Functional Ambiguity in Musical Structures

1983 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Thomson

This paper first establishes a definition of ambiguity and its significance to art and to perception in general. Its understanding is framed within a hierarchical conception of musical structure most similar to that of Leonard B. Meyer (1956,1973). Following (1) an illustrative survey of occurrences of intentional ambiguity found in the standard music repertory, and (2) a discussion of the limited attention paid by music theorists to ambiguity in the past, a general theory of musical ambiguity's causes is developed. The paper's final section consists of an extensive analysis of functional ambiguity as a principal expressive vehicle in Chopin's Mazurka, Opus 17, No. 4.

M n gement ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 9-27
Author(s):  
Isabelle Royer

Research on materiality has grown rapidly over the past 10 years, highlighting the influence of physical artifacts and spaces in organizations, which had been overshadowed by discursive approaches. This body of research enriches our understanding of organizations in many areas including technology, decision-making, routines, learning, identity, culture, power, and institutions. However, researchers sometimes struggle to select methods suited to study materiality, as previous works have not been explicit in that respect. This article calls organizational researchers interested in physical environments – that is, artifacts and spaces – to integrate observation into their data collection. The first section presents a tripartite definition of the physical environment including activities, conceptions, and lived experiences. Ontological debates are introduced, and observation is proposed as a relevant method for studying materiality in organizational research. The second section presents observation techniques based on three approaches: observing materiality in actions, observing beyond seeing, and making participants observe. Each approach is mainly associated with one of the three components of materiality. The final section discusses the scope of observation techniques, suggests how to combine approaches, and flags difficulties associated with visual techniques.


2019 ◽  
Vol 79 (2) ◽  
pp. 411-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bojan Žalec

The article deals with Charles Taylor's account of the secular age. In the first part, the main constituents of Taylor's narrative account are presented: the central concepts, distinctions, definition of the subject, the aims etc. The author pays special attention to the notions of secularity, secular age, religion, and transcendence. In the second part, Taylor's genealogy of the secular age is outlined and comparatively placed in the context of other main relative forms of genealogical account. Because our age is an age of authenticity, a special section is devoted to it. The final section presents some reproaches to Taylor and evaluates their strength and the value of Taylor's contribution. Besides, some speculative »forecasts« about secularity and post-secularity in Europe, the USA, and at the global scale are presented (by reference to Taylor's account). The author concludes that despite some (serious and cogent) reproaches and second thoughts about Taylor's account, it is doubtless one of the major achievements in the area that manifests features of a paradigmatic work. It helps us a lot to understand the condition of religion not only in the past and today, but also gives us directions and guidelines, conceptual and methodological tools, and ideas to more clearly discern the forms and condition of religion in the future.


2020 ◽  
Vol 28 (7) ◽  
pp. 797-833
Author(s):  
Kenneth Shapiro

Abstract This is the third in a series of reports on the state of the field of Human-Animal Studies. In the introductory section, major terms in the prevailing definition of the field—Human-Animal Studies is the interdisciplinary study of human-animal relationships—are unpacked and critically analyzed. Subsequent sections deal with the field’s past, present, and possible futures. A schematic history of the field considers both scholarly contributions and programmatic inroads in the academy. The current state of the field section describes its breadth in terms of publication venues, disciplines that interface with it, and the variety of methods employed. It also offers a description of several common strategies that critique the received view of the categorical divide between human and other animal beings. The final section highlights both the potential of and anticipated roadblocks to each of several future trajectories.


Author(s):  
K. T. Tokuyasu

During the past investigations of immunoferritin localization of intracellular antigens in ultrathin frozen sections, we found that the degree of negative staining required to delineate u1trastructural details was often too dense for the recognition of ferritin particles. The quality of positive staining of ultrathin frozen sections, on the other hand, has generally been far inferior to that attainable in conventional plastic embedded sections, particularly in the definition of membranes. As we discussed before, a main cause of this difficulty seemed to be the vulnerability of frozen sections to the damaging effects of air-water surface tension at the time of drying of the sections.Indeed, we found that the quality of positive staining is greatly improved when positively stained frozen sections are protected against the effects of surface tension by embedding them in thin layers of mechanically stable materials at the time of drying (unpublished).


Derrida Today ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Morris

Over the past thirty years, academic debate over pornography in the discourses of feminism and cultural studies has foundered on questions of the performative and of the word's definition. In the polylogue of Droit de regards, pornography is defined as la mise en vente that is taking place in the act of exegesis in progress. (Wills's idiomatic English translation includes an ‘it’ that is absent in the French original). The definition in Droit de regards alludes to the word's etymology (writing by or about prostitutes) but leaves the referent of the ‘sale’ suspended. Pornography as la mise en vente boldly restates the necessary iterability of the sign and anticipates two of Derrida's late arguments: that there is no ‘the’ body and that performatives may be powerless. Deriving a definition of pornography from a truncated etymology exemplifies the prosthesis of origin and challenges other critical discourses to explain how pornography can be understood as anything more than ‘putting (it) up for sale’.


Author(s):  
Volker Scheid

This chapter explores the articulations that have emerged over the last half century between various types of holism, Chinese medicine and systems biology. Given the discipline’s historical attachments to a definition of ‘medicine’ that rather narrowly refers to biomedicine as developed in Europe and the US from the eighteenth century onwards, the medical humanities are not the most obvious starting point for such an inquiry. At the same time, they do offer one advantage over neighbouring disciplines like medical history, anthropology or science and technology studies for someone like myself, a clinician as well as a historian and anthropologist: their strong commitment to the objective of facilitating better medical practice. This promise furthermore links to the wider project of critique, which, in Max Horkheimer’s definition of the term, aims at change and emancipation in order ‘to liberate human beings from the circumstances that enslave them’. If we take the critical medical humanities as explicitly affirming this shared objective and responsibility, extending the discipline’s traditional gaze is not a burden but becomes, in fact, an obligation.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Abbiss

This article offers a ‘post-heritage’ reading of both iterations of Upstairs Downstairs: the LondonWeekend Television (LWT) series (1971–5) and its shortlived BBC revival (2010–12). Identifying elements of subversion and subjectivity allows scholarship on the LWT series to be reassessed, recognising occasions where it challenges rather than supports the social structures of the depicted Edwardian past. The BBC series also incorporates the post-heritage element of self-consciousness, acknowledging the parallel between its narrative and the production’s attempts to recreate the success of its 1970s predecessor. The article’s first section assesses the critical history of the LWT series, identifying areas that are open to further study or revised readings. The second section analyses the serialised war narrative of the fourth series of LWT’s Upstairs, Downstairs (1974), revealing its exploration of female identity across multiple episodes and challenging the notion that the series became more male and upstairs dominated as it progressed. The third section considers the BBC series’ revised concept, identifying the shifts in its main characters’ positions in society that allow the series’ narrative to question the past it evokes. This will be briefly contrasted with the heritage stability of Downton Abbey (ITV, 2010–15). The final section considers the household of 165 Eaton Place’s function as a studio space, which the BBC series self-consciously adopts in order to evoke the aesthetics of prior period dramas. The article concludes by suggesting that the barriers to recreating the past established in the BBC series’ narrative also contributed to its failure to match the success of its earlier iteration.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vitaly Kuyukov

Quantum tunneling of noncommutative geometry gives the definition of time in the form of holography, that is, in the form of a closed surface integral. Ultimately, the holography of time shows the dualism between quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity.


2016 ◽  
pp. 52-65
Author(s):  
Patryk Kołodyński ◽  
Paulina Drab

Over the past several years, transplantology has become one of the fastest developing areas of medicine. The reason is, first and foremost, a significant improvement of the results of successful transplants. However, much controversy arouse among the public, on both medical and ethical grounds. The article presents the most important concepts and regulations relating to the collection and transplantation of organs and tissues in the context of the European Convention on Bioethics. It analyses the convention and its additional protocol. The article provides the definition of transplantation and distinguishes its types, taking into account the medical criteria for organ transplants. Moreover, authors explained the issue of organ donation ex vivo and ex mortuo. The European Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine clearly regulates the legal aspects concerning the transplantation and related basic concepts, and therefore provides a reliable source of information about organ transplantation and tissue. This act is a part of the international legal order, which includes the established codification of bioethical standards.


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