Go South! India “Discovers”: Africa and Latin America

In August 2012, India’s first dialogue with the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños, CELAC), founded in 2010, took place in New Delhi. Following India’s “rediscovery” of Africa, this demonstrated India’s interest in forging closer political ties with Latin America. Since the 1990s, India has been globalizing its foreign policy. Having initially focused on Southeast and East Asia, India has looked to extend its relationships with Africa and Latin America in recent years. The driving force behind India’s diversification of foreign policy to the global South is, on the one hand, economic interests, and, on the other, the quest for recognition of India’s ascent to great power status. India’s renewed engagement in Africa began with Indian businesses’ investments in the raw material sector. Through a number of development activities and with the participation of Indian soldiers in United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operations, the Indian government has been signaling to the international community its readiness to act as a responsible (potential) great power. Security policy interests are the reason for different kinds of security cooperation with East African states in the Indian Ocean region – an area India considers to be part of its extended regional neighborhood. Indian-owned businesses have become increasingly active in Latin America since the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is, however, not only due to the region’s resource wealth, but also to its potential as a market for Indian products and as an investment location. Foreign policy has only recently started to follow the economy, as shown by New Delhi’s hosting of the India-CELAC Foreign Ministers’ Dialogue in 2012. India remains, however, far behind China. Despite India’s growing engagement in Africa and Latin America, these regions are not of primary importance in the overall context of Indian foreign policy, which is still very much focused on security threats that spill over from the immediate regional vicinity

Come on Baby, Light My Fire

Peer Reviewe

Saccadic Eye-Movements Suppress Visual Mental Imagery and Partly Reduce Emotional Response During Music Listening

Visual mental imagery has been proposed to be an underlying mechanism of music-induced emotion, yet very little is known about the phenomenon due to its ephemeral nature. The present study utilised a saccadic eye-movement task designed to suppress visual imagery during music listening. Thirty-five participants took part in Distractor (eye-movement) and Control (blank screen) conditions, and reported the prevalence, control, and vividness of their visual imagery, and felt emotion ratings using the GEMS-9 in response to short excerpts of film music. The results show that the eye-movement task was highly effective in reducing ratings for prevalence and vividness of visual imagery, and for one GEMS item, Nostalgia, but was not successful in reducing control of imagery or the remaining GEMS items in response to the music. This represents a novel approach to understanding the potentially causal role of visual imagery on music-induced emotion, on which future research can build by considering the attentional mechanisms that a distraction task may pose during music-induced visual imagery formation

Chapter Introduction and Overview

Drawing on perspectives from music psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, musicology, clinical psychology, and music education, Music and Mental Imagery provides a critical overview of cutting-edge research on the various types of mental imagery associated with music. The four main parts cover an introduction to the different types of mental imagery associated with music such as auditory/musical, visual, kinaesthetic, and multimodal mental imagery; a critical assessment of established and novel ways to measure mental imagery in various musical contexts; coverage of different states of consciousness, all of which are relevant for, and often associated with, mental imagery in music, and a critical overview of applications of mental imagery in health, educational ,and performance settings. By both critically reviewing up-to-date scientific research and offering new empirical results, this book provides a unique overview of the different types and origins of mental imagery in musical contexts, various ways to measure them, and intriguing insights into related mental phenomena such as mind-wandering and synaesthesia. This will be of particular interest for scholars and researchers of music psychology and music education. It will also be useful for practitioners working with music in applied health and educational contexts

Third International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus10): A Conference Report

SysMus10, the third International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology, was held at the University of Cambridge, UK, in September 2010. The conference was organised by PhD students at the Centre for Music and Science in the University’s Faculty of Music. SysMus10 brought together around 40 advanced students working in the field of systematic musicology representing 14 nationalities. The presentations primarily focused on the students’ ongoing research for their PhDs or Masters’ degrees. The conference included the presentation and publication of 25 peer- reviewed papers and posters, keynotes from top researchers in the field (Eric Clarke, Nicholas Cook, and Petri Toiviainen), a workshop and several social activities. Although the conference revealed that the concept of “systematic musicology” is still not known much outside the German-speaking research community, it served as an excellent exchange platform for students doing music research in various disciplines. SysMus10 successfully continued the strong work of the first two SysMus conferences (SysMus08, held in Graz, Austria, and SysMus09, held in Ghent, Belgium), and no doubt next year’s conference, SysMus11 (to be held in Cologne, Germany), will be just as enlightening and inspiring for young musicologists and students of other fields alike

The VERBMOBIL domain model version 1.0

This report describes the domain model used in the German Machine Translation project VERBMOBIL. In order make the design principles underlying the modeling explicit, we begin with a brief sketch of the VERBMOBIL demonstrator architecture from the perspective of the domain model. We then present some rather general considerations on the nature of domain modeling and its relationship to semantics. We claim that the semantic information contained in the model mainly serves two tasks. For one thing, it provides the basis for a conceptual transfer from German to English; on the other hand, it provides information needed for disambiguation. We argue that these tasks pose different requirements, and that domain modeling in general is highly task-dependent. A brief overview of domain models or ontologies used in existing NLP systems confirms this position. We finally describe the different parts of the domain model, explain our design decisions, and present examples of how the information contained in the model can be actually used in the VERBMOBIL demonstrator. In doing so, we also point out the main functionality of FLEX, the Description Logic system used for the modeling

Music listening evokes story-like visual imagery with both idiosyncratic and shared content

There is growing evidence that music can induce a wide range of visual imagery. To date, however, there have been few thorough investigations into the specific content of music-induced visual imagery, and whether listeners exhibit consistency within themselves and with one another regarding their visual imagery content. We recruited an online sample (N = 353) who listened to three orchestral film music excerpts representing happy, tender, and fearful emotions. For each excerpt, listeners rated how much visual imagery they were experiencing and how vivid it was, their liking of and felt emotional intensity in response to the excerpt, and, finally, described the content of any visual imagery they may have been experiencing. Further, they completed items assessing a number of individual differences including musical training and general visual imagery ability. Of the initial sample, 254 respondents completed the survey again three weeks later. A thematic analysis of the content descriptions revealed three higher-order themes of prominent visual imagery experiences: Storytelling (imagined locations, characters, actions, etc.), Associations (emotional experiences, abstract thoughts, and memories), and References (origins of the visual imagery, e.g., film and TV). Although listeners demonstrated relatively low visual imagery consistency with each other, levels were higher when considering visual imagery content within individuals across timepoints. Our findings corroborate past literature regarding music’s capacity to encourage narrative engagement. It, however, extends it (a) to show that such engagement is highly visual and contains other types of imagery to a lesser extent, (b) to indicate the idiosyncratic tendencies of listeners’ imagery consistency, and (c) to reveal key factors influencing consistency levels (e.g., vividness of visual imagery and emotional intensity ratings in response to music). Further implications are discussed in relation to visual imagery’s purported involvement in music-induced emotions and aesthetic appeal

The neuro-oscillatory profiles of static and dynamic music-induced visual imagery

Visual imagery, i.e., seeing in the absence of the corresponding retinal input, has been linked to visual and motor processing areas of the brain. Music listening provides an ideal vehicle for exploring the neural correlates of visual imagery because it has been shown to reliably induce a broad variety of content, ranging from abstract shapes to dynamic scenes. Forty-two participants listened with closed eyes to twenty-four excerpts of music, while a 15-channel EEG was recorded, and, after each excerpt, rated the extent to which they experienced static and dynamic visual imagery. Our results show both static and dynamic imagery to be associated with posterior alpha suppression (especially in lower alpha) early in the onset of music listening, while static imagery was associated with an additional alpha enhancement later in the listening experience. With regard to the beta band, our results demonstrate beta enhancement to static imagery, but first beta suppression before enhancement in response to dynamic imagery. We also observed a positive association, early in the listening experience, between gamma power and dynamic imagery ratings that was not present for static imagery ratings. Finally, we offer evidence that musical training may selectively drive effects found with respect to static and dynamic imagery and alpha, beta, and gamma band oscillations. Taken together, our results show the promise of using music listening as an effective stimulus for examining the neural correlates of visual imagery and its contents. Our study also highlights the relevance of future work seeking to study the temporal dynamics of music-induced visual imagery

Go South! Indien "entdeckt" Afrika und Lateinamerika

Im August 2012 fand das erste Treffen Indiens mit der im Jahr 2010 gegründeten Gemeinschaft der Lateinamerikanischen und Karibischen Staaten (Comunidad de Estados Latinoamericanos y Caribeños, CELAC) in Neu-Delhi statt. Indien demonstrierte damit nach der „Wiederentdeckung“ Afrikas sein Interesse an engeren politischen Kontakten zu Lateinamerika. Analyse Seit den 1990er Jahren richtet Indien seine Außenpolitik globaler aus. Nachdem der Schwerpunkt zunächst auf Südost- und Ostasien lag, weitete Indien in den letzten Jahren seine Beziehungen auch zu Afrika und Lateinamerika aus. Die treibenden Kräfte der Diversifizierung indischer Außenpolitik hin zu diesen Regionen des „globalen Südens“ sind einerseits wirtschaftliche Interessen und andererseits das Streben nach Anerkennung für Indiens Aufstieg zur Großmacht. Indiens erneut erwachtes Engagement in Afrika begann mit Investitionen indischer Unternehmen im Rohstoffsektor. Durch eine Reihe entwicklungspolitischer Aktivitäten und mit der Teilnahme indischer Soldaten an UN-Friedensmissionen signalisiert die indische Regierung der internationalen Gemeinschaft seine Bereitschaft, als verantwortungsvolle (potenzielle) Großmacht zu handeln. Sicherheitspolitische Interessen sind der Anlass für eine Reihe von Sicherheitskooperationen mit den ostafrikanischen Anrainerstaaten am Indischen Ozean, den Indien als Teil seiner erweiterten regionalen Nachbarschaft wahrnimmt. Seit Anfang der 2000er Jahre sind indische Unternehmen zunehmend in Lateinamerika aktiv, allerdings nicht nur aufgrund seines Ressourcenreichtums, sondern auch als Absatzmarkt für indische Waren und als Investitionsstandort. Die Politik folgt erst seit Kurzem der Wirtschaft, wie die Ausrichtung des Indien-CELAC Treffens im Jahr 2012 zeigt. Im Vergleich mit China bleibt Indien jedoch zurück. Trotz des gewachsenen Engagements in Afrika und Lateinamerika sind diese Regionen auch weiterhin im Gesamtkontext indischer Außenpolitik nicht von primärer Bedeutung. Diese ist immer noch stark auf die Sicherheitsbedrohungen aus der unmittelbaren regionalen Nachbarschaft fokussiert