Saving New Sounds

"Over seventy-five million Americans listen to podcasts every month, and the average weekly listener spends over six hours tuning into podcasts from the more than thirty million podcast episodes currently available. Yet despite the excitement over podcasting, the sounds of podcasting’s nascent history are vulnerable and they remain mystifyingly difficult to research and preserve. Podcast feeds end abruptly, cease to be maintained, or become housed in proprietary databases, which are difficult to search with any rigor. Podcasts might seem to be highly available everywhere, but it’s necessary to preserve and analyze these resources now, or scholars will find themselves writing, researching, and thinking about a past they can’t fully see or hear. This collection gathers the expertise of leading and emerging scholars in podcasting and digital audio in order to take stock of podcasting’s recent history and imagine future directions for the format. Essays trace some of the less amplified histories of the format and offer discussions of some of the hurdles podcasting faces nearly twenty years into its existence. Using their experiences building and using the PodcastRE database—one of the largest publicly accessible databases for searching and researching podcasts—the volume editors and contributors reflect on how they, as media historians and cultural researchers, can best preserve podcasting’s booming audio cultures and the countless voices and perspectives podcasting adds to our collective soundscape.

Unmute This: Circulation, Sociality, and Sound in Viral Media

Cats at keyboards. Dancing hamsters. Giggling babies and dancing flashmobs. A bi-colored dress. Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video. Over the final decade of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, these and countless other examples of digital audiovisual phenomena have been collectively adjectivally described through a biological metaphor that suggests the speed and ubiquity of their circulation—“viral.” This circulation has been facilitated by the internet, and has often been understood as a product of the web’s celebrated capacities for democratic amateur creation, its facilitation of unmediated connection and sharing practices. In this dissertation, I suggest that participation in such phenomena—the production, watching, listening to, circulation, or “sharing” of such objects—has constituted a significant site of twenty-first-century musical practice. Borrowing and adapting Christopher Small’s influential 1998 coinage, I theorize these strands of practice as viral musicking. While scholarship on viral media has tended to center on visual parameters, rendering such phenomena silent, the term “viral musicking” seeks to draw media theory metaphors of voice and listening into dialogue with musicology, precisely at the intersection of audiovisual objects which are played, heard, listened to. The project’s methodology comprises a sonically attuned media archeology, grounded in close readings of internet artifacts and practices; this sonic attunement is afforded through musicological methods, including analyses of genre, aesthetics, and style, discourse analysis, and twenty-first-century reception (micro)histories across a dynamic media assemblage. By analyzing particular ecosystems of platforms, behavior, and devices across the first decades of the twenty-first century, I chart a trajectory in which unpredictable virtual landscapes were tamed into entrenched channels and pathways, enabling a capacious “virality” comprising disparate phenomena from simple looping animations to the surprise release of Beyoncé’s 2013 album. Alongside this narrative, I challenge utopian claims of Web 2.0’s digital democratization by explicating the iterative processes through which material, work, and labor were co-opted from amateur content creators and leveraged for the profit of established media and corporate entities. “Unmute This” articulates two main arguments. First, that virality reified as a concept and set of dynamic-but-predictable processes over the course of the first decades of the twenty-first century; this dissertation charts a cartography of chaos to control, a heterogeneous digital landscape funneled into predictable channels and pathways etched ever more firmly and deeply across the 2010s. Second, that analyzing the musicality of viral objects, attending to the musical and sonic parameters of virally-circulating phenomena, and thinking of viral participation as an extension of musical behavior provide a productive framework for understanding the affective, generic, and social aspects of twenty-first-century virality. The five chapters of the dissertation present analyses of a series of viral objects, arranged roughly chronologically from the turn of the twenty-first century to the middle of the 2010s. The first chapter examines the loops of animated phenomena from The Dancing Baby to Hampster Dance and the Badgers animation; the second moves from loops to musicalization, considering remixing approaches to the so-called “Bus Uncle” and “Bed Intruder” videos. The third chapter also deals with viral remixing, centering around Rebecca Black’s “Friday” video, while the fourth chapter analyzes “unmute this” video posts in the context of the mid-2010s social media platform assemblage. The final chapter presents the 2013 surprise release of Beyoncé’s self-titled visual album as an apotheosis to the viral narratives that precede it—a claim that is briefly interrogated in the dissertation’s epilogue

Scenarios for collaborative architectures for monetizing broadcast archive clips

Broadcasters own huge assets in form of audio-visual archives or licensing rights for content from 3 rd parties. A few public broadcasters grant free access to their consumer of their own produced content. Another trend is social media networks, where consumers are exchanging selected clips as form of digital goods on the Internet. Within the scope of this paper we especially focus on the investigation of this scenario, and research the business opportunities as well as the underlying potential digital platform for exchanging that can be utilized for exchanging digital clips and monetizing these as digital goods. However, the main focus will be on the presentation of the scenarios and the architecture to support the exchange of digital goods in a social media setting. © 2011 ACM

James Ensor, Paul Haesaerts and Cinéma Critique in 'Masques et Visages de James Ensor' (1952) and 'Moi, Ensor' (1972)

Late nineteenth-century artist James Ensor proved to be a beloved subject for Belgian filmmakers such as Charles Dekeukeleire, Henri Storck, André Cauvin, and Luc de Heusch, who contributed to a veritable boom of mid-century high-quality experimental art documentaries. Highly aware of the power of modern media himself, Ensor showed a great interest in film as well, and he often got involved in the production of documentaries on his artworks. Notwithstanding the significance of the cinematic explorations of his oeuvre, hitherto the interconnections between Ensor’s artistry and cinema have never been substantially investigated. Aiming to remedy this overlooked intersection of art and film, this article focuses on the representation of Ensor in the oeuvre of leading art historian-cum-filmmaker Paul Haesaerts. Following his concept of cinéma critique, Haesaerts’s exceptional 1952 film Masques et visages de James Ensor is a brilliant piece of art analysis. It self-consciously touches upon the ontological boundaries between Ensor’s visual arts and cinema as it wavers between stillness and movement, and between pictorial surface and cinematic space. Drawing on press articles, original archival research, and textual and film analysis, this article investigates how Haesaerts creates a specific cinematic syntax to analyze the formal elements of Ensor’s paintings. In addition, it takes Masques et visages de James Ensor as a starting point for discussions on broader themes concerning the Ensor scholarship, such as Ensor’s affinities with Belgian cinema; the convergence of Ensor’s pictorial strategies and cinematography; and the impact of experimental art documentaries on the reception of Ensor’s work by both filmmakers and art critics

Critical Analysis and Evaluation of Interactive and Customised Applications on Mobile Television. Interactive and Customised Mobile Television Applications are Evaluated Using the Views of Consumers, Advertisers, and Telecommunications Operators with Regard to Services and Also Assessing the Usability of Mobile Devices.

The shift of media from traditional forms to new digital ones has raised the possibility of new kinds of media services, including mobile television. In today¿s communications market, mobile phones are of increasing importance to users and, since mobile devices are connected most of the time, they have a high degree of location independence. The availability of 3G technology and the mobile devices needed to implement mobile television are now established and available. Mobile television is expected to be an important new service that could penetrate the market place and provide new applications, as well as create a market for new players and new investments, if the appropriate price, content and philosophy for content design are found. This research explores the many potential application areas for mobile TV, with a particular focus on advertising. Various organisations that seek success in this market can utilise the potential for advertising on mobile TV. Ultimately, mobile device users are able to use mobile TV for entertainment and information sourcing. However, a number of challenging issues remain to be addressed. The features that appealed to the consumers were studied in this research. Surveys were conducted to obtain an understanding of consumers¿ opinions and needs regarding the mobile TV experience. Many users clearly do like to interact with video content on mobile devices. Interactive mobile TV advertising can benefit users who will be able to use an essentially ¿free¿ mobile TV service, funded by an advertising model. This research proposes an environment for interactive advertising on mobile TV and discussion of an implementation of the proposed designs

Leveraging Client Processing for Location Privacy in Mobile Local Search

Usage of mobile services is growing rapidly. Most Internet-based services targeted for PC based browsers now have mobile counterparts. These mobile counterparts often are enhanced when they use user\u27s location as one of the inputs. Even some PC-based services such as point of interest Search, Mapping, Airline tickets, and software download mirrors now use user\u27s location in order to enhance their services. Location-based services are exactly these, that take the user\u27s location as an input and enhance the experience based on that. With increased use of these services comes the increased risk to location privacy. The location is considered an attribute that user\u27s hold as important to their privacy. Compromise of one\u27s location, in other words, loss of location privacy can have several detrimental effects on the user ranging from trivial annoyance to unreasonable persecution. More and more companies in the Internet economy rely exclusively on the huge data sets they collect about users. The more detailed and accurate the data a company has about its users, the more valuable the company is considered. No wonder that these companies are often the same companies that offer these services for free. This gives them an opportunity to collect more accurate location information. Research community in the location privacy protection area had to reciprocate by modeling an adversary that could be the service provider itself. To further drive this point, we show that a well-equipped service provider can infer user\u27s location even if the location information is not directly available by using other information he collects about the user. There is no dearth of proposals of several protocols and algorithms that protect location privacy. A lot of these earlier proposals require a trusted third party to play as an intermediary between the service provider and the user. These protocols use anonymization and/or obfuscation techniques to protect user\u27s identity and/or location. This requirement of trusted third parties comes with its own complications and risks and makes these proposals impractical in real life scenarios. Thus it is preferable that protocols do not require a trusted third party. We look at existing proposals in the area of private information retrieval. We present a brief survey of several proposals in the literature and implement two representative algorithms. We run experiments using different sizes of databases to ascertain their practicability and performance features. We show that private information retrieval based protocols still have long ways to go before they become practical enough for local search applications. We propose location privacy preserving mechanisms that take advantage of the processing power of modern mobile devices and provide configurable levels of location privacy. We propose these techniques both in the single query scenario and multiple query scenario. In single query scenario, the user issues a query to the server and obtains the answer. In the multiple query scenario, the user keeps sending queries as she moves about in the area of interest. We show that the multiple query scenario increases the accuracy of adversary\u27s determination of user\u27s location, and hence improvements are needed to cope with this situation. So, we propose an extension of the single query scenario that addresses this riskier multiple query scenario, still maintaining the practicability and acceptable performance when implemented on a modern mobile device. Later we propose a technique based on differential privacy that is inspired by differential privacy in statistical databases. All three mechanisms proposed by us are implemented in realistic hardware or simulators, run against simulated but real life data and their characteristics ascertained to show that they are practical and ready for adaptation. This dissertation study the privacy issues for location-based services in mobile environment and proposes a set of new techniques that eliminate the need for a trusted third party by implementing efficient algorithms on modern mobile hardware

Against remediation

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ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities: Contexts, Forms & Practices is a volume of essays that provides a detailed account of born-digital literature by artists and scholars who have contributed to its birth and evolution. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this book takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration, treating electronic literature from the perspective of the digital humanities (DH)––that is, as an area of scholarship and practice that exists at the juncture between the literary and the algorithmic. The domain of DH is typically segmented into the two seemingly disparate strands of criticism and building, with scholars either studying the synthesis between cultural expression and screens or the use of technology to make artifacts in themselves. This book regards electronic literature as fundamentally DH in that it synthesizes these two constituents. Electronic Literature as Digital Humanities provides a context for the development of the field, informed by the forms and practices that have emerged throughout the DH moment, and finally, offers resources for others interested in learning more about electronic literature