720 research outputs found

    Introduction to Gestural Similarity in Music. An Application of Category Theory to the Orchestra

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    Mathematics, and more generally computational sciences, intervene in several aspects of music. Mathematics describes the acoustics of the sounds giving formal tools to physics, and the matter of music itself in terms of compositional structures and strategies. Mathematics can also be applied to the entire making of music, from the score to the performance, connecting compositional structures to acoustical reality of sounds. Moreover, the precise concept of gesture has a decisive role in understanding musical performance. In this paper, we apply some concepts of category theory to compare gestures of orchestral musicians, and to investigate the relationship between orchestra and conductor, as well as between listeners and conductor/orchestra. To this aim, we will introduce the concept of gestural similarity. The mathematical tools used can be applied to gesture classification, and to interdisciplinary comparisons between music and visual arts.Comment: The final version of this paper has been published by the Journal of Mathematics and Musi

    The semiring-theoretic approach to MV-algebras: a survey

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    In this paper we review some of the main achievements of the semiring-theoretic approach to MV-algebras initiated and pursued mainly by the present authors and their collaborators. The survey focuses mainly on the connections between MV-algebras and other theories that such a semiringbased approach enabled, and on an application of such a framework to Digital Image Processing. We also give some suggestions for further developments by stating several open problems and possible research lines.Comment: Published versio

    Quantale Modules, with Applications to Logic and Image Processing

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    We propose a categorical and algebraic study of quantale modules. The results and constructions presented are also applied to abstract algebraic logic and to image processing tasks.Comment: 150 pages, 17 figures, 3 tables, Doctoral dissertation, Univ Salern

    Cities Made of Boundaries: Mapping Social Life in Urban Form

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    Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. Its vantage is a plea to establish a frame of reference for radically comparative urban studies positioned between geography and archaeology. Based in multidisciplinary social and spatial theory, a critical realist understanding of the boundaries that compose built space is operationalised by a mapping practice utilising Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Benjamin N. Vis gives a precise account of how BLT Mapping can be applied to detailed historical, reconstructed, contemporary, and archaeological urban plans, exemplified by sixteenth to twenty-first century Winchester (UK) and Classic Maya Chunchucmil (Mexico). This account demonstrates how the functional and experiential difference between compact western and tropical dispersed cities can be explored. The methodological development of Cities Made of Boundaries will appeal to readers interested in the comparative social analysis of built environments, and those seeking to expand the evidence-base of design options to structure urban life and development

    Cities Made of Boundaries

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    Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. Its vantage is a plea to establish a frame of reference for radically comparative urban studies positioned between geography and archaeology. Based in multidisciplinary social and spatial theory, a critical realist understanding of the boundaries that compose built space is operationalised by a mapping practice utilising Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Benjamin N. Vis gives a precise account of how BLT Mapping can be applied to detailed historical, reconstructed, contemporary, and archaeological urban plans, exemplified by sixteenth- to twenty-first century Winchester (UK) and Classic Maya Chunchucmil (Mexico). This account demonstrates how the functional and experiential difference between compact western and tropical dispersed cities can be explored. The methodological development of Cities Made of Boundaries will appeal to readers interested in the comparative social analysis of built environments, and those seeking to expand the evidence-base of design options to structure urban life and development

    The reasonable effectiveness of Mathematics and its Cognitive roots 1

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    “At the beginning, Nature set up matters its own way and, later, it constructed human intelligence in such a way that [this intelligence] could understand it” [Galileo Galilei, 1632 (Opere, p. 298)]. “The applicability of our science [mathematics] seems then as a symptom of its rooting, not as a measure of its value. Mathematics, as a tree which freely develops his top, draws its strength by the thousands roots in a ground of intuitions of real representations; it would be disastrous to cut them off, in view of a short-sided utilitarism, or to uproot them from the ground from which they rose ” [H. Weyl, 1910]. Summary. Mathematics stems out from our ways of making the world intelligible by its peculiar conceptual stability and unity; we invented it and used it to single out key regularities of space and language. This is exemplified and summarised below in references to the main foundational approaches to Mathematics, as proposed in the last 150 years. Its unity is also stressed: in this paper, Mathematics is viewed as a "three dimensiona

    Cities Made of Boundaries

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    Cities Made of Boundaries presents the theoretical foundation and concepts for a new social scientific urban morphological mapping method, Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. Its vantage is a plea to establish a frame of reference for radically comparative urban studies positioned between geography and archaeology. Based in multidisciplinary social and spatial theory, a critical realist understanding of the boundaries that compose built space is operationalised by a mapping practice utilising Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Benjamin N. Vis gives a precise account of how BLT Mapping can be applied to detailed historical, reconstructed, contemporary, and archaeological urban plans, exemplified by sixteenth- to twenty-first century Winchester (UK) and Classic Maya Chunchucmil (Mexico). This account demonstrates how the functional and experiential difference between compact western and tropical dispersed cities can be explored. The methodological development of Cities Made of Boundaries will appeal to readers interested in the comparative social analysis of built environments, and those seeking to expand the evidence-base of design options to structure urban life and development

    GIS Processing for Geocoding Described Collection Locations

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    Much useful data is currently not available for use in contemporary geographic information systems because location is provided as descriptive text and not in a recognized coordinate system format. This is particularly true for datasets with significant temporal depth such as museum collections. Development is just beginning on applications that automate the conversion of descriptive text based locations to geographic coordinate values. These applications are a type of geocoding or locator service and require functionality in two domains: natural language processing and geometric calculation. Natural language processing identifies the spatial semantics of the text describing a location and tags the individual text elements according to their spatially descriptive role. This is referred to as geoparsing. Once identified, these tagged text elements can be either converted directly to numeric values or used as pointers to geometric objects that represent geographic features identified in the description. These values and geometries can be employed in a series of functions to determine coordinates for the described location. This is referred to as geoprocessing. Selection of appropriate text elements from a location description and ancillary data as input is critical for successful geocoding. The traverse, one of many types of location description is selected for geocoding development. Specific text elements with spatial meaning are identified and incorporated into an XML format for use as geoprocessing input. Information associated with the location is added to the XML format to maintain database relations and geoprocessing error checking functionality. ESRI’s ArcGIS 8.3 is used as a development environment where geoprocessing functionality is tested for XML elements using ArcObjects and VBA forms
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