Networks of Liveness in Singer-Songwriting: A practice-based enquiry into developing audio-visual interactive systems and creative strategies for composition and performance.

This enquiry explores the creation and use of computer-based, real-time interactive audio-visual systems for the composition and performance of popular music by solo artists. Using a practice-based methodology, research questions are identified that relate to the impact of incorporating interactive systems into the songwriting process and the liveness of the performances with them. Four approaches to the creation of interactive systems are identified: creating explorative-generative tools, multiple tools for guitar/vocal pieces, typing systems and audio-visual metaphors. A portfolio of ten pieces that use these approaches was developed for live performance. A model of the songwriting process is presented that incorporates system-building and strategies are identified for reconciling the indeterminate, electronic audio output of the system with composed popular music features and instrumental/vocal output. The four system approaches and ten pieces are compared in terms of four aspects of liveness, derived from current theories. It was found that, in terms of overall liveness, a unity to system design facilitated both technological and aesthetic connections between the composition, the system processes and the audio and visual outputs. However, there was considerable variation between the four system approaches in terms of the different aspects of liveness. The enquiry concludes by identifying strategies for maximising liveness in the different system approaches and discussing the connections between liveness and the songwriting process

Depiction as comedy and truth: women’s dress in Marie Duval’s drawings for ‘Judy’ 1869 – 1885.

This paper will present and theorise aspects of the facture and iconography of the work of pioneering female cartoonist Marie Duval, in relation to conceptions and representations of women’s dress in London in the 1860s, 1870s and 1880s. Duval’s work appeared in a variety of the cheap British penny papers and comics of the 1860s-1880s. An actress as well as a cartoonist, she lived and worked in an environment of music halls and unlicensed theatres, sensational plays, serials, novels and comic journals. Her drawing style was theatrical, untutored and introduced many techniques that only became common in much later cartooning. She drew hundreds of comic strip pages for the magazine Judy and spin-off compilations, focusing on the humour, attitudes, urbanity and poverty of the types of people she knew. Her characters’ appearance, the ways in which they shape and move themselves in her visual world, and the technically maverick style in which they were drawn, provide a range of subtle and forthright commentaries on the historic dress and behaviour of her working-class London contemporaries, in particularly women of a range of ages, occupations and financial and social situations within this immediate milieu. First, the paper will consider the extent to which the facture of Duval’s drawings articulates relationships between constraint and liberation, in the ways in which she depicts women’s dress, utilising tracing techniques and briccolage, combined with a technically untutored style of drawing. She both cues readers to comedy (emerging as dissonance in her cutting and re-inscribing of contemporaneous fashion illustrations), and depicts embodied social discourse in the form of practices (as contemporaneous truths, in her deft manipulation of misrecognition), themselves generating a system of ideas, and creating a cognitive consensus connecting particular ideas with the behaviour of specific social groups. Second, the paper will consider Duval’s use of body distortion, accumulation, diminution and exaggeration, in which her depictive techniques present women’s dress not as a produced subject but as praxis. It will examine the complex parodic relationships that she creates between readers’ cultural knowledge of action on the contemporaneous theatre stage, in the practices of stage melodrama, and her depictions of women moving through her drawn plots in ‘old fashioned’ bonnets; of their noses; of the significant, ever-changing silhouettes of the carapaces of their chin-to-ankle dresses and of their feet, for example. Parallels will be identified between these Victorian ‘innovations’ and their continued use in twenty-first century ‘current’ and neo-Victorian’visual comedy. Finally, the paper will focus on the plots of Duval’s cartoons, identifying the general anonymity of Duval’s women characters relative to the developing visual identity of a single woman character who appears throughout: Judy herself, the muse and mistress of the magazine. It will present a close reading of a single frontispiece drawing of Judy from 1884, in which Judy rides an ostrich, in order to extrapolate a description of Duval’s cartoons of contemporaneous women that brings together facture, iconography and social milieu in order to understand both the unique processes of her comedy and her ability to depict the truth

Reimagining the Computer Keyboard as a Musical Interface

This paper discusses the use of typed text as a real-time input for interactive performance systems. A brief review of the literature discusses text-based generative systems, links between typing and playing percussion instruments and the use of typing gestures in contemporary performance practice. The paper then documents the author’s audio-visual system that is driven by the typing of text/lyrics in real-time. It is argued that the system promotes the sensation of liveness through clear, perceptible links between the performer’s gestures, the system’s audio outputs and the its visual outputs. The system also provides a novel approach to the use of generative techniques in the composition and live performance of songs. Future developments would include the use of dynamic text effects linked to sound generation and greater interaction between human performer and the visual

Audiovisual Music Production: Influence of the Natural World on Process and Works

This paper presents an overview of work in progress on a practice-research project that involves the creation of a series of audiovisual musical pieces in which both the creative process and the works themselves draw inspiration from deep engagement with the natural world. The project aims and methods are presented, followed by a summary of the ongoing field review to situate the work. Six audiovisual compositions (accessible as a video playlist at the link below) are presented as works in progress and briefly discussed. Emergent findings are summarised as a set of principles that describe the music production approach and a set of research questions that will guide future work. The project speaks to a number of areas including the relationship of art to nature, the role of the contemporary music producer, audiovisual composition, liveness, aesthetics, sustainability and well-being. Video playlist of creative works in progress: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEf_T--_c4UptppBielAE9xP2m5tJKKd

Church Belles: An Interactive System and Composition Using Real-World Metaphors: In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University

Church Belles explores how creating and using an interactive system for popular songwriting based on a physical metaphor impacts the composition process and the liveness of performances. Composing the piece was central to the research process (Candy and Edmonds, 2018) which involved a cyclical, iterative process of literature review, system-building/composing and reflection. While common in more experimental styles, the use of interactive music systems in popular music tends to be limited (Marchini et al, 2017). Several studies have demonstrated the potential for physical metaphors to be used as a design strategy for interactive systems (Johnston et al, 2009) that both facilitates audience understanding and focuses the compositional process. In this piece, church bells were selected as the metaphor they are a highly familiar cultural object with a simple physical mechanism, capable of producing complex timbres and unpredictable rhythms. Church Belles explores the impact of using an interactive system throughout the songwriting process. Creating the system therefore began before any songwriting took place, maximising the system’s influence over each stage of the composition. The research reveals strategies for working with interactive systems in highly-structured popular music contexts, which have been disseminated by a paper and demonstration at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) (Waite, 2016). Performances with the piece demonstrate high levels of several aspects of liveness (Sanden, 2013). Findings have been shared with international academic and professional audiences at Innovations in Music 2017 (London); Tracking the Creative Process in Music 2017 (Huddersfield) and Loop 2017 (Berlin). Recordings of the piece and accompanying commentary have been published online and the piece has been performed at Sonorities 2016 (Queen’s University), MTI concerts (De Montfort University) and NoiseFloor (Staffordshire University). The software for the piece is available for free download

Numerical Study of Quantum Resonances in Chaotic Scattering

This paper presents numerical evidence that for quantum systems with chaotic classical dynamics, the number of scattering resonances near an energy $E$ scales like $\hbar^{-\frac{D(K_E)+1}{2}}$ as $\hbar\to{0}$. Here, $K_E$ denotes the subset of the classical energy surface $\{H=E\}$ which stays bounded for all time under the flow generated by the Hamiltonian $H$ and $D(K_E)$ denotes its fractal dimension. Since the number of bound states in a quantum system with $n$ degrees of freedom scales like $\hbar^{-n}$, this suggests that the quantity $\frac{D(K_E)+1}{2}$ represents the effective number of degrees of freedom in scattering problems.Comment: 24 pages, including 44 figure

Application of a library of near isogenic lines to understand context dependent expression of QTL for grain yield and adaptive traits in bread wheat

(a) Summary of the mixed model analysis performed for the grain number components studied comprising 553 NILs carrying the Avalon or Cadenza alleles in the introgressed region in 2013. (b) Average values for the two groups (carrying the Avalon or Cadenza alleles in the QTL region) based on the chromosome and background in 2013. Significant difference between Avalon and Cadenza alleles are highlighted in bold (spikes/m2 (S), spikelet/spike (s/S) and grains/spikelet (G/S). (PDF 111 kb

Book Reviews

CLINICAL RESEARCH FOR ALL Cyril Maxwell Cambridge Medical Publications Ltd. (1973) Price £2.85pA COMPANION TO MEDICAL STUDIES Editors-in-Chief: R. Massmore and J. S. Robson Vol. 3, parts 1 and Oxford; Blackwell Scientific Publication- £11.50 each part (£8.00 paper-back)CHEMOTAXIS AND INFLAMMATION P.C. Wilkinson Churchill Livingstone 1974. £4.00THOMSON'S CONCISE MEDICAL DICTIONARY William A.R. Thomson, M.D. Churchill Livingstone, 1973. £1.80CLINICAL EXAMINATION Editor, J.G. Macleod: Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone. £4.2

Elevated blood pressure among adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa : A systematic review and meta-analysis

Background More people from sub-Saharan Africa aged between 20 years and 60 years are affected by end-organ damage due to underlying hypertension than people in high-income countries. However, there is a paucity of data on the pattern of elevated blood pressure among adolescents aged 10–19 years in sub-Saharan Africa. We aimed to provide pooled estimates of high blood pressure prevalence and mean levels in adolescents aged 10–19 years across sub-Saharan Africa. Methods In this systematic review and meta-analysis, we searched PubMed, Google Scholar, African Index Medicus, and Embase to identify studies published from Jan 1, 2010, to Dec 31, 2021. To be included, primary studies had to be observational studies of adolescents aged 10–19 years residing in sub-Saharan African countries reporting the pooled prevalence of elevated blood pressure or with enough data to compute these estimates. We excluded studies on non-systemic hypertension, in African people not living in sub-Saharan Africa, with participant selection based on the presence of hypertension, and with adult cohorts in which we could not disaggregate data for adolescents. We independently extracted relevant data from individual studies using a standard data extraction form. We used a random-effects model to estimate the pooled prevalence of elevated blood pressure and mean systolic blood pressure (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) levels overall and on a sex-specific basis. This study is registered with PROSPERO (CRD42022297948). Findings We identified 2559 studies, and assessed 81 full-text studies for eligibility, of which 36 studies comprising 37 926 participants aged 10–19 years from ten (20%) of 49 sub-Saharan African countries were eligible. A pooled sample of 29 696 adolescents informed meta-analyses of elevated blood pressure and 27 155 adolescents informed meta-analyses of mean blood pressure. Sex data were available from 26 818 adolescents (14 369 [53·6%] were female and 12 449 [46·4%] were male) for the prevalence of elevated blood pressure and 23 777 adolescents (12 864 [54·1%] were female and 10 913 [45·9%] were male) for mean blood pressure. Study quality was high, with no low-quality studies. The reported prevalence of elevated blood pressure ranged from 4 (0·2%) of 1727 to 1755 (25·1%) of 6980 (pooled prevalence 9·9%, 95% CI 7·3–12·5; I2=99·2%, pheterogeneity<0·0001). Mean SBP was 111 mm Hg (95% CI 108–114) and mean DBP was 68 mm Hg (66–70). 13·4% (95% CI 12·9–13·9; pheterogeneity<0·0001) of male participants had elevated blood pressure compared with 11·9% (11·3–12·4; pheterogeneity<0·0001) of female participants (odds ratio 1·04, 95% CI 0·81–1·34; pheterogeneity<0·0001). Interpretation To our knowledge, this systematic review and meta-analysis is the first systematic synthesis of blood pressure data specifically derived from adolescents in sub-Saharan Africa. Although many low-income countries were not represented in our study, our findings suggest that approximately one in ten adolescents have elevated blood pressure across sub-Saharan Africa. Accordingly, there is an urgent need to improve preventive heart-health programmes in the region. Funding None

Out with the Old and In with the New: Primary Care Management of Heart Failure with Preserved Ejection Fraction

Primary care plays an integral role in the management of complex, chronic disease states such as heart failure. However, there is a disconnect between the characteristics of those recruited into clinical trials and those managed in the real world, which means the contribution and consideration of primary care in current guidelines is suboptimal. In this article, the authors explore key issues in the diagnosis and management of heart failure that need to be addressed from a primary care perspective. This article focuses on the issue of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction and the integration of new clinical epidemiology and trial evidence into clinical practice. In response, the authors advocate for dedicated guidelines for the primary care management of heart failure, the development of strategies to facilitate communications between health professionals in acute and community care and a renewed focus on researching optimal models of heart failure care in the community