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Copyright of AugenBlick is the property of Schueren Verlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Audimat is the property of Editions Presentes and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Review of: On Minimalism: Documenting A Musical Movement, Kerry O'brien and William Robin (2023) Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 449 pp., ISBN 978-0-52038-208-4, p/bk, £30 The Names of Minimalism: Authorship, Art Music, and Historiography in Dispute, Patrick Nickleson (2023) Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 253 pp., ISBN 978-0-47203-309-8, p/bk, $29.95 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American composer David Mahler (b. 1944) has nurtured a career that is independent, diverse, and hard to classify. Democratic, inclusive, and community oriented, Mahler thinks deeply about sound in specific environments, and how music gets made, both by amateurs and professionals. Mahler's work is thus integrally connected to places, to the people in them, and to the songs those people sing. He is influenced and inspired by U.S. traditions of band music arrangements, the ragtime of Joseph Lamb, the songs of Stephen Foster, the bitonality of Charles Ives, the simple harmonic motion of classic minimalism, and the indeterminacy of John Cage. His teachers included Harold Budd, Morton Subotnick, and James Tenney, and he has been an important influence on many composers of his generation, including Michael Byron, Peter Garland, Larry Polansky, Thom Miller, and Stuart Dempster. Defining himself as a “Listener-in-Residence,” he has composed, performed, taught, organized, and directed, all while remaining almost completely unaffiliated with academic institutions. This article provides a portrait of Mahler's career in the context of the communities that have shaped his work and explores how his music responds to the world around him. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Nordic Journal of Francophone Studies / Revue Nordique des Études Francophones is the property of Ubiquity Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Park benches are distinctive public spaces that invite a temporary pause for thought and time out from everyday activities and worldly preoccupations. Park Bench Sojourn is a multimodal arts project that explores the uniqueness and universality of these spaces and the kinds of experiences they foster. It asks what it means to be human; surrounded, as we are, by computer technologies and digital media, living lives that are perpetually 'connected' and dispersed through the cloud. It reflects on how our technologically determined lives and lifestyles conspire against us to find opportunities to stop, reflect and be witnesses to lived experience. It is a conceptually playful creative work that shares concerns for health and well-being arising from the contemporary mindfulness movement and the traditional practices and worldviews upon which mindfulness draws. The project is based around a range of experiential sojourns, which require participants to find a bench to sit on and then take a sojourn, or a number of sojourns from the project's website, which may include audio, video, spoken word, or just listening. Other iterations of the project have included a multimedia gallery installation juxtaposing content from a variety of sojourns. Regardless of the format, context or specific content, the project explores ways in which we 'perform' ourselves and mediate experience via digital technologies. In this article, we describe the process of translating this mediated and performative artwork into a VR prototype and directions for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verbal probability expressions are often used to communicate risk in decision making situations. We tested the argument that fear would lead to more pessimistic risk perceptions and higher risk aversion than tranquility when the verbal probability expression used to communicate risk is more (vs. less) ambiguous. In Experiment 1, using a dispute resolution context, we found that fear led to a lower impasse rate than tranquility when the probability of winning in court was described using the ambiguous probability word 'a chance' than when less ambiguous probability words were used (i.e., doubtful, probable). In Experiment 2, we replicated this effect using a risky-choice task. Participants in the fear condition were more likely to choose the safe option than those in the tranquil emotion condition when risk was communicated using the ambiguous probability word 'a chance' (vs. 'doubtful' and 'probable'). The implications of these findings for emotion, risk taking, and risk communication literatures are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rationale: Recent studies have supported the safety and efficacy of psychedelic therapy for mood disorders and addiction. Music is considered an important component in the treatment model, but little empirical research has been done to examine the magnitude and nature of its therapeutic role.Objectives: The present study assessed the influence of music on the acute experience and clinical outcomes of psychedelic therapy.Methods: Semi-structured interviews inquired about the different ways in which music influenced the experience of 19 patients undergoing psychedelic therapy with psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. Interpretative phenomenological analysis was applied to the interview data to identify salient themes. In addition, ratings were given for each patient for the extent to which they expressed “liking,” “resonance” (the music being experienced as “harmonious” with the emotional state of the listener), and “openness” (acceptance of the music-evoked experience).Results: Analyses of the interviews revealed that the music had both “welcome” and “unwelcome” influences on patients’ subjective experiences. Welcome influences included the evocation of personally meaningful and therapeutically useful emotion and mental imagery, a sense of guidance, openness, and the promotion of calm and a sense of safety. Conversely, unwelcome influences included the evocation of unpleasant emotion and imagery, a sense of being misguided and resistance. Correlation analyses showed that patients’ experience of the music was associated with the occurrence of “mystical experiences” and “insightfulness.” Crucially, the nature of the music experience was significantly predictive of reductions in depression 1 week after psilocybin, whereas general drug intensity was not.Conclusions: This study indicates that music plays a central therapeutic function in psychedelic therapy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For over ten years, Los Angeles arts patron Betty Freeman (1921–2009) welcomed composers, performers, scholars, patrons, and invited guests into her home for a series of monthly musicales that were known as ‘Salotto’. In this article, I analyse Freeman's musicales within a sociological framework of gender and what Randall Collins calls ‘interaction rituals’. I contextualize these events, which took place in a space in her Beverly Hills home known as the Music Room, within a broader history of salon culture in Los Angeles in the twentieth century – a history that shaped the city's relationship with the artistic avant-garde and made Los Angeles an important amplifier for many of the most important voices in contemporary Western art music of the last sixty years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers several prominent pieces of minimalism in their movement from primary sound recording to secondary transcription. In place of the score-based formalism of much musicological scholarship on minimalism, I draw on my own archival work and interviews to consider the frequency of transcriptions of minimalism, as well as the politico-historical aspects of minimalism's development that are elided when the distinction between score and transcription is not taken into account. I argue that defining minimalism in relation to material practices of composing, writing, performing, and listening – rather than to formal features like gradual process, long duration, and diatonicism – helps in defining minimalism as a cohesive field of musical production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘In total darkness, or in a very large room, very quietly’ [Eno, Brian, and Peter Schmidt. (1979).Oblique Strategies. The Authors.] This article considers how Eno has used simple but innovative ideas, programmes and processes to inform his films, apps and installation work. Avoiding spectacle, noise and complexity, Eno and his collaborators have produced an array of intriguing and engaging visual art works. InT.The New York Times Style Magazine, Eno stated that he ‘was trying to make visual art become more like music, in that it changed the way music changes’ [Eno, Brian. (2013). ‘The Record Producer, Sound Conceptualist Futurist and Artist Extraordinaire on the Academy Couch.’ New York: Red Bull Music Academy. Accessed April 14, 2014]. Kingsley Marshall and Rupert Loydell use remix, juxtaposition and creative writing, along with more traditional research methods, to cast light onto the ways in which appropriation, process and collaboration have informed Eno’s creative output. They use Eno’s own words, along with critiques of his work, and writing by those who have inspired him, to consider how Eno creates his quiet rooms and visual music. Each consecutive response here was dictated by the turn of anOblique Strategiescard. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Revista Ártemis: Estudos de Gênero, Feminismo e Sexualidades is the property of Revista Artemis and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Socioloski Pregled is the property of Srpsko Sociolosko Drustvo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Jahrbuch Immersiver Medien is the property of Schueren Verlag GmbH and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Automated music emotion recognition (MER) is a challenging task in Music Information Retrieval with wide-ranging applications. Some recent studies pose MER as a continuous regression problem in the Arousal-Valence (AV) plane. These consist of variations on a common architecture having a universal model of emotional response, a common repertoire of low-level audio features, a bag-of-frames approach to audio analysis, and relatively small data sets. These approaches achieve some success at MER and suggest that further improvements are possible with current technology. Our contribution to the state of the art is to examine just how far one can go within this framework, and to investigate what the limitations of this framework are. We present the results of a systematic study conducted in an attempt to maximize the prediction performance of an automated MER system using the architecture described. We begin with a carefully constructed data set, emphasizing quality over quantity. We address affect induction rather than affect attribution. We consider a variety of algorithms at each stage of the training process, from preprocessing to feature selection and model selection, and we report the results of extensive testing. We found that: (1) none of the variations we considered leads to a substantial improvement in performance, which we present as evidence of a limit on what is achievable under this architecture, and (2) the size of the small data sets that are commonly used in the MER literature limits the possibility of improving the set of features used in MER due to the phenomenon of Subset Selection Bias. We conclude with some proposals for advancing the state of the art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the problems of authorship concerning free improvisation. It looks at three areas: collaboration, education, and emerging processes. There has been a recent trend for introducing spontaneous and collaborative elements into contemporary classical music projects. The current essay examines problems concerning how to nurture, present and disseminate new forms within very established formats. Even though free improvisation offers a medium in which to develop complementary crossover skills between composition and performance, this essay will discuss the impossibilities for a composer or performer (working in their respective fields) to claim authorship of a collaborative performance between free improvisation and composition. It identifies the free improvisation performance as an ephemeral, emerging process that does not create a product-that is, it is a process resistant to institutionalised assessment and ownership. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the two landmarks of ambient music, the musical works of Brian Eno in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the Tetsu Inoue's musical work "Ambient Otaku." Eno's musical works are regarded as the most famous in the music genre of ambient music as it reveals his novel way of attending to sounds in which his work "Ambient 4: On Land" in 1982 reflects his experiences as a traveling musician. Moreover, Inoue's work deals on music media as a substitute for mood-altering drugs.

A list of the music compositions of James Tenney is presented including "Interim," "Four Inventions," and "Two Christmas Songs."

One of the recurrent themes of James Tenney's highly diverse musical output is an engagement with the work of other composers. From QUIET FAN for ERIK SATIE of 1970 through Spectral CANON for CONLON Nancarrow in 1974, all the way to ’Scend for Scelsi in 1996 and Song’n’Dance for Harry Partch in 1999, Tenney's compositions bear dedications to a wide range of composers whose work he admired. Besides those already mentioned, we find Ives, Varèse, Cowell, Ruggles, Crawford, Wolpe, Cage, Xenakis, Feldman and many others. This practice manifests a desire on Tenney's part consciously to link his work to tradition: not merely the American experimental tradition, of which his own work forms so significant a part, but to aspects of twentieth-century European music as well. A given piece by Tenney rarely sounds much like the music of the composer invoked in its title; rather, this article argues that Tenney's work embodies an ecology of ideas, where techniques and inventions of other composers are rationalised, restated in different terms and sometimes playfully juxtaposed with ideas of others. Tenney saw himself partly in the role of curator of other people's ideas; and his work as a whole proposes a particular genealogy of twentieth-century music. This article discusses the nature of Tenney's dedicatory works and explores the possibility that his obsessive need to invoke other composers in the dedications of his works, while clearly on one level an affirmation—of heritage, identity and shared musical vision—nonetheless conceals a profound anxiety about the whole nature and purpose of musical composition in the second half of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1998, the New-York based, avant-garde collective Bang on a Can transcribed and recorded Brian Eno's ambient classic Music For Airports (1978). The project transformed what was the result of Eno's experimentations in the electronic studio into a showcase for live virtuosos. The CD is accompanied by Bang on a Can's typically polemical liner notes in which they take great pains to explain away Music for Airports' previous life—indeed its raison d'etre—as unobtrusive background music: 'it is music that's carefully, beautifully, brilliantly constructed and its compositional techniques rival the most intricate of symphonies'. Although this kind of spin recites what are by now familiar modernist tropes, the simple binary of modern/postmodern cannot adequately explain the phenomenon of Bang on a Can's Music for Airports. From the point of view of modernism, Eno's original is incomprehensible; from a postmodern vantage point, Bang on a Can's transcription represents, at best, a tragic misreading, at worse, an inexcusable betrayal of everything Music for Airports stood for. Fortunately, cultural theorists have begun to formulate more nuanced readings of the modern and postmodern epistemes. In this paper, I use French anthropologist Marc Augés relatively new idea of 'Supermodernism' in conjunction with architecture critic Charles Jencks' more established notion of 'Late Modernism' to argue that Bang on a Can's performance of Music for Airports changes Eno's quintessentially supermodernist sonic soundscape into an archetypal late-modernist phenomenon. I base my arguments on both the changed circumstances of the piece—from background music, piped into La Guardia airport to a virtuosic tour de force taking center stage at Alice Tully Hall—and the actual details of Bang on a Can's performance: timbre, instrumentation, and style. In addition, I use Umberto Eco's formulation of hyperreality to explain the transformation from Eno's flat background music to Bang on a Can's vivid live performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's comments on the use of improvisation as an important teaching tool in music. Improvisation activities can be used to reinforce music learning. There are several possible improvisation activities for music students like playing an open-string accompaniment while students solo arco, manipulating the rhythm of two pitches over a tonic-dominant harmonic pattern and conversations having pairs of students face each other and play musical phrases back and forth. For improvisation, students should be given the chord pitches to choose from tonic and dominant, set out a harmonic background, and let students create short cadential phrases from the notes available. Daily participation in improvisational activities can help everyone learn to enjoy improvisation. Many musicians and students fear improvisation for different reasons, but it is important to remove the element of fear and allow the musical mind to play. Using improvisation activities, students are learning to improvise in a low-stress setting.

This article reviews the 2004 International Conference on Auditory Display, a German book in sound art, several audio recordings, two interactive CD-ROM from Schott, and software from Cycling '74. In the opening discussion of the book Klangkunst: Tönende Objekte und klingende Räume, Helga de la Motte-Haber traces the influences of abstract art and of early experimental music and the Fluxus movement which they helped spawn. The subtitle of this book could just as well describe a symphony concert in one of the world's great venues, or the endeavors of a lone busker in a metro station. Without resounding objects and places to resound them in we would not have music. But rarely do the objects and the rooms have such a central, indeed defining, role as in what in Germany is called Klangkunst, or sound art, one of the most distinctive forms of artistic activity to emerge in the 20th century. The music recording Wholeness E.P., by Halou, is a richly textured exploration of emotion and melody that boasts exceptional production quality and depth of sound. It opens with the emotionally charged Everything Is Ok, one of those songs that sticks to your brain until you listen to it again. Rebecca Cosebloom's ascerbic voice is backed by rhythmic flutters and deep, pounding bass drums.

Artaud's Jet de Sang is a text of merely eight pages, published in 1925. This work has acquired a reputation of being 'unperformable', partly because of the 'impossible' scenic actions asked for in the stage directions (e.g. 'two stars crash into each other; and we see a number of live pieces of human bodies falling down: hands, feet, scalps...with a maddening, vomit-inducing slowness'), partly because the only professional production, by Peter Brook in the London Season of Cruelty in 1964, was judged to have been a total flop (Hunt & Reeve 77). Over the past ten years, I have scrutinized this text time and time again, related it to the theatrical ideas Artaud was professing in the 1920s, and have never quite understood why the play should be considered unperformable. It is a challenging text, yes, but when not interpreted literally it could act as a springboard for an exploration of Artaud's mind and of our own responses to the topics addressed in the play. A group of students with whom I had worked heft)re on a Dada project convinced me that a production of Jet de Sang, despite its reputation, could be contemplated. Nevertheless, at our first group meeting I expressed the view that the alliance between Surrealism and the theatre profession had been a failure in the past and that it was unlikely to succeed today without compromising either the fundamental intentions behind Surrealist art or the no less axiomatic notions of 'quality' in our contemporary theatre world. To explore Artaud's concept of Surrealist theatre would by necessity force us into taking a decision on whether to be faithful to Artaud's ideas or to produce 'theâtre-bien-fait'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the heat of the fraught political climate of 1969, the editors of SOURCE: Music of the Avant Garde invited 20 innovative composers and musicians to respond to a single question: "Have you, or has anyone, ever used your work for political or social ends?" Forty-five years later the author posed the same question to 20 unconventional composers working today, resulting in a provocative contemporary update to the original 1969 SOURCE article. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Profiles Joseph Jaworski, author of the book `Synchronicity: The Inner Path of Leadership.' Contents of the book; Jaworski's views on leadership; Encounter with University of London professor David Bohm, the man Albert Einstein credited with having taught him more about quantum physics than any other person; Jaworski's tips for becoming better at synchronicity.