Songs to the Jinas and of the Gurus: historical comparisons between Jain and Sikh devotional music

Jain worship has always been accompanied by music and likewise for Sikhs the performance of and listening to the singing of hymns, as composed by several of their Gurus, continuously has been central to the community’s spiritual experience. For different reasons, however, Sikh and Jain devotional music, known as kirtan and bhakti respectively, until recently were neglected subjects in historiography. This article investigates the parallels and differences among the two genres from a historical comparative perspective against the successive backgrounds of the bhakti movement and Indic culture, the imperial encounter and globalization. In doing so, it particularly emphasizes the importance of identity politics to the making of modern Sikh and Jain devotional music, as well as the fact that, in comparison to Jain bhakti, Sikh kirtan generally remains North Indian ‘Hindustani’ art music, rather than regional folk music

‘O Lord, open thou our lips’: listeners’ experiences of BBC Radio 3’s Choral Evensong on The New Radio 3 Forum

This chapter examines the listening experiences shared by contributors to The New Radio 3 Forum on threads related to BBC Radio 3’s Choral Evensong. Focusing on the musical, liturgical, and spiritual content of the experiences, it argues that they represent a community of highly engaged, committed, experienced, and knowledgeable listeners. It also demonstrates that engagement with the forum is a key part of the extended listening experience for regular contributors. While listeners demonstrate a variety of musical preferences and attitudes towards religious matters, their loyalty to Choral Evensong is shown to override such differences, enabling them to engage in informed and opinionated debate. The chapter draws on studies of communication patterns and engagement in online special-interest groups, the internet’s shaping of musical fandom, and the nature of online Christian communities to argue that the committed listening community that has developed on the forum and the detailed and discursive nature of its interactions exist in a symbiotic and self-sustaining relationship. The richness of the listening experiences both generates the strong sense of community and is enabled and perpetuated by it

Reduction in Computer Music:Bodies, Temporalities, and Generative Computation

In the age of pervasive computing the way our body interacts with reality needs to be reconceptualized. The reduction of embodiment is a problem for computer music since this music relies heavily on different layers of (digital) technology and mediation in order to be produced and performed. The article shows that such a mediation should not be conceived of as an obstacle but rather as a constitutive element of a permanent, complex negotiation between the artist, the machinery, and the audience, aimed at shaping a different temporality for musical language (as the Italian artist Caterina Barbieri develops).Federica Buongiorno, ‘Reduction in Computer Music: Bodies, Temporalities, and Generative Computation’, in The Case for Reduction, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey and Jakob Schillinger, Cultural Inquiry, 25 (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2022), pp. 175-90 <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-25_09

Providence: Lovecraft, Sexual Violence, And The Body Of The Other

The subject of this essay is the first six issues of Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows’ Providence, but let me begin with an apology. In Comics Journal #278 (October 2006), I wrote a negative review of Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls, arguing that Moore’s rigidly schematic plot made the book a chore to read, despite the beauty of Gebbie’s art. I still think Lost Girls is minor Moore, but I went too far in the final paragraph of my review. In response to Moore’s claims that he was retiring from comics (most fully expressed in an interview in Comic Book Artist #25 [April 2003]), I wrote that he was “leaving comics none too soon and many years too late” (138). I was disappointed with much of the America’s Best Comics line (though for me Promethea was major Moore), but I regret those words. They show ingratitude to a writer who entertained me for decades while inspiring other creators to produce better comics

Humanizing robot dance movements

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Universidade do Porto. Faculdade de Engenharia. 201

Explanations in Music Recommender Systems in a Mobile Setting

Revised version: some spelling errors corrected.Every day, millions of users utilize their mobile phones to access music streaming services such as Spotify. However, these `black boxes’ seldom provide adequate explanations for their music recommendations. A systematic literature review revealed that there is a strong relationship between moods and music, and that explanations and interface design choices can effect how people perceive recommendations just as much as algorithm accuracy. However, little seems to be known about how to apply user-centric design approaches, which exploit affective information to present explanations, to mobile devices. In order to bridge these gaps, the work of Andjelkovic, Parra, & O’Donovan (2019) was extended upon and applied as non-interactive designs in a mobile setting. Three separate Amazon Mechanical Turk studies asked participants to compare the same three interface designs: baseline, textual, and visual (n=178). Each survey displayed a different playlist with either low, medium, or high music popularity. Results indicate that music familiarity may or may not influence the need for explanations, but explanations are important to users. Both explanatory designs fared equally better than the baseline, and the use of affective information may help systems become more efficient, transparent, trustworthy, and satisfactory. Overall, there does not seem to be a `one design fits all’ solution for explanations in a mobile setting.Master's Thesis in Information ScienceINFO390MASV-INFOMASV-IK

The Sound of Paintings: Using Citizen Curation to Explore the Cross-Modal Personalization of Museum Experiences

This paper describes the use of Citizen Curation to explore ways in which cross-modal experiences can be used and created by museum visitors. Citizen Curation can be defined as individuals and groups from outside the museum profession engaging in curatorial activities to communicate their own ideas and stories. Previous work has explored how Citizen Curation can be used to broaden the range of voices reflected in the museum, thereby widening its appeal and relevance to new audiences. Recent research suggests that cross-modal experiences, combining visual art with music, can enhance the cultural experience as the visitor simultaneously draws on both what they see and hear. Citizen Curation provides a potential method through which visitors can create and share cross-modal experiences for each other, combining visual art and music. In this paper, we introduce the Deep Viewpoints web ap- plication that has previously been used for the Citizen Curation of looking at visual art. We then describe how the application was extended to support two further contexts (i) a musicologist curating experiences that link music to visual art in a museum collection, and (ii) visitors to a museum exhibition experiencing and creating cross-modal experiences. Finally, we reflect on different ways in which technology could be used to support cross-modal museum experiences

The Witches and the Witch: Verdi's Macbeth

The witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth equivocate between the demons of random malevolence and ordinary (if exceptionally nasty) old women; and both King James I, whose book on witchcraft may have influenced Shakespeare, and A. W. Schlegel, whose essay on Macbeth certainly influenced Verdi, also stress this ambiguity. In his treatment of Lady Macbeth, Verdi uses certain musical patterns associated with the witches; and like the witches, who sound sometimes tame and frivolous, sometimes like incarnations of supernatural evil, Lady Macbeth hovers insecurely between roles: she is a hybrid of ambitious wife and agent of hell.English and American Literature and Languag