O modelo integrativo para o espaço semântico da música e um processo educacional musical contemporâneo: a herança científica e criativa de Mikhail Borisovich Ignatyev

The advent of computer technology has led to the creation and development of new forms of teaching musical art. The emergence of music computer technologies (MCT) was the basis for creating both new forms in the educational process and new subjects, the appearance of new disciplines and new educational trends in the system of a contemporary musical education. These new subjects, such as “Musical Informatics,” “Computer Music Creative Work,” “Computer Arrangement and Composition, Sound and Timbre Programming,” “Electronic Musical Instruments” and many others, fully reflect the essence of the changes that have occurred in approaches to the study of music art. This article analyzes the possibility of including an integrative model for the semantic space of music, developed with the participation of the prominent cybernetics, scientist Mikhail Borisovich Ignatyev, in a contemporary musical educational process.O advento da tecnologia da computação levou à criação e ao desenvolvimento de novas formas de ensino da arte musical. O surgimento das tecnologias de computação musical (MCT) foi a base para a criação tanto de novas formas no processo educacional quanto de novos sujeitos, o surgimento de novas disciplinas e novas tendências educacionais no sistema de uma educação musical contemporânea. Esses novos assuntos, como "Informática Musical", "Trabalho Criativo de Música de Computador", "Arranjo e Composição de Computador, Programação de Som e Timbre", "Instrumentos Musicais Eletrônicos" e muitos outros, refletem totalmente a essência das mudanças que ocorreram em abordagens para o estudo da arte musical. Este artigo analisa a possibilidade de incluir um modelo integrativo para o espaço semântico da música, desenvolvido com a participação do destacado cibernético, o cientista Mikhail Borisovich Ignatyev, em um processo educacional musical contemporâneo

Leadership capability of team leaders in construction industry

This research was conducted to identify the important leadership capabilities for Malaysia construction industry team leaders. This research used exploratory sequential mix-method research design which is qualitative followed by quantitative research method. In the qualitative phase, semi-structured in-depth interview was selected and purposive sampling was employed in selecting 15 research participants involving team leaders and Human Resource Managers. Qualitative data was analysed using content and thematic analyses. Quantitative data was collected using survey questionnaire involving 171 randomly selected team leaders as respondents. The data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics consisting of t-test, One-way Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), Pearson Correlation, Multiple Regression and Structured Equation Modeling (SEM). This study found that personal integrity, working within industry, customer focus and quality, communication and interpersonal skill, developing and empowering people and working as a team were needed leadership capabilities among construction industry team leaders. The research was also able to prove that leadership skill is a key element to develop leadership capability. A framework was developed based on the results of this study, which can be used as a guide by employers and relevant agencies in enhancing leadership capability of Malaysia construction industry team leade

Cybernetics in Music

This thesis examines the use of cybernetics (the science of systems) in music, through the tracing of an obscured history. The author postulates that cybernetic music may be thought of as genera of music in its own right, whose practitioners share a common ontology and set of working practices that distinctly differ from traditional approaches to composing electronic music. Ultimately, this critical examination of cybernetics in music provides the framework for a series of original compositions and the foundation of the further study of cybernetic music

Frequency shifting approach towards textual transcription of heartbeat sounds

Auscultation is an approach for diagnosing many cardiovascular problems. Automatic analysis of heartbeat sounds and extraction of its audio features can assist physicians towards diagnosing diseases. Textual transcription allows recording a continuous heart sound stream using a text format which can be stored in very small memory in comparison with other audio formats. In addition, a text-based data allows applying indexing and searching techniques to access to the critical events. Hence, the transcribed heartbeat sounds provides useful information to monitor the behavior of a patient for the long duration of time. This paper proposes a frequency shifting method in order to improve the performance of the transcription. The main objective of this study is to transfer the heartbeat sounds to the music domain. The proposed technique is tested with 100 samples which were recorded from different heart diseases categories. The observed results show that, the proposed shifting method significantly improves the performance of the transcription

Hear After: Matters of Life and Death in David Tudor’s Electronic Music

In David Tudor’s electronic music, home-brew modular devices were carefully connected together to form complex feedback networks wherein all components—including the composer/performer himself—could only partially ‘influence’ one another. Once activated, the very instability of mismatched connections between the components triggered a cascade of signals and signal modulations, so that the work “composed itself,” and took “a life of its own.” Due to this self-producing, perpetuating nature of his works, Tudor insisted on what he called “the view from inside,” focusing more on the internal observation of his devices and sound than in materials external to the immanence of performance. When Tudor passed away in 1996, it became apparent that the sheer lack of resources outside the work—scores, instructions, recordings, texts—had made many of his music impossible to perform in his absence. The works that took a life of their own could not survive their composer’s death partially because of his utter reliance on them to do their work. By connecting often mismatched resources obtained from extended research on Tudor, this paper presents modular observations that seem to offer certain perspectives on the issue of life and death surrounding Tudor’s music. A comparison with developments in systems theory, most notably autopoiesis, outlines a mechanism for the endless life of sounds that compose themselves. Moving out of this theoretical reflection, a fieldwork report of an ongoing attempt to ‘revive’ some of Tudor\u27s works is offered. This report demonstrates the observer shifting from one ‘inside’ to another—from an electronic circuitry inside a particular device, to a network composed of several devices, and further into the activation of a composite instrument. Meandering away from the archives, the composer’s “view from inside” of his electronic devices is set side by side with recent insights of object-oriented ontology. A certain portion of this observation then feeds itself back to the perspective of autopoiesis, while others proceed to extract a distinct notion of ‘life’ out of object-orientation, this time in programming: an indeterminate ‘waiting’ time inherent in each ‘object’ that cannot be computed within a singular universal time. This latency embedded in objects that await activation correlates to the trajectory of the observer who is always in a transit from one ‘inside’ to another, finding different objects on each level of observation, and for whom, therefore, the delineation between life and death is always indeterminate. This view provides further explanation to the operative mechanism of Tudor’s music, wherein mismatched components sought to activate and influence one another, constituting an ‘electronic ecology’ endowed with a life of its own, but filled with partial deaths. The paper thus observes ultimately a parallel between the composer’s trajectory within his performances and that within his life, while attempting to reenact the complex nature of these said trajectories through the meandering manner of its own delivery

BitBox!:A case study interface for teaching real-time adaptive music composition for video games

Real-time adaptive music is now well-established as a popular medium, largely through its use in video game soundtracks. Commercial packages, such as fmod, make freely available the underlying technical methods for use in educational contexts, making adaptive music technologies accessible to students. Writing adaptive music, however, presents a significant learning challenge, not least because it requires a different mode of thought, and tutor and learner may have few mutual points of connection in discovering and understanding the musical drivers, relationships and structures in these works. This article discusses the creation of ‘BitBox!’, a gestural music interface designed to deconstruct and explain the component elements of adaptive composition through interactive play. The interface was displayed at the Dare Protoplay games exposition in Dundee in August 2014. The initial proof-of- concept study proved successful, suggesting possible refinements in design and a broader range of applications

Information Systems in University Learning

The authors of this article are going to bring into light the significance, the place and the role of information systems in the university education process. At the same time they define the objectives and the target group of the subject named Economic Information Systems and state the competence gained by students by studying this subject. Special attention is given to the curriculum to be taught to students and to a suggestive enumeration of a series of economic applications that can be themes for laboratory practice and for students’ dissertation (graduation thesis).Information System, Academic Partnership, Curriculum, General Competence, Specific Competence, Open Systems

Changing Social Focussing in the Development of Jazz Music

This paper traces the development of jazz musical styles by relating those styles to the organization of jazz musicians and the social context of American society. The authors use a theory developed by Flynn and Hay (2012) derived from chaos and complexity science. The Flynn/Hay theory states that social focussing (chaos, complexity or order: SF) is directly proportional to internal structure (differentiation: D) and inversely related to external information (centrality: C). In mathematical terms: SF = D/C.The authors of this paper describe the social focussing of jazz styles in terms of being chaotic, complex or ordered. They then relate the styles of social focussing to the differentiation of the social system of jazz musicians, and the centrality inputs from the surrounding American society. Their results demonstrating that the style of jazz at each period from the late 19th century to the present era, is dependent upon the ratio of d/c.They conclude that the same analysis could be applied to subsystems of the jazz system, including the development of jazz styles in different geographic regions, as well as within each band and even over the career of each musician, in a kind of fractal effect, where the shape of social focussing is the same at each level. &nbsp

Growing cybernetic ears: transduction and performativity in the analogue and digital what have you

At a time when digital technologies have become ubiquitous in music making, and where the majority of research into music technology happens at the computational ‘cutting edge’, this practice-based PhD explores analogue technologies deemed, in the main, obsolete, anachronistic, or as quaint nostalgic throwbacks, and asks how a combination of technological, historical and practice-based research, focused through commitment to artistic outputs in the domain of music technology, might shed new light on the terms analogue and digital, and on the nature of the analogue-digital relationship. Underlying much contemporary enthusiasm for ‘the digital’ are progress narratives that rely on both a succession logic (old analogue technology gets replaced by new digital technology) and an assumption of isomorphism (the digital technology does all the same things as the replaced technology, though often with ‘enhanced’ affordances). This thesis questions such assumptions along historical, philosophical and practice-based trajectories. Key to these research trajectories is the trans-discipline cybernetics, in particular the second-order cybernetics of Gordon Pask, whose self-designation ‘philosophical mechanic’ indicates the importance he placed on a cyclical, mutually accommodating thinking-designing-making. Pask presented a powerful practical methodology for the examination and creation of dynamical systems in flux, systems that evolve as a result of participant interaction, systems that can be seen to manifest self-organisation. Second-order cybernetics puts the emphasis on processes in interaction rather than positing pre-existing objects (including concepts) in a world ‘out there’. Cybernetics helps us to explore systems whose complexity and interdependence precludes the separation out into constituent parts, systems where control is shared across multiple mutually interacting dimensions, and where the observer is a committed participant whose actions, interests and biases cannot be divorced from the interactions therein. Two other key concepts are: (1) transduction, which relates energy, information, patterns of growth, or other dynamical processes across media or between domains; (2) performativity, an interventional act that brings forth a world. Transduction is essential to an understanding of recording studio processes and practices: the microphone, signal processing and recording itself all rely on transduction. When viewed from a performative perspective, actions such as recording are found to be carried out very differently when the final stage of transduction is discrete (the case with the now ubiquitous digital audio workstation) or continuous (such as recording to tape). This difference is primarily due to the hyper-plasticity of digital audio, a taking of sound ‘out of time’. Rather than seeing this as an evolution of ‘precursor’ analogue technologies, as most accounts have it, this thesis takes the perspective that this is a difference in kind, rather than one of degree, and explores that difference with a particular focus on emergent and intertwined cultural, embodied and technological systems, rather than on end products. The second half of the thesis presents the compositional practice, ranging from experimental work on tape music composition and installation, through a series of modular synthesis live performances, to tape-based recording of pop music. The physical, gestural engagement with the resistant materiality of these technologies emphasises a very different cognitive engagement with processes of composition and production to that which happens with supposed ‘successor’ digital technologies; assumptions of isomorphism, buttressed by skeuomorphic emulation, tend to occlude this cognitive distinction. This thesis is offered as an act of cybernetic musicking – resolutely practical in orientation, with a wide-ranging, trans-disciplinary theoretical framework, and with the emphasis not on things but on ongoing processes in complex interaction with a world in constant becoming