scholarly journals Endless loop: A brief history of chiptunes

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Driscoll ◽  
Joshua Diaz
Keyword(s):  
Video Game ◽  
Computer Game ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Technical Process ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Personal Computing ◽  
Music Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
And Performance

Chiptune refers to a collection of related music production and performance practices sharing a history with video game soundtracks. The evolution of early chiptune music tells an alternate narrative about the hardware, software, and social practices of personal computing in the 1980s and 1990s. By digging into the interviews, text files, and dispersed ephemera that have made their way to the Web, we identify some of the common folk-historical threads among the commercial, noncommercial, and ambiguously commercial producers of chiptunes with an eye toward the present-day confusion surrounding the term chiptune. Using the language of affordances and constraints, we hope to avoid a technocratic view of the inventive and creative but nevertheless highly technical process of creating music on computer game hardware.

Tusslers, Beatdowns, and Brothers: A Sociohistorical Overview of Video Game Arcades and theStreet FighterCommunity

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 742-762
Author(s):  
Michael Ryan Skolnik ◽  
Steven Conway
Keyword(s):  
Video Games ◽  
Identity Formation ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Moral Panics ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Historical Movement

Alongside their material dimensions, video game arcades were simultaneously metaphysical spaces where participants negotiated social and cultural convention, thus contributing to identity formation and performance within game culture. While physical arcade spaces have receded in number, the metaphysical elements of the arcades persist. We examine the historical conditions around the establishment of so-called arcade culture, taking into account the history of public entertainment spaces, such as pool halls, coin-operated entertainment technologies, video games, and the demographic and economic conditions during the arcade’s peak popularity, which are historically connected to the advent of bachelor subculture. Drawing on these complementary histories, we examine the social and historical movement of arcades and arcade culture, focusing upon the Street Fighter series and the fighting game community (FGC). Through this case study, we argue that moral panics concerning arcades, processes of cultural norm selection, technological shifts, and the demographic peculiarities of arcade culture all contributed to its current decline and discuss how they affect the contemporary FGC.

Maelzel, the Metronome, and the Modern Mechanics of Musical Time

2021 ◽  
pp. 302-340
Author(s):  
Alexander E. Bonus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reception History ◽  
Professional Musicians ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
Musical Time ◽  
Performance Culture ◽  
Industrial Age ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary Performance ◽  
And Performance

Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, despite being most recognized today for inventing the clockwork metronome, was one of the most famous automata showmen of the nineteenth century. This chapter begins by offering a reception history of Maelzel, the metronome, and his automata, and exploring the cultural significances underlying his clockwork creations across the Industrial Age. As numerous accounts maintain, Maelzel’s automata projected decidedly inhuman performance practices. His automata emblematized a machine culture that ran in direct opposition to the subjective ‘artistry’ championed by many skilled performers and composers over the century. This study subsequently addresses the discord between Maelzel’s age and ours regarding the values of musical time and performance practices: those metronomic qualities largely rejected by Maelzel’s musical contemporaries are often vehemently endorsed today by many professional musicians and educators who apply mechanically precise tempos and rhythms to all musical repertoires. This history ultimately confronts the veiled ‘metronome mentality’ found throughout contemporary performance culture, which neglects many musical-temporal aesthetics and rhythmic qualities from a pre-industrial, pre-metronomic past.

Ban and benevolence: Circus, animals and Indian state

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-266
Author(s):  
P.R. Nisha
Keyword(s):  
The Public ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
Animal Training ◽  
Indian State ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Postcolonial States ◽  
Human Association ◽  
Legal Battle

Social sciences and humanities have recently begun posing enquiries such as do animals have histories, memories and subjectivities. Circus animals hardly figure in the discourses on animals while a wide variety of animals existed in the rings globally as performers and workers. The ban of the training and performance of certain wild animals by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, India in 1991 was a watershed moment for the almost 150-year-old circus industry in the subcontinent. This article explores the legal battle that followed the ban, various discourses around animals, both wild and captive, the human and non-human association in circuses and the history of animal training and performance and critically examines the ideas of rescue, rehabilitation and conservation. The acquisition, taming and trade of animals are implicated in the history of hunting, wildlife policies of the colonial and postcolonial states in India. The ‘rescue’ and ‘rehabilitation’ of animals from the ‘private’ circus companies to the ‘public’ zoos would unravel how the very idea of scientific conservation becomes a violent guile of state and civil society actively propagating the binary of cruelty and mercy. The article will also briefly discuss the questions of intimacy and emotions between the animal and the animal trainer beyond the common representations.

The ‘impure’ auteur

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben McCann
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Film Production ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
Music Production ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Film Making ◽  
Historical Range

This opening chapter will contextualise the ‘Duvivier style’. It will look at his chief formative influence, André Antoine, whose influential theories on cinematic naturalism, location shooting, and performance authenticity was cultivated and developed by Duvivier throughout his career. The chapter will examine what makes a Duvivier film. Historians often make reference to Duvivier’s love of ‘work well done’ as his signature legacy and enduring film-making ethos. The chapter will introduce the key recognisable Duvivier traits: an expressive mise en scène, fluid camera movement and a complex negotiation of décor, strong central performances by stars and new actors, pessimistic narratives, incorporation of melodramatic elements (music, production design), and a film-by-film reliability. This analysis of Duvivier, beyond its historical range, also proposes to engage with key debates in film studies: notably auteurism, stardom and audience reception. The chapter will also look at how Duvivier fits into a history of both French national cinema and international film production. Duvivier’s genre eclecticism and lack of a coherent corpus should not be seen as a negative; instead, it is necessary to read Duvivier’s wide-ranging approach to genre and subject matter as a response to and engagement with important development in French and international film praxis.

The Melancholic State of Turkish Classical Music

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Denise Gill
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Classical Music ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Turkish Republic ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Coup Attempt

Chapter 1 brings to life a vast history of institutional reforms, politics, and performance practices that were affected by, and also facilitated, massive political changes from the seventeenth century of the Ottoman Empire to the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923 through the various coups in Turkey (1960, 1971, 1981, and 1997, and the 2016 coup attempt) and contemporary shifts experienced by Turkish classical musicians under privatization and neoliberalism. The chapter argues that one of the most central binding elements of the genre “Turkish classical music” is a loss narrative which that tells the story of roots that have been cut and positions the music as dead.

Dramatic Measures: Comedy as Philosophical Paradigm

2018 ◽  
Vol 136 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Street
Keyword(s):  
Social Regulation ◽  
Western Civilization ◽  
Literary Genres ◽  
Performance Practices ◽  
The Sublime ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
History Of Western Civilization ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

AbstractTragedy’s overwhelming presence, presaged by the conspicuous absence of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy, has dominated the debate between philosophy and poetry ever since Plato, making tragedy the dominant paradigm for philosophical and performance practices. Over the last century, the gradual blurring of genre distinctions has led to George Steiner’s declaration of the ‘death of tragedy’ and to J. L. Styan’s recognition of the emergence of ‘dark comedy’, giving rise to a growing body of research on comedy. Nevertheless, despite the unprecedented attention, the prejudices against comedy run wide and deep, from philosophical neglect to high-brow conceptions of art all the way to underlying economies of power and social regulation. In consequence, comedy has been side-stepped as an inferior genre or mode, or rehabilitated as a truer or newer form of the tragic. The present study attempts to frame this prejudice as the result of theories of aesthetics and ethics which systematically exclude the comic vision, claiming that it is possible to trace a distinct corollary between the development of theories of genre and the development of philosophical aesthetic categories. The emphasis on the beautiful and the sublime, and its corresponding brand of ethics, can be linked to the flourishing of theories of tragedy, while the systematized rejection of the ugly, the ridiculous, and the ethically ambiguous can be shown to correspond to the floundering of theories of comedy, which remained largely neglected for over two thousand years. Much more than mere literary genres, the terms comedy and tragedy, when applied to the history of Western civilization, reveal the extent of our penchant for the speculative to the detriment of the actual.

Toward a Speech Sciences Community

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-20
Author(s):  
Donald Finan ◽  
Stephen M. Tasko
Keyword(s):  
Science Research ◽  
Knowledge Generation ◽  
Speech Language Pathology ◽  
Mandated Curriculum ◽  
Professional Discipline ◽  
Common Area ◽  
Language Pathology ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Common ◽  
Speech Science

The history of speech-language pathology as a profession encompasses a tradition of knowledge generation. In recent years, the quantity of speech science research and the presence of speech scientists within the domain of the American Speech-Hearing-Language Association (ASHA) has diminished, even as ASHA membership and the size of the ASHA Convention have grown dramatically. The professional discipline of speech science has become increasingly fragmented, yet speech science coursework is an integral part of the mandated curriculum. Establishing an active, vibrant community structure will serve to aid researchers, educators, and clinicians as they work in the common area of speech science.

Sea Urchins and Circuses: The Modernist Natural Histories of Jean Painlevé and Alexander Calder

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-211
Author(s):  
Patricia E. Chu
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Sea Urchins ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Machine Age ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The One ◽  
Natural Historian

The Paris avant-garde milieu from which both Cirque Calder/Calder's Circus and Painlevé’s early films emerged was a cultural intersection of art and the twentieth-century life sciences. In turning to the style of current scientific journals, the Paris surrealists can be understood as engaging the (life) sciences not simply as a provider of normative categories of materiality to be dismissed, but as a companion in apprehending the “reality” of a world beneath the surface just as real as the one visible to the naked eye. I will focus in this essay on two modernist practices in new media in the context of the history of the life sciences: Jean Painlevé’s (1902–1989) science films and Alexander Calder's (1898–1976) work in three-dimensional moving art and performance—the Circus. In analyzing Painlevé’s work, I discuss it as exemplary of a moment when life sciences and avant-garde technical methods and philosophies created each other rather than being classified as separate categories of epistemological work. In moving from Painlevé’s films to Alexander Calder's Circus, Painlevé’s cinematography remains at the forefront; I use his film of one of Calder's performances of the Circus, a collaboration the men had taken two decades to complete. Painlevé’s depiction allows us to see the elements of Calder's work that mark it as akin to Painlevé’s own interest in a modern experimental organicism as central to the so-called machine-age. Calder's work can be understood as similarly developing an avant-garde practice along the line between the bestiary of the natural historian and the bestiary of the modern life scientist.

Applying analytical procedures for performance audit of customs authorities

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (6) ◽  
pp. 1035-1055 ◽  
Author(s):  
S.V. Pankova ◽  
V.V. Popov
Keyword(s):  
Distance Method ◽  
Scientific Methods ◽  
Scientific Hypothesis ◽  
Financial Audit ◽  
Promising Area ◽  
History Of ◽  
Performance Audit ◽  
Analytical Procedures ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Customs Administration

Subject. The article considers the development of a set of methods and indicators of economic analysis, which can be used for performance audit of customs authorities, using the Volga Customs Administration case. Objectives. The aim is to justify the use of analytical procedures to rank the effectiveness of customs payments for the purpose of performance audit of customs authorities. Methods. We employ general scientific methods of research, i.e. dialectical and monographic methods, logical analysis, comparison, as well as the Euclidean distance method. Results. We reviewed works by Russian and foreign scholars on the history of customs audit development and internal financial control of customs authorities, gave scientific credence to attributing the system of customs payment and performance to the indicators of economic activity of customs authorities. Due to the lack of methods for assessing the performance of customs authorities, the use of analytical procedures during the performance audit seems to be a promising area. Conclusions. When verifying the scientific hypothesis put forward in the study, we established that the introduction and development of the ranking system for the performance of customs authorities related to the collection of customs duties can contribute to effective financial audit of customs authorities in general.

From the history of manufacturing Romanian nai at the turn of 20–21 centuries

2018 ◽  
pp. 71-74
Author(s):  
A. Drutsé
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Fine Arts ◽  
Research Interest ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Theater ◽  
Technical Improvement ◽  
Performance Skills ◽  
Doctoral Candidate ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance

The modern world popularity of the nai — a traditional Romanian instrument — has identified interest in writing this article. This problematic constitutes the circle of our research interest as a doctoral candidate, but also as a concert performer, a graduate of the Academy of Music, Theater and Fine Arts. One of the most interesting aspects of the study of nai is its technical improvement since 60s of the 20th century, which led to the acquisition of a number of new, innovative skills and performance skills. In this article we have identified some pages of the modern history of the manufacture of this ancient instrument associated with these processes.

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