From Microsound to Vaporwave:internet-mediated musics, online methods, and genre

How is the internet transforming musical practices? In this article, through a study of five prominent popular and crossover music genres spanning the period from the late 1990s to the present, we examine how the internet has augmented the creative, aesthetic, communicative and social dimensions of music. Analysing the internet-based practices associated with these genres poses methodological and theoretical challenges. It requires new research tools attentive to the online practices involved in their creation and reception. To this end we adapt the Issue Crawler software, an established digital method that analyses networks of hyperlinking on the world-wide web. In addition, it requires a theoretical framework that can respond to music’s profuse mediations in the digital environment. We propose that a version of genre theory offers such a framework. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of our analysis for theorising music and place and for historical periodization after the internet

Interdisciplinarity: Reconfigurations of the Social and Natural Sciences

The idea of discipline opens up a nexus of meaning. Disciplines discipline disciples.1 A commitment to a discipline is a way of ensuring that certain disciplinary methods and concepts are used rigorously and that undisciplined and undisciplinary objects, methods and concepts are ruled out. By contrast, ideas of interdisciplinarity imply a variety of boundary transgressions, in which the disciplinary and disciplining rules, trainings and subjectivities given by existing knowledge corpuses are put aside. In this introduction we interrogate the current preoccupation with interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity, in particular the ascendance in recent years of a particular discourse on interdisciplinarity where it is associated with a more generalised transformation in the relations between science, technology and society. We are therefore less concerned with interdisciplinarity in general than with the contemporary formation of interdisciplinarity: how it has come to be seen as a solution to a series of current problems, in particular the relations between science and society, the development of accountability, and the need to foster innovation in the knowledge economy. The present situation, we will suggest, can be understood as a problematisation: 2 the question of whether a given knowledge practice is too disciplinary, or interdisciplinary, or not disciplinary enough has become an issue and an object of enquiry for governments, funding agencies and researchers

Measuring Commonality in Recommendation of Cultural Content: Recommender Systems to Enhance Cultural Citizenship

Recommender systems have become the dominant means of curating cultural content, significantly influencing the nature of individual cultural experience. While the majority of research on recommender systems optimizes for personalized user experience, this paradigm does not capture the ways that recommender systems impact cultural experience in the aggregate, across populations of users. Although existing novelty, diversity, and fairness studies probe how systems relate to the broader social role of cultural content, they do not adequately center culture as a core concept and challenge. In this work, we introduce commonality as a new measure that reflects the degree to which recommendations familiarize a given user population with specified categories of cultural content. Our proposed commonality metric responds to a set of arguments developed through an interdisciplinary dialogue between researchers in computer science and the social sciences and humanities. With reference to principles underpinning non-profit, public service media systems in democratic societies, we identify universality of address and content diversity in the service of strengthening cultural citizenship as particularly relevant goals for recommender systems delivering cultural content. Taking diversity in movie recommendation as a case study in enhancing pluralistic cultural experience, we empirically compare systems' performance using commonality and existing utility, diversity, and fairness metrics. Our results demonstrate that commonality captures a property of system behavior complementary to existing metrics and suggest the need for alternative, non-personalized interventions in recommender systems oriented to strengthening cultural citizenship across populations of users. In this way, commonality contributes to a growing body of scholarship developing 'public good' rationales for digital media and ML systems.Comment: The 16th ACM Conference on Recommender System

Towards a Critical Understanding of Music, Emotion and Self-Identity

The article begins by outlining a dominant conception of these relations in sociologically informed analysis of music, which sees music primarily as a positive resource for active self-making. My argument is that this conception rests on a problematic notion of the self and also on an overly optimistic understanding of music, which implicitly sees music as highly independent of negative social and historical processes. I then attempt to construct a) a more adequately critical conception of personal identity in modern societies; and b) a more balanced appraisal of music-society relations. I suggest two ways in which relations between self, music and society may not always be quite so positive or as healthy as the dominant conception suggests: 1) Music is now bound up with the incorporation of authenticity and creativity into capitalism, and with intensified consumption habits. 2) Emotional self-realisation through music is now linked to status competition. Interviews are analysed

Increase of invasive meningococcal serogroup W disease in Europe, 2013 to 2017

Background: The total incidence of invasive meningococcal disease (IMD) in Europe has been declining in recent years; however, a rising incidence due to serogroup W (MenW), predominantly sequence type 11 (ST-11), clonal complex 11 (cc11), was reported in some European countries. Aim: The aim of this study was to compile the most recent laboratory surveillance data on MenW IMD from several European countries to assess recent trends in Europe. Methods: In this observational, retrospective study, IMD surveillance data collected from 2013–17 by national reference laboratories and surveillance units from 13 European countries were analysed using descriptive statistics. Results: The overall incidence of IMD has been stable during the study period. Incidence of MenW IMD per 100,000 population (2013: 0.03; 2014: 0.05; 2015: 0.08; 2016: 0.11; 2017: 0.11) and the proportion of this serogroup among all invasive cases (2013: 5% (116/2,216); 2014: 9% (161/1,761); 2015: 13% (271/2,074); 2016: 17% (388/2,222); 2017: 19% (393/2,112)) continuously increased. The most affected countries were England, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Sweden. MenW was more frequent in older age groups (≥ 45 years), while the proportion in children (< 15 years) was lower than in other age groups. Of the culture-confirmed MenW IMD cases, 80% (615/767) were caused by hypervirulent cc11. Conclusion: During the years 2013–17, an increase in MenW IMD, mainly caused by MenW cc11, was observed in the majority of European countries. Given the unpredictable nature of meningococcal spread and the epidemiological potential of cc11, European countries may consider preventive strategies adapted to their contexts.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Welcoming Voices: Memory, Migration and Music

There are many studies of migration that focus on the economic and social impact of immigration, but the effect that migration has on cultural practices is less explored. This article considers the relationship song plays in the experience of migration. It focuses on the recent migration of Eastern European communities to the UK, played out against the backdrop of tensions surrounding Brexit. It explores how engaging with song plays a role in assimilation, reorientation, and displacement processes. Song has had a profound historical significance for Eastern European nations and their identity, demonstrated vividly in the events surrounding the collapse of the USSR in the late 1980s. Throughout 1987, the Lithuanian Rock March Festival toured the country to perform forbidden (“Western”) songs by way of political protest; in 1988 the anti-Soviet rock musical Lāčplēsis took Latvia by storm playing to over 180,000 people; and in the same year, Estonian musician Alo Mattiisen’s “Five Fatherland Songs” formed the basis of the Tartu Music Days festival, constructing a powerful song-cycle of anthems against the oppression of the Soviet state. Following this concert, the journalist Heinz Valk penned a celebrated article crystallizing the significance of these events in the evocative term “The Singing Revolution”. In this context, song became for these nations a deep expression of identity, a force for non-violent protest against oppression, and a communal bond whose articulation in mass singing events created a powerful voice enabling their emergence onto the stage of the coveted West. Thirty years later, the relationship of Eastern Europeans with the West continues to be tested as the world’s borders become points of tension and as the identities of nation states and national identities become scattered. With accession to the EU in 2004, a surge of movement beyond national boundaries created diasporic populations of Eastern Europeans in the UK. Here, encountering the tensions of immigrant life, the barriers of linguistic and cultural currency and the challenges of assimilation, migrants experience both individual and communal dynamics that influence their sense of personal and national identity. Informed by a number of ethnographic projects with migrant populations, this article explores some of the ways in which that sense of personal and national identity is played out through music and song. Working principally with Lithuanian and Polish communities in Lincolnshire between 2016 and the present, and engaging with local community events, outreach activities and interviews, the article will listen to the migrants’ own voices in exploring the subtle, personal and communal ways in which song informs their sense of self

The Virtual Sociality of Rights: The Case of Women\u27s Rights are Human Rights

This essay traces the relationship between activists and academics involved in the campaign for women\u27s rights as human rights as a case study of the relationship between different classes of what I call knowledge professionals self-consciously acting in a transnational domain. The puzzle that animates this essay is the following: how was it that at the very moment at which a critique of rights and a reimagination of rights as rights talk proved to be such fertile ground for academic scholarship did the same rights prove to be an equally fertile ground for activist networking and lobbying activities? The paper answers this question with respect to the work of self-reflexivity in creating a virtual sociality of rights

Diabolic marks, organs and relations: exiting symbolic misery

The globalized societies of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries are de-composing, according to Bernard Stiegler. This decay is expressed by breakdown in the compositional process between symbol and diabol as the dynamic circuit of interiorization and exteriorization, vital for individuation, has become subject to mass calculation, marketization, and hyper-synchronization. For Stiegler there is no way out of this impasse and the result is misery – a diabolic world. In Stiegler’s narration of symbolic misery, diabolic activities and aesthetic forms are not considered capable of conditioning social relations. This article develops the concept of the diabol through readings of Emily Dickinson’s poetry – her diabolic marks – and the diabolic organs and relations of feminist free improvisation. I demonstrate how diabolic inscriptions, which intensify singularity and diachrony, are social-aesthetic resources that can support individuation and trans-individuation and hold potential to open up a new epoch of diabolic sense