1,439 research outputs found
Emotions in the Listener: A Criterion of Artistic Relevance
Philosophers of music and psychologists have examined the various ways in which music is capable of arousing emotions in a listener. Among philosophers, opinions diverge as to the different types of music-induced emotions and as to their relevance to music listening. A somewhat neglected question concerns the possibility of developing a general criterion for the artistic relevance of music-induced emotions. In this paper, I will try to formulate such a criterion. In whatever way music may induce emotions and regardless of the sorts of emotion music is taken to arouse, a given emotion will qualify as artistically relevant if and only if it is caused by appropriate listening, it is dependent on features of the piece of music as a work of art and is capable of further directing our attention to such features
On the Destruction of Musical Instruments
In this article, I aim to provide an account of the peculiar reasons that motivate our negative reaction whenever we see musical instruments being mistreated and destroyed. Stephen Davies has suggested that this happens because we seem to treat musical instruments as we treat human beings, at least in some relevant respects. I argue in favour of a different explanation, one that is based on the nature of music as an art form. The main idea behind my account is that musical instruments are not mere tools for the production of art; rather, they are involved in an essential way in artistic appreciation of music. This fact not only grounds our negative reaction to their mistreatment and destruction but also has a normative force that is lacked by the account proposed by Davies
Stephen Davies on the Issue of Literalism
In this paper I discuss Stephen Davies’s defence of literalism about emotional descriptions of music. According to literalism, a piece of music literally possesses the expressive properties we attribute to it when we describe it as ‘sad’, ‘happy’, etc. Davies’s literalist strategy exploits the concept of polysemy: the meaning of emotion words in descriptions of expressive music is related to the meaning of those words when used in their primary psychological sense. The relation between the two meanings is identified by Davies in music’s presentation of emotion-characteristics-in-appearance. I will contend that there is a class of polysemous uses of emotion terms in descriptions of music that is not included in Davies’s characterization of the link between emotions in music and emotions as psychological states. I conclude by indicating the consequences of my claim for the phenomenology of expressive music
On Evolutionary Explanations of Musical Expressiveness
In this paper, I will examine an evolutionary hypothesis about musical
expressiveness first proposed by Peter Kivy. I will first present the
hypothesis and explain why I take it to be different from ordinary
evolutionary explanations of musical expressiveness. I will then argue that
Kivy’s hypothesis is of crucial importance for most available resemblancebased
accounts of musical expressiveness. For this reason, it is particularly
important to assess its plausibility. After having reviewed the existing
literature on the topic, I will list five challenges the hypothesis is supposed
to meet. Although my list of challenges does not aim at exhaustiveness, I
believe that the hypothesis must meet all of the challenges I suggest if it is
to work as a cornerstone for a theory of musical expressiveness
State of the art POWHEG generators for top mass measurements at the LHC
We study the theoretical uncertainties in the determination of the top-quark
mass using next-to-leading-order (NLO) generators, that describe the top-quark
decay at different levels of accuracy, interfaced to parton showers (PS).
Specifically we consider one generator that implements NLO corrections only in
the production dynamics, one that also takes them into account in the top-quark
decay in the narrow width approximation (NWA) and one that implements them
exactly, including finite-width and interference effects. We aim at assessing
the errors in top-mass determinations of purely theoretical origin. We do so by
measuring relative peak position shifts of -jet mass distributions. Besides
the theoretical errors due to the use of less accurate NLO+PS generators, we
also explore uncertainties related to shower and modelling of non-perturbative
effects by comparing the results obtained by interfacing our generators to both
Pythia and Herwig shower Monte Carlos (SMCs).Comment: Proceedings of the XXVI International Workshop on Deep-Inelastic
Scattering and Related Subjects (DIS2018), 16-20 April 2018, Kobe, Japa
All-orders behaviour and renormalons in top-mass observables
We study a simplified model of top production and decay, consisting in a
virtual vector boson decaying into a massive-massless -
quark-antiquark pair. The top has a finite width and further decays into a
stable vector boson and a quark. We then consider the emission or the
virtual exchange of one gluon, with all possible light-quark loop insertions.
These are the dominant diagrams in the limit of an infinite number of light
flavours. We devise a procedure to compute this process fully, by analytic and
numerical methods, and for any infrared-safe final-state observables. We
examine the results at arbitrary orders in perturbation theory, and assess the
factorial growth associated with renormalons. We look for renormalon effects
leading to corrections of order , that we dub `linear'
renormalons, in the inclusive cross section (with and without selection cuts),
in the mass of the reconstructed-top system, and in the average energy of the
final-state boson, considering both the pole and the
scheme for the top mass. We find that the total cross section without cuts, if
expressed in terms of the mass, does not exhibit linear
renormalons, but, as soon as selection cuts are introduced, jets-related linear
renormalons arise in any mass scheme. In addition, we show that the
reconstructed mass is affected by linear renormalons in any scheme and that the
average energy of the boson (that we consider as a simplified example of
leptonic observable), in any mass scheme, has a renormalon in the narrow-width
limit, that is however screened at large orders for finite top widths, provided
the top mass is in the scheme.Comment: 40 pages, 17 figure
Principles for optimal cooperativity in allosteric materials
Allosteric proteins transmit a mechanical signal induced by binding a ligand.
However, understanding the nature of the information transmitted and the
architectures optimizing such transmission remains a challenge. Here we show
using an {\it in-silico} evolution scheme and theoretical arguments that
architectures optimized to be cooperative, which propagate efficiently energy,
{qualitatively} differ from previously investigated materials optimized to
propagate strain. Although we observe a large diversity of functioning
cooperative architectures (including shear, hinge and twist designs), they all
obey the same principle {of displaying a {\it mechanism}, i.e. an extended
{soft} mode}. We show that its optimal frequency decreases with the spatial
extension of the system as , where is the spatial dimension.
For these optimal designs, cooperativity decays logarithmically with for
and does not decay for . Overall our approach leads to a natural
explanation for several observations in allosteric proteins, and { indicates an
experimental path to test if allosteric proteins lie close to optimality}.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures in the main text, 9 pages 9 figures in the
supplemental materia
Architecture and Co-Evolution of Allosteric Materials
We introduce a numerical scheme to evolve functional materials that can
accomplish a specified mechanical task. In this scheme, the number of
solutions, their spatial architectures and the correlations among them can be
computed. As an example, we consider an "allosteric" task, which requires the
material to respond specifically to a stimulus at a distant active site. We
find that functioning materials evolve a less-constrained trumpet-shaped region
connecting the stimulus and active sites and that the amplitude of the elastic
response varies non-monotonically along the trumpet. As previously shown for
some proteins, we find that correlations appearing during evolution alone are
sufficient to identify key aspects of this design. Finally, we show that the
success of this architecture stems from the emergence of soft edge modes
recently found to appear near the surface of marginally connected materials.
Overall, our in silico evolution experiment offers a new window to study the
relationship between structure, function, and correlations emerging during
evolution.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, SI: 2 pages, 4 figure
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