1,720,992 research outputs found
Martin Wesley-Smith: Snark-Hunting (1984)
No full text"Snark-Hunting was composed as a study for the musical comedy Boojum!, which I wrote in the following year. Boojum! is about the life and work of Lewis Carroll, and is based on his epic poem The Hunting of the Snark. (English composer Mike Batt has also based a piece on this poem, and several other composers have set it to music.) An intrepid band of adventurers, led by the Bellman, sets off in search of a Snark, a strange creature about which they know only a few odd facts (it .has a hollow .but crisp taste, for example, and is fond of bathing machines). They have been warned that if their Snark turns out to be a Boojum then they will softly and suddenly vanish away. Undeterred by this possibly terrible fate the Baker, who some believe is Carroll's representation of himself, surges to the front, finds the Snark, then promptly vanishes ('For the Snark was a Boojum, you see'). Snark-Hunting 1s a programmatic piece loosely based on Carroll's poem. It attempts, like several of my other Carroll pieces, to paint a musical picture of his drawing room at Oxford, where he often used to entertain his young girl friends by tinkering with music boxes so that they played their tunes backwards and upsidedown. The piano is the Baker, the flute the Beaver {Alice?), and percussion the Bellman; the tape is the rest of the crew. One of the tunes used upside-down and backwards during the piece 1s heard rightways-up and forwards at the end: Rock-a-Bye Baby; other snippets come from Humpty-Dumpty, Pat-a-Cake, Oranges and Lemons and others. The tape part for Snark-Hunting was realised in the Electronic Music Studio of the NSW State Conservatorium of Music using, amongst other things, a Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument. The piece was commissioned (and first performed) by Flederman with financial assistance from the Music Board of the Australia Council." -- Martin Wesley-Smit
Martin Wesley-Smith: Pat-a-Cake (1980)
No full text"Children's rhymes and their accompanying tunes tend to be very simple. Because they are based on the rhythms and intonation f.speech they often.repr~sent examples of playground refinement: music in which constant use has eradicated any inessential adornment. Like hymn tunes they conform to conventional notions of a theme for variation: that is, stripped down source material with unlimited potential for expansion or embellishment. Wesley-Smith's Pat-a-Cake for solo tenor trombone and tape takes the first three notes of its namesake song as its musical point of departure. These notes consist simply of an arpeggiated major triad in a triplet pattern. That the work never proceeds past these three notes is a measure of the potential Wesley-Smith is able to find in the most basic of source materials. For much of the work WesleySmith treats the triad in such an obsessive manner that the characteristic sonorities and textures are entirely saturated by its statements and transformations. The tape part of the work was created on the Fairlight CMI. Wesley-Smith has worked with the Fairlight in much of his recent music, including For Marimba and Tape and Snark-Hunting. The transparent, diatonic textures and metrically articulated rhythms of these works are also apparent in Pat-a-Cake. At its premiere Pat-aCake was given with live performance on the Fairlight. The tape part was subsequently recorded in the form heard on this disc; it is quite restricted in its choice of sonorities and most sounds used resemble or are modifications of the trombone's timbre. This is not surprising, given that the work was composed in 1980 in the early days of digital sampling. This technique, in which live sounds are 'sampled' and electronically imitated, was pioneered by Fairlight. The similarity of tape and trombone sonorities is also reflected in the work's structure. The tape part often imitates and repeats the trombone's interjections and is the primary determinant of texture and continuity in the work. The sameness of material in a monothematic work can make sectional divisions rather unclear. To some extent this is the case in Pat-a-Cake. Despite the exuberant rhythmic activity, the piece is quite static. Broadly speaking, Pat-a-Cake consists of an introductory section followed by four stanzas or variations, built on repetitive patterns drawn from the triadic figure. The work opens with a fanfare-like statement of the triad. The music in the introductory section is disjunct and hesitant, with sudden accumulations and dispersals of sound surrounded by lengthy penods of silence. Some elements are presented in their rawest form here; especially significant is the accumulation of arpeggiated thirds to form chords and an insistent, but normally short lived and rapid repeated note figure. Both elements appear throughout the work, particularly as a cadential gesture at the end of the four subsequent sections. The material that follows the opening section at times suggests the repetition based patterned music of minimalist composers such as Steve Reich or Louis Andriessen. Unlike much minimalist music, however, the work does not consistently present a gradual process of evolution. Instead, minimalist techniques are used as a constructional device. The four 'variations' on the triad have a common structural formula consisting of (a) a simple statement of the triad by trombone, (b) the imitation of first and subsequent trombone patterns by tape, (c) an increase of harmonic, rhythmic and textural density, and (d) a cadential gesture, returning to (a). Variations one and two are most alike; in three and four, the longest variation, varying rhythmic shapes proliferate. Composers of stereo tape music have at their disposal an· element additional to pitch, duration, timbre and volume - that of space. It is this feature that in some ways dominates Pat-a-Cake. The sounds on the tape are in a constant state of physical motion. The trombone remains solidly in the centre. At one point in the fourth variation a quick, repeated triad on the tape is presented in the centre of the loudspeakers. The pattern is then panned outwards to left and right speakers, revealing that what sounded as one pattern is, in fact, two. Later, WesleySmith's separation of space allows the original and the retrograde forms of the triad to be heard simultaneously. This separation of left and right, forwards and backwards, is in turn mirrored by a rhythmic dislocation of the two lines, which produces a hocket effect. Analogies with children's games are hard to avoid. This is as much apparent in the playful, rather sardonic nature of the piece, as it is in its derivation of source material from children's songs. Many of the fast spatial effects may be likened to the skipping or hand clapping games that might accompany a child's performance of Pat-aCake. Yet, as in the work of Lewis Carroll (whose works Wesley-Smith has frequently set) the childlike, apparently naive exterior often conceals twists of reality and looking-glass illusions. The use of stereo space is at times like an optical illusion - what we hear is not necessarily what we think we are perceiving, as it is often in the process of becoming something else. The moralising duchess of Alice in Wonderland has expressed it better: .. the moral of that is - 'Be what you would seem to be' or, if you'd like it put more simply - 'Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise'." -- Andrew Schult
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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