The Soundscape of Alola: Exploring the Use of Hawaiian Musical Tropes and Motifs in the World of Pokémon Sun and Moon

This article explores how Pokémon Sun and Pokémon Moon use Hawaiian musical tropes and nondiegetic signifiers throughout the games, helping to “situate the player in the game.” This identification relies on a combination of player cultural literacy and game musical literacy to contextualize the Pokémon region of Alola. The soundscape of the game is made up of the underscore, incorporating traditional instruments from the steel guitar to Ka'eke'eke drums, alongside diegetic sounds to evoke and situate gameplay in a culture and geography most likely foreign to the player. The player’s ability to contextualize and situate themselves in this region relies on a combination of their cultural and game musical literacy. This investigation will also address the consumption of Hawaiian culture both within Japan and in the West, and the portrayal of its traditional music and performance within not only the Pokémon franchise but other AAA game titles that have been enjoyed globally. The use of these musical tropes and nondiegetic signifiers simultaneously grounds the player in the region of Alola, whilst constructing a sense of “otherness” in a Hawaiian soundscape designed by composers who are observing and enjoying the culture as tourists and visitors. The soundscape developed for Alola takes inspiration from traditional Hawaiian culture and music, but it ultimately diverges from these musical traditions and thereby produces a sonic environment unique to the fictional region. Consequently, players develop a literacy built through a return to the sounds traditionally associated with the Pokémon game franchise with a new addition of Hawaiian musical tropes to create a region that serves as something of a pastiche of Hawai'i, packaged to be culturally palatable and consumable to nonnative audiences

Evolutionary Synthesis Of Stellar Population In Elliptical Galaxies .1. Ingredients, Broad-Band Colors, And Infrared Features

NSF MPS 73-04673 A01, GP-40482, GP-3143, MPS 75-01398Astronom

News and knowledge capital

We explore the ability of a model with knowledge capital to generate business cycles driven by expectations of future movement in total factor productivity (TFP). These cycles are characterized by a boom in which consumption, investment, output and hours-worked all rise in advance of any actual movement in TFP. We model knowledge capital as an input into production which is endogenously produced through a learning-by-doing process. When firms receive news of an impending productivity increase, the value of knowledge capital rises, inducing the firm to hire more hours to "invest" in knowledge capital. The rise in the value of knowledge capital immediately raises the value of the firm, causing an appreciation in share prices, a feature that has empirical support. The increase in output of the firm allows both consumption and investment to rise despite the absence of any contemporaneous productivity shock. If the expected increase in productivity fails to materialize, the model generates a recession as well as a crash in the stock market.Expectations-driven business cycle; Pigou cycle; News shock; Learning-by-doing; Asset pricing

News, Intermediation Efficiency and Expectations-driven Boom-bust Cycles

The years leading up to the "great recession" were a time of rapid innovation in the financial industry. This period also saw a fall in interest rates, and a boom in liquidity that accompanied the boom in real activity, especially investment. In this paper we argue that these were not unrelated phenomena. The adoption of new financial products and practices led to a fall in the expected costs of intermediation which in turn engendered the flood of liquidity in the financial sector, lowered interest rate spreads and facilitated the boom in economic activity. When the events of 2007-2009 led to a re-evaluation of the effectiveness of these new products, agents revised their expectations regarding the actual efficiency gains available to the financial sector and this led to a withdrawal of liquidity from the financial system, a reversal in interest rates and a bust in real activity. We treat the efficiency of the financial sector as an exogenous process and study the impact of "news shocks" regarding this process. Following the expectations driven business cycle literature, we model the boom and bust cycle in terms of an expected future efficiency gain which is eventually not realized. The build up in liquidity and economic activity in expectation of these efficiency gains is then abruptly reversed when agent's hopes are dashed. The model generates counter-cyclical movements in the spread between lending rates and the risk-free rate which are driven purely by expectations, even in the absence of any exogenous movement in intermediation costs.externalities; expectations-driven business cycles, intermediation shocks, credit shocks, financial intermediation, financial innovation, news shocks, business cycles.