The Sound of Architecture

Acoustic atmospheres can be fleeting, elusive, or short-lived. Sometimes they are constant, but more often they change from one moment to the next, forming distinct impressions each time we visit certain places. Stable or dynamic, acoustic atmospheres have a powerful effect on our spatial experience, sometimes even more so than architecture itself. This book explores the acoustic atmospheres of diverse architectural environments, in terms of scale, function, location, or historic period—providing an overview of how acoustic atmospheres are created, perceived, experienced, and visualized. Contributors explore how sound and its atmospheres transform architecture and space. Their essays demonstrate that sound is a tangible element in the design and staging of atmospheres and that it should become a central part of the spatial explorations of architects, designers, and urban planners. The Sound of Architecture will be of interest to architectural historians, theorists, students, and practicing architects, who will discover how acoustic atmospheres can be created without complex and specialized engineering. It will also be of value to scholars working in the field of history of emotions, as it offers evocative descriptions of acoustic atmospheres from diverse cultures and time periods.

Dos mundos conectados: Cómo la exposición al estrés social nos hace más vulnerables al consumo de drogas

Stress is one of the main risk factors that can induce humans to develop disorders such as depression, anxiety, or drug use. One of the main sources of stress is social interaction, which can lead to situations such as bullying at school or at work. In this article we will review the close relationship between exposure to stressful situations and increased cocaine or alcohol use. We will present the main results obtained with animal models, which allow us to study the brain mechanisms involved in the impact of stress on drug use. To conclude, we will detail the main mechanisms that explain the powerful effect of stress on drug use.

Effect of Cooling Rate on the Volume Fractions of the Constituent Phases of the Tempcore Steel Rebars

Tempcore process considers the widest process that is being used in the production of reinforced steel rebar. The normal tempcore process is fundamentally dependent on the amount of latent heat in the core of the steel rebar, and the cooling rate of the rebar cross-section. Cooled water box and the cooling bed have a powerful effect on the cooling rate of the steel rebar. This research has been designed to monitor the continuous cooling transformation CCT diagram of steel rebar with different two contents of residual elements. Moreover, the effect of the cooling bed’s conditions has been simulated to identify the effect of cooling rate at the cooling bed step on the microstructure, as well as the hardness value of the produced steel rebar. It was found that the cooling rate at the cooling bed step has a great powerful effect on the produced steel rebar in term of bainite phase increment, and the hardness value as well.

Brahms, Beethoven, and a Reassessment of the Famous Footsteps

To speak of Brahms and Beethoven in the same breath is almost a cliché: Brahms was intimately conscious of Beethoven's music from early youth. This article describes the details of his youthful involvement, the compositions he had in his repertoire as well as those other works which had a powerful effect on his development. By age 20, Brahms was frequently compared to Beethoven by people who met him or heard him play. My interest is in the way he was influenced by Beethoven and the manner in which he eventually found his own voice. The compositional history of his First Symphony provides the primary focus: its long gestation, and the alleged quote by Brahms given in Max Kalbeck's massive biography: ‘I'll never write a symphony, you have no idea what it feels like … to hear the footsteps of a giant behind one’. The reference is presumably to Beethoven, but there exists no corroborating evidence that Brahms ever said those words. They gained credence as one writer after another simply accepted Kalbeck's word. Yet substantial evidence exists that in writing his biography, Kalbeck distorted and even invented ‘facts’ when it suited his purposes, including a specific instance dealing with writing a symphony. An alternative view of the symphony's long gestation is based on a view of Brahms's compositional history. He wrote for musical forces he knew at first hand, and only from 1872 to 1875 did he have command of an orchestra. Intriguingly, while fulfilling the contemporary accepted demands of a symphony after Beethoven, Brahms devised an unusual strategy for the final movement, the basis of its great success.

Boundaries in space and time: iconic biases across modalities

The idea that the form of a word reflects information about its meaning has its roots in Platonic philosophy, and has been experimentally investigated for concrete, sensory-based properties since the early 20th century. Here, we provide evidence for an abstract property of ‘boundedness’ that introduces a systematic, iconic bias on the phonological expectations of a novel lexicon. We show that this abstract property is general across events and objects. In Experiment 1, we show that subjects are systematically more likely to associate sign language signs that end with a gestural boundary with telic verbs (denoting events with temporal boundaries, e.g., die, arrive) and with count nouns (denoting objects with spatial boundaries, e.g., ball, coin). In Experiments 2-3, we show that this iconic mapping acts on conceptual representations, not on grammatical features. Specifically, the mapping does not carry over to psychological nouns (e.g. people are not more likely to associate a gestural boundary with idea than with knowledge). Although these psychological nouns are still syntactically encoded as either count or mass, they do not denote objects that are conceived of as having spatial boundaries. The mapping bias thus breaks down. Experiments 4-5 replicate these findings with a new set of stimuli. Finally, in Experiments 6-11, we explore possible extensions to a similar bias for spoken language stimuli, with mixed results. Generally, the results here suggest that ‘boundedness’ of words’ referents (in space or time) has a powerful effect on intuitions regarding the form that the words should take.

Digital Storytelling in the Context of Crisis Com-Munication: Post – Crisis Campaigns

The paper attempts to clarify the concepts of digital narrative and digital storytelling in the context of crisis communication. It is highlighted that the aim in the post-crisis campaigns is to be restored the organizational reputation and the loyalty of the targeted communities. The author attempts to analyze post-crisis campaigns in three different fields - institutional, corporate, and non-government that involving forms of digital narrative. Digital storytelling has a strong and powerful effect on communicating NGO causes. In two out of three cases (NGOs and the corporate sector) communication professionals used video storytelling, while in the institutional sector, formats such as story map and location-based storytelling are used.

Turf Wars in Colombia’s Red Corner

This chapter shows how, in the 1970s and 1980s, the Cold War drew Urabá's economies of violence into the vortex of insurgency and counterinsurgency, reinforcing the region's reputation as a stateless frontier. The political violence wracking Urabá had clinched its position in the minds of locals and outsiders alike as a lawless, stateless frontier zone. While critical of these discourses of statelessness, the chapter demonstrates how they had a powerful effect on local political struggles. The frontier effect enabled the proliferation of competing state projects, turning the region into an even more fractious social space—a jagged mosaic of rival territorialities. But the violent clashes between insurgency and counterinsurgency that made Urabá into the “red corner” of Colombia were not caused by the absence of the state; they were conflicts over the form and content of statehood itself. None of these struggles played out in the absence of governmental structures and practices.