Prosecution and radical discourse during the 1790s: The case of the Scottish sedition trials

This essay looks at the sedition trials in Scotland during the 1790s to examine how prosecution was exploited by radicals as a forum for political expression. As the government instituted a concerted campaign against radical activism, an increasing number of reformers faced trial on sedition and treason in this period. The courtroom emerged as an alternative venue for political discourse and this essay will explore some of the ways by which radicals challenged the dominant discursive and performative elements of trial proceedings. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

An Australian Idol of Modernist Consumerism: Minnie Tittell Brune and the Gallery Girls

The Australian career of the young American actor Minnie Tittell Brune exemplifies the complex cultural and economic forces operating on the institution of live theatre at the beginning of the twentieth century. Brune focalizes the contemporary processes which reconstituted the international institution of mass entertainment out of the traditional cultural practices of theatre. The theatrical star is seen as both engaging with and resisting the commodification of her labour power; image and talent resulting from her ambiguous industrial role as magnetic 'star' and as managerial commodity. However, the iconic and affective power of the actor evokes strong attachment from significant sections of the newly heterosocial popular audience, in particular from the gallery girls, the young female audience who idolized Brune as a performative personality enacting social self-realization and glamorous transformation. Through reading Brume's repertoire, her social persona as 'star' and her 'emotional' performative style, it is demonstrated how artistic retro-glamour, religious evangelicalism and discourses of sexuality and femininity serve to manage theatre's move into the mass-entertainment age.

Meaningful Interaction in Virtual Learning Environments

There is still a great deal of opportunity for research on contextual interactive immersion in virtual heritage environments. The general failure of virtual environment technology to create engaging and educational experiences may be attributable not just to deficiencies in technology or in visual fidelity, but also to a lack of contextual and performative-based interaction, such as that found in games. However, there is little written so far on exactly how game-style interaction can help improve virtual learning environments.

Dynamic response: Real-time adaptation for music emotion

Music plays an enormous role in today's computer games; it serves to elicit emotion, generate interest and convey important information. Traditional gaming music is fixed at the event level, where tracks loop until a state change is triggered. This behaviour however does not reflect musically the in-game state between these events. We propose a dynamic music environment, where music tracks adjust in real-time to the emotion of the in-game state. We are looking to improve the affective response to symbolic music through the modification of structural and performative characteristics through the application of rule-based techniques. In this paper we undertake a multidiscipline approach, and present a series of primary music-emotion structural rules for implementation. The validity of these rules was tested in small study involving eleven participants, each listening to six permutations from two musical works. Preliminary results indicate that the environment was generally successful in influencing the emotion of the musical works for three of the intended four directions (happier, sadder & content/dreamier). Our secondary aim of establishing that the use of music-emotion rules, sourced predominantly from Western classical music, could be applied with comparable results to modern computer gaming music was also largely successfully.