Vaporwave is dead, long live vaporwave!

Popular music subcultures have acknowledged, engaged with, or rejected digital platforms to varying degrees; their relationship to it is often made fraught, ambivalent and ironic by projections of the Internet as inauthentic or impersonal and their inheritance of Romantic-influenced countercultural aesthetics. The genre vaporwave offers a key example of this, especially given that it emerged and exists almost exclusively on digital platforms. Vaporwave addresses its own digital nature and historicity in sound and image, as recent scholarship on it has observed. Its life online represents not an abandonment of traditional formulations of the relationship between culture, technology and authenticity, but a new arena in which to negotiate them

Digital voices: Posthumanism and the generation of empathy

This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital

Post-Operative Functional Outcomes in Early Age Onset Rectal Cancer

Background: Impairment of bowel, urogenital and fertility-related function in patients treated for rectal cancer is common. While the rate of rectal cancer in the young (<50 years) is rising, there is little data on functional outcomes in this group. Methods: The REACCT international collaborative database was reviewed and data on eligible patients analysed. Inclusion criteria comprised patients with a histologically confirmed rectal cancer, <50 years of age at time of diagnosis and with documented follow-up including functional outcomes. Results: A total of 1428 (n=1428) patients met the eligibility criteria and were included in the final analysis. Metastatic disease was present at diagnosis in 13%. Of these, 40% received neoadjuvant therapy and 50% adjuvant chemotherapy. The incidence of post-operative major morbidity was 10%. A defunctioning stoma was placed for 621 patients (43%); 534 of these proceeded to elective restoration of bowel continuity. The median follow-up time was 42 months. Of this cohort, a total of 415 (29%) reported persistent impairment of functional outcomes, the most frequent of which was bowel dysfunction (16%), followed by bladder dysfunction (7%), sexual dysfunction (4.5%) and infertility (1%). Conclusion: A substantial proportion of patients with early-onset rectal cancer who undergo surgery report persistent impairment of functional status. Patients should be involved in the discussion regarding their treatment options and potential impact on quality of life. Functional outcomes should be routinely recorded as part of follow up alongside oncological parameters

Early palliative care consults reduce patients\u27 length of stay and overall hospital costs

Palliative care improves health outcomes and satisfaction and supports decision-making for patients and families during challenging times in their lives. Earlier referral for consults has demonstrated increased costs savings. Education proposing physicians order a palliative care consult within 3 days of patient hospital admission will decrease patient length of stay (LOS) and overall costs as well as expedite the transition to next level of care. A descriptive retrospective cohort study was completed using de-identified data originally captured for a system-wide initiative at a large acute care hospital in Illinois. Hospitalists were selected as the pilot group and received education encouraging physicians to order palliative care consults within 3 days of patient admission. Non-hospitalists (control group) did not receive the education. All results were compared to a 3-month baseline period. A total of 711 patients were included in this study (367 baseline, 138 pilot, 206 controls). The baseline pre-consult LOS of 4.8 days was reduced to 3.7 days in the pilot group, representing a \u3e 1 day decrease in the timing of palliative consult. The pilot demonstrated a direct cost savings of 26% over the 3-months pilot period. Additionally, a 2-day reduction in overall LOS was demonstrated in the pilot group compared to both the baseline and control groups. This pilot demonstrated an ability to change the timing of new palliative care consults, resulting in direct cost savings and LOS reduction. These results demonstrated the need for a larger study to confirm these findings

Virtual worlds from recording to video games

Music plays a significant role in both the establishment of and immersion in virtual worlds. This chapter theorises various forms of musical virtual reality, arguing that the virtual worlds of music challenge existing understandings of virtual reality and immersion. Analysing recording technology, mobile music, video games and the phenomenology of listening, the chapter argues that musical virtual reality can be theorised as an omnipresent, perpetually moving and embodied circulation of musical energy. Musical virtual reality invites a ‘drastic’ musicology that engages with the immediate, immersive and affectively powerful aspects of the listening event