Community Co-Creation and Virtual Reality in Opera: Composing "Out of the Ordinary/As an nGnách"

The musical submission for this dissertation is a twenty-minute opera in virtual reality, "Out of the Ordinary/As an nGnách," which was commissioned and produced by Irish National Opera and co-produced by Virtual Reality Ireland. It was developed over two years through a co-creation process with three communities. The music was set to a libretto in English and Irish by Jody O’Neill, and the opera was directed by Jo Mangan. The animated virtual reality world was designed and developed by Algorithm, a creative production company. "Out of the Ordinary/As an nGnách," is one of three trials as part of Traction, an EU-funded research project. The opera is scored for two professional opera singers, professional and non-professional instrumentalists and a community choir. This written submission for my dissertation examines how the community co-creation and the virtual reality technology influenced the final work. I highlight how material and themes from the community workshops informed the narrative and libretto, and I analyze the ways in which the co-creation process and the non-professional artists from the communities are incorporated into the music. I discuss the process of composing for the virtual reality medium and finally, I reflect on where I believe improvements within the process could have been made, and the overall accomplishments of the project

An enquiry concerning the passions: a critical study of Hume's Four Dissertations

Hume's first work, A Treatise of Human Nature, has traditionally received the lion's share of scholarly attention, at the expense of his later and more polished texts. The tide has started to shift in recent years, with the result that Hume's two Enquiries - his mature investigations of the understanding and morals - are now recognised as important works in their own right (though most commentators still continue to prefer the Treatise). With regard to Hume's work on the passions, however, Book~2 of the Treatise still commands all of the attention. In this thesis, I defend two important claims. The first is that Hume has a mature philosophy of emotion, significantly different - indeed, significantly improved - from that of the Treatise. Most strikingly, it is anti-egoist and anti-hedonist about motivation, where the Treatise had espoused a Lockean hedonism and egoism. In parts it is also more cognitivist, and although Hume remains as opposed to moral rationalism as he ever was, his arguments in support of this opposition are very different. The second claim is that Hume's mature philosophy of emotion is to be found, not in the Dissertation on the Passions, but rather in the full set of Four Dissertations in which this work first appeared, including also the Natural History of Religion, Of Tragedy, and Of the Standard of Taste. The passions, I argue, form the unifying theme of this collection, which is in effect Hume's Enquiry concerning the Passions. I maintain that they are profitably studied together on this understanding, and my thesis is offered as the first such study

Agency without Avoidability: Defusing a New Threat to Frankfurt’s Counterexample Strategy1

In this paper, I examine a new line of response to Frankfurt’s challenge to the traditional association of moral responsibility with the ability to do otherwise. According to this response, Frankfurt’s counterexample strategy fails, not in light of the conditions for moral responsibility per se, but in view of the conditions for action. Specifically, it is claimed, a piece of behavior counts as an action only if it is within the agent’s power to avoid performing it. In so far as Frankfurt’s challenge presupposes that actions can be unavoidable, this view of action seems to bring his challenge up short. Helen Steward and Maria Alvarez have independently proposed versions of this response. Here I argue that this response is unavailable to Frankfurt’s incompatibilist opponents. This becomes evident when we put this question to its proponents: “Are actions that originate deterministically ipso facto unavoidable?” If they answer “yes,” they encounter one horn of a dilemma. If they answer “no,” they encounter the other horn. Since no one has a clearer stake in meeting Frankfurt’s challenge than these theorists do, it is significant that the Steward-Alvarez response is unavailable to them

The incidence and prevalence of diabetes in patients with serious mental illness in North West Wales: Two cohorts, 1875–1924 & 1994–2006 compared

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Against a background of interest in rates of diabetes in schizophrenia and related psychoses and claims that data from historical periods demonstrate a link that antedates modern antipsychotics, we sought to establish the rate of diabetes in first onset psychosis and subsequent prevalence in historical and contemporary cohorts.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>Analysis of two epidemiologically complete databases of individuals admitted for mental illness. 3170 individuals admitted to the North Wales Asylum between 1875–1924 and tracked over 18,486 patient years and 394 North West Wales first admissions for schizophrenia and related psychoses between 1994 and 2006 and tracked after treatment.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The prevalence of Type 2 diabetes among patients with psychoses at time of first admission in both historical and contemporary samples was 0%. The incidence of diabetes remained 0% in the historical sample throughout 15 years of follow-up but rose in the contemporary sample after 3, 5 and 6 years of treatment with an incidence rate double the expected population rate so that the 15 year prevalence is likely to be over 8%.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>No association was found between diabetes and serious mental illness, but there may be an association between diabetes and treatment.</p