Sounding the Bromance: The Chopstick Brothers' 'Little Apple' music video, genre, gender and the search for meaning in Chinese popular music

This article analyses the music video of ‘Little Apple’ by Wang Taili and Xiao Yang, also known as the Chopstick Brothers, one of China’s most successful productions in 2014, and one that exemplifies certain emerging trends in Chinese popular music more generally. The music video draws on K-pop models but also on Western inspirations (biblical, historical and contemporary) and has proven hard to reduce to a single, definitive narrative or interpretation. The analysis proceeds by introducing the song and its video, in the context of the Chopstick Brothers’ wider work. Its musical structure is presented, leading to questions as to its particular retro aesthetic. This leads to a study of the emergent genre of shenqu (divine song), which is based on notions of virality, epic craziness and the earworm effect, and to which ‘Little Apple’ contributes. The final sections of the article look at the production of gendered positions within the music video— noting that it is a love song sung by one man to another—and examine the public square dance setting where this song has been so widely picked up. Finally, I suggest why it may be that ‘Little Apple’ particularly can open out a space temporarily in which participants can experience a warm sense of human collaboration

New Musicologies, Old Musicologies: Ethnomusicology and the Study of Western Music*

Ethnomusicology currently engages with the study of Western music in two principal ways. On the one hand, there are specific ethnomusicological studies that focus on aspects of Western musical traditions. Examples include Paul Berliner's analysis of improvisation in jazz (1994), Philip Bohlman's study of chamber music as ethnic music in contemporary Israel (1991), and the examinations of music schools and conservatories by Bruno Nettl (1995) and Henry Kingsbury (1988). These works, in and of themselves, offer explicit and direct indication of what an ethnomusicological approach to Western music involves and what manner of insights can be produced thereby. Second, and more diffusely, ethnomusicological research plays into the study of Western music through musicologists' adoption, adaptation, and application of ethnomusicological techniques and concepts: some musicologists have drawn from specific ethnographies of non Western musical traditions, and others have made recourse to the standard texts of ethnomusicological theory and practice (such as Merriam 1964 and Nettl 1983). This article discusses the recent diversification of traditional musicology and the serious consideration by musicologists of ethnomusicological theory and practice

Cenozoic evolution of Neotethys and implications for the causes of plate motions

Africa-North America-Eurasia plate circuit rotations, combined with Red Sea rotations and new estimates of crustal shortening in Iran define the Cenozoic history of the Neotethyan ocean between Arabia and Eurasia. The new constraints indicate that Arabia-Eurasia convergence has been fairly constant at 2 to 3 cm/yr since 56 Ma with slowing of Africa-Eurasia motion to <1 cm/yr near 25 Ma, coeval with the opening of the Red Sea. Ocean closure occurred no later than 10 Ma, and could have occurred prior to this time only if a large amount of continental lithosphere was subducted, suggesting that slowing of Africa significantly predated the Arabia-Eurasia collision. These kinematics imply that Africa's disconnection with the negative buoyancy of the downgoing slab of lithosphere beneath southern Eurasia slowed its motion. The slow, steady rate of northward subduction since 56 Ma contrasts with strongly variable rates of magma production in the Urumieh-Dokhtar arc, implying magma production rate in continental arcs is not linked to subduction rate

Dynamic treatment of vibrational energy relaxation in a heterogeneous and fluctuating environment

A computational approach to describe the energy relaxation of a high-frequency vibrational mode in a fluctuating heterogeneous environment is outlined. Extending previous work [H. Fujisaki, Y. Zhang, and J.E. Straub, J. Chem. Phys. {\bf 124}, 144910 (2006)], second-order time-dependent perturbation theory is employed which includes the fluctuations of the parameters in the Hamiltonian within the vibrational adiabatic approximation. This means that the time-dependent vibrational frequencies along an MD trajectory are obtained via a partial geometry optimization of the solute with fixed solvent and a subsequent normal mode calculation. Adopting the amide I mode of N-methylacetamide in heavy water as a test problem, it is shown that the inclusion of dynamic fluctuations may significantly change the vibrational energy relaxation. In particular, it is found that relaxation occurs in two phases, because for short times ($\lesssim$ 200 fs) the spectral density appears continuous due to the frequency-time uncertainty relation, while at longer times the discrete nature of the bath becomes apparent. Considering the excellent agreement between theory and experiment, it is speculated if this behavior can explain the experimentally obtained biphasic relaxation the amide I mode of N-methylacetamide.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, submitted to J. Chem. Phy

The rotation group in plate tectonics and the representation of uncertainties of plate reconstructions

The calculation of the uncertainty in an estimated rotation requires a parametrization of the rotation group; that is, a unique mapping of the rotation group to a point in 3-D Euclidean space, R^3. Numerous parametrizations of a rotation exist, including: (1) the latitude and longitude of the axis of rotation and the angle of rotation; (2) a representation as a Cartesian vector with length equal to the rotation angle and direction parallel to the rotation axis; (3) Euler angles; or (4) unit length quaternions (or, equivalently, Cayley-Klein parameters). The uncertainty in a rotation is determined by the effect of nearby rotations on the rotated data. The uncertainty in a rotation is small, if rotations close to the best fitting rotation degrade the fit of the data by a large amount, and it is large, if only rotations differing by a large amount cause such a degradation. Ideally, we would like to parametrize the rotations in such a way so that their representation as points in R^3 would have the property that the distance between two points in R3 reflects the effects of the corresponding rotations on the fit of the data. It can be shown mathematically that this is impossible, but for rotations of small angle, it can be done to close approximation by using vectors in Cartesian coordinates. Thus, we are led to parametrizing the uncertainty separately from the parametrization of the best fitting rotation. This approach results in simpler, more efficient calculations than if uncertainties are described in terms of rotation parameters (i.e., latitude, longitude, and the angle). We illustrate this with the example of equations for determining the uncertainty in a composite rotation from the uncertainties of its constituents

Different Ways of Reading, or Just Making the Right Noises?

What does reading look like? Can learning to read be reduced to the acquisition of a set of isolable skills, or proficiency in reading be equated with the independence of the solitary, silent reader of prose fiction? These conceptions of reading and reading development, which figure strongly in educational policy, may appear to be simple common sense. But both ethnographic data and evidence from literary texts suggest that such paradigms offer, at most, a partial and ahistorical picture of reading. An important dimension, neglected in the dominant paradigms, is the irreducibly social quality of reading practices

From soft harmonic phonons to fast relaxational dynamics in CH3_{3}NH3_{3}PbBr3_{3}

The lead-halide perovskites, including CH$_{3}$NH$_{3}$PbBr$_{3}$, are components in cost effective, highly efficient photovoltaics, where the interactions of the molecular cations with the inorganic framework are suggested to influence the electronic and ferroelectric properties. CH$_{3}$NH$_{3}$PbBr$_{3}$ undergoes a series of structural transitions associated with orientational order of the CH$_{3}$NH$_{3}$ (MA) molecular cation and tilting of the PbBr$_{3}$ host framework. We apply high-resolution neutron scattering to study the soft harmonic phonons associated with these transitions, and find a strong coupling between the PbBr$_{3}$ framework and the quasistatic CH$_{3}$NH$_{3}$ dynamics at low energy transfers. At higher energy transfers, we observe a PbBr$_{6}$ octahedra soft mode driving a transition at 150 K from bound molecular excitations at low temperatures to relatively fast relaxational excitations that extend up to $\sim$ 50-100 meV. We suggest that these temporally overdamped dynamics enables possible indirect band gap processes in these materials that are related to the enhanced photovoltaic properties.Comment: (main text - 5 pages, 4 figures; supplementary information - 3 pages, 3 figures