Unearthing Tree Symbolism in Song: A Sentiment Analysis

How societies communicate about nature can shape the way that they interact with it. Messages contained in music are especially interesting to study because of the unique ability of sound and language to alter moods and/or induce physiological reactions. Research on cultural values in music is growing but studies on environmental themes are scarce despite pervasive natural symbolism in songs. Historically, most species of tree have gained a symbolic meaning in part based on their physical characteristics and the various ways they are used by humans (e.g., for construction or for medicine). The overall goal of this thesis was to understand the emotional sentiment associated with tree symbolism in English-language songs. To quantitatively investigate these associations, I assembled a corpus of 1335 songs that use common North American tree names in lyrics. Songs were categorized into two groups based on the evolutionary history of the tree used in lyrics. Trees are either angiosperms (typically flowering, fruiting, and deciduous) or gymnosperms (typically cone-producing and evergreen). I extracted lyrical sentiment (e.g., positive words) and musical qualities (e.g., tempo) of each song for analyses. Lyrically, I found that angiosperm songs were more likely to contain positive words and less likely to contain negative words than gymnosperm songs. Additionally, angiosperm songs were more likely to contain words of anticipation, joy, and trust, while gymnosperm songs were more likely to contain words of anger, fear, and sadness. Musically, gymnosperm songs had higher energy and tempo than angiosperm songs. Exploring these data further at other levels of taxonomy would likely provide higher resolution of thematic content. These results provide support for the idea that the sentiments we associate with trees are related to the tree’s evolutionary history which is important because our sentiments have the potential to affect how we connect to and interact with environments

Echoes of Persuasion: The Effect of Euphony in Persuasive Communication

While the effect of various lexical, syntactic, semantic and stylistic features have been addressed in persuasive language from a computational point of view, the persuasive effect of phonetics has received little attention. By modeling a notion of euphony and analyzing four datasets comprising persuasive and non-persuasive sentences in different domains (political speeches, movie quotes, slogans and tweets), we explore the impact of sounds on different forms of persuasiveness. We conduct a series of analyses and prediction experiments within and across datasets. Our results highlight the positive role of phonetic devices on persuasion

Empirical Challenges in Organizational Aesthetics Research: Towards a Sensual Methodology

Despite growing scholarly interest in aesthetic dimensions of organizational life, there is a lack of literature expressly engaging with the methodological mechanics of 'doing aesthetics research'. This article addresses that gap. It begins with an overview of the conceptual idiosyncrasies of 'aesthetics' as a facet of human existence and maps out the challenges these pose for empirical research methodology. A review of methodological approaches adopted to date in empirical studies of organizational aesthetics is then presented. The remainder of the article draws on the author's experiences and suggests methods and techniques to address both conceptual and practical challenges encountered during the execution of an organizational aesthetics research project. The article calls for a firmer focus on the aesthetic experiences of organizational members in addition to those of researchers and concludes with some suggestions as to the future of such 'sensual methodologies' </jats:p

The Messianic Zeal: A Case of Radical Aesthetics in Black Cultural Production

This essay examines artwork by popular artists D’Angelo, Kanye West, Kendrick Lamar and 2pac Shakur and compares their articulations to a larger discourse of messianic symbolism in (black) American popular culture. In this paper, messianic symbolism is a discursive chain of symbols that invoke the Black experience. Artists extend the legacy of earlier representations of black messianism by similarly representing themselves as Jews, saviors or folk heroes with a specific mission to save a world burdened by racial strife and oppression. These qualities manifest in lyrics, album covers, and other late 20th century rhetoric

Cross-cultural representations of musical shape

In cross-cultural research involving performers from distinct cultural backgrounds (U.K., Japan, Papua New Guinea), we examined 75 musicians' associations between musical sound and shape, and saw pronounced differences between groups. Participants heard short stimuli varying in pitch contour and were asked to represent these visually on paper, with the instruction that if another community member saw the marks they should be able to connect them with the sounds. Participants from the U.K. group produced consistent symbolic representations, which involved depicting the passage of time from left-to-right. Japanese participants unfamiliar with English language and western standard notation provided responses comparable to the U.K. group's. The majority opted to use a horizontal timeline, whilst a minority of traditional Japanese musicians produced unique responses with time represented vertically. The last group, a non-literate Papua New Guinean tribe known as BenaBena, produced a majority of iconic responses which did not follow the time versus pitch contour model, but highlighted musical qualities other than the parameters intentionally varied in the investigation, focusing on hue and loudness. The participants' responses point to profoundly different 'norms' of musical shape association, which may be linked to literacy and to the functional role of music in a community

Synthesized: A Narrative Exploring the Perception of Analog Synthesizer Enthusiasts\u27 Identity and Communication

This document is a written reflection of the production process of the creative project Synthesized, a scholarly-rooted documentary exploring the analog synthesizer world with focus on organizational structure and perception of social identity. After exploring how this production complements existing works on the synthesizer, electronic music, identity, Communication and group association, this reflection explores my creative process and decision making as an artist and filmmaker through the lens of a qualitative researcher. As part of this, I will discuss logistic, as well as artistic and creative, challenges. This includes how I negotiated limited access, resources, time constraints, selecting an event and potential participants according to set parameters, lighting and acoustic conditions at venues, avoiding copyright violations, obtaining proper permission to film, and the scheduling of production and editing. The production of Synthesized is the story of my process of deepening and challenging my own understanding of the culture of analog synthesizer enthusiasts; field observations and interviews, gathering and exploring relevant documents, and other interpretive and creative processes of knowledge production were part of the documentary filmmaking process. Consequently, the production process overlaps with aspects of traditional qualitative research. This paper will take a closer look at the relationship between data collection and filming, as well as footage review, editing techniques, and theme selection, and how they relate to qualitative analysis. It is my hope that these reflections will eliminate the notion that data collection can only be undertaken in a purely scientific manner and that the lines can blur between creative exploration and traditional research

Documentary Transformations and Cultural Context

This article is a translation of one originally published in 1948 in Review of Documentation. The article examines the relationship between documents, broadly defined, and culture. More specifically, it examines the connections between experience, reason and the stability of documents as media technologies evolve over time

SEMANTIC SHIFT ON MALAY WORDS IN CLASSICAL MALAY TEXT HIKAYAT HANG TUAH COMPARE TO MODERN MALAY ( TO CULTURAL CONTEXT

Language—like many other aspects of life—changes over time. All living languages will experience changes. The slightest indication of language change can be seen in older and younger generation. The earlier generation of language user might speak differently from the younger generation and vice versa. Because language contains form and meaning, the changes are not only limited to the form, but also to the meaning. Indonesian language, as a living language, has its periodical changes and one of them is Classical Malay. Hikayat Hang Tuah is one of the most well-known classical Malay texts. Due to language change, there are some differences in Malay language written in Hikayat Hang Tuah and Modern Malay Based on the previous explanation, it is intriguing to analyze the semantic shift in words written in Hikayat Hang Tuah compare to Indonesian Language. However, there are multi-factors triggering the change of language, including culture. Therefore, this paper will not only describe the semantic shift on Malay words in Hikayat Hang Tuah, but also the cultural context affecting the change