Genre of Bangla Music: A Machine Classification Learning Approach

The necessity for designing autonomous indexing tools to establish expressive and efficient means of describing musical media content is well recognized. Music genre classification systems are significant to manage and use music databases. This research paper proposes an enhanced method to automatically classify music into different genre using a machine learning approach and presents the insight and results of the application of the proposed scheme to the classification of a large set of The Bangla music content, a South-East Asian language rich with a variety of music genres developed over many centuries. Building upon musical feature extraction and decision-making techniques, we propose new features and procedures to achieve enhanced accuracy. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method by extracting features from a dataset of hundreds of The Bangla music pieces and testing the automatic classification decisions. This is the first development of an automated classification technique applied specifically to the Bangla music to the best of our knowledge, while the superior accuracy of the method makes it universally applicable.

Pattani’s Architectural Epitome of the Yaring Palace: Journeying the Historical Phases of a Regional Design Language

This paper uses the case of the exquisite design Yaring palace as a framework and springboard to discuss the particularities of the design language of the Pattani palace and architecture. The region of Pattani represents a unique crossing between a Thai identity and a Malay identity in terms of architecture. Because of its geographic position, both Asian identities merge into a language of regionalism syncretism that creates a rich blend of architectural expression representative of a South East Asian language. The paper discusses its facade expression, ornamentation, layout and interior design elements.

China's Hegemony

Many have viewed the tribute system as China's tool for projecting its power and influence in East Asia, treating other actors as passive recipients of Chinese domination. China's Hegemony sheds new light on this system and shows that the international order of Asia's past was not as Sinocentric as conventional wisdom suggests. Instead, throughout the early modern period, Chinese hegemony was accepted, defied, and challenged by its East Asian neighbors at different times, depending on these leaders' strategies for legitimacy among their populations. Focusing on China-Korea-Japan dynamics of East Asian international politics during the Ming and High Qing periods, Ji-Young Lee draws on extensive research of East Asian language sources, including records written by Chinese and Korean tributary envoys. She offers fascinating and rich details of war and peace in Asian international relations, addressing questions such as: why Japan invaded Korea and fought a major war against the Sino-Korean coalition in the late sixteenth century; why Korea attempted to strike at the Ming empire militarily in the late fourteenth century; and how Japan created a miniature tributary order posing as the center of Asia in lieu of the Qing empire in the seventeenth century.