Analysis and resynthesis of polyphonic music

This thesis examines applications of Digital Signal Processing to the analysis, transformation, and resynthesis of musical audio. First I give an overview of the human perception of music. I then examine in detail the requirements for a system that can analyse, transcribe, process, and resynthesise monaural polyphonic music. I then describe and compare the possible hardware and software platforms. After this I describe a prototype hybrid system that attempts to carry out these tasks using a method based on additive synthesis. Next I present results from its application to a variety of musical examples, and critically assess its performance and limitations. I then address these issues in the design of a second system based on Gabor wavelets. I conclude by summarising the research and outlining suggestions for future developments

Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline

Spectatrices: Moviegoing and Women's Writing, 1925-1945

How did cinema influence the many writers who also constituted the first generation of moviegoers? In Spectatrices, I argue that early moviegoing was a rich imaginative reservoir for anglophone writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Coming to cinema from the vantage of the audience, I suggest that women of the 1920s found in moviegoing a practice of experimentation, aesthetic inquiry, and social critique. My project is focused on women writers not only as a means of reclaiming the femininized passivity of the audience, but because moviegoing offered novel opportunities for women to gather publicly. It was, for this reason, a profoundly political endeavor in the first decades of the 20th century. At the movies, writers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf developed concepts of temporary community, alternative desire, and discontinuous form that they then incorporated into their literary practice. Where most scholarship assessing cinema’s influence on literature is governed by the medium-specificity of film, my project emphasizes the public dimension of the movies, the fleeting and semi-anonymous intimacy of the moviegoing audience. In turning to moviegoing, Spectatrices opens new methods of comparison and cross-canonical reorganization, focusing on the weak social ties typified by moviegoing audiences, the libidinal permissiveness of fantasy and diva-worship, the worshipful rhetoric by which some writers transformed the theater into a church, and most significantly, the creation of new public formations for women across different axes of class, gender, and race. In this respect, cinema’s dubious universalism is both an invitation and a problem. Writers from vastly different regional, racial, linguistic, and class contexts were moviegoers, together and apart; but to say they had the same experience is obviously inaccurate. In this project, I draw from historical accounts of moviegoing practices in their specificity to highlight that whereas the mass-distributed moving image held the promise, even the premise, of shared experience, moviegoing was structured by difference. The transatlantic organization of the project is meant to engage and resist this would-be universality, charting cinema’s unprecedented global reach while describing differential scenes and modes of exhibition. Focusing on moviegoing not only permits but requires a new constellation of authors, one that includes English and American, Black and white, wealthy and working class writers alike. Across these axes of difference, women theorized the politics and possibilities of gathering, rethinking the audience as a vital and peculiar social formation

The imagery of travel in British painting : with particular reference to nautical and maritime imagery, circa 1740-1800

The dissertation is divided into two sections, dealing with the positive and negative faces of travel and the sea in visual art, each further subdivided by chapter. Following the introduction, Chapter 2 deals with cartography, providing a broad context for the cultural reception of travel imagery. Chapter 3 discusses Thames imagery. It is argued that the increased interest in the river as a pictorial subject was part of a growing view of London as the metropolis of a grand commercial empire, whereby the Thames was aligned to the construction of the imperial nation. Chapter 4 examines metropolitan contexts for travel and maritime imagery. Conflicts are noticed between the image of navigation as a sign for commerce, and the marginalization of marine artists from polite artistic society. Patterns of patronage also indicate an ideological and actual distancing of the maritime nation from maritime communities. The second section turns to the image of the sea as a negative force in British culture. After an introduction, Chapter 5 examines the problematic depiction of the lower deck sailor, as a contradictory figure in national culture. Chapter 6 looks at how smugglers and wreckers were visualized, as wreckers both of individual ships, and of the larger ship of the commercial state, which assumed markedly political connotations in the 1790s. Chapter 7 considers the slave trade, especially the implications of the absence of imagery dealing positively with such an important component of the maritime nation's prosperity. It is argued that the force of abolitionist images relies upon inversions of pictorial conventions. Chapter 8 examines the wider significance of shipwreck imagery, in relation to shipwreck literature. Discussion of illustrations to Falconer's poem, The Shipwreck, is extended to the wider field of the shipwreck narrative. By providing a vehicle for the expression of native virtues, shipwreck reinforced British identity's being located with the sea, at the same time as it was shown stricken by disaster. The Conclusion considers further how national concerns and values were mediated by the image of maritime disaster. Through a consideration of Loutherbourg's work of the 1790s, it is argued that the aesthetic of the maritime, by being increasingly interleaved with the sublime, permeated a wide variety of imagery. But the naturalization of the nation in the sublimity of the sea represented it continually on the verge of disintegration. For a maritime nation enduring the crises of naval mutiny and continual threat of invasion by sea, this was peculiarly apposite

Genre and Globalization: Working Title Films, the British Romantic Comedy and the Global Film Market

This thesis seeks to better understand the relationship of film genre to globalization through an examination of the use of the British romantic comedy and other related genres by the production company Working Title Films (WTF) from the 1900s through the 2000s. Because of the sudden and unexpected global success of British romantic comedies by Working Title Films such as Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, the 1990s is a significant period for the study of the genre. In this examination the process of globalization is understood as one of complex connectivity postulated by John Tomlinson in Globalization and Culture as ‘the rapidly developing and ever-densening network of interconnections and interdependences that characterize modern social life’. This theory of globalization is used as a methodological framework to understand the complex network of global and local interconnections that has driven the development of Working Title Films over the past twenty five years to becoming one of the most important British production companies in the international film industry. Through a detailed analysis of the practices of development, production, distribution and exhibition by Working Title Films and the Hollywood dominated global film industry, this thesis seeks to understand the function of genre and genre films as cultural products, economic products and meaningful representations in the global market and to better understand Hollywood, mainstream film and cinema as social institution. The analysis in the following chapters serves as evidence to support the central argument of this thesis that the use of genre in the film industry’s production, distribution and exhibition processes of globalization was the critical area for Working Title Films to master in order to produce value as meaningful audience appeal and connectivity to global audiences for on-going economic success