Representations of ethnic minorities in China's university media

This paper examines the representation of ethnic minorities in China through a review of campus newspapers, a major print medium in which universities exercise power over the discourse of cultural recognition. Three universities attended by minority students were selected. A two-dimensional mode (content and configuration) is established to analyze ethnic representations. A combination of content analysis and discourse analysis is used to categorize and analyze text and photographs relevant to ethnicity. The study concludes that (1) different discursive practices are employed to construct 'images' of ethnic groups as 'Others' or 'Us'; (2) representations of ethnic minorities and the Han generate three discursive dichotomies between minority and majority: minority groups are distinctive, potentially separatistic, and visible; and the Han people are normative, patriotic, and invisible, respectively; (3) the university media reflects an ideology of 'state multiculturalism' that constructs a reflexive representation of the relationship between majority and minority. © 2010 Taylor & Francis.postprin

Multi-Modal Automatic Prosody Annotation with Contrastive Pretraining of SSWP

In the realm of expressive Text-to-Speech (TTS), explicit prosodic boundaries significantly advance the naturalness and controllability of synthesized speech. While human prosody annotation contributes a lot to the performance, it is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process, often resulting in inconsistent outcomes. Despite the availability of extensive supervised data, the current benchmark model still faces performance setbacks. To address this issue, a two-stage automatic annotation pipeline is novelly proposed in this paper. Specifically, in the first stage, we propose contrastive text-speech pretraining of Speech-Silence and Word-Punctuation (SSWP) pairs. The pretraining procedure hammers at enhancing the prosodic space extracted from joint text-speech space. In the second stage, we build a multi-modal prosody annotator, which consists of pretrained encoders, a straightforward yet effective text-speech feature fusion scheme, and a sequence classifier. Extensive experiments conclusively demonstrate that our proposed method excels at automatically generating prosody annotation and achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance. Furthermore, our novel model has exhibited remarkable resilience when tested with varying amounts of data.Comment: Submitted to ICASSP 202

Timbre-based composition:exploration of drone-overtone singing with reference to Tuvan and Mongolian sonorities and its integration into Western contemporary compositions.

This doctoral research in composition focuses on investigating Tuvan throat singing (khöömei), in comparison with Mongolian throat singing (khöömii) and its application in Western contemporary classical composition. This has been achieved through a survey ofethnomusicology and the inclusion of timbre-centrism in my compositions. The ethnomusicological angle aims to discover exemplary research methods for khöömei bridging the oppositions of outsider (etic) and insider (emic) perspectives. Based on this goal, this research explores two examples of research approaches: an etic approach by A. N. Aksenov and the combination of etic and emic approach by Theodore Levin with Valentina Süzükei. Ultimately, this exploration underlines the importance of combining etic and emic approaches giving priority to emic perspective in the research of khöömei and its integration into experimental compositional practices. Additionally, this research finds that the political changes in Inner Asia have influenced the cultural maintenance transforming the art form and practice of khöömei. This ends up with developing khöömei as state or national art in each state that practises khöömei. This actuality is investigated not only by noticing the dispute over the ownership of khöömei among its holders but also by looking into the stylistic difference between Tuva Republic and Mongolia. However, this research concentrates more on intrinsic personal diversity and creativity of khöömei performance supporting this idea with graphic analyses, which have become an influential vehicle in my music-making process. Finally, an in-depth study of Tuvan aesthetic in music “timbre-centred listening” is undertaken, and then methods of imbuing the sounds of nature into European-style composition are minutely traced.On the compositional side, Tuvan ethnomusicologist Valentina Süzükei’s theory “timbrecentralism” has been tested as a valid musical system for contemporary classical music looking at the potential that hybrid music surmounts cultural appropriation. Various musical experiments with khöömei have been conducted in practical ways based on Tuvan musical aesthetics, new notation and technique applications, interdisciplinary approaches, and becoming a khöömei practitioner myself. Additionally, other ethnic and extended vocal techniques such as the Inuit vocal game katajjaq, vocal fry and "drone-partials vocal technique" (see Pegg 2024 forthcoming for the latter), as Stockhausen demands in his piece Stimmung, have been experimented with by myself and versatile vocalists within my compositions. This practical research is demonstrated in the concert recordings that accompany and should be considered as a part of this portfolio

Chinese and Western elements in contemporary Chinese composer Zhou Long’s works for solo piano Mongolian Folk-Tune Variations, Wu Kui, and Pianogongs

Zhou Long is a Chinese American composer who strives to combine traditional Chinese musical techniques with modern Western compositional ideas. His three piano pieces, "Mongolian Folk-Tune Variations", "Wu Kui", and "Pianogongs" each display his synthesis of Eastern and Western techniques. A brief cultural, social and political review of China throughout Zhou Long's upbringing will provide readers with a historical perspective on the influence of Chinese culture on his works. Study of "Mongolian Folk-Tune Variations" will reveal the composers early attempts at Western structure and harmonic ideas. "Wu Kui" provides evidence of the composer's desire to integrate Chinese cultural ideas with modern and dissonant harmony. Finally, the analysis of "Pianogongs" will provide historical context to the use of traditional Chinese percussion instruments and his integration of these instruments with the piano. Zhou Long comes from an important generation of Chinese composers including, Chen Yi and Tan Dun, that were able to leave China achieve great success with the combination of Eastern and Western ideas. This study will deepen the readers' understanding of the Chinese cultural influences in Zhou Long's piano compositions

UniMorph 4.0:Universal Morphology

The Universal Morphology (UniMorph) project is a collaborative effort providing broad-coverage instantiated normalized morphological inflection tables for hundreds of diverse world languages. The project comprises two major thrusts: a language-independent feature schema for rich morphological annotation and a type-level resource of annotated data in diverse languages realizing that schema. This paper presents the expansions and improvements made on several fronts over the last couple of years (since McCarthy et al. (2020)). Collaborative efforts by numerous linguists have added 67 new languages, including 30 endangered languages. We have implemented several improvements to the extraction pipeline to tackle some issues, e.g. missing gender and macron information. We have also amended the schema to use a hierarchical structure that is needed for morphological phenomena like multiple-argument agreement and case stacking, while adding some missing morphological features to make the schema more inclusive. In light of the last UniMorph release, we also augmented the database with morpheme segmentation for 16 languages. Lastly, this new release makes a push towards inclusion of derivational morphology in UniMorph by enriching the data and annotation schema with instances representing derivational processes from MorphyNet