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Peer reviewed: True, Skazka Skazok/Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979) has delighted and puzzled audiences and critics ever since its release. It presents a series of beautifully-animated episodes that seem to make narrative sense at the micro-level and that appear to fit together as a whole, but leaves the audience bemused as to why this should be so. The article discusses the history and context of the film, arguing that the ways in which sound and, particularly, music are deployed in relation to its visual elements provide powerful clues and cues as to the film’s over-arching narrative significances. Close analysis of the film’s music, sound and visuals reveals teleological underpinnings that are realized by means of alignment and re-alignment of music and image, leading to a new understanding of how the film and its success can be interpreted.

The sudden appearance of Maya-style characteristics in the art of Epiclassic sites in Central Mexico has sparked debate regarding the relationship between the polity of Cacaxtla and the distant Maya Lowlands. Early studies linked these developments, described in ethnohistoric sources, to migrations of the Olmeca-Xicalanca of the southern Gulf Coast. Recent studies assert that Cacaxtla’s artists adopted an “eclectic” assortment of foreign stylistic elements in order to proclaim ties to distant sources of wealth and power that were not necessarily rooted in historic reality. This study argues that Cacaxtla’s artists deployed stylistic, technical, and iconographic conventions in a manner that reflects deep and sustained engagement with specific Maya cities rather than superficial claims of aggrandizement. Evaluation through current anthropological understandings of how and why people migrate and how group identity is expressed in the midst of population movements suggests that Cacaxtla’s monumental art programs constitute an additional line of evidence in support of Epiclassic migration from the southern Gulf Coast, or western Maya Lowlands, to Central Mexico.

Peer reviewed: True, The British rave scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s is widely remembered as a moment of elation and bliss. Contemporary cultural representations position the Second Summer of Love of 1989 – when thousands of young people attended illegal parties, experienced the hypnotic beats of house music and had their first brush with the drug ecstasy – as an object of nostalgia. I argue that rave nostalgia is suspended between two dispositions: the afterglow and the hangover. Whereas the former involves happiness, reversibility and continuity, the latter is defined by melancholia, irreversibility and discontinuity. On this basis, I consider two texts that creatively combine these dispositions in their evocation of rave: the music video for The Streets’s ‘Weak Become Heroes’ and Jeremy Deller’s documentary Everybody in the Place. Finally, I assess how the euphoria associated with rave nostalgia helps to augment and advance the recent turn to joy in memory studies.

This article examines a series of lawsuits that consumed Italy’s legal establishment between approximately 1924 and 1933. Resulting from a protracted labor dispute between instrumental musicians who worked in cinemas and the exhibitors who employed them, the lawsuits turned on a question of employment law: whether musicians ought to be considered full-time employees—entitled to various benefits and protections against unfair termination—or more precariously situated freelancers whom exhibitors could hire and fire at will. As a consequence of the vagaries of existing Italian labor law and new Fascist legislation governing labor relations, musicians were already at a disadvantage in this dispute. Unexpectedly, their situation was further undermined by the judiciary, as Italy’s highest court made their employee status conditional on the perceived aesthetic value of cinema and its associated music making. That is, musicians had to prove that their musical abilities were integral to the artistic outcome of any given film screening—a tall order in the context of silent cinematic exhibition, where musical accompaniment was materially distinct from the projected film. Precisely because the courts valorized the fusion of music and image, however, the Italian musicians’ lawsuits illuminate a fundamental parameter of cinematic aesthetics—synchronization—and reveal something significant about the nature of film music. Public recognition for effecting music-image synchronization in film conferred symbolic, but also literal, capital; thus I contend that synchronization ought to be understood as a form of musical labor, both in the silent era and beyond.

The Sadler partbooks (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Mus. e. 1–5), one of the most important English polyphonic sources to survive from the sixteenth century, reflect the interventions of several generations of later owners. Today the volumes bear a number of marks that were clearly not coeval with their copying in the sixteenth century; they have also been subjected to at least one rebinding, and some leaves are in a disrupted position, hitherto unobserved (and still misplaced). This article seeks to account for the custodial history of the Sadler partbooks, and to chart the bearing that their later owners have had on the partbooks’ present state. Apart from showing that the books travelled widely—they can be traced in Norwich, London, Bath, Bristol, Manchester, and eventually Oxford—it also shows that the partbooks came to the brink of destruction in the hands of one former owner, surviving fire, flood, and theft.

This collaborative manual on AI tools in education has been developed by a team of experts in the field. The primary developers of this draft are Prof Dr. Liam Murray and Muhammad Irfan from the University of Limerick. The manual has been specifically created to help educators and learners around the world understand the key concepts of AI tools in education, with a particular focus on the higher education environment in Central Asia. Recently, a collaborative initiative among Central Asian universities has been launched to equip faculty and students, mostly in the social sciences, with the ongoing revolution of AI tools. This manual is just one of many resources that aim to support teachers and learners in Central Asia and beyond, helping them to develop critical thinking and integrate AI into the teaching and learning process. Contributions to this manual were made by several experts in the field. Key notes were provided by Fahad Aldulaylan and Yahya AlQahtani, while Dr. Muhammad Sajjad focused on developing the limitations and analysis section. Engr. Francis Ashiq provided the technical layout to enhance readers' understanding of AI tools in education, and Bronwyn April shared her expertise on the social aspect of AI in education, teaching, and learning. Additionally, Niamh O'Brien provided support in the graphical aspect of teaching and learning. This manual is available for anyone to use for research, teaching, or academic purposes, but it is important to acknowledge the authors for their contributions.

This study scrutinizes the role of AI literacy and ChatGPT-3 in enhancing critical reasoning and journalistic writing competencies among 50 third-term journalism students at Tajik National University. Given the escalating relevance of AI across sectors, including journalism, we aim to highlight the potential advantages of incorporating AI utilities in journalism pedagogy. We utilized a mixedmethods approach, comprising both quantitative and qualitative data collection techniques, for a comprehensive examination of the influence of AI literacy and ChatGPT-3 on student skill development. We gathered insights via surveys and interviews, revealing the impact of AI on learning outcomes. Our findings suggest a significant improvement in students' critical thinking and journalistic writing skills with ChatGPT-3 usage. The integration of AI tools in the classroom encourages in-depth analysis and collaboration, thereby enhancing students' writing skills. The results underline the importance of AI literacy in journalism education, preparing students for the rapidly transforming, AI-centric journalism industry. Measuring Improvement in Critical Thinking and Journalism Writing Skills: A pre-and-post-test model was applied to measure the improvement in students' critical reasoning and journalistic writing competencies. The students undertook a critical analysis evaluation and a journalistic writing assignment prior to and subsequent to the use of ChatGPT-3. Descriptive and inferential statistical methods were used to analyse the quantitative data. Collecting Qualitative Data through Semi-Structured Interviews Semi-structured interviews were conducted with the students to obtain qualitative data regarding their experiences and perceptions of using ChatGPT-3. These interviews were transcribed and subjected to thematic analysis. Assessing Critical Thinking and Journalism Writing Tasks Before the intervention (pre-test) and after utilizing ChatGPT-3 (post-test), participants undertook a critical reasoning evaluation and a journalistic writing assignment. The critical reasoning evaluation was modelled on the Cornell Critical Thinking Test Level Z (Ennis et al., 2005), assessing critical reasoning abilities like inductive and deductive reasoning, credibility appraisal, and identification of presuppositions. The evaluation contained 25 multiple-choice queries, where higher scores represented enhanced critical thinking competencies. The journalism writing task required participants to compose a 500-word news article based on a given set of information. The articles were evaluated using a rubric developed by Rivenburgh et al. (2018), which assessed the articles based on accuracy, clarity, structure, and objectivity. Two experienced journalism educators, blinded to the study's purpose and the participants' pre- and post-test conditions, independently assessed the articles. The inter-rater reliability was calculated using Cohen's kappa coefficient (Cohen, 1960). Quantitative Data Analysis The quantitative data were analyzed using descriptive statistics to describe the sample's characteristics and to summarize the scores in the critical thinking assessment and the journalism writing task. Paired sample t-tests were performed to compare the pre-test and post-test scores for both the critical thinking assessment and the journalism writing task, determining whether there were significant improvements after using ChatGPT-3. Qualitative Data Collection and Analysis: Semi-Structured Interviews Semi-formal interviews were held with the participants to gather qualitative insights regarding their experiences and viewpoints on the application of ChatGPT-3 in journalism pedagogy. An interview blueprint, crafted in light of the literature review (Cukier et al., 2019; Graefe, 2016; Broussard, 2018), encompassed open ended queries about the perceived advantages, hurdles, and learning encounters linked to the usage of ChatGPT-3. Each interview, lasting roughly 30 minutes, was audibly documented and transcribed word-for-word.

This creative practice thesis comprises two components, a dissertation titled Co-Creating with the Senses: Towards an Embodiment Grammar for Conceptualising Virtual Reality (VR) Narrative Design and a creative work, The Recluse, a fictional VR script written in the Maria Vargas Immersive Play template, available through Final Draft. The advent of publicly available virtual reality (VR) technologies has led to the emergence of a new genre of storytelling, henceforth referred to as ‘VR narratives’. There has therefore been a need to articulate its defining grammar and to contribute insights born out of artistic experimentation in a scholarly field which until recently was dominated by scientific points of view. Employing a somaesthetics approach outlined by researcher Kristina Höök, the dissertation draws on a qualitative study into 10 VR narrative works in order to propose an embodiment grammar through which the art form may be conceptualised. The study’s findings, a group of eight embodied states organised into a framework, urge for the relenting of authorial control in order to instead frame affective potential, thus echoing a Deleuzian concept of the assemblage. In particular, the framework draws attention to the way that VR’s deeper affective dimensions may be elucidated by framing co-creation through the medium’s distinct sensory possibilities. As interest gathers in a future metaverse, the insights raised by the study are significant, with potential applications in a range of affective design contexts. The Recluse is my original contribution to this emerging art form and a case study through which to interrogate the framework’s findings. A mystery with supernatural elements, the VR script aims to communicate an experience that transports the participant to the world of Alma Cohen, a famous artist turned recluse, where they are invited to experience the strange occurrences in Alma’s life through their own embodied actions. The VR script explores the potential for intimate encounters with virtual characters and the sensory, co-creational and affective possibilities which arise through these dynamics. It highlights, following the framework, the way that more open structuring approaches are required in order to access the medium’s deeper affective possibilities and also the present technological constraints in achieving this.

In the twenty-first century Latin America has become the most urbanized region on the planet and, at the same time, the one that has the highest level of inequality. This article discusses how this tension is expressed in cinema, an eminently urban art, through two case studies: the Mexican Nuevo orden (dir. by Michel Franco, 2020) and the Brazilian film Era uma vez Brasília (dir. by Adirley Queirós, 2017). Both works are independent films that deal with issues of urban violence and authoritarianism through a distinct style that combines the techniques of realist representation with fictional elements borrowed from dystopian and science fiction genres. While the two show a preoccupation with the economic and racialized inequality that characterizes urban space in the capital cities of Mexico and Brazil, they ultimately evoke two modes of utopian discourse. Whereas the first film can be considered anti-utopian, criticizing the impulse to seek social change, the second one, though pessimistic, retains a utopian call for political action.

Physical activity is important for children’s health. However, evidence suggests that many children and adults do not meet international physical activity recommendations. Current school-based interventions have had limited effect on physical activity and alternative approaches are needed. Context, which includes school setting, ethos, staff, and sociodemographic factors, is a key and largely ignored contributing factor to school-based physical activity intervention effectiveness, impacting in several interacting ways.ConceptualizationCurrent programs focus on tightly-constructed content that ignores the context in which the program will be delivered, thereby limiting effectiveness. We propose a move away from uniform interventions that maximize internal validity toward a flexible approach that enables schools to tailor content to their specific context.Evaluation designsEvaluation of context-specific interventions should explicitly consider context. This is challenging in cluster randomized controlled trial designs. Thus, alternative designs such as natural experiment and stepped-wedge designs warrant further consideration.Primary outcomeA collective focus on average minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity may not always be the most appropriate choice. A wider range of outcomes may improve children’s physical activity and health in the long-term. In this paper, we argue that greater consideration of school context is key in the design and analysis of school-based physical activity interventions and may help overcome existing limitations in the design of effective interventions and thus progress the field. While this focus on context-specific interventions and evaluation is untested, we hope to stimulate debate of the key issues to improve future physical activity intervention development and implementation.

A mixed-methods concurrent identical design was implemented to explore the following research question: what are the emotional, social, and practical impacts of group singing for women from a regeneration area? Members of an all-female community choir based in an area of disadvantage participated in a focus group and survey. The most significant quantitative finding was an increase in the overall perceived level of health, which seemed linked to qualitative themes of 'positive emotions', 'redefining and reclaiming identity', 'choir as an extended family' and 'community interaction and impact'. Three themes arose from qualitative data: social impact, health and well-being aspects, and practical issues. Integrating qualitative and quantitative findings identified an overarching concept that 'choir participation may increase emotional and social health and well-being'. Group singing was found beneficial, with a potential to serve as a resource in cultivating resilience in individuals living in areas of disadvantage.There is a growing body of evidence supporting the health and emotional, social, and psychological well-being benefits of group singing (Clift et al., 2008, 2010; Clift and Hancox, 2010; Reagon et al., 2016; Fancourt and Finn, 2019). This study explored the experience of group singing for a specific demographic: women from an area of disadvantage. Members of an all-female choir based in a council estate of Limerick participated in a focus group and completed a survey investigating the emotional, social and practical impacts of group singing. Gains were noted across all three categories, and participant feedback was overwhelmingly positive regarding the benefits of choir membership. There were two particularly noteworthy findings: the ‘universality of singing’ across various age groups and ‘weariness of labels’, a novel subtheme that emerged during the focus group.

Luke Pearson’s comic for children, Hilda and the Black Hound (2017), introduces characters who live at the margins of society and who respond to those marginalising forces not with outright resistance but with what Monalesia Earle has called ‘misdirection’. As the characters move around and through the gutters of the comics page, they similarly slip between and around the authority that stands in their way. Literary theories related to formalism, children’s literature and the Gothic illuminate how the movement on the page hints at a form of disobedience.

Funder: Center for Educational Research and Academic Development in the Arts (CERADA), Making sense of musicians’ professional learning pathways is of crucial importance to understanding their career progressions, their routes into creative employment, and the relevance of various policies to their professional lives. However, this is a far cry from understanding how critical reflection catalyzes diverse learning routes, especially when considering evidence originating from postgraduate musicians’ own accounts of their journeys into job creation. In this study, we invited five postgraduate classical musicians who were invested in professional learning through performance programs in higher education to contribute these types of personal perspectives. The article explores the value of postgraduate musicians’ own accounts of their journeys and illustrates how a more nuanced understanding of them can be arrived at through the use of visual-based tools, for example, Rivers of Musical Experience and Dixit Cards. This constructivist intervention prompted both group and individual critical reflections, as well as sense-making processes that enabled the participants to become more informed about the (typically overlooked or neglected) critical incidents that differently catalyze professional learning pathways. All of the participants articulated sociocultural influences that were situated along historical, present, and future points of departure and arrival, helping them to create meaning and understanding of themselves and their (at times unsettling) professional learning pathways. From the ensuing thematic analyses, we identified a commonality of themes across life phases with three key influential groups of people (parents, peers, and professionals) that strongly affected their professional learning pathways and learner identity-construction. The results indicate that the relationships between these phases and people are complex. The research illuminates the previously unexplored connection between the meaning-making trajectories that are instantiated through critical reflection, and adds to our understanding of the development of musicians’ professional learning pathways and learner identities.

Ever since Thomas Elsaesser coined the term ‘family melodrama’ in his seminal essay ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’ (1972), the notion that there is a specific genre of melodrama focused on generational and gender conflict has played a key role in the study of melodrama in film theory and beyond. Yet while the canonical family melodramas of the 1950s and 60s have been widely studied for their expressive mise en scène and critical social awareness, one crucial fact about the genre has always escaped notice: that the archetypical ‘family melodramas’ are invariably about family businesses. This previously unrecognized connection, I argue, is actually the key to understanding the genre: the ‘family melodrama’ is ultimately defined by the way that the personal relations of the family are treated like the impersonal, contract- and exchange-based relations of the market. Through an extensive rereading of Elsaesser’s essay, I thus demonstrate that the particular way in which he defined the genre has led subsequent critics to see it either too narrowly—as a 1950s Hollywood phenomenon—or too broadly—as referring to virtually any melodrama that features a family. And through a discussion of Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945), I further argue that rethinking the family melodrama specifically in terms of the family business reframes some of the most important debates in melodrama studies, challenging both the idea that the genre can be explained solely through Oedipal or gender conflict and the idea that melodrama itself represents a sentimental, reactionary response to modern capitalism.

This article examines the intersection of Taiwanese horror videogame Devotion (2019) and folk religious ritual guanluoyin 觀落陰 (descent into the netherworld) as a new window into the symbiotic evolution of religion and gaming technology. It traces the curious trend whereby Taiwanese gamers, after encountering guanluoyin while playing Devotion, went to offline, physical guanluoyin temples to ‘play’ the ritual for themselves, and playfully invoked Devotion’s intra-game religious narrative in their extra-game lives. Devotion thus activated a dynamic community of gamers who, hungry for horror, produced novel forms of engagement with the world(s) beyond their consoles. This anthropological study reconfigures the popular framework in existing scholarship of ‘gaming as a religious experience’, instead investigating ‘religion as a gaming experience’, and proposes the concept of ‘religious gamification’ to capture religion’s re-imagination, marketing, and operation as a gaming experience by a surprising ensemble of social actors and institutions. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and analyses of game design, temple advertisements, gaming chatrooms, a television show, songs, viral videos, and social media trends, this article explores the unexpected convergence and mutual articulation of Taiwan’s gaming and religious cultures, and the wider implications thereof for understanding religion in our rapidly gaming-mediated world.

Within academia, as in other corporatized environments, there are irreconcilable tensions embedded in the managerial data imaginary, in contrast to the messy reality of lived experience and increasingly precarious working conditions for those at the coalface of Higher Education. Combined with student debt and escalating surveillance via so-called ‘artificially intelligent’ transactional data analysis, fantasies of control and domination converge on platitudes about Big Data and computational information, often presented as unambiguously neutral via idealized visualizations and ‘dashboards’ such as those commonly provided by Tableau and Google. As a structure, the digital archive is no different, open to fantasies of secure representation but, in fact, always unstable, subject to the materiality and flux of electronic, symbolic and social processes. As academics exposed to intensified metricization within increasingly data driven institutions, how can we counter the reduction of our qualitative research and experience to dashboards and scores? Drawing upon the work of Fleming’s Dark Academia: How Universities Die (2021), Poster’s The Mode of Information (1990), Cascella’s En Abime: Listening, Reading, Writing: An Archival Fiction (2012) and Bayne et al.’s The Manifesto for Teaching Online (2020) among others, and focusing on work developed by the authors from 2008 onwards, they discuss their contingent, often nauseating virtual reality information repository, the Riverine Archive, developed to hold and withhold information about their writing and art within the ugly hulk of what they define as a ‘neoliberal ship of fools’. The work seeks to offer a counter to prevailing platitudes and fantasies about the neutrality and realism of data to directly represent a stable, singular reality. The authors concur that information is not beautiful, but rather a fallacy of stability, servicing a rapacious, anti-academic neoliberal ideology that needs to be brought to the surface and subjected to honest discourse, away from hype and managerial wishful thinking. Truth and beauty cannot be framed as stable, monolithic or universal; to do so is to replicate a colonial projection of knowledge, a mono-logic, centring all truth upon the Global North.

This chapter considers the Baltic Sea as a unique conduit for Russia’s transcultural exchange, with all the imperialist rivalry that this entailed. It takes as its case study a handful of portraits that the Danish artist Vigilius Eriksen painted for Catherine the Great in the 1760s and ‘70s, and the way in which their circulation and display enabled the empress to become arguably the most efficient ruler of her generation to foster a personal iconography that announced and then cemented her eminence on the European stage. Tracing the trajectories of Eriksen’s portraits reveals a commanding nexus between political ascendency, international relations, and visual imagery, and the function of paintings as highly charged conductors of regal clout around the Baltic Sea. Collectively, they engaged with power differentials in highly suggestive ways, confirming the vitality with which portraiture constructed and signalled status and authority between some of the Baltic’s most competitive courts.

The rise of highly curated networks is a pivotal dimension of social media history, yet its diverse origins remain overlooked. Here, two inductive studies investigated the case of Path: a platform (2010–2019) designed around so-called “Dunbar’s Numbers” and core networks (i.e., close friends). Study 1 conducted manual and automated text analyses using App Store archives via the Wayback Machine to evaluate changes in the industry presentation over time. Analyses showed how Path placed consistent emphasis on its ability to reinforce close ties and provide a curation-centered version of authenticity. Study 2 analyzed how users and commenters discussed Path over the same period via topic modeling of a Twitter corpus, revealing the centrality of rise-and-fall narratives to conversation about the platform. Together, the studies displayed how Path’s growth foretold changes in the social media ecosystem and how online conversation diverged from industry logics. To conclude, we discuss how Path’s history parallels theories on personal network changes, including the importance of user-driven versus algorithm-driven curation. To that end, we showcase the potential (and challenges) of using digital traces to uncover the evolution of platforms from the perspectives of different stakeholders.

The use of telehealth within music therapy practice has increased through necessity in recent years. To contribute to the evolving evidence base, this current study on Telehealth Music Therapy (TMT) was undertaken to investigate the telehealth provision experiences of music therapists internationally. Participants completed an anonymous online cross-sectional survey covering demographics, clinical practice, telehealth provision, and telehealth perceptions. Descriptive and inferential statistics, in combination with thematic analysis, were used to analyze the data. A total of 572 music therapists from 29 countries experienced in providing TMT took part in this study. The results showed that the overall number of clinical hours (TMT and in-person hours combined) declined due to the pandemic. Participants also reported reduced perceived success rates in utilizing both live and pre-recorded music in TMT sessions when compared to in-person sessions. Although many music therapists rose to the challenges posed by the pandemic by incorporating TMT delivery modes, there was no clear agreement on whether TMT has more benefits than drawbacks; however, reported benefits included increased client access and caregiver involvement. Furthermore, a correlation analysis revealed moderate-to-strong positive associations between respondents who perceived TMT to have more benefits than drawbacks, proficiency at administering assessments over telehealth, and perceived likelihood of using telehealth in the future. Regarding the influence of primary theoretical orientation and work setting, respondents who selected music psychotherapy as a primary theoretical orientation had more experience providing TMT prior to the pandemic while those primarily working in private practice were most inclined to continue TMT services post-pandemic. Benefits and drawbacks are discussed and future recommendations for TMT are provided.

Funder: Universidad Complutense de Madrid, In recent years, social media has become increasingly relevant in democratic decision-making processes, such as referendums or elections. Recent investigations have raised the concern of social media misuse in attempts to manipulate the public opinion and influence results, undermining the foundations of democracy. By analyzing the use of Twitter during the 2017/2018 presidential elections in Paraguay, this study provides empirical evidence and analysis about the role of social media on political campaigns. In a departure from other countries in the region, dominance in this network did not correlate with elections results. The results we highlight in this article, therefore, challenge the impact of social media on elections, offering an interesting view of their role in Latin America countries, like Paraguay.

Recent technological advances and the enhanced availability of digital tools in classrooms have seen increasing attention paid to the interaction between, and possible interdependency of, a dialogic pedagogy and digital technology. In this chapter, we reflect on the role of digital technology in supporting productive classroom dialogue by presenting an overview of the first systematic scoping review to investigate the interactions between classroom dialogue and digital technology (Major, Warwick, Rasmussen, Ludvigsen & Cook, 2018). Identified as a key theme by this review, we also further consider the concept of technology ‘affordances’. Reflecting on research involving the implementation of a micro-blogging tool developed to support classroom dialogue (Talkwall), we demonstrate how an understanding of affordance as broad categories pertaining to a range of ‘action possibilities’, as has traditionally often been the case, can inform more empirically-based analyses of the ‘enacted affordances’ of specific technology. In particular, we suggest the idea of ‘affordances for dialogue’ enables a reinterpretation that may helpfully inform researchers, practitioners and developers interested in the role of digital technology in dialogic contexts.

Industrial, academic, activist, and policy research and advocacy movements formed around resisting ‘machine bias’, promoting ‘ethical AI’, and ‘fair ML’ have discursive implications for what constitutes harm, and what resistance to algorithmic influence itself means, and is deeply connected to which actors makes epistemic claims about harm and resistance. We present a loose categorization of kinds of resistance to algorithmic systems: a dominant mode of resistance as ‘filtering up’ and being translated into design fixes by Big Tech; and advocacy and scholarship which bring a critical frame of lived experiences and scholarship around algorithmic systems as socio-technical entities. Three recent cases delve into how Big Tech responds to harms documented by marginalized groups; these highlight how harms are valued differently. Finally, we identify modes of refusal that recognize the limits of Big Tech's resistance; built on practices of feminist organizing, decoloniality, and New-Luddism, they encourage a rethinking of the place and value of technologies in mediating human social and personal life; and not just how they can deterministically ‘improve’ social relations.

Wanda Landowska and Joaquín Nin were, in the context of the Parisian Schola Cantorum during the first decade of the twentieth century, two of the leading artists performing the harpsichord repertoire. This established them as pioneers of its concert practice, but their irreconcilable attitudes to performance – Landowska’s supposedly historical/reconstructive (employing the harpsichord) and Nin’s updated (employing the modern piano) – embroiled them in a fierce controversy conducted in French and Spanish journals between November 1911 and October 1912. This article examines a large quantity of unedited correspondence together with the relevant press articles in the context of the two performers’ agendas. The results suggest that this controversy was an unprecedented marketing strategy orchestrated by Nin against, but reliant upon, Landowska’s success at the time when he was about to make his début in Spain. However, the unforeseen and long-lasting consequences of this controversy brought priceless publicity for Landowska’s cause: the revival of the harpsichord.

Writing at Ugarit has received a great deal of scholarly attention for the wide range of languages and writing systems used, and especially for the city’s distinctive alphabetic cuneiform script which accounts for around half of the inscribed material from the site. The vast majority of the rest is in the Akkadian language and logo-syllabic cuneiform script. This written material is, justifiably, usually seen as scribal, in that the vast majority stems from the state bureaucracy and from professional writers formally trained in a curriculum derived from the Mesopotamian cuneiform tradition. However, by using the blanket term ‘scribe’ we risk obscuring potential diversity in who used writing and why. This paper will explore the extent to which we can identify social diversity within writing practices at Ugarit and will focus in particular on three main areas: gender and women’s literacy; social mobility and writing outside the traditional literate establishment; and the relationship between writing and possible minority communities within Ugaritian society.

As a young boy in the 1930s, Jacob Taubes (1923-1987) and his family left Austria for Switzerland to escape Nazism. In Switzerland, Taubes received both ordination as a rabbi and a classical education in philosophy (culminating in a doctorate), before going on to further study with Leo Strauss in New York and Gershom Scholem in Jerusalem. Taubes held teaching positions at Harvard and Princeton before attaining permanent academic positions at Columbia and the Free University of Berlin, the last of which he held until his death in 1987. Ranging widely from Biblical hermeneutics to the philosophy of Heidegger to the interpretation of Hobbes to the political thought of Carl Schmitt, Taubes’s works take up an impressive range of issues in political theory, the sociology of religion, and the politics of his own time.

In 2009, Mary Hafeli theorized our field’s “lack of regard for antecedents in art education scholarship” (p. 370). 1 She explained this phenomenon through three factors: the nausea of information f...

Radio Alice was a free radio station that broadcast from 1976–1977 in Bologna, Italy, and was an integral part of the left-wing, countercultural Movement of 1977. This article contextualises the emergence of Radio Alice in relation to the Movement of 1977; the avant-garde political magazine A/Traverso, which had been published since 1975 by the collective that founded Radio Alice; and the international history of community radio. I then show how Radio Alice’s approach to broadcasting drew from these three contexts in seeking to unseat the logic of capitalism and replace it with a celebration of desire. The station’s practice emphasised polyvocality through the extensive use of telephone phone-ins, and challenged language itself through surreal speech and non-linguistic vocalisation. I explore how this vocal practice expressed the stations countercultural politics and, drawing on the work of Adriana Cavarero and Doreen Massey, I argue that it was a practice with spatial consequences. These spatial consequences became both explicit and tangible during the 1977 Bologna riots when the station was shut down live on air. Ultimately, and most broadly, I contend that as a central component of human interrelation the voice is always already implicated in the social construction of space.

This article outlines a number of potential contributions that a consideration of early eighteenth-century conceptions of musical expressivity might make to certain present-day philosophical and psychological accounts of musical emotions and their expression. Taking as its central case study a performance by Christian Gerhaher in Peter Sellars's 2014 staging of J. S. Bach'sSt John Passion, the article calls for closer attention to both the historical specifics of music's expressive capacities and the corporeal dimension of performance (past and present). It argues that a more sustained engagement with these domains can productively complicate some fundamental assumptions that underpin current approaches to musical expression.

This article focuses on the early modern reception of a single verse from Persius’s Satires, ‘ut ramale vetus vegrandi subere coctum’ (1.97). It begins by explaining a four-hundred-year-old, bilingual, terribly rude joke that was inspired by this verse and was told on the London stage. It then develops the explanation of this English-Latin pun into a sustained study of the scholarly reception of that line in early modern commentaries of Persius. Today, classicists consider this line to be part of an impertinent but ultimately inconsequential remark by Persius’s interlocutor. As I shall show, however, in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, 1.97 was of great critical interest: it was edited as a stand-alone punch-line and interpreted as nothing less than Persius’s vindication of Virgil’s epic style. For an early modern reader, 1.97 thus promised to reveal what the highly respected Persius thought about the even more admirable Virgil. But what exactly does it mean to say that Virgil’s style is ‘like an ancient dried-up branch with swollen bark’? Early modern commentators’ efforts to explain how this strange simile might function as a defence of the Aeneid provide us with fresh sources for the study of Renaissance attitudes to Virgil’s epic style. Some of the explanations of 1.97 support and further elucidate what we already know about Renaissance perspectives on Virgilian style; another opens up surprising perspectives on Virgil as a difficult, even crabbed, stylist. I take the latter as an invitation to put ancient, early modern and modern commentators on Virgil’s language into dialogue. In a coda, this investigation returns to its place of origin, the early modern London stage and brings its insights to bear on a striking expression in Ben Jonson’s Poetaster.

Funder: BK21 Plus Postgraduate Organization for Content Science, Recent advances in the quantitative, computational methodology for the modeling and analysis of heterogeneous large-scale data are leading to new opportunities for understanding human behaviors and faculties, including creativity that drives creative enterprises such as science. While innovation is crucial for novel and influential achievements, quantifying these qualities in creative works remains a challenge. Here we present an information-theoretic framework for computing the novelty and influence of creative works based on their generation probabilities reflecting the degree of uniqueness of their elements in comparison with other works. Applying the formalism to a high-quality, large-scale data set of classical piano compositions–works of significant scientific and intellectual value–spanning several centuries of musical history, represented as symbolic progressions of chords, we find that the enterprise’s developmental history can be characterised as a dynamic process composed of the emergence of dominant, paradigmatic creative styles that define distinct historical periods. These findings can offer a new understanding of the evolution of creative enterprises based on principled measures of novelty and influence.

In a new introduction to his article “The Early History of Music Writing in the West,” first published in 1982, Leo Treitler expanded upon the implications of his call for a shift from palaeographic to semiotic study of early notations. What was needed was a reorientation to consider who used notation, for what purpose, using what modes of representation, entailing what conception of musical objects, and on the basis of what sort of knowledge and competence. A possible focus for such inquiry was briefly mentioned, namely neumatic notations added to sources of classical poetry copied from the ninth to the twelfth century. The broad extent of these notations had been known since the pioneering codicological work undertaken by Birger Munk Olsen and Yves-François Riou, as reported in a series of publications beginning in the 1980s, which identified some ninety notated manuscripts. Renewed interest was sparked in the first decade of the new millennium by Jan Ziolkowski’s framing of questions about these notations as a philologist interested in the reception of classical texts. Inspired by Ziolkowski’s exploration of the cultural implications of notating classical verse, Treitler warned that future musical research in this area should not “leap to assimilate this phenomenon to the medieval song traditions of sequence, versus, and conductus and restrict the study of it to the control of the questions we are accustomed to raising about those traditions.”

Summary The majority of people living with dementia are cared for by their families. Family carers play a vital role in upholding the formal care system. Caring for a family member with dementia can be fulfilling. However, this role can have a considerable negative impact on family carers’ mental and physical health and quality of life. Several empirical research studies have recently been conducted that explore the potential benefits of music interventions for family carers of people living with dementia. Singing has been the primary musical medium employed. This article presents the first review of this literature to date. It investigates the impact of music interventions on the health and well-being of family carers of people living with dementia, and how they experience and perceive these interventions. Whittemore and Knafl’s five-stage integrative review framework was utilized: (i) problem identification; (ii) literature search; (iii) data evaluation; (iv) data analysis and synthesis; and (v) presentation of the findings. A total of 33 studies met the inclusion criteria. Analysis and synthesis resulted in three overarching themes: impact on family carers, carer perceptions of music interventions and null quantitative findings in small studies. The review found that singing and music interventions may improve family carers’ social and emotional well-being, enhance their ability to cope and care and ameliorate the caring relationship, contributing to experiences of flourishing. However, it highlighted that this area is under-researched and pointed to the need for larger, more rigorous studies.

The language teaching landscape in Ireland has changed considerably over the last 30 years as a result of substantial and sustained inward migration into the country during this period. These social and demographic developments have added to the country's already bilingual context and created a much more varied multilingual landscape than had existed in previous decades. They have also impacted various aspects of language teaching policy, provision and methods for both indigenous and foreign languages. This article reviews research on language teaching and learning in Ireland published during the period 2012–2021. We discuss relevant work disseminated primarily in peer-reviewed journals (national and international), as well as in books, commissioned reports and chapters in edited volumes. The research and policy documents presented concern the teaching and learning of Irish, English and Modern Foreign Languages as second and/or additional languages across all levels of education. They address language teacher training contexts as well. We believe that this review of research demonstrates the extent to which recent inquiries in these domains have advanced knowledge and practice in the Irish context, and have also informed the international research community more generally.

The photograph depicts an indigenous Greenlandic seal hunter and member of the Inuit people. The picture was taken by a fellow Inuk named John Møller (1867–1935). With the photographic practices that he had learned from the Danish and the technology provided by the Danish colonial administration of Greenland, Møller created a ‘photographic memory’ of the Greenlandic Inuit and a rare insight into the lives of an Arctic indigenous people at the turn of the twentieth century.

The values and expectations of the current educational approach to dance composition in secondary schools in New South Wales (NSW) are expressed through its curriculum. The NSW Dance syllabus currently restricts choreographic potential through the limiting requirements and measures articulated in its discourse. Close observation of the syllabus reveals that the conventional compositional prescriptives have little emphasis on improvisation as a choreographic device, so that frameworks for learning and assessment omit valued and applied contemporary choreographic practices. The resources and scholars inspiring the curriculum’s approach to compositional pedagogy negate the fundamental benefits that improvisation offers. In addition, although the literature referenced was written over twenty years ago it is still being employed as the educational framework for a discipline that is constantly evolving in contemporary practice. 'Enacting (Re)Actions: Affect Theory and Embodied Resonance in Improvisational Contemporary Dance and Compositional Pedagogy' delves into improvisational practice, analysing theoretical concepts in the field, including mind-body consciousness, embodiment, corporeal resonance and modes of instantaneous reception. Improvisation demonstrates the pairing of mind and body in continuous engagement and responsivity from actions to reactions, and results in creativity in dance choreography. Affect theory is shown to be valuable in analysing the core of improvisation; it supports observations on the creative value and potential of choreographic development through developing improvisational skills. A comprehensive theoretical understanding of improvisational practice through affect theory supports an understanding of how to utilise embodied resonance and consciousness as creative potential. This thesis supports the renovation of methods and approaches to choreographic pedagogy in dance curriculum both locally and elsewhere through the inclusion of improvisational pedagogy.

Will the proliferation of data enable AI to deliver progress? An ever-growing swath of life is available as digitally captured and stored data records. Effective government, business management, and even personal life are increasingly suggested to be a matter of using AI to interpret and act on the data. This optimism should be tempered with caution. Data cannot capture much of the richness of life, and while AI has great potential for beneficial uses, its delivery of progress in any human sense will depend on not using all the data that can be collected. Moreover, the more digital technology rewires society, creating opportunities for the use of big data and AI, the greater the need for trust and human deliberation.

The (mistake) Making inquiry explores the generative potential of the unintentionally made mistake using the rule-based textile technique of hand-knitting and a collection of commercially designed knitting patterns, to (gently) challenge and subvert conventional views of knitting and mistake-making. Significant to the inquiry is my ongoing struggle with linear, sequential forms of rule-based expression. In the context of this research this is explored through experimenting with linear, encoded, written knitting instructions; and the mistake-making, unmaking and remaking my struggles precipitate. Theoretical investigations draw from popular culture, philosophy and contemporary art to elicit views of the mistake or error. These develop a nuanced, multifaceted (mistake) Making vocabulary that expresses the ethos of this inquiry. Particular attention is given to Patricia Bryans’ “blame-free” approach to learning from mistakes. This tactic is adopted in subjective and participatory praxis areas of research. In addition, the creative role of errant mistakes is explored within specific examples of non-knitting systems through an analysis of the systems-directed work of Mark Nunes and artists Ryan Estep and Sara Morawetz. Intermingling with theoretical investigations is studio experimentation with the notion of mistake-marking. Arising from these experiments a predominantly red body of knitted works have been created that make visible the generative potential of mistakes, through observable changes to a predetermined knitted form. Furthermore, a collection of transposable mistake-marking instructions evolved and new ways to manage personal struggles with making were trialled. Studio mistake-marking findings were further explored through six participatory art fieldwork events, which were informed by Nicolas Bourriauds’ concept of relational aesthetics and Bryans’ “blame-free” approach to the occurrence of mistakes. The subjective and participatory artworks are contextualised alongside such contemporary artists as, Sabrina Gschwandtner, Freddie Robins, Chihura Shiota and Kate Just. Through the lens of (mistake) Making I was able to generate a creative, idiosyncratic, experimental approach to theoretical and studio research. In addition, I was able to broaden the scope of a personal making method through creating three participatory artworks which exposed participants to alternative, non-judgemental approaches to mistake-making, further revealing the mistakes generative potential. P Bryans, ‘What do professional men and women learn from making mistakes at work? Research in post-compulsory education, vol. 4, no. 2, 1999, pp. 183–192 M Nunes, ‘Error, noise and potential: The outside of purpose’, Error: Glitch, noise, and jam in new media cultures, The Continuum International Publishing Group, New York, London, 2014, pp. 3-23 N Bourriaud, Relational aesthetics, Collection Documents sur l’art, translated by S Pleasance, F Woods and M Copeland, 1998

I discuss three fundamental questions underpinning the study of consonance: 1) What features cause a particular chord to be perceived as consonant? 2) How did humans evolve the ability to perceive these features? 3) Why did humans evolve to attribute particular aesthetic valences to these features (if they did at all)? The first question has been addressed by several recent articles, including Friedman, Kowalewski, Vuvan, and Neill (2021), with the common conclusion that consonance in Western listeners is driven by multiple features such as harmonicity, interference between partials, and familiarity. On this basis, it seems relatively straightforward to answer the second question: each of these consonance features seems to be grounded in fundamental aspects of human auditory perception, such as auditory scene analysis and auditory long-term memory. However, the third question is harder to resolve. I describe several potential answers, and argue that the present evidence is insufficient to distinguish between them, despite what has been claimed in the literature. I conclude by discussing what kinds of future studies might be able to shed light on this problem.

Media histories of music often frame technological innovation in the early twentieth century within a general zeal for automated musical reproduction. The engineering efforts of the Aeolian Company and its Pianola counter such narratives by fostering active music-making rather than passive listening. As a pneumatically powered attachment to a piano, the Pianola was initially limited to reproducing strictly mechanical renditions of music from perforated paper rolls. But the invention of the Metrostyle in 1903, a hand lever to achieve tempo-specific effects, significantly refined the musical capacities of the instrument. It allowed for inscribing onto the music rolls authoritative performance instructions that could be enacted by the player. Revisiting the various places that the Metrostyle Pianola inhabited, from the manufacturing site to the concert hall and the bourgeois living room, I illuminate the different sociocultural relationships and musical experiences that it mediates. By relegating certain tasks of conventional piano-playing to the mechanical workings inside the instrument, the Pianola was marketed as facilitating simplified music-making in ever wider parts of society. The Metrostyle annotations served as a pedagogical device for instructing novice players in principles of nuanced and tasteful interpretation. My analysis exposes the reciprocal relationships between the instrument and its human players, from attempts to adapt the physical interface to human physiologies, to the ways in which the instrument, in turn, imposes certain mechanistic affordances on its players.

‘You can hear everything? You can hear my voice?’ The scratchy recording that opensREwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimonyprefigures the questions of memory and performance that underlie Philip Miller's multimedia exploration of testimony from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this article, I adapt Diana Taylor's concepts of the archive and the repertoire to questions of musical communication. I posit that Miller's collage of testimonial ‘shards’, images, and historic audio recordings disrupts the TRC's official narrative by replacing the archive's narrative of completion with one comprising deliberately disjointed moments of individual suffering. The result is an audiovisual creation that sutures together disparate elements to reflect the complexity of the South African truth-telling process. I suggest that in performance, Miller's work re-animates the TRC archive, bringing it into the contemporary repertoire where it re-inscribes the experiences of TRC testifiers for contemporary audiences.

This paper examines the reactions to the trauma of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition in the novellas of a writer known only as “Xiaoxiang mijinduzhe” (The Hazy Crossing Ferryman of Xiaoxiang). His works provide an informative contrast to the more celebrated loyalist literature of the same era: they express unease at foreign rule but do not show an idealistic loyalism to the Ming. Though the Yongle period (1402–1424) of the Ming is held up as a lost golden age, the post-Yongle Ming dynasty is portrayed as an era of corruption and chaos, presided over by incompetent and/or dissolute emperors. The novellas also reflect on the lessons of the transition on a deeper level, questioning the long-standing cultural preference for the civil arts over the martial arts. While the novellas acknowledge the poignancy of the passing of an era, they also strike hopeful notes for the future under the Qing.

Observing images of jetpacks, flying cars and space colonization today provokes a contradictory reaction. On the one hand, such phenomena remain unrealized and unfamiliar in everyday life but, on t...

For more than thirty years, Schenker scholarship has been challenged by Schenker’s apparent repudiation, in ‘Der Geist der musikalischen Technik’ (1895), of the possibility of organicism in music. The present article seeks to reconsider the issue—and particularly the shift from Geist’ to the much more organically-charged thinking of Harmonielehre (1906)—by introducing an unpublished and unexamined essay by Schenker: ‘Der Weg zum Gleichniss’ (‘The Path to Likeness’). It is argued that this undated essay, which draws heavily upon examples from Beethoven’s piano sonatas, was written between ‘Geist’ and Harmonielehre, and is intimately related to the latter text while it yet explicitly repeats the earlier essay’s position on organicism. Despite this, ‘Der Weg zum Gleichniss’ asserts that in music ‘a new art was established artificially, as it were a distinct, second, artificial and higher nature’, and that nature herself was ‘elevated’ through music’s ability to be created in its own likeness rather than in a likeness to nature, as is the case for the other arts. Likenesses are primarily purely musical (essentially, they are motivic imitations), though these, once established, can be supplemented by the ‘second, secondary likeness of the poetic’, namely programmatic likeness. An investigation of possible sources for Schenker’s unusual use of the word Gleichnis leads forward to his 1933 newspaper article ‘Was wird aus der Musik?’ and back as far as the Old Testament.

Quadrilles were a popular genre of group dancing in the nineteenth century. Existing melodies were normally used to accompany the dancing sessions, but the monotony of their repetition and the cost of a professional piano player capable of improvising were an issue. Thus, the idea of a “machine” that would be able to endlessly produce quadrille music at no cost was suggesting itself. The Quadrille Melodist, a paper-based system for the generation of piano pieces, was published in nineteenth-century Victorian London by John Clinton, a “professor in the Royal Academy of Music.” Already in 1650, Athanasius Kircher proposed in his Musurgia Universalis a device consisting of stripes with short snippets of music that could be used to create combinatorial pieces and variations. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, a whole genre of quasi-algorithmic compositions was emerging, spurred by the popularity of such works as the Musikalisches Würfelspiel, a piece attributed to Mozart. In this article, I analyze the Quadrille Melodist against the background of the history of combinatorial music. I contrast its unique features with other predigital, as well as later digital, music systems and discuss its design with respect to the phenomenon of predictability in dance music. Additionally, I discuss reasons for the circumstance that the historically advertised number of possible quadrilles, 428 million, is much smaller than the real number of combinations.

In this article, I use my oud lessons in Somaliland as a point of departure to reflect on the analytical and methodological potential of musical apprenticeship, with a particular focus on what and how we might learn from playing “out of time” and “out of tune.” Organized around three lessons, each beginning in a moment of “mistuning,” I reflect both on what it means to become the kind of person who can make music in a religiously contested postwar context and on the process of mistake-making, by which apprentices come into new knowledge about music-making and musical personhood. Qoraalkan wuxuu ku saabsan yahay casharradaydii kabanka ee Somaliland. Waxaan halkan ku qeexayaa habka iyo falanqaynta barashada muusigga, gaar ahaan waxaan idiin hogatusaalayn doonaa qaabka looga baran karo codka jaban iyo laaxinka. Waxaan qaadaadhigayaa saddex cashar oo mid walba ku furmayo cod doorsamay iyo laaxin. Anoo isticmaalaya khaladadaydii barashada kabanka, waxaan dib u eegayaa sida uu ku hirgalo muusigistaha ku barbaarey xaalad gaar aa oo ka dhalataye hirdanka ka dhexeeya diinta iyo fanka dagaalladii sokeeye ka dib ee Somaliland. Waxaan sidoo kale falanqaynayaa hannaanka kufa-kaca ah ee qofka gacan yaraha ahi uu ku kasboda aqoon cusub oo qusaya curinta muusigga iyo kaalintiisa muusigyahannimo.

Miniaturized people, including Damon, retain their deep voices, their perceptual ranges and acuity, and their sensory proprioception; they feel no change of atmospheric pressure, gain no insight into the newly massified world around them, and can still engage with their unminiaturized human interlocutors at will. To be sure, it now seems unsurprising for a postmodern philosopher in the 1980s to signal as casualties the principles of a reality beyond the play of appearances, the existence of unique individual subjects, claims for a truth or a metaphysics that persists. Dystopian rhetoric aside, Baudrillard’s claim that simulation is built on a world of code has proven influential. It asserts that contemporary culture can be coded into ones and zeros, that “digitality is among people. Obscenity is not confined to sexuality, because today there is a pornography of information and communication, a pornography of circuits and networks, and objects in their legibility.

In a brief essay on Cato the Younger, Montaigne draws together five excerpts from Latin verse in Cato's honour; by the time he returned to the essay in his final years, those excerpts elicited some of the author's richest remarks on poetry and the poetic sublime. This essay argues that the anthology, in its various shapes and forms, offered early modern readers a way of doing literary criticism. Taking its cue from Montaigne's essay, it focuses on a number of English anthologies, associated with John Bodenham, and often known as the ‘Wits’ series, printed at around the turn of the seventeenth century. It argues that the commonplace-book structure of these volumes acted as a spur to detailed stylistic analysis. Anthologies encouraged their readers to compare poets with one another, working out what they had in common, and what made each one distinct; in this, they fostered the sort of critical scrutiny discussed in Scaliger's Poetics, and put into practice in the theatrical exchanges of the ‘Poets' War’. But as in Montaigne's case, they could also spark reflections about those verses that lay beyond criticism's reach, in the numinous realm of the sublime.