Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion

Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion aims at advancing the study of anime, understood as largely TV-based genre fiction rendered in cel, or cel-look, animation with a strong affinity to participatory cultures and media convergence. Taking Neon Genesis Evangelion (Shin Seiki Evangerion) as a case study, this volume acknowledges anime as a media form with clearly recognizable aesthetic properties, (sub)cultural affordances and situated discourses. First broadcast in Japan in 1995-96, Neon Genesis Evangelion became an epoch-making anime, and later franchise. The initial series used already available conventions, visual resources and narrative tropes typical of anime in general and the mecha (or giant-robot) genre in particular, but at the same time it subverted and reinterpreted them in a highly innovative and as such standard-setting way. Investigating anime through Neon Genesis Evangelion this volume takes a broadly understood media-aesthetic and media-cultural perspective, which pertains to medium in the narrow sense of technology, techniques, materials, and semiotics, but also mediality and mediations related to practices and institutions of production, circulation, and consumption. In no way intended to be exhaustive, this volume attests to the emergence of anime studies as a field in its own right, including but not prioritizing expertise in film studies and Japanese studies, and with due regard to the most widely shared critical publications in Japanese and English language. Thus, the volume provides an introduction to studies of anime, a field that necessarily interrelates media-specific and transmedial aspects. In Anime Studies: Media-Specific Approaches to Neon Genesis Evangelion, anime is addressed from a transnational and transdisciplinary stance. The disciplinary and methodological perspectives taken by the individual chapters range from audio-visual culture, narratology, performance and genre theory to fandom studies and gender studies. In its first part, the book focuses on textual analysis and media form in the narrow sense with regard to filmic media, bank footage, voice acting and musical score, and then it broadens the scope to consider subcultural discourse, franchising, manga and video game adaptations, as well as critical and affective user engagement.

The constraints, aesthetic implications, and creative strategies of composing for networked music performance

<p>Performing music together over a public network while being located at a distance from each other necessarily means performing under a particular set of technical and performative constraints. These constraints are antithetical to—and make cumbersome—the performance of tightly synchronised music, which traditionally depends on the conditions of transmission stability, ultra-low latency, and shared presence. These conditions are experienced optimally only when musicians perform at the same time and in the same place. Except for specialized private network services, public networks are inherently latent and unstable, which disrupts musicians’ ability to achieve precise vertical synchronisation and create an environment where approaches to music performance and composition must be reconsidered. It is widely considered that these conditions mean that networked music performance is a future genre for when network latencies and throughput improve, or one that is currently reserved for high-end heavily optimised networks afforded by institutions and not individuals, or one that is primarily reserved for improvisatory or aleatoric composition and performance techniques. I disagree that networked music is dependent on access to advanced Internet technologies and suggest that music compositions for networked music performance can be highly successful over regular broadband conditions when the composer considers the limitations as opportunities for new creative strategies and aesthetic approaches. In this exegesis, I outline the constraints that prove that while networked music performance is latent, asynchronous, multi-located, multi-authorial, and hopelessly, intrinsically, and passionately digitally mediated, these constraints provide rich creative opportunities for the composition and performance of synchronised and resonant music. I introduce four aesthetic approaches, which I determine as being critical towards the development of networked music: 1) postvertical harmony, where the asynchronous arrival of signals ruptures the harmonic experience; 2) new timbral fusions created through multi-located resonant sources; 3) a contribution to performative relationships through the generation and transmission of vital information in the musical score and through the development of new technologies for facilitating performer synchronisation; and 4) the post-digital experience, where all digital means of manipulation are permitted and embraced, leading to new ways of listening to and forming reproduced realities. Each of these four aesthetic approaches are considered individually in relation to the core constraints, through discussion of the present-day technical conditions, and how each of these approaches are applied to my musical portfolio through practical illustration.</p>

The constraints, aesthetic implications, and creative strategies of composing for networked music performance

<p>Performing music together over a public network while being located at a distance from each other necessarily means performing under a particular set of technical and performative constraints. These constraints are antithetical to—and make cumbersome—the performance of tightly synchronised music, which traditionally depends on the conditions of transmission stability, ultra-low latency, and shared presence. These conditions are experienced optimally only when musicians perform at the same time and in the same place. Except for specialized private network services, public networks are inherently latent and unstable, which disrupts musicians’ ability to achieve precise vertical synchronisation and create an environment where approaches to music performance and composition must be reconsidered. It is widely considered that these conditions mean that networked music performance is a future genre for when network latencies and throughput improve, or one that is currently reserved for high-end heavily optimised networks afforded by institutions and not individuals, or one that is primarily reserved for improvisatory or aleatoric composition and performance techniques. I disagree that networked music is dependent on access to advanced Internet technologies and suggest that music compositions for networked music performance can be highly successful over regular broadband conditions when the composer considers the limitations as opportunities for new creative strategies and aesthetic approaches. In this exegesis, I outline the constraints that prove that while networked music performance is latent, asynchronous, multi-located, multi-authorial, and hopelessly, intrinsically, and passionately digitally mediated, these constraints provide rich creative opportunities for the composition and performance of synchronised and resonant music. I introduce four aesthetic approaches, which I determine as being critical towards the development of networked music: 1) postvertical harmony, where the asynchronous arrival of signals ruptures the harmonic experience; 2) new timbral fusions created through multi-located resonant sources; 3) a contribution to performative relationships through the generation and transmission of vital information in the musical score and through the development of new technologies for facilitating performer synchronisation; and 4) the post-digital experience, where all digital means of manipulation are permitted and embraced, leading to new ways of listening to and forming reproduced realities. Each of these four aesthetic approaches are considered individually in relation to the core constraints, through discussion of the present-day technical conditions, and how each of these approaches are applied to my musical portfolio through practical illustration.</p>

Collaborative Musical Creativity between Students and Adults: The Sonorous Paella

While creativity is a key element of contemporary curriculum frameworks around the world, it is still insufficiently fostered in formal education settings. This study analyzes a project for collaborative musical creativity, entitled The Sonorous Paella. Participants (N = 12) were eight Year 4 secondary students, two professional musicians, an artist-in-residence, and a music teacher. Drawing on a graphic musical score, the participants worked together for 1.5 months to produce a group composition and performance. They were provided with various sound producers (instruments, everyday objects, technological devices) and were encouraged to flexibly utilize the physical space to maximize collaborative participation. Field notes and pictures taken during working sessions and rehearsals, audio recordings from the final concert, and individual interviews with all participants were qualitatively analyzed. In response to the three study objectives, we conclude that: (1) the design of this collaborative project was consistent with current research-based creativity discourses; (2) drawing on the quality and originality of the final concert, the project fostered the musical creativity of the group; and (3) participants’ perceptions of and opinions about their creativity learning processes were unanimously positive. Our final aim is to inspire music teachers in designing curriculum units that foster collaborative musical creativity.

The War Requiem by Benjamin Britten in the Light of Intertextual Links

The theme of war and peace is one of humankind’s eternal problems and one of the most relevant topics in art at all times. On the 75th anniversary of the Victory in the Great Patriotic War (1941—1945), the author’s research interest is focused on one of the rare works in terms of its power of influence, which tears the mask off the apologetics of war, uncompromisingly and honestly telling about the human price for the military madness. That is B. Britten’s “War Requiem”.The presented experience of art historical analysis is intended to explicate the intertextual connections of the work with a number of texts (verbal and mainly musical) inscribed in a wide socio-historical and artistic context of both the past and contemporary works of the English musician. This way of reading the opus allows to trace the role of dialogue with the European and national tradition in the birth of B. Britten’s text, which is original, innovative in style, highly outstanding in its artistic and civil-ethical merits. With the identification of intertextual inclusions — literary, ideological-shaped, story, genre, musical-lexical, intonational, and those at the level of musical thematism (from the works of Mozart, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich) — a number of new opportunities appear: to strengthen the emotional experiences of the recipient; to deepen the understanding of the meaning of both individual sections of the requiem and its general concept; to expand the content field of interpretations of the musical score; to ensure that cultural traditions are inexhaustible for relevant art creativity; and finally, to specify our ideas about Britten’s expressed humanist and anti-militarian aspirations, which were dictated not so much by the external reasons (the relevance of the topic during the Cold War, the Requiem’s being ordered for the opening of the cathedral in Coventry), but by his deep sufferings for the fate of the world and humanity. In general, according to the author, the analysis practically confirms the idea that semiosis — the process of interpreting signs and generating meanings in art (including music) — is unlimited, and can cease only with the termination of the existence of the culture itself.

Sonja: The White Swan: Music as narrative device

Anne Sewitsky’s biopic Sonja (Sonja: The White Swan) (2018) is an example of authorial intervention that prioritizes a character-centred narrative rather than historical context. The article focuses on the musical score and the contemporary pop songs that contribute to building the psychological–emotional portrait of Norwegian-born Sonja Henie, champion figure skater and Hollywood star. In Sewitsky’s narrative strategy, non-diegetic music, sometimes deployed anachronistically, is used both to comment on the protagonist’s motivations and behaviour and to express her inner states of mind. By foregrounding Henie’s psyche through music, the film balances her negative and positive sides and presents her as complex and sometimes contradictory individual.

Predicting emotions in music using the onset curve

The relationship between parameters extracted from the musical stimuli and emotional response has been traditionally approached using several physical measures extracted from time or frequency domains. From time-domain measures, the musical onset is defined as the moment in that any musical instrument or human voice issues a musical note. The onsets’ sequence in the performance of a specific musical score creates what is known as the onset curve (OC). The influence of the structure of OC on the emotional judgment of people is not known. To this end, we have applied principal component analysis on a complete set of variables extracted from the OC to capture their statistical structure. We have found a trifactorial structure related to activation and valence dimensions of emotional judgment. The structure has been cross-validated using different participants and stimuli. In this way, we propose the factorial scores of the OC as a reliable and relevant piece of information to predict the emotional judgment of music.

Semantic oscillations of supporting music of the ancient cult as the foundation of metamodernism elements in the works of contemporary opera directors

In recent decade, modernism as one of the varieties of post-postmodernism, draws interest of the researchers. It is suggested that modern culture has transgressed the situation of postmodernism, gravitating towards conceptual and semantic sustainability. As a language of self-description of the new era, the foundations of metamodernism are reflected in various forms of art. The opera house, overcoming the inertia of conservatism, perceives these trends, refracting them in a characteristic oscillation between the extreme semantic poles, which formed during the period of antiquity. The subject of this research is the correlation between the ancient musical heritage and metamodernistic trends in the modern opera theater. It is determined that translation of the principles of musical score of the ancient cult within the framework of the works of modern opera directors implies the characteristic to the supporting music of the cult forms of Ancient Greece and Rome oscillation between the poles of monophony &ndash; polyphony, instrumentality of accompaniment &ndash; a cappella, improvisational &ndash; preset of musical pieces. Paradigmatic assimilation of the fluctuations inherent to the cult of antiquity, as well as the absence of intentionality in their manifestations (which partially reflects the religious-ecstatic procedurality of art), largely determine the specific attributes of metamodernism, emphasized in the works of R. Castellucci, P. Sellars, R. Wilson, and&nbsp;D. Chernyakov.