Editorial Introduction: Circuits of Art and Communication in the Twenty-First Century

A founding editor of Sound Scripts, Jonathan W. Marshall, introduces the essays that follow in volume six of the journal, taking the reader through a tour of informatic exchanges, truths and falsehoods

Freezing the Music and Fetishising the Subject: The Audiovisual Dramaturgy of Michel van der Aa

When, with our eyes shut we run our hands along a surface, the rubbing of our fingers against the surface, and especially the varied play of our joints, provide a series of sensations, which differ only by their qualities and which exhibit a certain order in time. In this paper, I will explore the sonic relationship of sound to the development of new imaging technologies through Atomic Force Microscopes (AFM). In 2003, UCLA scientist, James Gimzewski, positioned a sensitive instrument called an atomic force microscope over a cell to try to detect its motion and the microscope picked up regular vibrations. These vibrations can be translated to sound files so one can listen to variations on various material structures at an atomic level. Anne Niemetz, a sound artist who worked on the 2004 Nano exhibition, suggests that, “the AFM can be regarded as a new type of musical instrument.” The issues of the relationship of nanotechnology to sound will be clarified through a discussion of my current research on the molecular particles that exist at the point of transition between the skin and gold. The data gathered at an atomic level is investigated to present sonically what is transferred at the point where the materials of skin and gold make contact. The idea of contact is related to the way that the AFM scan the surface of objects not by optics but by touch. The small stylus, ten nanometres at its tip, is analogous to the old record player stylus as it touches the grooves. Working at a molecular level, nano technologies offer new ways of exploring the infinitely small sonically by defying ocular-centrism and constructing sonic maps of new post-perspectival spatialities

Sonic Pleasure, Absence and the History of the Self: An Alternative Approach to the Criticism of Sound Art

Historical, psychoanalytic and cinema criticism have characterised the history of Western modernity and the individual subject as founded upon an affective lack. Pleasure is solicited by the promise of fullness, but this is never fulfilled, fuelling further desire. Sound art however is more typically theorised as inherently present and immersive, as a form that offers direct experience, which literally touches the subject. I draw upon the work of Jonathan Sterne, Steven Connor, psychoanalysis and film criticism to rearticulate not just modernist media and subjectivity as characterised by lack and absence, but the perception of aestheticised sound. Starting with an analysis of influential seventeenth century audiovisual theorist Athanasius Kircher, I sketch a history of the self and media where pleasure is solicited and threatened by subjective absence and lack, in which the aesthetics of Romanticism, absolute music, Alvin Lucier, Noise artists (Justice Yeldham), feminist sound poets (Amanda Stewart), the New Music Ensemble Decibel (director Cat Hope) and others are implicated

From the Phenomenal Sublime to Critical Play: Sonic Approaches to Engagement at the 13th Totally Huge New Music Festival

The thirteen Tura Totally Huge Festival of New Music was held in Perth, 19-29 Oct 2017. The Festival included numerous performances, residencies and workshops, as well as the Totally Huge New Music Festival Conference, 26 Oct 2017. The following article provides a critical overview of key performances within the Festival. The 2017 Festival was particularly notable for immersive works which offered what one might call phenomenal experiences, particularly Michael Pisaro’s A Wave and Waves and DCC: Glitch by Kouhei Harada, Mitsuaki Matsumoto and Shohei Sasagawa. A Wave and Waves and DCC: Glitch harnessed the fully embodied and located experience of aesthetic material, providing a combination of literally felt sound, an active perception of duration, and the sonic dramatization of space. The compositions of Anne LeBaron did not entirely fall outside of this paradigm. The most striking element of her works, however, was the way that she blends together what Gary Rickards characterised as the “progressive” wing of US and international art music in the 1970s (Harry Partch, György Ligetti, etcetera) with outrageous fun and open-ended, semi-improvised provocations, close to her early work with the neo-Dadaist, avant-garde rabble rousers Raudelunas. Where A Wave and Waves and DCC: Glitch tend towards sublime immersion (always problematic for the politics of art), LeBaron works to activate playful reflection through humour, pleasure and (at times) outrage or discomfort. Also discussed are the alternative musical-poetic histories offered by Ros Bolleter (Quarry Music) and the reconfiguring of mainstream, post-truth discourse through musical AI (Mississippi Swan: Daybew by Rick Snow and Chris Tonkin)

Performing kayepa dordok living waters in Noongar boodjar, South-Western Australia

Performance through language, song and dance provides alternative knowledges and ways of understanding, in this case, developing deeper relationships with living water. Drawing on Indigenous Noongar culture from south-western Australia, this paper addresses the question: How can relationships between living underground, estuarine and riverine water bodies (kayepa dordok) be performed? Two new interlinked Noongar works in response to local riverscapes were developed for, and performed as part of, the 2021 Perth Festival. The first was to embody the return journey of the bullshark, from the salt water to the riverine fresh water; the second was to enact the presence of the unseen groundwater – which emerges as wetlands and estuaries strewn throughout the landscape – on its return to the sea. The method used to derive the song and dance, and the impact of the performance itself, are described. The experiment makes a case for multiple benefits associated with re-establishing connections among culture and nature by drawing on Indigenous perspectives, through performance giving voice to a relationality between river systems and people

The Curious Case of HU Aquarii - Dynamically Testing Proposed Planetary Systems

In early 2011, the discovery of two planets moving on surprisingly extreme orbits around the eclipsing polar cataclysmic variable system HU Aquraii was announced based on variations in the timing of mutual eclipses between the two central stars. We perform a detailed dynamical analysis of the stability of the exoplanet system as proposed in that work, revealing that it is simply dynamically unfeasible. We then apply the latest rigorous methods used by the Anglo-Australian Planet Search to analyse radial velocity data to re-examine the data used to make the initial claim. Using that data, we arrive at a significantly different orbital solution for the proposed planets, which we then show through dynamical analysis to be equally unfeasible. Finally, we discuss the need for caution in linking eclipse-timing data for cataclysmic variables to the presence of planets, and suggest a more likely explanation for the observed signal.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Managing at the Speed of Light: Improving Mission-Support Performance

The House and Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittees requested this study to help DOE's three major mission-support organizations improve their operations to better meet the current and future needs of the department. The passage of the Recovery Act only increased the importance of having DOE's mission-support offices working in the most effective, efficient, and timely manner as possible. While following rules and regulations is essential, the foremost task of the mission-support offices is to support the department's mission, i.e., the programs that DOE is implementing, whether in Washington D.C. or in the field. As a result, the Panel offered specific recommendations to strengthen the mission-focus and improve the management of each of the following support functions based on five "management mandates":- Strategic Vision- Leadership- Mission and Customer Service Orientation- Tactical Implementation- Agility/AdaptabilityKey FindingsThe Panel made several recommendations in each of the functional areas examined and some overarching recommendations for the corporate management of the mission-support offices that they believed would result in significant improvements to DOE's mission-support operations. The Panel believed that adopting these recommendations will not only make DOE a better functioning organization, but that most of them are essential if DOE is to put its very large allocation of Recovery Act funding to its intended uses as quickly as possible

Divergent Relationship of Circulating CTRP3 Levels between Obesity and Gender: a Cross-sectional Study

C1q TNF Related Protein 3 (CTRP3) is a novel adipose tissue derived secreted factor, or adipokine, which has been linked to a number of beneficial biological effects on metabolism, inflammation, and survival signaling in a variety of tissues. However, very little is known about CTRP3 in regards to human health. The purpose of this project was to examine circulating CTRP3 levels in a clinical population, patients with symptoms requiring heart catheterization in order to identify the presence of obstructive coronary artery disease (CAD). It was hypothesized that serum CTRP3 levels would be decreased in the presence of CAD. Methods Body mass index (BMI), diabetes status, and plasma samples were collected from 100 patients who were \u3e30 years of age and presented at the East Tennessee State University Heart Clinic with symptoms requiring heart catheterization in order to identify the presence of cardiovascular blockages (n = 52 male, n = 48 female). Circulating CTRP3 levels were quantified using commercially available ELISA. Results Circulating CTRP3 levels had no relationship to the presence of CAD regardless of gender. However, circulating concentrations of CTRP3 were significantly higher in normal weight (BMI \u3c 30) females (0.88 ± 0.12 µg/ml) compared with males (0.54 ± 0.06 µg/ml). Further, obesity (BMI \u3e 30) resulted in an increase in circulating CTRP3 levels in male subjects (0.74 ± 0.08 µg/ml) but showed a significant decrease in female subjects (0.58 ± 0.07 µg/ml). Additionally, there was a significant reduction in circulating CTRP3 levels in female subjects who were diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes compared with patients without (0.79 ± 0.08 vs. 0.42 ± 0.10 µg/ml). There was no relationship between diabetes status and circulating CTRP3 levels in male subjects. Conclusion Circulating CTRP3 levels had a different relationship with diabetes and obesity status between male and female patients. It is possible that circulating CTRP3 levels are controlled by hormonal status, however more research is needed to explore this relationship. Nevertheless, future studies examining the relationship between CTRP3 levels and disease status should treat gender as an independent variable

γδ T cell response to prolonged heavy endurance exercise

The focus of this study was to assess exercise-induced alterations in circulating γδ T cell subpopulations and memory phenotypes after a prolonged heavy-intensity exercise bout. Ten highly-trained endurance cyclists (mean ± SEM: age 24.0 ± 1.3 years; height 1.81 ± 0.02 m; body mass 73.3 ± 1.8 kg; peak oxygen uptake 60.7 ± 1.5 mL.kg-1.min-1) performed 2 h of cycling exercise at 90% of the second ventilatory threshold. Blood samples were collected before exercise, immediately post-exercise, 1 h, 2 h, 4 h, and 6 h post-exercise. Flow cytometry was used to examine γδ T cell subsets, memory phenotypes and receptor expression. A significant decrease in cell concentration was observed in total γδ T cells and the δ2 subset from pre-exercise to 1 h, 2 h, and 4 h post-exercise. Further analysis of the δ2 subset revealed a significant decrease from pre-exercise to 1 h, 2 h, and 4 h post-exercise in naive δ2 cells, and a significant decrease from pre-exercise to 1 h and 2 h post-exercise in central memory δ2 cells. A significant decrease was observed in γδ T cells expressing CD11ahigh, CD62Lhigh and CD94+ from pre-exercise to 1 h, 2 h, and 4 h post-exercise. Furthermore, a significant decrease was observed from pre-exercise to 1 h post-exercise in CD62Llow and CD94- γδ T cells. These results suggest an exercise-stress-induced redistribution of γδ T cells from the circulation with greater propensity for antigen stimulation, tissue and lymph node homing potential for a duration of 4 h after the cessation of exercise

The gold standard: accurate stellar and planetary parameters for eight Kepler M dwarf systems enabled by parallaxes

We report parallaxes and proper motions from the Hawaii Infrared Parallax Program for eight nearby M dwarf stars with transiting exoplanets discovered by Kepler. We combine our directly measured distances with mass-luminosity and radius–luminosity relationships to significantly improve constraints on the host stars’ properties. Our astrometry enables the identification of wide stellar companions to the planet hosts. Within our limited sample, all the multi-transiting planet hosts (three of three) appear to be single stars, while nearly all (four of five) of the systems with a single detected planet have wide stellar companions. By applying strict priors on average stellar density from our updated radius and mass in our transit fitting analysis, we measure the eccentricity probability distributions for each transiting planet. Planets in single-star systems tend to have smaller eccentricities than those in binaries, although this difference is not significant in our small sample. In the case of Kepler-42bcd, where the eccentricities are known to be ≃0, we demonstrate that such systems can serve as powerful tests of M dwarf evolutionary models by working in L⋆ − ρ⋆ space. The transit-fit density for Kepler- 42bcd is inconsistent with model predictions at 2.1σ (22%), but matches more empirical estimates at 0.2σ (2%), consistent with earlier results showing model radii of M dwarfs are underinflated. Gaia will provide high-precision parallaxes for the entire Kepler M dwarf sample, and TESS will identify more planets transiting nearby, late-type stars, enabling significant improvements in our understanding of the eccentricity distribution of small planets and the parameters of late-type dwarfs.Support for Program number HST-HF2-51364.001-A was provided by NASA through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555.Some of the data presented in this paper were obtained from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). STScI is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS5-26555. Support for MAST for non-HST data is provided by the NASA Office of Space Science via grant NNX09AF08G and by other grants and contracts. This paper includes data collected by the Kepler mission. Funding for the Kepler mission is provided by the NASA Science Mission directorate. The authors acknowledge the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) at The University of Texas at Austin for providing HPC resources that have contributed to the research results reported within this paper. URL: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu. (HST-HF2-51364.001-A - NASA through Space Telescope Science Institute; NAS5-26555 - NASA; NNX09AF08G - NASA Office of Space Science; NASA Science Mission directorate