scholarly journals Uneasy Listening

Resonance ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-93
Author(s):  
Yair Rubinstein
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Software Developers ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
The Past ◽  
Interesting Object ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
Musical Genres

This paper explores the cultural ramifications of music generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Deploying complex algorithms to create original music productions, AI’s automation of human authorship may suggest a radically new sonic form. However, its creators have preferred to use its tools to mimic established musical genres from the past. As a result, notable AI-music programmers like composer David Cope and software developers Flow Machines have galvanized the public’s interest in AI-generated music not by creating completely alien sonic forms, but by simulating popular styles like rock and classical music. Consequently, listeners often report AI music sounds unnervingly familiar rather than aesthetically inaccessible. I argue that it is precisely AI music’s devotion to uncannily approximating its human forebears that makes it such an interesting object of contemporary sonic production. It also provides a useful historical parallel to a short-lived musical movement from the 2000s known as sonic hauntology. Much like AI programmers, producers of sonic hauntology applied digital technology to the sonic past. However, they confronted it in more deliberately political and subversive ways. Sampling sonic artifacts and cultural marginalia from the mid-20th century, sonic hauntologists created eerie soundscapes designed to challenge mass culture’s erasure of history’s political depth, or what Fredric Jameson famously referred to as late capitalism’s cultural logic of postmodernism. While AI music has yet to be exploited in this way, I argue its inherently “uneasy listening” carries the potential to further sonic hauntology’s project of repurposing the sonic past to estrange listeners from the present moment.

The Presence of the Past

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Bishop
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Sound Design ◽  
Media Technologies ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
Art And Culture ◽  
Picture Show ◽  
Historical Past

In the tumultuous era of the late sixties and early seventies, several currents of American art and culture coalesced around a broad sensibility that foregrounded and explored the immediacy of lived experience as both an aesthetic and political imperative. But in films set in the historical past, this sensibility acquired complex additional resonances by speaking to the ephemerality of the present moment through a framework of history, myth, nostalgia, and other forms of temporal alienation and distance. The Presence of the Past explores the implications of this complex moment in Hollywood cinema through several prominent examples released in the years 1967 to 1974. Key genres are explored in detailed case studies: the outlaw film (Bonnie and Clyde and Badlands), the revisionist Western (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, McCabe and Mrs. Miller), the neo-noir (Chinatown), and the nostalgia film (The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti). In these films, “the past” is more than a matter of genre or setting. Rather, it is a richly diverse, often paradoxical concern in its own right, whose study bridges diverse conceptual territories within soundtrack studies, including the sixties pop score, myth criticism, media technologies, and the role of classical music in compilation scoring. Against a broader background of an industry and film culture that were witnessing a stylistic and aesthetic diversification in the use of music and sound design, The Presence of the Past argues for the film-philosophical importance of the soundtrack for cultivating an imagined experiential understanding of the past.

scholarly journals MONTSERRAT ROIG’S EL TEMPS DE LES CIRERES: A NOSTALGIC LOOK AT THE PAST

2006 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-81
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Deiser
Keyword(s):  
Transition To Democracy ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Cultural Logic ◽  
The Past ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Fredric Jameson ◽  
Historical Transition ◽  
Remote Past

In Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson speaks to the legitimacy of the claim that we have entered the postmodern era. He also notes, however, that cultural artifacts often contain elements of a previous social structure while, at the same time, revealing one in its early stages of development. In this article I argue that Montserrat Roig’s 1977 novel, El temps de les cireres, supports Jameson’s premise. Through the motifs of photography and time, Roig not only chronicles some of the significant social changes took place in Barcelona during the 1960s and 1970s, she also conjures up the city’s more remote past for an older generarion that had been denied it, as well as for a younger generation that no longer recognized it. In so doing, her novel not only documents events leading up to Spain’s transition to democracy, it also grapples with the broader historical transition from modernity to postmodernity in Spain.

Child Composers in the Old Conservatories

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert O. Gjerdingen
Keyword(s):  
Teaching Methods ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Colleges And Universities ◽  
Mental Ability ◽  
Original Music ◽  
Innovative Teaching ◽  
Musical Works ◽  
History Of ◽  
Youtube Videos ◽  
Typical Day

The original music conservatories were orphanages. Through innovative teaching methods the masters of these old institutions were able to transform poor and often illiterate castoffs into elite musicians, many of whom became famous in the history of classical music. The book tells the story of how this was done. It shows what the lessons were like, what a typical day was like for an orphan, and how children progressed from simple lessons to ones more advanced than any seen today in colleges and universities. Recent rediscoveries of thousands of the old lessons have allowed us to understand how children’s minds were systematically developed to be able to “think” in music. That is, the lessons slowly built up the mental ability to imagine the interplay of two or more voices or instruments. Today we think of Mozart as having a miraculous ability to imagine musical works in his head, but in truth many of the conservatory graduates of that era had attained a similar level of controlled musical imagination. They could improvise for hours at the keyboard, and they could quickly compose whole works for ensembles. The book is accompanied by 100 YouTube videos so that readers can hear what the lessons sounded like.

Ways of Being and Time

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kris McDaniel
Keyword(s):  
Being And Time ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
Ontological Pluralism ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Better Than

This chapter develops a version of ontological pluralism that respects two common intuitions about time: that the present moment is metaphysically distinguished but not in such a way that the past is unreal. The version of ontological pluralism developed—presentist existential pluralism (PEP)—embraces two modes of being, the mode of being that present objects enjoy and the mode of being that past objects enjoy. The author argues that this view fares at least as well, and probably better, than other views in which the present is metaphysically distinguished. The chapter also introduces another form of ontological superiority called “levels of being.”

Effective splicing localization based on noise level inconsistencies

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
P. N. R. L. Chandra Sekhar Author ◽  
T. N. Shankar Author
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Social Networking Sites ◽  
Noise Level ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Multimedia Content ◽  
Noise Levels ◽  
Multimedia Forensics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Photo Editing ◽  
State Of Art

In the era of digital technology, it becomes easy to share photographs and videos using smartphones and social networking sites to their loved ones. On the other hand, many photo editing tools evolved to make it effortless to alter multimedia content. It makes people accustomed to modifying their photographs or videos either for fun or extracting attention from others. This altering brings a questionable validity and integrity to the kind of multimedia content shared over the internet when used as evidence in Journalism and Court of Law. In multimedia forensics, intense research work is underway over the past two decades to bring trustworthiness to the multimedia content. This paper proposes an efficient way of identifying the manipulated region based on Noise Level inconsistencies of spliced mage. The spliced image segmented into irregular objects and extracts the noise features in both pixel and residual domains. The manipulated region is then exposed based on the cosine similarity of noise levels among pairs of individual objects. The experimental results reveal the effectiveness of the proposed method over other state-of-art methods.

Feeling Film: Time, Space, and the Third Image

2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110180
Author(s):  
Luke Hockley
Keyword(s):  
Present Moment ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The World

This article explores what it means to feel film. It does so through an exploration of the interconnections between Bergson, Deleuze, and Jung. Central to the argument is the ontological status of the image in these different philosophical and psychological traditions. In particular, image is seen as an encapsulation of coming into being, or what Bergson terms durée. To feel film is to engage with its therapeutic capacity to bring us into being. In the consulting room and in the cinema, this process is embodied and in some way created either between client and therapist or viewer and screen. The elusive present moment is the site at which the past permeates the present, creating as it does feeling toned entry into the process of becoming. Jung thought of this as central to individuation and Bergson as central to being. Feeling film from this perspective becomes a way of finding ourselves in both the world of the film and in our individual psyche.

Glocal riddim: cultural production and territorial identity in Caribbean music videos

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-111
Author(s):  
Murali Balaji ◽  
Thomas Sigler
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
Regional Identity ◽  
Intimate Relationship ◽  
Music Videos ◽  
Pop Music ◽  
Web Based ◽  
Territorial Identity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Musical Genres

Over the past two decades, several musical genres have transcended their Caribbean origins to achieve global recognition and success. Among these are soca, dancehall and reggaeton, all forms that had been inextricably tied to native cultural expressions, but have become increasingly popular as global commodities, particularly as web-based streaming platforms (e.g. YouTube) enhance their global audiovisual mobility. Numerous artists within these genres have become internationally recognized superstars, and many of the most recent tracks reflect an increasing co-mingling with American ‘pop’ music, as record companies seek to invigorate mainstream sounds with these ‘exotic’, yet widely popular artists. This article explores representations of scalar territorial identity as articulated in music videos from within these genres so as to evaluate how identity intersects with profit-driven models applicable to the contemporary music industry. By evaluating imagery from a regionally representative sample of music videos, they identify the intimate relationship between identity, scale and cultural production. Ultimately, we interrogate how place-based identity is commodified in these representations and whether certain images are constructed more for transnational consumption than an articulation of a coherent local national, or regional identity.

A view of the current state of hygiene, sanitation, and public medicine

1923 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 90-92
Author(s):  
V. V. Miloslavsky
Keyword(s):  
Medical Knowledge ◽  
Total Loss ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The Past ◽  
Premature Deaths ◽  
Current State

Hardly any other branch of medical knowledge has ever faced greater challenges, more pressing questions, than hygiene does at the present moment. The past war has uprooted about 6 million healthy, strong individuals - a direct sacrifice on the altar of Mars. To this should be added about 50 million premature deaths caused by an increase of mortality and those who were not born as a result of a decrease in the birthrate. For Russia, the total loss had already reached 21 million souls by the end of 1920, with 25 million disabled.

The Macroform in Post-Tonalmusic. Listening and Analysis

2003 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Baroni
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Extreme Points ◽  
Musical Time ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Hierarchical Levels ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
Recorded Performance ◽  
A Performance

Form in classical music is fundamentally a question of organising musical time in order to facilitate a listening corresponding to author's expectations. In the past this was obtained by coordinating different parameters towards a single goal. In twentieth century music, the more detached relationship between the composer and the listener meant that less importance was given to the idea of “correct” listening and to the coordination of parameters. This article is devoted to one of the extreme points in this process: A quartet by Bruno Maderna composed in 1956 under the influence of the ideologies of Darmstadt. The quartet was examined by three different groups of analysts. The first group examined the score of the quartet, while the third group only had a recorded performance at its disposal; the second group analyzed both the score and the performance. The three groups had to describe the form of the piece in terms of three hierarchical levels: Its microform {i.e. the organisation of minimal units not divisible into smaller parts); its macroform (i.e. its division into the minimum possible number of parts); the medium form {i.e. a collection of minimal units that could also be interpreted as an acceptable division of the parts at a macroformal level). Two basic criteria were used: Segmentation (local parametric discontinuity between two adjacent parts) and similarity (coherence between the parameters within each part). The results of the three analyses were somewhat diverse, thus demonstrating the tendency to relax the sense of form in such a quartet, as well as the presence of different procedures used when listening to a performance and analysing a score.

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