Human beings are animals who use tools. But the tools we use also reshape us – changing the way we think, the way we organize our lives, our relationships, our societies. Each time, the introduction of a new technology into human societies has brought war, the destruction of human lives. Because with technology change, we get paradigm change. When there is paradigm change, what it means to be human changes too. For the way we see and interact with the world around us determines who we are.
And yet, some things don’t change. Essential to being human are two things - ideas and love. But today, with the coming of the internet and the smartphone, how we access love and ideas has changed. No technology has had quite as much of an effect on so many human lives at once as the internet. We all spend at least a few hours on our computers and phones. We all have at least two identities, a digital one and a real one. This is as true in Africa as it is in Iceland, in Delhi or New York. Today we find and enact love through apps. Accessing news and ideas is happening mostly through apps. We see ourselves through the eyes of social media apps. We listen to music on apps. And social media ‘influencers’ can bring down governments or get a president elected.
Technology also affects the words we use. It can even produce new words. In the eighties, the spread of cheap music technology brought words like ‘rewind’ and ‘fast forward’ into the English vocabulary. ‘Groovy’, a very seventies hippie word, came from records and vinyl technology. Most of these words died along with the technologies that produced them. But some didn’t – they lingered, taking on a life of their own as they attached themselves to concepts that were important to us humans.
The internet has generated all kinds of interesting words – ‘reddit’, ‘ping me’, ‘like’, ‘emoji’. But I will concentrate on one word, ‘deep fake’, for it symbolizes, for me, the central problem of the internet age: trust. I came across this word around the time of the first Trump election and since then my mind won’t let go of it for it symbolizes the central conundrum of our internet world – the loss of trust. Society is built on trust. One has to have some trust between people in order for society to function. Trust is an important part of any relationship whether it is with one’s partner or with one’s banker. But how do you trust a person when you are communicating through a machine? How do we know what is real and what is not?
Deep Fake, to me, refers to something that is fake, but which people believe in and act upon because they no longer trust. I believe we are living in an age of ‘deep fake’ where certain concepts such ‘truth’ no longer play an important part in our political and social lives, what matters more is liking or not-liking ideas/people. Trust has been replaced or is being replaced with liking or disliking, loving or hating.
Lastly, I will look at the relationship between trust and education. What does one study in a world where one cannot trust that what one is being taught/learning is important? What can one learn if liking what one is learning feels more important than learning something new? And how does the crisis of trust affect literature and writing fiction?
Which brings me to Plato’s allegory of the cave. Today Plato’s cave is the digital world. When we are online, we do not, or cannot, look behind or around us. We forget that it is not the real world at all, but a simulacrum of the real world, and that the knowledge we seem to be able to access so easily, is not really knowledge at all but a shadow of knowledge, a compilation of knowledge with some important elements left out or misunderstood. Have we entered a time when even philosophers cannot get out of the cave for ‘light’ (truth in Plato’s case) itself is no longer important?
Vincenzo Galilei and Constantijn Huygens were both humanists and eminent musicians, the former from the late Renaissance and the latter from the early Modern era. Their respective sons, Galileo and Christiaan, were scientists whose importance cannot be overestimated. My aim in this chapter is to set the scene for a parallel presentation of the legacy of the Galilei on the one hand, and the Huygens on the other. This will give us an opportunity to talk about mathematics, music and acoustics, but also about science in general, at this time of birth of the Modern era.
In this paper we propose a conditioned UNet for Music Source Separation (MSS). MSS is generally performed by multi-output neural networks, typically UNets, with each output representing a particular stem from a predefined instrument vocabulary. In contrast, conditioned MSS networks accept an audio query related to a stem of interest alongside the signal from which that stem is to be extracted. Thus, a strict vocabulary is not required and this enables more realistic tasks in MSS. The potential of conditioned approaches for such tasks has been somewhat hidden due to a lack of suitable data, an issue recently addressed with the MoisesDb dataset. A recent method, Banquet, employs this dataset with promising results seen on larger vocabularies. Banquet uses Bandsplit RNN rather than a UNet and the authors state that UNets should not be suitable for conditioned MSS. We counter this argument and propose QSCNet, a novel conditioned UNet for MSS that integrates network conditioning elements in the Sparse Compressed Network for MSS. We find QSCNet to outperform Banquet by over 1dB SNR on a couple of MSS tasks, while using less than half the number of parameters.
Music and language are structurally similar. Such structural similarity is often explained by generative processes. This paper describes the recent development of probabilistic generative models (PGMs) for language learning and symbol emergence in robotics. Symbol emergence in robotics aims to develop a robot that can adapt to real-world environments and human linguistic communications and acquire language from sensorimotor information alone (i.e., in an unsupervised manner). This is regarded as a constructive approach to symbol emergence systems. To this end, a series of PGMs have been developed, including those for simultaneous phoneme and word discovery, lexical acquisition, object and spatial concept formation, and the emergence of a symbol system. By extending the models, a symbol emergence system comprising a multi-agent system in which a symbol system emerges is revealed to be modeled using PGMs. In this model, symbol emergence can be regarded as collective predictive coding. This paper expands on this idea by combining the theory that ''emotion is based on the predictive coding of interoceptive signals'' and ''symbol emergence systems,'' and describes the possible hypothesis of the emergence of meaning in music.
Ane López de Aguileta, Alba Crespo-López, Garazi López de Aguileta
The positive effects of music on physical and psychological wellbeing have been widely evidenced by scientific literature. However, its effects on the topics of research of Social Work have been less researched. Therefore, the present article addresses this issue of how music fosters what the definition of Social Work states: social change and development, social cohesion, the empowerment and liberation of people, and respect for diversity. The purpose of this study is to analyze in the existing scientific literature whether any research has analyzed the potential of music regarding the objectives of Social Work. To meet that objective, a comprehensive literature review of this topic has been carried out using Web of Science. In total, 28 articles have been analyzed. The results show the ability of music to promote participants’ cohesion, community creation, and transformative actions that align with the values and goals of Social Work. Implications of these results within the field and the social impact of the actions related to music toward respect for diversity are argued.
Conditional music generation offers significant advantages in terms of user convenience and control, presenting great potential in AI-generated content research. However, building conditional generative systems for multitrack popular songs presents three primary challenges: insufficient fidelity of input conditions, poor structural modeling, and inadequate inter-track harmony learning in generative models. To address these issues, we propose BandCondiNet, a conditional model based on parallel Transformers, designed to process the multiple music sequences and generate high-quality multitrack samples. Specifically, we propose multi-view features across time and instruments as high-fidelity conditions. Moreover, we propose two specialized modules for BandCondiNet: Structure Enhanced Attention (SEA) to strengthen the musical structure, and Cross-Track Transformer (CTT) to enhance inter-track harmony. We conducted both objective and subjective evaluations on two popular music datasets with different sequence lengths. Objective results on the shorter dataset show that BandCondiNet outperforms other conditional models in 9 out of 10 metrics related to fidelity and inference speed, with the exception of Chord Accuracy. On the longer dataset, BandCondiNet surpasses all conditional models across all 10 metrics. Subjective evaluations across four criteria reveal that BandCondiNet trained on the shorter dataset performs best in Richness and performs comparably to state-of-the-art models in the other three criteria, while significantly outperforming them across all criteria when trained on the longer dataset. To further expand the application scope of BandCondiNet, future work should focus on developing an advanced conditional model capable of adapting to more user-friendly input conditions and supporting flexible instrumentation.
The article provides a comparative analysis of the conceptual metaphor "Person and Society" in mass media
texts on the material of the Ukrainian and English languages. A metaphor is a tool for thinking and knowing the world, it reflects
fundamental cultural values. The cognitive-semantic content of the conceptual metaphor "Person and Society" makes it possible to
divide it into four frames that are common to both studied languages: "War and Crime", "Medicine", "Sports and Games", and
"Culture and Art". The conceptual metaphors of the "War and Crime" frame refer to war and its varieties, military actions, weapons,
criminals and their victims, and places of imprisonment. The frame "Medicine" includes metaphors depicting various diseases,
their treatment, names of drugs, as well as nominations of patients and staff and names of medical institutions. The frame "Sports
and Games" combines metaphorical expressions indicating sports and its terminology, athletes and their qualifications, the results
of sports competitions, as well as the names of games and their rules. The frame "Culture and Art" is the basis of metaphors,
focused on the elements of creative artistic activity, education and science, which depict theater, visual arts, literature, as well as
music and cinema. It should be noted that the frame "Economics and Finance" is frequently used in the English mass media texts
and is almost never found in the Ukrainian mass media. The framework "Economics and Finance" includes the concepts of financial
and economic activity, which are based on the appropriate terminology during verbalization.
Gary Clark, Arthur Saniotis, Robert Bednarik
et al.
In this article we seek to integrate theories of music origins and dance with hominin fossil anatomy and the paleoecological contexts of hominin evolution. Based on the association between rhythm in music, dance and locomotion, we propose that early bipedal hominins may have evolved neurobiological substrates different from other great apes due to the rhythmic aspects of bipedal walking and running. Combined with the emancipation of the hands resulting from erect posture, we propose that the neurobiological changes necessary for technological innovation, cultural practices and human musical abilities may have evolved, at least in incipient form, much earlier than previously thought. The consequent ability to synchronize movement and sound production may have also proved beneficial as early bipedal hominins ventured out of late Miocene and early Pliocene woodland and forested habitats and into more open habitats with increased predation risk. We also postulate that, along with bipedalism, paedomorphic morphogenesis of the skull at the base of the hominin clade was a necessary prerequisite for the evolution of vocal modulation and singing in later varieties of hominin. To date research into the evolution of music and dance has yet to be integrated with the fossil and paleoecological evidence of early hominin evolution. This paper seeks to fill this lacuna in the extant literature on human evolution. We also suggest that autocatalytic feedback loops evolving synergistically with hominin erect posture, skull and hand morphology, neurochemical processes and the self-domestication syndrome, have been operative from early hominins some 6 Ma to the present. We document this process by reference to primatological, ethnographic, neurochemical and archaeological data.
The term local genre may not be an established term for all people who study cinema and film critics, because genre is defined as a global category and is less attributed to a specific region or nation. However, this research considers it possible to use the term local genre with the following simple definition; local genres are subgenres or hybrid genres with features that are less common elsewhere. In many cases, by repeating some special features in works of a subgenre or hybrid genre in the films of a nation or region, and of course the presence of a significant number of works in that genre, these subgenres or hybrid genres will become local genres. For example, all local genres in Japanese cinema like Kaiju or Yakuza films are sub-genres or hybrid genres: Kaiju genre is a combination of features of two genres, science-fiction and horror, and Yakuza film is one of the sub-genres of crime genre.Studying a wide range of local genres including the Martial Arts in Hong Kong, Spaghetti Western in Italy, Masala in India, Heimatfilm in Germany, Anime in Japan and Filmfarsi in Iran, proves that despite the diversity of generic elements in local genres, there is a consistent trend in the development of these genres which seems to be an influence of the national or cultural identity of that genre's region. With the temporary salience of national identity with factors such as war, colonialism, cultural domination and other elements that emphasize the concepts of "self" and "other", filmmakers are drawn to cultural heritage and are using it to represent a national identity in the content and structure of films, which in turn, has led to the formation of genres that have distinct characteristics compared to the dominant cinematic genres. The expression of national concerns in terms that can be understood by the general public has made these films extremely popular among audiences of that region, and over time, these genres have gained their audience inside and outside that particular geographical area, thus facilitating the development of a "national cinema".Filmmakers around the world can produce films that include their identity and culture by relying on the achievements of native genres inside and outside their country. The use of genre to express contemporary national concerns, along with examining the unique features of expression in classical literary and artistic works of each country, can play an important role in eliminating the common demarcation of popular and artistic cinema, and result in an increase in the social role of any particular genre.In this article, the main features of local genres and their differences are compared with the dominant genres of Hollywood cinema, reflecting upon the competitive nature of this genre in regards to the dominance of Hollywood cinema. The role of national identity in the formation of this genre will be analyzed, and finally, the influence of classical arts on the content, structure, style and iconography of this genre will be further explained.
Western postmodernism is a cultural trend of thought that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Its influence involves many fields, such as art, literature, philosophyand aesthetics, which indicates that a major change has taken place in the whole Western society, and also has a profound impact on contemporary culture and art. By analyzing the far-reaching influence of postmodernism on music and philosophy, this paper provided development strategies and suggestions for music and philosophy under the background of postmodernism. This paper studied the positive and negative effects of postmodernism on philosophy and music from two aspects: music and philosophy. The positive influence of postmodernism on philosophy and music is manifested in advocating equality, harmony between man and nature, innovation and critical spirit. Of course, the postmodernism trend of thought also has some negative effects, which should be viewed dialectically on its impact on music and philosophy. On the premise of encouraging innovation, respecting freedom and difference, self-confidence value should be established, so as to promote the further development of philosophy and music. Postmodernism is a cultural form in the later period of capitalism. In the field of music, it is necessary to not only adhere to the rebellion and openness brought by postmodernism, but also attach importance to the artistic value of music works to prevent the production and proliferation of vulgar music works. The influence of postmodernism on music and philosophy, studied in this paper, has important practical significance.
Importance. The necessity of using the motivational aspect in the professional training of music specialists, which contributes to the effectiveness of the educational process, is determined. A motivated student strives to constantly improve his skills, which allows him to become a professional in his field. The types of motivation that influence the vocal students’ professional development and various aspects such as vocal training, musical abilities development, music theory studying, working on performance technique and much more that contribute the vocalist’s professional development are revealed.Research Methods. Based on a theoretical analysis of specialized literature and systematization of materials from scientific sources, the role of the motivational aspect in vocal students’ professional development is substantiated.Results and Discussion. The possibilities of motivation that contribute to improving the quality of education and developing the personality of a vocal student are considered. The characteristics of the main methods that teachers use to motivate vocal students are given. Recommendations are offered for the use of motivation in the process of vocal students training.Conclusion. It is concluded that motivation contributes to the education quality improving, vocal student’s personality development and his successful adaptation in the modern world.
Despite their impressive offline results, deep learning models for symbolic music generation are not widely used in live performances due to a deficit of musically meaningful control parameters and a lack of structured musical form in their outputs. To address these issues we introduce LooperGP, a method for steering a Transformer-XL model towards generating loopable musical phrases of a specified number of bars and time signature, enabling a tool for live coding performances. We show that by training LooperGP on a dataset of 93,681 musical loops extracted from the DadaGP dataset, we are able to steer its generative output towards generating 3x as many loopable phrases as our baseline. In a subjective listening test conducted by 31 participants, LooperGP loops achieved positive median ratings in originality, musical coherence and loop smoothness, demonstrating its potential as a performance tool.
This paper surveys the empirical literature of inflation targeting. The main findings from our review are the following: there is robust empirical evidence that larger and more developed countries are more likely to adopt the IT regime; the introduction of this regime is conditional on previous disinflation, greater exchange rate flexibility, central bank independence, and higher level of financial development; the empirical evidence has failed to provide convincing evidence that IT itself may serve as an effective tool for stabilizing inflation expectations and for reducing inflation persistence; the empirical research focused on advanced economies has failed to provide convincing evidence on the beneficial effects of IT on inflation performance, while there is some evidence that the gains from the IT regime may have been more prevalent in the emerging market economies; there is not convincing evidence that IT is associated with either higher output growth or lower output variability; the empirical research suggests that IT may have differential effects on exchange-rate volatility in advanced economies versus EMEs; although the empirical evidence on the impact of IT on fiscal policy is quite limited, it supports the idea that IT indeed improves fiscal discipline; the empirical support to the proposition that IT is associated with lower disinflation costs seems to be rather weak. Therefore, the accumulated empirical literature implies that IT does not produce superior macroeconomic benefits in comparison with the alternative monetary strategies or, at most, they are quite modest.
Nieznanym ośrodkiem muzycznym w osiemnastowiecznej Warszawie pozostawał dotychczas kościół kanoników regularnych pw. św. Jerzego na ulicy Świętojerskiej. Tę nieistniejącą już dziś świątynię obrało za swoją siedzibę Bractwo Aniołów Stróżów, skupiające głównie kupców i istniejące od przynajmniej 1707 roku. Dzięki dotychczas nieznanej szerzej księdze rachunkowej konfraterni za l. 1746–71 można wysnuć wnioski nie tylko na temat samej organizacji, ale też przeznaczanych przez nią funduszów na muzykę. Autorka niniejszego artykułu analizuje zapiski obecne w księdze, starając się odtworzyć obraz muzykowania w kościele św. Jerzego pod egidą bractwa. W ten sposób wydatki zostają podzielone na te dotyczące kapeli, trębaczy i kotlistów; ponadto odnotowuje się pojedyncze zapiski dotyczące finansowania organisty i zakupu kancjonałów. Kapela zatrudniana przez bractwo to prawdopodobnie zespół zbierany z muzyków warszawskich lub też stała kapela kanoników regularnych z kościoła św. Jerzego. Składało się na nią najczęściej jedenastu muzyków. Uświetniała przede wszystkim odpusty w dniach św. Filipa i Jakuba, św. Stanisława, św. Piotra i Pawła, Nawiedzenia NMP, św. Michała i Św. Aniołów Stróżów. Z kolei czterej trębacze i kotliści to muzycy zatrudniani do gry w trakcie procesji. Odnotowane wydatki to zarówno kwoty pieniężne stanowiące prawdopodobnie zapłatę w gotówce, jak i sumy przeznaczane na poczęstunek dla muzyków; wysokości kwot różnią się od niewielkich do bardzo znacznych.
Do artykułu dołączony jest chronologiczny wypis wydatków na muzykę obecnych w omawianej księdze wraz z uroczystościami, które uświetniała kapela, kotliści i trębacze.
The `colored Cube Dance' is an extension of Douthett's and Steinbach's Cube Dance graph, related to a monoid of binary relations defined on the set of major, minor, and augmented triads. This contribution explores the automorphism group of this monoid action, as a way to transform chord progressions. We show that this automorphism group is of order 7776 and is isomorphic to $({\mathbb{Z}_3}^4 \rtimes D_8) \rtimes (D_6 \times \mathbb{Z}_2)$. The size and complexity of this group makes it unwieldy: we therefore provide an interactive tool via a web interface based on common HTML/Javascript frameworks for students, musicians, and composers to explore these automorphisms, showing the potential of these technologies for math/music outreach activities.
Giuseppe Clemente, Arianna Crippa, Karl Jansen
et al.
We explore ideas for generating sounds and eventually music by using quantum devices in the NISQ era using quantum circuits. In particular, we first consider a concept for a "qeyboard", i.e. a quantum keyboard, where the real-time behaviour of expectation values using a time evolving quantum circuit can be associated to sound features like intensity, frequency and tone. Then, we examine how these properties can be extracted from physical quantum systems, taking the Ising model as an example. This can be realized by measuring physical quantities of the quantum states of the system, e.g. the energies and the magnetization obtained via variational quantum simulation techniques.