Wars, and demonstrates how that exchange affected ideas of race and nation in both countries. From Americans interpreting advertisements for Brazilian coffee or dancing the Brazilian maxixe, to Rio musicians embracing the “foreign” qualities of jazz, Seigel traces a lively, cultural back and forth. Along the way, she shows how race and nation for both elites and non-elites are constructed together, and driven by global cultural and intellectual currents as well as local, regional, and national ones. Seigel explores the circulation of images of Brazilian coffee and of maxixe in the United States during the period just after the imperial expansions of the early twentieth century. Exoticist interpretations structured North Americans’ paradoxical sense of themselves as productive “consumer citizens.” Some people, however, could not simply assume the privileges of citizenship. In their struggles against racism, Afro-descended citizens living in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, New York, and Chicago encountered images and notions of each other, and found them useful. Seigel introduces readers to cosmopolitan Afro-Brazilians and African Americans who rarely traveled far from home but who nonetheless absorbed ideas from abroad. She suggests that studies comparing U.S. and Brazilian racial identities as two distinct constructions are misconceived. Racial formation transcends national borders; attempts to understand it must do the same

Urban Variation Through Evolutionary Development: Evolutionary Processes in Design and the Impact of Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithms Generating Urban Form

The extent to which the mathematics of nature can serve as a generative model to design variation of urban form is dependent upon an understanding of the impact of natural systems on phenotypic variation across natural species, and in specific, the role that evolutionary developmental biology has on the application of these processes in an urban context. Through a thorough analysis of the intersection between the three primary fields of urban variation, biology and computation; multiple methods, that are both generative and analytic, are developed with the aim of establishing an efficient, effective and robust modus operandi for the application of biological evolutionary principles in generating urban variation. Utilising urban blocks and superblocks within multiple urban tissues that differ in location, environment and historical context; the research is developed through a progression of 5 key experiments that advance the methods and tools developed for their application in design problems that range in both scale and complexity; demonstrating the advantages of utilising regulatory mechanisms towards generating varied populations of context-specific morphologies that provide for greater diversity between the phenotypic attributes that characterise the urban superblock

The Music Sound

A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music

Ruins and Riots: Transnational Currents in Mexican Cinema

The dissertation examines 1950s, 60s, and 70s Mexican émigré cinema through aesthetic and political strategies that critically reassess national cinematic self-representation. I discuss multiple factors, including film texts, modes of production, immigration policies, historical discourses and cinematic scholarship in order to understand particular shifts in the images of Mexican national identity. While Mexican cinema's "Golden Age" (approx. 1935-55) is characterized by consistent and regularized images of Mexico's nationhood, I argue that the mid-twentieth century texts undermine homogeneous images of its national body. I explore the works of several émigré filmmakers as case studies that demonstrate how intellectual projects and mobile aesthetic strategies are produced from positions of exile. These films give rise to alternative political and social filmmaking practices other than dominant nationalist visual universes. For instance, I show that the films' grotesque and surrealist predilections emerge from different national traditions and act as palimpsests without homogenizing their differences. While these modes utilize divergent intellectual and artistic forms, they simultaneously bring to the forefront tensions and discontinuities among national traditions that cannot be readily reconciled. In so doing, they fragment earlier "Golden Age" figurations of the Mexican people, particularly dominant tropes of rural and urban identities. I illustrate how these national traditions are in dialogue with the transatlantic influences that inform and underlie the émigré films of the era. By exploring their affinities to such avant-garde theoretical traditions as the theater of the absurd and popular European forms such as the Italian western, I contend that these works attempt to redefine national spectacle by seeking to map international practices onto regional mythologies, topographies and institutions. These films undermine myths of the nation-state that saturate Mexican cinema and popular culture, including notions of post-revolutionary popular unity and official modes of historical narration. I argue that mid-twentieth century filmmaking aptly illustrates contradictory political, social, and aesthetic impulses at work in the twentieth-century. In examining this era of filmmaking, I show how it anticipates contemporary Mexican cinema's reliance on exiled and dissident filmmakers (e.g. Guillermo del Toro and Arturo Ripstein) and their migratory artistic practices that participate in twenty-first century cultural and political thinking

This is Irish dance: innovation and tradition in Irish dance teaching and choreography.

PhD ThesisThis thesis explores alternative forms of Irish dance, examining the work of key choreographers who are creating new Irish dance performances which question what Irish dance is and can be. Innovative Irish dance emerges out of a discontent with the competitive, commercial and regulated nature of traditional Irish dance schools and instead, incorporates training in other dance forms, prioritises dance safety and welcomes improvisation as well as student involvement in the classroom and choreography. To examine the development and possibilities of new forms of Irish dance, the thesis draws on, and contributes to cultural geographical scholarship on dance, space and performance, research on folk dance and music, and Irish dance studies. Together these bodies of literature examine questions around tradition, modernity, authenticity, creativity, cultural change in relation to national cultural practices, and Irish dance more specifically. The thesis examines three main themes: i) the context, networks and motivations behind alternative Irish dance; ii) innovative Irish dance choreography, specifically the influences, form and values that shape and are inspired through new forms of Irish dance and; iii) the approaches, challenges and possibilities that arise through teaching Irish dance. I explore these themes geographically through an attention to the sites and spaces of alternative Irish dance, such as the studio, stage and classroom, and scales including the body, local, regional, national and international dimensions. The empirical findings were generated through a practice-based approach that drew on my experience as a former champion Irish dancer. The research has found that for innovative choreographers and teachers, how a dancer’s body moves in learning and performing Irish dance reflects an approach that does not oppose individual creativity and tradition. The authenticity of the movement depends on a respectful return to and innovative reworking of this cultural form

The Music of Sting

The relationship between Stings personal creative style and the multiple musical genres he incorporates is the primary focus of this dissertation. This study exemplifies the diverse influences that have molded Stings music throughout his life. An extensive analysis of Stings compositions and an investigation of the widespread stylist tapestry that is demonstrated in his music are considered. From classical to Brazilian composers, from Caribbean reggae to Anglo-folk, to blues, rock, pop and jazz sources, Stings mines the key elements and essence of various genres and weaves the materials into his highly original and inspired compositions

Wild Music: Ideologies of Exoticism in Two Ukrainian Borderlands

This dissertation presents case studies of two distinct Ukrainian borderland groups: the Crimean Tatars of Crimea, and the Hutsuls of the Carpathian Mountains – two human collectivities that are both, today, Ukrainian by citizenship. Both of these groups also embody dominant stereotypes of otherness in Ukraine – Hutsuls as the ideal Herderian romantic folk, and Crimean Tatars as the menacing, mysterious, “oriental” other. This dissertation traces how historical stereotypes of both of these groups as “wild” have shaped and defined their contemporary expressive cultures, specifically addressing how stereotypes of wildness—or hegemonic conceptions of “otherness”—manifest on the ground within the communities who bear the stigma of such entrenched histories of exoticism. This ethnographic project focuses on music as a medium for challenging and reinforcing ideologies of exoticism, demonstrating how insiders and outsiders in both cases draw upon indigenous musical tropes to express or subvert stereotypes of “wildness.” By analyzing how music energizes social and political agendas for borderland groups such as the Hutsuls and Crimean Tatars, this project emphasizes the copresence of alternate subalterities within the nation-state, demonstrating the degrees to which a post-socialist, diverse and fractured state such as Ukraine is constructed through imaginings of its internal, peripheral Others

National phonography: field recording and sound archiving in Postwar Britain

Vast numbers of historical field recordings are currently being digitised and disseminated online; but what are these field recordings—and how do they resonate today? This thesis addresses these questions by listening to the digitisation of recordings made for a number of ethnographic projects that took place in Britain in the early 1950s. Each project shared a set of logics and practices I call national phonography. Recording technologies were invested with the ability to sound and salvage the nation, but this first involved deciding what the nation was, and what it was supposed to sound like. National phonography was an institutional and technological network; behind the encounter between recordist and recorded lies a complex and variegated mess of cultural politics, microphones, mediality, sonic aesthetics, energy policies, commercial interests, and music formats. The thesis is structured around a series of historical case studies. The first study traces the emergence of Britain’s field recording moment, connecting it to the waning of empire, and focusing on sonic aspects of the 1951 Festival of Britain and the recording policies of national and international folk music organisations. The second study listens to the founding of a sound archive at the University of Edinburgh, also in 1951, asking how sound was used in constructing Scotland as an object of study, stockpiling the nation through the technologies and ideologies of preservation. The third study tracks how the BBC used fieldwork – particularly through its Folk Music and Dialect Recording Scheme (1952-57) – as part of an effort to secure the aural border. The fourth study tells the story of The Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, produced by Alan Lomax while based in Britain and released in 1955. Here, recordings were presented in fragments as nations were written onto long-playing records, and the project is discussed as a museum of voice. The final chapter shifts perspective to the online circulation of these field recordings. It asks what an online sound archive is, hearing how recordings compress multiple agencies which continue to unfold on playback, and exploring the archival silences built into sonic productions of nations. Finally, online archives are considered as heritage sites, raising questions about whose nation is produced by national phonography. This thesis brings together perspectives from sound studies and ethnomusicology; and contributes to conversations on the history of ethnomusicology in Europe, the politics of technology, ontologies of sound archives, and theories of recorded sound and musical nationalisms

How not to return to normal

In a March 2020 article published in Le Monde, Bruno Latour defined the Covid-19 emergency as "the big rehearsal" for the larger disaster to come: one that extends to all forms of life on Earth. The ongoing crisis, in his eyes, becomes both a risk and an opportunity to trial and develop new action plans necessary for the continuation of life. "The pandemic is a portal," wrote author Arundhati Roy a few days later, calling for a more equitable and sustainable post-pandemic future. The pandemic is an opportunity for un-learning and changing direction, particularly in how we approach risk and disaster. The dominant narrative for politicians and the media, however, is one of “returning to normal” as soon as possible, bouncing back, relying on established models of resilience based on the management of economic risk. They are also rehearsing, or modelling, worst- or best-case scenarios. Artists, designers, and institutions are shaping discourses around the growing extinguishment of our resources, but also performing, visualising, simulating and modelling responses to possible risks and imagining resilience differently. Design and art can foster new visions, pilot new modes of communication and knowledge sharing, and drive the interdisciplinary collaborations necessary to address common issues. This panel explores ways in which art and design practices can be mobilized to transform current approaches to risk and disaster in imaginative, sustainable and equitable ways. The papers selected for this session reflect a need to reassess, reframe, and reimagine the roles of museums, art and design, and thus contribute to a space for critical reflection to inform action, strategy, and practices. It is important to remember that our fields are far from immune from being complicit in the creation and reinforcement of the kinds of inequalities and injustices that have been made even more unmistakably clear in the last year: as Sasha Costanza-Shock, author of the book Design Justice, has pointed out, designers are ‘often unwittingly reproducing the existing structure of [...] who's going to benefit the most and who's going to be harmed the most by the tools or the objects or the systems or the buildings or spaces that we're designing.’ The urge to respond in an emergency, whether it's a design challenge in the context of COVID 19 or exhibition on climate change, requires space for critical thinking, inclusive conversation and production. This necessity comes across on the three papers brought together for this panel, and in the opening presentation by Emily Candela and Francesca Cavallo