Beyond the Radif: New Forms of Improvisational Practice in Iranian Music

This essay explores new forms of improvisational practice being developed by Iranian musicians in a tradition where the canonic radif repertoire has been central to improvisational practice for more than a century. I focus on the work of two musicians, Amir Eslami (nei) and Hooshyar Khayam (piano), and discuss pieces from their 2010 album All of You (Hermes Records, Iran). This music takes inspiration from the radif but lies outside the radif tradition and differs in important respects from “traditional” forms of improvisation, not least in the discussions that precede performance and in the discursive foregrounding of compositional thinking by the musicians themselves. I ask what the work of these musicians might tell us about the future direction of creative practice in Iranian classical music

An exergy approach to efficiency evaluation of desalination

This paper presents an evaluation process efficiency based on the consumption of primary energy for all types of practical desalination methods available hitherto. The conventional performance ratio has, thus far, been defined with respect to the consumption of derived energy, such as the electricity or steam, which are susceptible to the conversion losses of power plants and boilers that burned the input primary fuels. As derived energies are usually expressed by the units, either kWh or Joules, these units cannot differentiate the grade of energy supplied to the processes accurately. In this paper, the specific energy consumption is revisited for the efficacy of all large-scale desalination plants. In today's combined production of electricity and desalinated water, accomplished with advanced cogeneration concept, the input exergy of fuels is utilized optimally and efficiently in a temperature cascaded manner. By discerning the exergy destruction successively in the turbines and desalination processes, the relative contribution of primary energy to the processes can be accurately apportioned to the input primary energy. Although efficiency is not a law of thermodynamics, however, a common platform for expressing the figures of merit explicit to the efficacy of desalination processes can be developed meaningfully that has the thermodynamic rigor up to the ideal or thermodynamic limit of seawater desalination for all scientists and engineers to aspire to

Development of a green combat armour from rame-Kevlar-polyester composite

This study was conducted for the development of the green protection garments. For this purpose, laminate composite material was developed from Kevlar 29-ramie-unsaturated polyester resin. The aim of this study was to develop a solid body armour that meets the specific requirements of ballistic resistance. This composite is subjected to high impact loading. The target was shot using gas gun machine that is supported by camera hardware to capture the projectile speed. In order to achieve the goal of the research, several experiments were conducted with the aim to estimate the ballistic limit, maximum energy absorption, composite failure mode, life time rupture, target geometry, and environmental effect. The results of these experiments indicated that the maximum ballistic limit validated at impact speed is in the range of 250 m/s to 656.8 m/s for the second protection level. The targets are improved in term of the impact response with the increase in the relative humidity, i.e. the range of 50% ± 20%, whereas, reduction of resistance results in the increase of temperature. The range of temperatures was between 20°C and 70°C. A limited delamination was generated under multiple shots. Targets geometry plays a major role in increasing the impact response. Hence, the results present a high resistant impact for pairs from the panels with total thickness arrived to 15 mm ± 3 mm. This body armour is one of the most economical armour products, in which common materials are used in its production, particularly to reduce the amount of Kevlar, and this could further lead to a decrease in its production cost. On the other hand, this armour meets the ballistic threats under 623 m/s of 15 mm ± 3 mm target thickness and 837.5 m/s of 25 mm ± 2.mm. Thus, the armour is equivalent to the third level of protective ballistic limits in the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) standards

A computational framework for aesthetical navigation in musical search space

Paper presented at 3rd AISB symposium on computational creativity, AISB 2016, 4-6th April, Sheffield. Abstract. This article addresses aspects of an ongoing project in the generation of artificial Persian (-like) music. Liquid Persian Music software (LPM) is a cellular automata based audio generator. In this paper LPM is discussed from the view point of future potentials of algorithmic composition and creativity. Liquid Persian Music is a creative tool, enabling exploration of emergent audio through new dimensions of music composition. Various configurations of the system produce different voices which resemble musical motives in many respects. Aesthetical measurements are determined by Zipf’s law in an evolutionary environment. Arranging these voices together for producing a musical corpus can be considered as a search problem in the LPM outputs space of musical possibilities. On this account, the issues toward defining the search space for LPM is studied throughout this paper

Fracture toughness of kenaf mat reinforced polyester composite

The fracture behaviour represents the most critical issue in the automotive and aerospace engine fields. Thus, the objective of this study was to estimate and analyze the crack criteria by using the Mathematical laws that were limited in E 1820 standard and the results affirmed by applying the numerical solutions of ANSYS to estimate the fracture toughness value KIC, besides the energy release rate of biomass composite. The specimens were prepared from different percentage of kenaf mat (KM) and unsaturated polyester resin (UP) 20% KM – 80% UP and 40% KM – 60% UP, respectively, as well the other composite properties which were calculated using the stress-strain data. The fracture characterizations of this composite were carried out using the compact tension (CT) specimen that was commonly used to determine Mode-I fracture properties. The fracture toughness has been found to be independent of pre-crack length. Meanwhile, the tests were performed at room temperature. The numerical simulations of the ANSYS model results demonstrated a good agreement between the experiments computed results of the fracture toughness. The fracture toughness KIC of 20% KM – 80% UP and 40% KM – 60% UP was equivalent to 0.76 MPa√m and 2.0 MPa√m, respectively. Thus, the fracture propagation is dependent on the fibre percentage of the composite. On the other hand, there are unlimited mechanisms of crack paths derived from randomly kenaf mat packs, particularly in the frontal process zone of crack tip

The Elephant and the Blind Men: Myth-Making, Musical Tracking and the Creative Process

In the ancient parable of the elephant and the blind men, each man attempts to describe the elephant through feeling a different part of its body - the smooth tusk, the long trunk, the rough skin, and so on - and each reaches a very different understanding of the nature of the animal. Tracking creative processes in music often feels rather like this: each of the methodologies commonly used by scholars working in the various branches of music studies – whether ethnographic, analytical, psychological, and so on - touches on and seems to reveal quite different things about the creative process. In this keynote, I explore some of the themes and issues that have arisen within ethnomusicological studies of musical creativity, through the prism of my own work on Iranian classical music, a tradition in which the performer plays a central creative role and which is therefore usually described as ‘improvised’. I will consider some of the myth-making that surrounds musical creativity in this tradition - and the purpose that such myths serve - as well as exploring the ways in which younger musicians are developing new discursive frameworks for their creative practice. Ultimately, I’m interested in the methodological challenges in bringing together the different parts of the elephant in order to describe and understand creative processes in music more holistically

Vix sibi credere. Appunti per la storia di un topos

A partire dall'episodio odissiaco in cui il protagonista, riportato a Itaca dai Feaci, non riconosce la terra natìa, viene analizzato il motivo del "non credere ai propri occhi" in diversi autori latini come Catullo, Plauto, Seneca e altri