Narratives and exploration in a musicology app: Supporting scholarly argument with the Lohengrin TimeMachine

We present the Lohengrin TimeMachine web application, consisting of video and textual musicological essays supported by an interactive digital companion. The digital companion allows a user to browse and compare all the occurrences of a motive in the opera Lohengrin, viewing them by text, vocal score and orchestration, with detailed views, segment labelling, audio excerpts and textual commentaries supporting the exploration. The video and essay modes show live links into the companion as the viewer or reader progresses through the narrative. This application is built on Linked Data technology and demonstrates the viability of such an approach, with the knowledge graph being traversed in the user’s browser to gather the materials for display. It uses the Music Encoding and Linked Data (MELD) framework, which provides the basis for a range of music-related Linked Data applications. In this paper, we describe and illustrate the application in use, its technological underpinnings, as well as the motivation and implementation experience

An interactive multimedia companion to Wagner’s Lohengrin: encoding and visualising a motivic study

We introduce a tablet based interactive application which presents a comprehensive digital exploration as a companion to a musicological article. Taking the opera Lohengrin, the article and digital companion show how one motive is altered each time it recurs, reflecting its role in the drama, and exploring Wagner’s sophisticated treatment of recurring themes. Musicological analysis is encoded using Linked Data as an independent, repurposable, and open Research Object. Interactive user views are generated directly and dynamically in the browser from this knowledge graph using novel visualisations, which in turn enable the user to navigate all possible paths through the evidential multimodal materials. Our companion explores the different compositional devices Wagner uses to vary his motives, browsing the whole opera for motive occurrences and their musical and textual contexts. Visualisations and recordings support the analysis, making it accessible to an audience that may struggle with a Wagnerian orchestral score

Recognition of leitmotives in Richard Wagner's music: chroma distance and listener expertise

The leitmotives in Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen serve a range of compositional and psychological functions, including the introduction of musical structure and mnemonic devices for the listener. Leitmotives in the Ring differ greatly in their construction, salient aspects (e.g. rhythmic, melodic, harmonic), and their usage in particular scenes and contexts. We aim to understand listeners’ real-time processing of leitmotives, and have gathered data from a memory test, probing participants’ memory for different leit- motives contained in a 10-minute excerpt from the opera Siegfried. An item response theory (IRT) approach was used to estimate item difficulty parameters as well as parameters characterizing participants’ individual recognition ability. We fit a series of IRT models to the data obtained from 68 participants, finding that a Rasch Model with an unconstrained but fixed discrimination parameter fit the data best accord- ing to the Bayesian Information Criterion. We further investigated the relationship between model parameters and factors such as: number of leitmotive occurrences in the excerpt; acoustical distance using chroma features (Mauch & Dixon, 2010) and distance thresholding (Casey, Rhodes & Slaney, 2008); extent of musical training; and objective and self-reported Wagner expertise, finding that performance in the objective Wagner test and chroma distance were statistically significant predictors, while number of occurrences, self-reported Wagner expertise and extent of musical training did not reach significance

Lohengrin TimeMachine: Musicological Multimedia Made with MELD

Music and the scholarship around it can be challenging to present in the forms associated with books and articles – primarily linear and with an emphasis on the static and visual over the sonic and interactive. We introduce the Lohengrin TimeMachine, a multiple-path multimedia app, optimised for a touch-screen tablet. The app offers two essays about motifs in the opera – one in textual form, and one a 30-minute video. These linear narratives are supported by audio examples, along with dynamic links that take the reader into a fully-interactive exploration of the occurrence of motifs across the opera. The reader’s journey is supported with recorded music and scores, as well as novel visualisations of the orchestration and the timeline of the opera. The app is designed to operate over standards-based web documents published online, with extension and reuse in mind. In this paper, we describe the app, its underlying technology, and the journeys it supports

Search for an Association between V249I and T280M CX3CR1 Genetic Polymorphisms, Endothelial Injury and Preeclampsia: The ECLAXIR Study

BACKGROUND: Preeclampsia and coronary-artery disease share risk factors, suggesting common pathophysiological mechanisms. CX3CR1/CX3CL1 mediates leukocyte migration and adhesion and has been implicated in the pathophysiology of several inflammatory diseases. M280/I249 variants of CX3CR1 are associated with an atheroprotective effect and reduced endothelial dysfunction. The aim of this study was to search for an association between V249I and T280M polymorphisms of CX3CR1, preeclampsia and endothelial dysfunction. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: We explored these polymorphisms with real-time polymerase chain reaction in a case-control study (184 white women with preeclampsia and 184 matched normotensive pregnant women). Endothelial dysfunction biomarkers including von Willebrand factor, VCAM-1 and thrombomodulin, as well as the soluble form of CX3CL1 were measured by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assays (ELISA). The I249 and M280 alleles were associated neither with preeclampsia, nor with its more severe form or with endothelial injury. In contrast, we found a trend toward increased CX3CL1 levels in preeclampsia patients, especially in early-onset- preeclampsia as compared to its level in later-onset- preeclampsia. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: This is the first study to characterize the CX3CR1 gene polymorphisms in patients with preeclampsia. We found no differences in genotype or haplotype frequencies between patients with PE and normal pregnancies, suggesting that maternal CX3CR1 V249I and T280M polymorphisms do not increase susceptibility to preeclampsia. Further studies should be performed to directly evaluate the pathophysiological role of CX3CL1, a molecule abundantly expressed in endometrium, which has been shown to stimulate human trophoblast migration

A toolkit for live annotation of opera performance: Experiences capturing Wagner's Ring Cycle

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Artificial Stupidity

Public debate about AI is dominated by Frankenstein Syndrome, the fear that AI will become superhuman and escape human control. Although superintelligence is certainly a possibility, the interest it excites can distract the public from a more imminent concern: the rise of Artificial Stupidity (AS). This article discusses the roots of Frankenstein Syndrome in Mary Shelley’s famous novel of 1818. It then provides a philosophical framework for analysing the stupidity of artificial agents, demonstrating that modern intelligent systems can be seen to suffer from ‘stupidity of judgement’. Finally it identifies an alternative literary tradition that exposes the perils and benefits of AS. In the writings of Edmund Spenser, Jonathan Swift and E.T.A. Hoffmann, ASs replace, enslave or delude their human users. More optimistically, Joseph Furphy and Laurence Sterne imagine ASs that can serve human intellect as maps or as pipes. These writers provide a strong counternarrative to the myths that currently drive the AI debate. They identify ways in which even stupid artificial agents can evade human control, for instance by appealing to stereotypes or distancing us from reality. And they underscore the continuing importance of the literary imagination in an increasingly automated society

Metacognition of intentions in mindfulness and hypnosis

In a famous series of experiments, Libet investigated the subjective timing of awareness of an intention to move, a task that can be considered a metacognitive judgement. The ability to strategically produce inaccurate metacognitions about intentions has been postulated to be central to the changes in judgements of agency common to all hypnotic responding. Therefore, differences in hypnotisability may be reflected in Libet’s measure. Specifically, the ability to sustain inaccurate judgements of agency displayed by highly hypnotisable people may result from their having coarser higher order representations of intentions. They therefore should report a delayed time of intention relative to less hypnotisable individuals. Conversely, mindfulness practice aims at accurate metacognition, including of intentions, and may lead to the development of finer grained higher order representations of intending. Thus, the long-term practice of mindfulness may produce an earlier judgement of the time of an intention. We tested these groups using Libet’s task, and found that, consistent with predictions, highly hypnotisable people reported a later time of intention than less hypnotisable people and meditators an earlier time than non-meditators. In a further two studies we replicated the finding that hypnotisable people report later awareness of a motor intention and additionally found a negative relationship between trait mindfulness and this measure. Based on these findings, we argue that hypnotic response and meditation involve opposite processes