On the Nature of Students\u27 Digital Mathematical Performances

In this study I investigate the nature of digital mathematical performances (DMPs) produced by elementary school students (Grades 4-6). A DMP is a multimodal text/narrative (e.g., a video) in which one uses the performance arts to communicate mathematical ideas. I analyze twenty-two DMPs available at the Math + Science Performance Festival in 2008. Assuming a sociocultural/postmodern perspective with emphasis on multimodality, my focus is on the role of the arts and technology in shaping students’ mathematical communication and thinking. Methodologically, I employ qualitative case studies, along with video analysis. I conduct a descriptive analysis of each DMP using Boorstin’s (1990) categories of what makes good films, focusing on surprises, sense-making, emotions, and visceral sensations. I also conduct a cross-case analysis using Boorstin’s categories and the mathematical processes and strands of the Ontario Curriculum. The multimodal nature of DMP is one of its most significant pedagogic attributes. Mathematics is traditionally communicated through print-based texts, but the production of DMPs is an alternative that engages students in conceiving multimodal narratives. The playfulness offers scenarios for students’ collaboration, creativity, and imagination. By making DMPs available online, students share their ideas in a public and social environment, beyond the classrooms. Most of the DMPs only explore Geometry and offer opportunities to experience some surprises, sense-making, emotions, and visceral sensations. The lack of focus on other strands (e.g., Algebra) may be seen as a reflection on what (and how) students are (or not) learning in their classes. The production of conceptual DMPs is a rare event, although I acknowledge that I analyzed only DMPs of the first year of the Festival, that is, students did not have examples or references to produce their DMPs. Some DMPs potentially explore conceptual mathematical surprises, but they appear to have gaps in terms of sense-making. The use of the arts and technologies does not guarantee the mathematical conceptuality of DMPs. This study contributes to mathematics education with an exploratory discussion about how mathematical ideas can be (a) communicated and represented as multimodal texts at the elementary school level and (b) seen through a performance arts lens. The study also points out directions about the pedagogic components for conceiving conceptual DMPs in terms of the performance arts and the components of the Ontario Curriculum

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

Topics in Programming Languages, a Philosophical Analysis through the case of Prolog

[EN]Programming languages seldom find proper anchorage in philosophy of logic, language and science. is more, philosophy of language seems to be restricted to natural languages and linguistics, and even philosophy of logic is rarely framed into programming languages topics. The logic programming paradigm and Prolog are, thus, the most adequate paradigm and programming language to work on this subject, combining natural language processing and linguistics, logic programming and constriction methodology on both algorithms and procedures, on an overall philosophizing declarative status. Not only this, but the dimension of the Fifth Generation Computer system related to strong Al wherein Prolog took a major role. and its historical frame in the very crucial dialectic between procedural and declarative paradigms, structuralist and empiricist biases, serves, in exemplar form, to treat straight ahead philosophy of logic, language and science in the contemporaneous age as well. In recounting Prolog's philosophical, mechanical and algorithmic harbingers, the opportunity is open to various routes. We herein shall exemplify some: - the mechanical-computational background explored by Pascal, Leibniz, Boole, Jacquard, Babbage, Konrad Zuse, until reaching to the ACE (Alan Turing) and EDVAC (von Neumann), offering the backbone in computer architecture, and the work of Turing, Church, Gödel, Kleene, von Neumann, Shannon, and others on computability, in parallel lines, throughly studied in detail, permit us to interpret ahead the evolving realm of programming languages. The proper line from lambda-calculus, to the Algol-family, the declarative and procedural split with the C language and Prolog, and the ensuing branching and programming languages explosion and further delimitation, are thereupon inspected as to relate them with the proper syntax, semantics and philosophical élan of logic programming and Prolog

\u27Space is the Place:\u27 Afrofuturism in Black Popular Music

This dissertation focuses on developing a theory of Afrofuturist music. Afrofuturism is an umbrella term used to describe Black cultural productions that reflect on the African diasporic culture of the past while imagining potential futures, often while appropriating imagery of technology and science-fiction tropes. With the intent of redefining notions of blackness, Afrofuturist artists create alternative historical narratives and speculative future projections. These productions create space that allows the Afrofuturist to discorporately negotiate the limits of Black subjectivity. Poet, activist, and avant-garde musician Sun Ra is credited as the progenitor of Afrofuturism, and his model has since been adapted by subsequent generations of Black artists. Using selections from popular artists Erykah Badu, OutKast, and Janelle Monáe as case studies, I demonstrate how these artists use Afrofuturist speculative thought to inform their music, videos, and overall aesthetic, especially as it relates to style, form, and temporality. Scholarship of Black popular music in general, specifically rap and hip-hop, is typically musicological or ethnomusicological in nature, focusing on extra-musical aspects like history, linguistics, and cultural impact. This project incorporates theoretical analysis so as to bring into sharper relief the complex intertextualities within Black popular music. My methodology melds pre-existing interdisciplinary literature with traditional and non-traditional musical analysis to better analyze unique sonic phenomena employed by Afrofuturist musicians as well as contextualizing these phenomena in what I call “Afrofuturist space.” These analyses demonstrate how future scholarship on Afrofuturist music can remain sensitive to its Afrofuturist context, while expanding theoretical frameworks to better deal with issues of teleology, cyclicity, and interconnected musical narrative in Black popular music

Technology and ontology in electronic music : Mego 1994-present

The Vienna based record label Mego is known for establishing an uncompromising, radically experimental electronic music in the 1990s. This thesis considers the work of various different artists on the label, examining in particular their approaches to technology. The artists discussed appear to share an approach that I describe as pragmatic or experimental, which I contrast with idealist or rational approaches. In the latter, music appears to be understood within the framework of a simplistic model of communication, where technology is seen as a medium that should be transparent, allowing the music to pass unaffected. In the pragmatic approach however, I claim that technology is not seen not as a medium for the communication of ideas, but rather as a source of ideas. Implications follow for the ontology of the music. In the simplistic model of communication, physical sound can be considered merely a representation of something more abstract: musical form conceived by the composer. But if music is materially constructed and based on experimentation with the technology at hand, then the sound should not be considered a representation; there is no preconceived idea for it to be a representation of. This concept, which I refer to as 'literalism', is explored in a number of musical examples, and I link it to a definition of noise

Хмарні технології в освіті: матеріали 6-го семінару CTE 2018

This volume represents the proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Cloud Technologies in Education (CTE 2018), held in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, in December 21, 2018. It comprises 36 contributed papers that were carefully peer-reviewed and selected from 59 submissions. The accepted papers present the state-of-the-art overview of successful cases and provides guidelines for future research. The volume is structured in five parts, each presenting the contributions for a particular workshop track.Цей том представляє матеріали 6-го семінару "Хмарні технології в освіті" (CTE 2018), який відбувся у Кривому Розі, Україна, 21 грудня 2018 р. Він включає 36 доповідей, які були ретельно перевірені та відібрані з 59 подань. Прийняті матеріали представляють сучасний огляд успішних прикладів використання та надають рекомендації щодо майбутніх досліджень. Том складається з п'яти частин, кожна з яких представляє відповідну секцію семінару

Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo

How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new

Skyler and Bliss

Hong Kong remains the backdrop to the science fiction movies of my youth. The city reminds me of my former training in the financial sector. It is a city in which I could have succeeded in finance, but as far as art goes it is a young city, and I am a young artist. A frustration emerges; much like the mould, the artist also had to develop new skills by killing off his former desires and manipulating technology. My new series entitled HONG KONG surface project shows a new direction in my artistic research in which my technique becomes ever simpler, reducing the traces of pixelation until objects appear almost as they were found and photographed. Skyler and Bliss presents tectonic plates based on satellite images of the Arctic. Working in a hot and humid Hong Kong where mushrooms grow ferociously, a city artificially refrigerated by climate control, this series provides a conceptual image of a imaginary typographic map for survival. (Laurent Segretier

User serviceable parts: Practice, technology, sociality and method in live electronic musicking

In live electronic musical research there is a need to confront the interrelationships between the social and the technological in order to understand our music as practice. These interrelationships form a complex and dynamic ecosystem that not only forms the context to, but is constitutive of practice. I interrogate from a variety of perspectives the musical practice that has formed over the course of this research in order to reveal the dispositions towards technology, the social situatedness and the musical approach that underlies my work. By taking a disposition towards musical practice-led research that is non-hierarchical, performative, ecological, phenomenological and pragmatic, I place into wider context compositional and technological decisions, in terms of their relationships to improvising, skill, design, performance and research. This work contributes both new theories of live electronic musical practice and new suggestions for practice-led methods aimed at investigating the interplay of social and material factors in musicking, and at interrogating the disciplinary status of our field vis-a-vis musical and technical disciplines