Fear and the musical avant-garde in games: Interviews with Jason Graves, Garry Schyman, Paul Gorman and Michael Kamper

© 2014 Intellect Ltd Article. If you have ever experienced the cold chill of fear when watching a film or playing a video or computer game, it is highly probable that your responses have been manipulated by composers exploiting the musical resources of modernism, experimental music and the avant-garde. Depictions of fear, horror, amorality, evil and so on, have come to be associated with these sound worlds, particularly within the realm of popular culture. A number of game titles and franchises have emerged in recent years, which exploit these musical associations, exploring their creative potential as vehicles of fear and horror within the context of interactive game-play. Two composers associated with this approach are Jason Graves (Dead Space franchise) and Garry Schyman (Bioshock franchise, Dante’s Inferno). This article explores perceived links between avant-garde music (as defined in ‘populist’ rather than musicological or historical terms, as a ‘catch-all’ phrase for twentieth-century music exploiting experimental techniques, modernism and atonality) and depictions of horror and fear through interviews with Graves and Schyman. Further questions are posed to Paul Gorman (audio director – Dante’s Inferno) and Michael Kamper (audio director – Bioshock 2) to contextualize the discussion by demonstrating the significant creative influence of audio directors in guiding the musical approach taken by game composers. The article would be of potential interest to anyone with an interest in game audio, commercial composition/composers, game development, creative collaboration, audio direction and the power of music to manipulate the emotions in association with visual media

Recent Results on Charmonium Decays at CLEO-c

The CLEO-c Experiment has made several recent contributions to the study of charmonium decays. This review briefly outlines the CLEO-c analyses of charmonium that were completed or made public during 2010. Special attention is given to the discovery of the process e+e- to pi+pi-h_c at a center of mass energy of 4170 MeV.Comment: Proceedings for CHARM 201

Survey of timing/synchronization of operating wideband digital communications networks

In order to benefit from experience gained from the synchronization of operational wideband digital networks, a survey was made of three such systems: Data Transmission Company, Western Union Telegraph Company, and the Computer Communications Group of the Trans-Canada Telephone System. The focus of the survey was on deployment and operational experience from a practical (as opposed to theoretical) viewpoint. The objective was to provide a report on the results of deployment how the systems performed, and wherein the performance differed from that predicted or intended in the design. It also attempted to determine how the various system designers would use the benefit of hindsight if they could design those same systems today

History of whaling in and near North Carolina

This study aims to reconstruct the history of shore whaling in the southeastern United States, emphasizing statistics on the catch of right whales, Eubalaena glacialis, the preferred targets. The earliest record of whaling in North Carolina is of a proposed voyage from New York in 1667. Early settlers on the Outer Banks utilized whale strandings by trying out the blubber of carcasses that came ashore, and some whale oil was exported from the 1660s onward. New England whalemen whaled along the North Carolina coast during the 1720s, and possibly earlier. As some of the whalemen from the northern colonies moved to Nortb Carolina, a shore-based whale fishery developed. This activity apparently continued without interruption until the War of Independence in 1776, and continued or was reestablished after the war. The methods and techniques of the North Carolina shore whalers changed slowly: as late as the 1890s they used a drogue at the end of the harpoon line and refrained from staying fast to the harpooned whale, they seldom employed harpoon guns, and then only during the waning years of the fishery. The whaling season extended from late December to May, most successfully between February and May. Whalers believed they were intercepting whales migrating north along the coast. Although some whaling occurred as far north as Cape Hatteras, it centered on the outer coasts of Core, Shackleford, and Bogue banks, particularly near Cape Lookout. The capture of whales other than right whales was a rare event. The number of boat crews probably remained fairly stable during much of the 19th century, with some increase in effort in the late 1870s and early 1880s when numbers of boat crews reached 12 to 18. Then by the late 1880s and 1890s only about 6 crews were active. North Carolina whaling had become desultory by the early 1900s, and ended completely in 1917. Judging by export and tax records, some ocean-going vessels made good catches off this coast in about 1715-30, including an estimated 13 whales in 1719, 15 in one year during the early 1720s, 5-6 in a three-year period of the mid to late 1720s, 8 by one ship's crew in 1727, 17 by one group of whalers in 1728-29, and 8-9 by two boats working from Ocracoke prior to 1730. It is impossible to know how representative these fragmentary records are for the period as a whole. The Carolina coast declined in importance as a cruising ground for pelagic whalers by the 1740s or 1750s. Thereafter, shore whaling probably accounted for most of the (poorly documented) catch. Lifetime catches by individual whalemen on Shackleford Banks suggest that the average annual catch was at least one to two whales during 1830·80, perhaps about four during the late 1870s and early 1880s, and declining to about one by the late 1880s. Data are insufficient to estimate the hunting loss rate in the Outer Banks whale fishery. North Carolina is the only state south of New Jersey known to have had a long and well established shore whaling industry. Some whaling took place in Chesapeake Bay and along the coast of Virginia during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, but it is poorly documented. Most of the rigbt whales taken off South Carolina, Georgia, and northern Florida during the 19th century were killed by pelagic whalers. Florida is the only southeastern state with evidence of an aboriginal (pre-contact) whale fishery. Right whale calves may have been among the aboriginal whalers' principal targets. (PDF file contains 34 pages.

The Origin of Warped, Precessing Disks in X-Ray Binaries

The radiation-driven warping instability discovered by Pringle holds considerable promise as the mechanism responsible for producing warped, precessing accretion disks in X-ray binaries. This instability is an inherently global mode of the disk, thereby avoiding the difficulties with earlier models for the precession. Here we follow up earlier work to study the linear behavior of the instability in the specific context of a binary system. We treat the influence of the companion as an orbit-averaged, quadrupole torque on the disk. The presence of this external torque allows the existence of solutions in which the direction of precession of the warp is retrograde with respect to disk rotation, in addition to the prograde solutions which exist in the absence of external torques.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure