Steve Reich\u27s ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ as a Soundscape Composition

Over the past half century, there has been much research into the acoustic qualities of soundscapes from a variety of perspectives: the humanities and social sciences as per the ‘acoustic ecology’ movement (established by Schafer, Truax, and Westerkamp et al.), and more recently the environmental science and ecology as per ‘soundscape ecology’ (established by Farina, Pijanowski, and Krause, et al.). Collectively, these disciplines provide diverse methods for engagement with analysis of acoustic environments. Simultaneous to the rise of the acoustic ecology movement in the 1970s (marked by the publication of Schafer’s ‘The Tuning of the World (1974)), the composition of numerous seminal ‘minimalist’ musical works occurred, notable amongst them Steve Reich’s ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ (1974-6). Whilst there has been significant analysis of this work from a traditional musicological standpoint, the environmental implications of its process-driven nature have gone largely ignored, particularly in relation to ecological processes and behaviours. This paper provides an ecomusicological analysis of ‘Music for 18 Musicians’, investigating the numerous affinities that the piece has with acoustic ecology and soundscape ecology concepts alike. This will be explored at both a macromorphological level (considering large-scale temporal cycles and processes), and micromorphological level (as related to orchestration, textural organisation, instrumental content in the context of bioacoustics, community sound cues and ensemble agency). A concluding discussion of Reich’s compositional influences (themselves influenced by natural soundscapes) and process follows, with questions raised around the possibility of ecomusicological analysis of other ‘abstract’ musical works to encourage further research in compositional approaches and music therapy

Marvell\u27s The Garden as metamorphosis

Each poem may be regarded as a metamorphosis, a transformation, whether because it brings the disconnected elements of life into form, or because it brings new life to old forms. And both of these changes may occur in one poem which will contain, then, something new and something old, weather the old be the reflection of a tradition, or simply a fixed attitude of the poet

Rainfall as a cause of mechanical damage to Pseudocyphellaria rufovirescens in a New Zealand temperate rainforest

Lichens, like all poikilohydric plants, have a metabolism that is dependent on external moistening from their environment. In the case of green algal lichens high humidities may be sufficient for positive net photosynthesis to occur (Lange et al. 1993a). For these plants water stress is usually taken to mean a lack of water (Kappen 1988; Rundel 1988) but it can also mean an excess of water that leads to depressed CO2 exchange because of increased diffusion resistances at high thallus water contents (Lange & Tenhunen 1981; Kershaw 1985). Rather than this being an unusual occurrence, Lange et al. (19936) found reduced CO2 exchange at thallus supra-saturation to be present over long periods in the temperate rainforest of north-eastern New Zealand

Steve Reich's 'Music for 18 Musicians' as a soundscape composition

Over the past half century, there has been much research into the acoustic qualities of soundscapes from a variety of perspectives: the humanities and social sciences as per the ‘acoustic ecology’ movement (established by Schafer, Truax, and Westerkamp et al.), and more recently the environmental science and ecology as per ‘soundscape ecology’ (established by Farina, Pijanowski, and Krause, et al.). Collectively, these disciplines provide diverse methods for engagement with analysis of acoustic environments. Simultaneous to the rise of the acoustic ecology movement in the 1970s (marked by the publication of Schafer’s ‘The Tuning of the World (1974)), the composition of numerous seminal ‘minimalist’ musical works occurred, notable amongst them Steve Reich’s ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ (1974-6). Whilst there has been significant analysis of this work from a traditional musicological standpoint, the environmental implications of its process-driven nature have gone largely ignored, particularly in relation to ecological processes and behaviours. This paper provides an ecomusicological analysis of ‘Music for 18 Musicians’, investigating the numerous affinities that the piece has with acoustic ecology and soundscape ecology concepts alike. This will be explored at both a macromorphological level (considering large-scale temporal cycles and processes), and micromorphological level (as related to orchestration, textural organisation, instrumental content in the context of bioacoustics, community sound cues and ensemble agency). A concluding discussion of Reich’s compositional influences (themselves influenced by natural soundscapes) and process follows, with questions raised around the possibility of ecomusicological analysis of other ‘abstract’ musical works to encourage further research in compositional approaches and music therapy.Jesse Bude

Direito e Arte: Trabalho Ilícito e Direito de Greve a Partir da Música Greve dos Ladrões.

Trata-se de Revisão bibliográfica pautada na interseção entre Direito e Arte que visa à utilização de uma manifestação artística musical como base para o fornecimento de inspiração para o estudo do Direito, a reflexão crítica sobre os resultados obtidos e para a adoção de uma abordagem metodológica pautada nos ensinamentos de Dworkin. Com base nesses pressupostos procede-se com o Estudo dos temas Trabalho ilícito e Direito de Greve inspirado na música “Greve dos Ladrões” de Bezerra da Silva, partindo do arcabouço teórico do Direito e Arte e chegando na ceara do Direito do Trabalho

Topological properties and organizing principles of semantic networks

Interpreting natural language is an increasingly important task in computer algorithms due to the growing availability of unstructured textual data. Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications rely on semantic networks for structured knowledge representation. The fundamental properties of semantic networks must be taken into account when designing NLP algorithms, yet they remain to be structurally investigated. We study the properties of semantic networks from ConceptNet, defined by 7 semantic relations from 11 different languages. We find that semantic networks have universal basic properties: they are sparse, highly clustered, and many exhibit power-law degree distributions. Our findings show that the majority of the considered networks are scale-free. Some networks exhibit language-specific properties determined by grammatical rules, for example networks from highly inflected languages, such as e.g. Latin, German, French and Spanish, show peaks in the degree distribution that deviate from a power law. We find that depending on the semantic relation type and the language, the link formation in semantic networks is guided by different principles. In some networks the connections are similarity-based, while in others the connections are more complementarity-based. Finally, we demonstrate how knowledge of similarity and complementarity in semantic networks can improve NLP algorithms in missing link inference