From holism to compositionality: memes and the evolution of segmentation, syntax, and signification in music and language

Steven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF)

Absent cadences

The slow movement of Symphony No. 64 in A major, ‘Tempora mutantur’, has long intrigued Haydn scholars on account of its absent cadences and enigmatic form. The Latin title of the symphony is thought to be derived from the epigram by John Owen, a near-contemporary of Shakespeare, and it was used by Elaine Sisman to support her hypothesis that the slow movement formed part of Haydn’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The enigma can be explained through an analysis informed by concepts native to eighteenth-century music theory. The absent cadences create instances of ellipsis, a rhetorical figure described by Johann Adolph Scheibe and Johann Nikolaus Forkel, and the form plays with a familiar template codified by Heinrich Christoph Koch. This analysis leads to a different interpretation. Rather than suggesting the protagonist of Shakespeare’s tragedy, the movement stages a fictive composer in an act of musical comedy not dissimilar to that in Symphony No. 60, ‘Il Distratto’. The title comes not from Owen but from a Latin adage that was incorporated by Owen into his epigram. This adage had been popular in Germany since the Reformation and was then applied by one eighteenth-century music theorist to describe changes of musical conventions

Product package redesign.

Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics currently spends $250,000 annually to package and ship their products. Although the current packaging method is relatively inexpensive, it lacks reusability and sufficient protection of the film, and suffers from reoccurring damage to some of the components. This project consisted of investigating current industry standards, interacting with SGPP customers and employees who work directly with the product and formulating alternative solutions aimed at reducing costs

Fire safety in historic buildings.

This report presents findings on fire prevention in historical buildings. Several areas of fire protection have been touched on in the report. These focus areas deal with prevention, retrofitting, past fires and legislation dealing with fire prevention. A case study was performed on the Massachusetts Military Archive and Museum in Worcester, Massachusetts. The study provides possibilities that present several alterations and upgrades to improve the building against fire