Crossing You in Style: Cross-modal Style Transfer from Music to Visual Arts

Music-to-visual style transfer is a challenging yet important cross-modal learning problem in the practice of creativity. Its major difference from the traditional image style transfer problem is that the style information is provided by music rather than images. Assuming that musical features can be properly mapped to visual contents through semantic links between the two domains, we solve the music-to-visual style transfer problem in two steps: music visualization and style transfer. The music visualization network utilizes an encoder-generator architecture with a conditional generative adversarial network to generate image-based music representations from music data. This network is integrated with an image style transfer method to accomplish the style transfer process. Experiments are conducted on WikiArt-IMSLP, a newly compiled dataset including Western music recordings and paintings listed by decades. By utilizing such a label to learn the semantic connection between paintings and music, we demonstrate that the proposed framework can generate diverse image style representations from a music piece, and these representations can unveil certain art forms of the same era. Subjective testing results also emphasize the role of the era label in improving the perceptual quality on the compatibility between music and visual content

Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Aesthetics, Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media

The Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade and the Society for Aesthetics of Architecture and Visual Arts of Serbia (DEAVUS) are proud to be able to organize the 21st ICA Congress on “Possible Worlds of Contemporary Aesthetics: Aesthetics Between History, Geography and Media”. We are proud to announce that we received over 500 submissions from 56 countries, which makes this Congress the greatest gathering of aestheticians in this region in the last 40 years. The ICA 2019 Belgrade aims to map out contemporary aesthetics practices in a vivid dialogue of aestheticians, philosophers, art theorists, architecture theorists, culture theorists, media theorists, artists, media entrepreneurs, architects, cultural activists and researchers in the fields of humanities and social sciences. More precisely, the goal is to map the possible worlds of contemporary aesthetics in Europe, Asia, North and South America, Africa and Australia. The idea is to show, interpret and map the unity and diverseness in aesthetic thought, expression, research, and philosophies on our shared planet. Our goal is to promote a dialogue concerning aesthetics in those parts of the world that have not been involved with the work of the International Association for Aesthetics to this day. Global dialogue, understanding and cooperation are what we aim to achieve. That said, the 21st ICA is the first Congress to highlight the aesthetic issues of marginalised regions that have not been fully involved in the work of the IAA. This will be accomplished, among others, via thematic round tables discussing contemporary aesthetics in East Africa and South America. Today, aesthetics is recognized as an important philosophical, theoretical and even scientific discipline that aims at interpreting the complexity of phenomena in our contemporary world. People rather talk about possible worlds or possible aesthetic regimes rather than a unique and consistent philosophical, scientific or theoretical discipline

A Qualitative IPA of the Motivations of Retirees’ Transitions to ‘Retirement’ Social Identities and the Consequences on Retirement Adjustment Satisfaction

Retirement is a relatively new phenomenon in relation toshifting from being a privilege for the few to becoming anormative ‘third age’ of the life course. However, retirementrepresents one of the major life course transitions in late adultlife and associated with this transition is the question of howwell people adjust to retirement and the consequences of howwell people negotiate this adjustment on their sense of worthand well-being can be either negative or positive. This paperpresents a qualitative approach through Social Identity Theoryand Self-determination Theory to explore the underpinningmotivational processes of retirees in their transition to‘retirement’ social identities and the consequences onsatisfaction in retirement. Semi-structured interviews wereconducted with four white British participants includingthree males and one female ranging in age from sixty-fourto sixty-nine and having retired between fifteen months andfour years. An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis ofthe transcribed interviews led to five main themes emerging,namely Strength of identity with working life; Significanceof non-work-related aspects of life; Psychologically preparingfor retirement; Process of shifting/adjusting to retirement;Meeting expectations of retirement. The study found thatretirement is not a formulaic process but people experienceadjusting to retirement differently based on their individualmotivations and resources for preparing for and facilitatingthe transition. The findings from the study has implicationsin relation to the provision of intervention in supportingindividuals psychologically preparing for retirement beyondfinancial planning along with those experiencing negativeconsequences in transitioning to retirement