Harmonic Syntax in the "Serial" Works of Dmitri Shostakovich

Abstract: The works of the last decade of Shostakovich's life are peppered by a peculiar phenomenon; the inclusion of twelve-tone rows. Classification of these works, often labeled (and subsequently unlabeled) as "serial," remains problematic. Elements of Western serialism are present, albeit in highly unconventional forms. To start, Shostakovich does not utilize the familiar canonic operations of serial theory including transposition, inversion and/or retrograde. Alternative techniques instead include the use of multiple rows, juxtaposition of serial and non-serial elements, and the near exclusive use of the row as a linear rather than harmonic resource. No discussion of Shostakovich's serialism would be complete without a survey of Soviet music at the time. Isolated from the West throughout most of the 20th century, Russian composers had limited access to Western "formalist" scores. Given such isolation, it is little wonder that composers developed their own stylistic approaches. These experiments--fueled in part by lack of information and natural curiosity--shaped the development of a Russian school of serialism based on a range of "twelve-toneness." According to such definitions, Shostakovich's music overlaps with the broad category of twelve-tone, allowing for a preliminary examination of his harmonic grammar according to both serial and non-serial stylistic features. Recent research regarding the composer's late harmonic style in turn allows for a more detailed form of codification. Most importantly, Peter Child's article on interval collections in late Shostakovich centers around the reconciliation of serial and non-serial elements in his Symphony No. 15. Stephen Brown, on the other hand, describes a mapping and coordinate system in which harmonic and melodic intervals can be graphed spatially. Brown notes Shostakovich's propensity to use ascending fifths as a primary aspect of harmonic syntax and ascending semitones as a neighbor-note feature of melodic motion. The present inquiry, then, will focus primarily on the historical background and harmonic idiolect of Shostakovich's so-called "serial" works, composed between 1967 and 1974. The analysis will center on pertinent collectional similarities shared by his serial and non-serial approaches to pitch organization

Interactive Technologies for the Public Sphere Toward a Theory of Critical Creative Technology

Digital media cultural practices continue to address the social, cultural and aesthetic contexts of the global information economy, perhaps better called ecology, by inventing new methods and genres that encourage interactive engagement, collaboration, exploration and learning. The theoretical framework for creative critical technology evolved from the confluence of the arts, human computer interaction, and critical theories of technology. Molding this nascent theoretical framework from these seemingly disparate disciplines was a reflexive process where the influence of each component on each other spiraled into the theory and practice as illustrated through the Constructed Narratives project. Research that evolves from an arts perspective encourages experimental processes of making as a method for defining research principles. The traditional reductionist approach to research requires that all confounding variables are eliminated or silenced using methods of statistics. However, that noise in the data, those confounding variables provide the rich context, media, and processes by which creative practices thrive. As research in the arts gains recognition for its contributions of new knowledge, the traditional reductive practice in search of general principles will be respectfully joined by methodologies for defining living principles that celebrate and build from the confounding variables, the data noise. The movement to develop research methodologies from the noisy edges of human interaction have been explored in the research and practices of ludic design and ambiguity (Gaver, 2003); affective gap (Sengers et al., 2005b; 2006); embodied interaction (Dourish, 2001); the felt life (McCarthy & Wright, 2004); and reflective HCI (Dourish, et al., 2004). The theory of critical creative technology examines the relationships between critical theories of technology, society and aesthetics, information technologies and contemporary practices in interaction design and creative digital media. The theory of critical creative technology is aligned with theories and practices in social navigation (Dourish, 1999) and community-based interactive systems (Stathis, 1999) in the development of smart appliances and network systems that support people in engaging in social activities, promoting communication and enhancing the potential for learning in a community-based environment. The theory of critical creative technology amends these community-based and collaborative design theories by emphasizing methods to facilitate face-to-face dialogical interaction when the exchange of ideas, observations, dreams, concerns, and celebrations may be silenced by societal norms about how to engage others in public spaces. The Constructed Narratives project is an experiment in the design of a critical creative technology that emphasizes the collaborative construction of new knowledge about one's lived world through computer-supported collaborative play (CSCP). To construct is to creatively invent one's world by engaging in creative decision-making, problem solving and acts of negotiation. The metaphor of construction is used to demonstrate how a simple artefact - a building block - can provide an interactive platform to support discourse between collaborating participants. The technical goal for this project was the development of a software and hardware platform for the design of critical creative technology applications that can process a dynamic flow of logistical and profile data from multiple users to be used in applications that facilitate dialogue between people in a real-time playful interactive experience

Architecture theory, 1960-1980 : emergence of a computational perspective

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2004.Leaf 175 blank.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 162-175).This thesis attempts to clarify the need for an appreciation of architecture theory within a computational architectural domain. It reveals and reflects upon some of the cultural, historical and technological contexts that influenced the emergence of a computational practice in architecture. To carry out this new reading, we focus on the pioneering research that underpinned the beginnings of the relationship between architecture and computation and which was carried out at four research Centres both in the UK and in the USA: The Land Use and Built Form Studies [LUBFS], founded at Cambridge, UK; The Center for Configurational Studies at the Open University, Milton Keynes; The Architecture Machine Group [AMG] at MIT, and the Design Research Center [DRC] at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA. Moreover this thesis reinterprets the role of Leslie Martin as the founding father of LUBFS by showing the influence of the British physicist Desmond Bernal's building science research and the British avant-garde movement on Martin's work. This thesis also presents reflections on how best to use computation in architecture.by Altino João Magalhães Rocha.Ph.D

Troubling textualities: insubordinate politics and conflicted complicity in the work of Kathy Acker (1978-1988)

Kathy Acker (1937-1997) was a celebrated experimental writer, who found a striking degree of commercial and critical success in the mid-1980s. Born and primarily based in the U.S., Acker managed to trace a creative and professional trajectory across the Atlantic, becoming an esteemed author - and often, a minor celebrity - both in the U.S. and in the U.K. Her book-length, novelistic experiments challenged the tenets of the contemporary novel, powerfully subverting encoded expectations and dominant definitions of narrative form, of authorial intent, and of literary creativity. Often grouped with post-modernist contemporaries, Acker's work both expresses something of that historical moment and surprises its convened temporality, producing imaginative pathways across various counter-traditions of innovative and oppositional literature. Variously described as pornographic, feminist, plagiaristic, violent, transformative, queer, punk, bad or derivative, her writing holds a compelling force of its own, and attests to a distinctive ethos of transgression. This project departs from extant understandings of Acker's work and the various ways it has been valued and rememorated across time - especially as the anniversary of both her birth and her death was celebrated in 2017. Recognizing these more recent processes of recollection and rememoration across various media and discursive contexts, this project unequivocally situates itself amidst an ongoing reassessment of the capacities and potentialities of Acker's body of work. However, unlike most contemporary discussions of Acker's writing, this project holds that her standing as a radically committed writer demands increased – rather than decreased – scrutiny into the more normative impulses of her work. While emphasizing the multiple ways her writing disrupted normalized structures of meaning and understanding, we must also probe into those moments where it reiterated, repeated, and reasserted the political fictions of hegemony and dominion. Three categories prove indispensable to this confrontation with the defining limits of Acker’s work: race, gender, and sexuality. With a strong intersectional emphasis, the present project suggests readings of three of Acker's novels: Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), Blood and Guts in High School (1984) and Empire of the Senseless (1988). Tracing a comparative critical trajectory across the three texts, it evinces the inevitable contradictions of Acker's writing, and attempts to widen the scope of present conversations about the politics and poetics of her work.Kathy Acker (1937-1997) foi uma autora experimental celebrada, que encontrou um surpreendente grau de sucesso comercial e crítico em meados dos anos 80. Nascida e primariamente baseada nos Estados Unidos, Acker conseguiu traçar uma trajectória criativa e profissional através do Atlântico, tornando-se uma autora estimada – e muitas vezes, uma celebridade menor – tanto nos Estados Unidos como no Reino Unido. As suas experiências com o formato do romance desafiaram os fundamentos do romance contemporâneo, poderosamente subvertendo expectativas codificadas e definições dominantes de forma narrativa, de intenção autoral, e de criatividade literária. Frequentemente agrupada com autores pós-modernistas seus contemporâneos, a obra de Acker simultaneamente expressa algo desse momento histórico e surpreende a sua temporalidade convencional, produzindo percursos imaginativos através de diversas contra-tradições de literatura inovadora e oposicional. Variavelmente descrita enquanto pornográfica, feminista, plagiária, violenta, transformativa, queer, punk, má ou derivativa, a sua escrita mantém uma força própria, e expressa uma distintiva ética da transgressão. Este projecto parte de leituras existentes do trabalho de Acker, e dos vários modos pelos quais este tem sido valorizado e rememorado ao longo do tempo – especialmente com as celebrações do aniversário do seu nascimento e da sua morte, em 2017. Reconhecendo processos mais recentes de memorialização através de diversos media e contextos discursivos, este projecto situa-se inequivocamente num debate em curso, pelo qual se reconsideram as capacidades e potencialidades da sua obra. No entanto, ao contrário da maioria das discussões contemporâneas sobre a escrita de Acker, mantemos que a localização da autora enquanto uma escritora radicalmente comprometida exige escrutínio acrescido – e não reduzido – sobre os impulsos mais normativos da sua obra. Conforme enfatizamos os múltiplos meios pelos quais a sua escrita perturbou estruturas normativas de sentido e interpretação, devemos prestar especial atenção àqueles momentos em que esta mesma repete, reitera e reafirma as ficções políticas da hegemonia e do domínio. Três categorias são cucais para este confronto com os limites constitutivos do trabalho de Acker: a raça, a o género, e a sexualidade. Com uma marcada ênfase interseccional, o presente projecto avança leituras de três romances da autora: Kathy Goes to Haiti (1978), Blood and Guts in High School (1984) e Empire of the Senseless (1988). Traçando criticamente uma trajectória comparativa através dos três textos, expomos as inevitáveis contradições próprias à escrita de Acker, e procuramos ampliar o escopo de discussões actuais sobre a sua agência política e poética

Spaced Out in Paradise: Post-Punk Futurities, Politics, Transitions, and Other Voices in Brazil

This dissertation is a practice-based autoethnographic post punk study concerning the investigation of underground music and politics in Brazil. It focuses on the utopian impulses and forms of futurities manifested in distinct DIY scenes and contexts, as Brazil was emerging from a twenty-one-year repressive military dictatorship. The research articulates a particular genealogy of Brazilian music in conversation with a system of formative historical and aesthetic pasts, trajectories, and mutant sonic worlds, from the legacies of Brazilian Modernism through to the countercultural residues of Tropicalismo, and Anglo-American post punk. It examines the spaces and conditions of possibility for underground creative practices to take place in distinct periods and political scenarios. At the same time, it engages with questions of improvisation, cultural cannibalism, and how such processes developed into experimentalist post-tropicalist forms of sensibility in Brazil, and how these gave rise to new futures and alternative formulations of knowledge. Largely, the thesis explores how Brazilian post punk challenged understandings of both Tropicalismo, and Anglo-American post punk disciplinary study and thought. The study is informed by scholarly and creative multidisciplinary approaches, drawing from the fields of popular music studies, cultural history and analysis, black studies, semiotics, Latin American/Brazilian studies, and political science. In addition to these, the project also draws on my practice as a musician/poet and active participant of the Brazilian post punk scene since the mid 1980s. It delves into forms of musicality and collective assemblages of knowledges as I examine a constellation of voices, sounds, modes of composing and operating in the work of artists such as Tom Zé, Mercenárias, Black Future, Divergência Socialista, Julio Barroso and Gang 90 & Absurdettes, Sexo Explícito, Tetine among others, culminating with the making of an album as the outcome of this research

2D to 3D non photo realistic character transformation and morphing (computer animation)

This research concerns the transformation and morphing between a full body 2D and 3D animated character. This practice based research will examine both technical and aesthetic techniques for enhancing morphing of animated characters. Stylized character transformations from A to B and from B to A, where details like facial expression, body motion, texture are to be expressively transformed aesthetically in a narrated story. Currently it is hard to separate 2D and 3D animation in a mix media usage. If we analyse and breakdown these graphical components, we could actually find a distinction as to how these 2D and 3D element increase the information level and complexity of storytelling. However, if we analyse it from character animation perspective, instance transformation of a digital character from 2D to 3D is not possible without post production techniques, pre-define 3D information such as blend shape or complex geometry data and mathematic calculation. There are mainly two elements to this investigation. The primary element is the design system of such stylizes character in 2D and 3D. Currently many design systems (morphing software) are based on photo realistic artifacts such as Fanta Morph, Morph Buster, Morpheus, Fun Morph and etc. This investigation will focus on non photo realistic character morphing. In seeking to define the targeted non photo realistic, illustrated stylize 2D and 3D character, I am examining the advantages and disadvantages of a number of 2D illustrated characters in respect to 3D morphing. This investigation could also help to analyse the efficiency and limitation of such 2D and 3D non photo realistic character design and transformation where broader techniques will be explored. The secondary element is the theoretical investigation by relating how such artistic and technical morphing idea is being used in past and today films/games. In a narrated story contain character that acts upon a starting question or situation and reacts on the event. The gap between his aim and the result of his acting, the gap between his vision and his personality creates the dramatic tension. I intend to distinguish the possibility of identifying a transitional process of voice between narrator and morphing character, while also illustrating, through visual terminology, the varying fluctuations between two speaking agents. I intend to prove and insert sample demonstrating “morphing” is not just visually important but have direct impact on storytelling

Hiding and seeking: form, vision, and history in William Faulkner and John Dos Passos

This thesis investigates how two distinctive and conflicting literary modernisms generate, and subsequently attempt to deal with the proliferation of difficult historical meaning. Part one scrutinizes three novels from William Faulkner’s middle period, The Sound and the Fury (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), and Sanctuary (1931). Its arguments issue from three linked assumptions: first, that semantic meaning, in Faulkner, resides within the smallest of textual locations; second, that this meaning is insistently historical; and third, that the attempt to hide its release as historical meaning generates a formal opacity that, in turn, occasions acutely visual problems at the level of the text. Specific attention is drawn to what I consider to be the “compacted doctrines” (Empson) of Faulkner’s prose: the pronoun. It is argued that, in these three novels, historically sedimented meaning congeals in three single words: “them”, “I” and finally, “it”. If Faulkner’s texts come into meaning at the level of the word, John Dos Passos’ come into meaning at the level of the concept. What was “small”, begrudging, and intractable in Faulkner becomes “big”, abundant, and eminently retrievable in Dos Passos. The semantic “concept” to which I attend is The Camera Eye, a place of visual efficiency. Two parallel concerns drive these chapters. First, I claim that The Camera Eye is the preeminent site of the dialectic in U.S.A.; second, that these episodes provide the formal indices for Dos Passos’ shift in political intensities. Sustaining an antagonistic tension between aesthetic modernity and historical memory, however, these mechanical integers problematize their own semantic productions. With reference to the generation of surplus and to Marx’s concept of “hoarding” I route the (over)production of the textual product, and its subsequent channelling into distinct textual locations, into conversations regarding commodification, reification and the division of labour

Music and Digital Media: A planetary anthropology

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of an extra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory

Music and Digital Media

Anthropology has neglected the study of music. Music and Digital Media shows how and why this should be redressed. It does so by enabling music to expand the horizons of digital anthropology, demonstrating how the field can build interdisciplinary links to music and sound studies, digital/media studies, and science and technology studies. Music and Digital Media is the first comparative ethnographic study of the impact of digital media on music worldwide. It offers a radical and lucid new theoretical framework for understanding digital media through music, showing that music is today where the promises and problems of the digital assume clamouring audibility. The book contains ten chapters, eight of which present comprehensive original ethnographies; they are bookended by an authoritative introduction and a comparative postlude. Five chapters address popular, folk, art and crossover musics in the global South and North, including Kenya, Argentina, India, Canada and the UK. Three chapters bring the digital experimentally to the fore, presenting pioneering ethnographies of anextra-legal peer-to-peer site and the streaming platform Spotify, a series of prominent internet-mediated music genres, and the first ethnography of a global software package, the interactive music platform Max. The book is unique in bringing ethnographic research on popular, folk, art and crossover musics from the global North and South into a comparative framework on a large scale, and creates an innovative new paradigm for comparative anthropology. It shows how music enlarges anthropology while demanding to be understood with reference to classic themes of anthropological theory. Praise for Music and Digital Media ‘Music and Digital Media is a groundbreaking update to our understandings of sound, media, digitization, and music. Truly transdisciplinary and transnational in scope, it innovates methodologically through new models for collaboration, multi-sited ethnography, and comparative work. It also offers an important defense of—and advancement of—theories of mediation.’ Jonathan Sterne, Communication Studies and Art History, McGill University 'Music and Digital Media is a nuanced exploration of the burgeoning digital music scene across both the global North and the global South. Ethnographically rich and theoretically sophisticated, this collection will become the new standard for this field.' Anna Tsing, Anthropology, University of California at Santa Cruz 'The global drama of music's digitisation elicits extreme responses – from catastrophe to piratical opportunism – but between them lie more nuanced perspectives. This timely, absolutely necessary collection applies anthropological understanding to a deliriously immersive field, bringing welcome clarity to complex processes whose impact is felt far beyond what we call music.' David Toop, London College of Communication, musician and writer ‘Spanning continents and academic disciplines, the rich ethnographies contained in Music and Digital Media makes it obligatory reading for anyone wishing to understand the complex, contradictory, and momentous effects that digitization is having on musical cultures.’ Eric Drott, Music, University of Texas, Austin ‘This superb collection, with an authoritative overview as its introduction, represents the state of the art in studies of the digitalisation of music. It is also a testament to what anthropology at its reflexive best can offer the rest of the social sciences and humanities.’ David Hesmondhalgh, Media and Communication, University of Leeds ‘This exciting volume forges new ground in the study of local conditions, institutions, and sounds of digital music in the Global South and North. The book’s planetary scope and its commitment to the “messiness” of ethnographic sites and concepts amplifies emergent configurations and meanings of music, the digital, and the aesthetic.’ Marina Peterson, Anthropology, University of Texas, Austi