Upbeat and quirky with a bit of a build: Interpretive repertories in creative music search

Pre-existing commercial music is widely used to accom-pany moving images in films, TV commercials and com-puter games. This process is known as music synchronisa-tion. Professionals are employed by rights holders and film makers to perform creative music searches on large catalogues to find appropriate pieces of music for syn-chronisation. This paper discusses a Discourse Analysis of thirty interview texts related to the process. Coded ex-amples are presented and discussed. Four interpretive repertoires are identified: the Musical Repertoire, the Soundtrack Repertoire, the Business Repertoire and the Cultural Repertoire. These ways of talking about music are adopted by all of the community regardless of their interest as Music Owner or Music User. Music is shown to have multi-variate and sometimes conflicting meanings within this community which are dynamic and negotiated. This is related to a theoretical feedback model of communication and meaning making which proposes that Owners and Users employ their own and shared ways of talking and thinking about music and its context to determine musical meaning. The value to the music information retrieval community is to inform system design from a user information needs perspective

The Internet and Daily Life

Presents findings from a survey conducted in November and December 2003. Looks at Internet use compared to the traditional offline ways of communicating, transacting affairs, getting information, and finding entertainment

Content or context? Searching for musical meaning in task-based interactive information retrieval

Creative professionals search for digital music to accompany moving images using interactive information retrieval systems run by music publishers and record companies. This research investigates the creative professionals and the intermediaries communication processes and information seeking and use behaviour with a view to making recommendations to information retrieval systems builders as to the extent of relative importance of content and contextual factors. A communications model is used to suggest that the meaning of music is determined by its listener and use context, as well as cultural codes and competences. The research is framed by a holistic approach based on Ingwersen and Jarvelin’s Interactive Information Seeking, Retrieval and Behavioral processes model

Living and Learning With New Media: Summary of Findings From the Digital Youth Project

Summarizes findings from a three-year study of how new media have been integrated into youth behaviors and have changed the dynamics of media literacy, learning, and authoritative knowledge. Outlines implications for educators, parents, and policy makers

Horizon Report 2009

El informe anual Horizon investiga, identifica y clasifica las tecnologías emergentes que los expertos que lo elaboran prevén tendrán un impacto en la enseñanza aprendizaje, la investigación y la producción creativa en el contexto educativo de la enseñanza superior. También estudia las tendencias clave que permiten prever el uso que se hará de las mismas y los retos que ellos suponen para las aulas. Cada edición identifica seis tecnologías o prácticas. Dos cuyo uso se prevé emergerá en un futuro inmediato (un año o menos) dos que emergerán a medio plazo (en dos o tres años) y dos previstas a más largo plazo (5 años)

Cultural Vitality in Communities: Interpretation and Indicators

This report introduces a definition of cultural vitality that includes the range of cultural activity people around the country find significant. We use this definition as a lens to clarify our understanding of data necessary, as well as the more limited data currently available, to document arts and culture in communities in a consistent, recurrent and reliable manner. Specifically, we define cultural vitality as evidence of creating, disseminating, validating, and supporting arts and culture as a dimension of everyday life in communities. We develop and recommend an initial set of arts and culture indicators derived from nationally available data, and compare selected metropolitan areas based on these measures. Policy and planning implications for use of the cultural vitality definition and related measures are discussed

Smart radio and audio apps: the politics and paradoxes of listening to (anti-) social media

The recent crop of vocal social media applications tends to appeal to users in terms of getting their voices heard loud and clear. Indeed, it is striking how often verbs like ‘shout’ and ‘boast’ and ‘brag’ are associated with microcasting platforms with such noisy names as Shoutcast, Audioboom, Hubbub, Yappie, Boast and ShoutOmatic. In other words, these audio social media are often promoted in rather unsociable terms, appealing less to the promise of a new communicative exchange than to the fantasy that we will each can be at the centre of attention of an infinite audience. Meanwhile, many of the new forms of online radio sell their services to listeners as offering ‘bespoke’ or ‘responsive’ programming (or ‘audiofeeds’), building up a personal listening experience that meets their individual needs and predilictions. The role of listening in this new media ecology is characterised, then, by similarly contradictory trends. Listening is increasingly personalised, privatised, masterable and measurable, but also newly shareable, networked and, potentially, public. The promotional framing of these new media suggests a key contradiction at play in these new forms of radio and audio, speaking to a neo-liberal desire for a decentralization of broadcasting to the point where every individual has a voice, but where the idea of the audience is invoked as a mass network of anonymous and yet thoroughly privatised listeners. Focusing on the promotion and affordances of these various new radio- and radio-like applications for sharing speech online, this article seeks to interrogate what is at stake in these contradictions in terms of the ongoing politics, experience and ethics of listening in a mediated world

Opera Man and the Meeting of ‘Tastes’

The introduction of the Super League in 1996 heralded a more commercial era for professional rugby league in the United Kingdom (Meier, 2000). Part of the associated package has been an entertainments programme around games. Initially hesitant following a near disastrous first Super League season, Leeds Rhinos (the brand name adopted by Leeds Rugby League Football Club) have embraced this initiative. An MC introduces a bill that variously includes: the team’s mascot, Ronnie the Rhino; a dance team and community dance groups; children’s mini rugby; local singers and tribute acts; silly games featuring people from the crowd; presentations of former stars and special appearances (e.g. the Forces). While very deliberately identifying the persistence of some rationalist/modernist dimensions of Super League rugby Denham (2000: p. 289) observes of this development: Part of the attraction is to sell more than the game by adding entertainment and additional spectacle through cheerleaders, mascots and fireworks. Postmodernism has been seen as reflecting the fragmentation and diversification of culture and, along with it, the breakdown of older categories and binary divisions that have been associated with modern culture, such as high/low... One of the most successful elements of the wider entertainment package at Leeds’ games has been ‘Opera Man’. This is the nickname given to John Innes, the classically-trained singer, by the crowd at Headingley Stadium (the home of the Rhinos). Some seem unsurprised by the success of this initiative, but it piqued my curiosity as an unlikely coming-together of two leisure interests. As a fan my initial reaction was similar to what one of my respondents described: “When he first came in you could see in the crowd it was ‘You what? An opera guy coming to sing at rugby league?’. And then he became a cult figure … Who would have thought that rugby league would have been the home for Opera Man?” (Chrissy). On one of the blog sites Jerry Chicken commented: “Opera Man” as he has become known to your average rugby league fan who, it has to be said, would in all other circumstances call John Innes and his ilk “big puffs” has introduced the concept of the aria to the sport so much so that the crowd actually sing along with him now, even though they know not the words and simply make the sounds. http://jerrychicken.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/opera-man.html [last accessed 27th January 2013] To explore what underlies the apparent success of this Heston Blumenthal recipei, this paper borrows concepts from Bourdieu (1984)