Computational Approaches to Music Motor Performance: Clustering of Percussion Kinematics Underlying Performance Style

The present study investigated motor kinematics underlying performance-related movements in marimba performance. Participants played a marimba while motion capture equipment tracked movements of the torso, shoulders, elbows, wrists, and hands. Principal components analysis was applied to assess the movements during the performance related to sound production and sound preparation. Subsequent cluster analyses sought to identify coupling of limb segment movements that may best characterize performance styles present in the performance. The analysis revealed four clusters that were thought to reflect performance styles of expressive performance, postural sway, energy efficiency, and a blend of the former styles. More specifically, the expressive cluster was best characterized by limb movements occurring along the vertical z-axis, whereas the postural sway cluster was characterized by forwards and backwards motions of the torso and upper limbs. The energy efficient cluster was characterized by movements of the body moving left to right along the marimba, whereas the blended style demonstrated limited delineation from the alternate styles. Such findings were interpreted as evidence that performance styles occur within a framework of biomechanical constraints and hierarchical stylistic factors. Overall, the results provided a more holistic understanding of motor execution in percussion performance.

A Night at the (Imaginary) Opera: The Visual Dimension in Hector Berlioz's Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust

<p>In keeping with the spirit of Romanticism, Hector Berlioz has always been something of a rogue figure. Works like Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust, which Daniel Albright refers to as 'semi-operas', occupy an uncomfortable place within the concert hall. The intersections between song, symphony, opera and the spoken word that form these works immediately pose questions concerning musical unity, narrative interpretation, issues of genre, and performance style. While the musical and literary aspects of the three compositions have been the subject of scholarly attention, this study turns its gaze onto the various visual dimensions that are present within Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust. By emphasising the presence of spectacle in Berlioz's compositions, questions soon arise concerning the implications of these visual elements for performance. Berlioz's relatively early work, Lelio, illustrates the extent to which the composer is already concerned with how the visual suppression of performing bodies can create and change narrative meanings. Romeo et Juliette raises the curtains that hide Lelio's musical forces. Rather than simply distilling Shakespeare's drama into music, Berlioz relies instead on a visual memory of Romeo and Juliet to replace the absence of physical characters within his 'symphonie dramatique', thus creating an aural rendition of a past theatrical event. Through an exploration of the spectacle within Lelio and Romeo et Juliette, we see how Berlioz has constructed a visually detailed imaginary theatre that resides within the score. An understanding of this imaginary theatre is integral in the subsequent analysis of Berlioz's controversial and wonderfully diabolical La damnation de Faust. This work is performed as often in the opera house as it is in the concert hall. However, an in-depth analysis of the libretto and score reveals curious and occasionally contradictory visual implications. The impact that these contradictions have on the visual dimension in the performance of La damnation de Faust will be explored through a reading of two ground-breaking productions: Raoul Gunsbourg's La damnation de Faust from 1893 - the first production to treat Berlioz's score as an opera; and Robert Lepage's mixed-media production of La damnation. The work of these two directors serves to highlight, perhaps inadvertently, the problematic effects of Berlioz's imaginary theatre on the necessarily more concrete realisations of La damnation when confined within the opera house. However, the cinematic approach of Lepage suggests another avenue of performance that has the potential to reveal new dimensions of Berlioz's unique dramatic-symphonic works. Ultimately, it may be that the supreme technicolour nature of Berlioz's music always functions to transport us beyond our own mundane experiences and forever challenges us to seek something beyond the limits of the possible, however much those limits might change.</p>

A Night at the (Imaginary) Opera: The Visual Dimension in Hector Berlioz's Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La Damnation de Faust

<p>In keeping with the spirit of Romanticism, Hector Berlioz has always been something of a rogue figure. Works like Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust, which Daniel Albright refers to as 'semi-operas', occupy an uncomfortable place within the concert hall. The intersections between song, symphony, opera and the spoken word that form these works immediately pose questions concerning musical unity, narrative interpretation, issues of genre, and performance style. While the musical and literary aspects of the three compositions have been the subject of scholarly attention, this study turns its gaze onto the various visual dimensions that are present within Lelio, Romeo et Juliette and La damnation de Faust. By emphasising the presence of spectacle in Berlioz's compositions, questions soon arise concerning the implications of these visual elements for performance. Berlioz's relatively early work, Lelio, illustrates the extent to which the composer is already concerned with how the visual suppression of performing bodies can create and change narrative meanings. Romeo et Juliette raises the curtains that hide Lelio's musical forces. Rather than simply distilling Shakespeare's drama into music, Berlioz relies instead on a visual memory of Romeo and Juliet to replace the absence of physical characters within his 'symphonie dramatique', thus creating an aural rendition of a past theatrical event. Through an exploration of the spectacle within Lelio and Romeo et Juliette, we see how Berlioz has constructed a visually detailed imaginary theatre that resides within the score. An understanding of this imaginary theatre is integral in the subsequent analysis of Berlioz's controversial and wonderfully diabolical La damnation de Faust. This work is performed as often in the opera house as it is in the concert hall. However, an in-depth analysis of the libretto and score reveals curious and occasionally contradictory visual implications. The impact that these contradictions have on the visual dimension in the performance of La damnation de Faust will be explored through a reading of two ground-breaking productions: Raoul Gunsbourg's La damnation de Faust from 1893 - the first production to treat Berlioz's score as an opera; and Robert Lepage's mixed-media production of La damnation. The work of these two directors serves to highlight, perhaps inadvertently, the problematic effects of Berlioz's imaginary theatre on the necessarily more concrete realisations of La damnation when confined within the opera house. However, the cinematic approach of Lepage suggests another avenue of performance that has the potential to reveal new dimensions of Berlioz's unique dramatic-symphonic works. Ultimately, it may be that the supreme technicolour nature of Berlioz's music always functions to transport us beyond our own mundane experiences and forever challenges us to seek something beyond the limits of the possible, however much those limits might change.</p>

The Interpretive Challenges of American Presidential Discourse Described as Joking (Russian Translation)

When the American President speaks in a way that is later characterized as joking/kidding, a wide range of interpretations become possible. At a minimum, there are two basic interpretations: serious and non-serious.At the other extreme, there may be as many nuanced interpretations as there are audiences for the discourse. In this study, I will first examine the “just/only joking” strategy, considering how it fits within a theoretical understanding of humorous discourse, and lay out the prototypical strategic moves. Then I will explore how the two main audiences (the currently polarized political groupings in the United States) tend to interpret the “joking” in relation to the performance style of President Donald J. Trump. Using three examples, I will attempt to show how the same utterance can be interpreted by one audience as a harmless joke and by the other as a grave threat.

Discussion on the Morphological Characteristics of Dance Performance of "Female Roles" in Gannan Tea-picking Opera

Gannan tea-picking opera is a folk opera popular in the south of Jiangxi, among which "Liangdan Yichou" is the most representative way of performance. "Female roles" can be divided into "Xiao Dan" and "Cai Dan". The relationship of "Liangdan Yichou" in Gannan tea-picking opera can be roughly summarized as "the clown who plays the role of a female is responsible for matching, Zhengchou resembles the female character type in Beijing opera and “Fanchou”makes troubles. Cai Dan gives a beat of person with bad behavior. As the female character type in Beijing opera like three-inch “golden lotuses” (woman's bound feet in feudal age) encounters the exaggerated caricature like clown who plays the role of a female, the distinctive female dance performance style of Gannan tea-picking opera was formed. This paper aims to sort out and summarize the formation of the "female roles" dance performance in Gannan tea-picking opera and its unique character characteristics to have a clearer understanding of the aesthetic norms and artistic value of the dance performance of "female roles" in Gannan tea-picking opera to improve the cultural content of Gannan tea-picking opera and promote the inheritance and development of Gannan tea-picking opera as a whole.

Legacy

This chapter surveys the existence of Queen—as a band and a cultural product—since 1991. It is argued that the ongoing status of Queen is one of protecting and enshrining certain iconic elements of their musical identity: the extravagant and flamboyant performance style of Mercury; the sonic power of their idiolect; and their position in the canon of rock music. These observations are drawn from examination of the replacement vocalists, a major single release in 1997 (‘No One But You’), and the West End musical We Will Rock You. The chapter concludes by considering Queen’s influence on later artists, which is not as widespread as may be intimated from the praise lavished by their successors (such as Dave Grohl or Katy Perry). It is contended that the very nature of Queen’s idiolect meant that such influence is either difficult to discern musically or is limited to a small selection of textural patterns, such as vocal or guitar arrangements.

The cultural potential of Modest Mentsinsky's work in the context of the development of the musical culture of the early twentieth century

The purpose of the article is to establish the contribution of the opera singer and famous tenor Modest Omelianovych Mentsynskyi to Ukrainian and world music art. The methodology is based on using historical, biographical, and analytical methods, which allows distinguishing and reviewing the special features of the Ukrainian singer‘s ―internationally universal‖ performance style as well as tracking the stages of his creative evolution. The scientific novelty of the research is in the affirmation that the artist‘s work within the mentioned period, on the one hand, led to the ―Europeanization‖ of the Ukrainian music culture, which influenced the formation of the national vocal and opera school, and, on the other hand, his high vocal level and popularization of the Ukrainian music in the walls of numerous European theaters promoted the popularization of the Ukrainian music culture in the world. Conclusions. Relying on the achievements of the three most famous opera schools (Italian, German and French) and his own experience, the signer formed the ―internationally universal‖ performance style, which helped him make a considerable contribution to the development of opera art in at least three countries: Germany (as the most prominent singer of Wagner‘s plays with a vocal role of a ―heroic tenor‖), Sweden (as a performer and pedagogue who stood at the origins of the vocal school in this country) and Ukraine (as a talented interpreter of the Ukrainian chamber repertoire and popularizer of the national music heritage in the world).

Iterative Text-Based Editing of Talking-Heads Using Neural Retargeting

We present a text-based tool for editing talking-head video that enables an iterative editing workflow. On each iteration users can edit the wording of the speech, further refine mouth motions if necessary to reduce artifacts, and manipulate non-verbal aspects of the performance by inserting mouth gestures (e.g., a smile) or changing the overall performance style (e.g., energetic, mumble). Our tool requires only 2 to 3 minutes of the target actor video and it synthesizes the video for each iteration in about 40 seconds, allowing users to quickly explore many editing possibilities as they iterate. Our approach is based on two key ideas. (1) We develop a fast phoneme search algorithm that can quickly identify phoneme-level subsequences of the source repository video that best match a desired edit. This enables our fast iteration loop. (2) We leverage a large repository of video of a source actor and develop a new self-supervised neural retargeting technique for transferring the mouth motions of the source actor to the target actor. This allows us to work with relatively short target actor videos, making our approach applicable in many real-world editing scenarios. Finally, our, refinement and performance controls give users the ability to further fine-tune the synthesized results.

Reading the Biopic through Persona: A Comparison between "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Rocketman"

Personas are the public expressions of a private identity, the performance of personality in the social world. They are particularly visible and familiar in the world of celebrity, where entertainers regularly adopt an alter-ego for performance. This has intriguing consequences for biographical representations of performers. Biopic actors are obliged to duplicate the public-facing persona, which is an already-known, semi-fictional construction, and the private individual beneath. The narrative of the biopic must account for this relationship between the persona and the person who authors it. This article explores this process in two high-profile rock biopics, Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) and Rocketman (2019), comparing their different approaches to reproducing and exploring the persona of their subjects in performance, style and mise en scène.

Exploring correlations in genetic and cultural variation across language families in northeast Asia

Culture evolves in ways that are analogous to, but distinct from, genomes. Previous studies examined similarities between cultural variation and genetic variation (population history) at small scales within language families, but few studies have empirically investigated these parallels across language families using diverse cultural data. We report an analysis comparing culture and genomes from in and around northeast Asia spanning 11 language families. We extract and summarize the variation in language (grammar, phonology, lexicon), music (song structure, performance style), and genomes (genome-wide SNPs) and test for correlations. We find that grammatical structure correlates with population history (genetic history). Recent contact and shared descent fail to explain the signal, suggesting relationships that arose before the formation of current families. Our results suggest that grammar might be a cultural indicator of population history while also demonstrating differences among cultural and genetic relationships that highlight the complex nature of human history.