Learning, linking and participating : transmitting African music in Australian schools

Considered in this paper is the concept of "change"for practising teachers who are teaching and learning African music in Melbourne, Australia. African music and culture is seen as an effective way for these teachers to experience a cross-cultural odyssey through both social and situated learning. This chapter reports on a music project where teachers perceived African music to be an effective way to leam link and participate with a new music and culture. The chapter summarises pertinent findings relating to why and how teachers are engaging with African music.

Transmitting music through culture: a way forward to harmonise a discordant world

This paper situates itself in an Australian society that has become increasingly globalised and cosmopolitan. It is concerned with the implementation programs and policies that reflect a context of diversity as one that promotes respect for a multicultural society and one that promotes respect for diversity across the community. Considering the contradictory and ambivalent understandings that underpin these discussions and their implications for the conceptual and material conditions that structure the debate, the authors explore the use of teaching African music at tertiary level as a pathway for change. The authors further reflect whether such a diffusion of intercultural dialogue through music can promote cultural tolerance and diversity in our changing world.

Telescope

Telescope is a feature length time lapse of reflections, changes in sunlight of my backyard, assembled over 20 years. Telescope starts in Super 8 and ends with digital video, shot mostly while the family were themselves at work, somewhere else. It is an emptied landscape. When people think of Australia they imagine open space and bush. But really most Australians inhabit or were born in suburban spaces, often with backyards with fences, big enough for fruit trees, lawns and clotheslines. I consider this a place of absence that speaks to many things that our culture avoids.The backyard as emblem of a White Australia that hit its highpoint in the 1950s, for example. Australia is a migrant culture settled by waves of newcomers escaping, running away from somewhere else, leaving to forget. Another story concerns the continued invisibility of the indigenous people. When the British first planted the Union Jack on Australian soil and said "there is nothing here" they set up a tradition of denial as our founding principle. This still plagues us. What is festering in Australian backyards are these denials and erasures that I try to bring out in the soundtrack, that plays like the radio that meanders through a lazy Sunday afternoon. Such sounds try to tell stories of absence, of occupation, and of a nostalgia for an Australia that no longer exists, but still palpably reverberates around the suburban backyard.

Telescope

Assembled from more than 25 years of footage, starting in Super 8 and ending with digital video, Melbourne-based experimental filmmaker Dirk de Bruyn's lens captures the comings and goings of Australian suburban life. A nostalgia-filled soundtrack accompanies footage of empty backyards, over-crowded lounge rooms and sun-drenched porches. Interspersed with line-animation, de Bruyn recalls an Australia that no longer exists in this time-lapse feature length film.

Travelling drum with different beats: experiencing African music and culture in Australian teacher education

This article reports on a study that examined the effectiveness of introducing African music and culture to Australian non-specialist primary teacher education students at Deakin University in Melbourne (Australia). The study demonstrates that African music enhanced the generic musical experiences, learning, motivation, interest, confidence and competence of students in their fourth year of teacher education. The research also addressed the significance and contribution of African music and culture as a cross-cultural experience for these beginning teachers who in turn could provide similar experiences for their own students. This study highlighted the author's role and cultural identity as a South African music educator in transmitting the music and culture represented in 'the travelling drum' to a cohort of students with a predominantly Eurocentric orientation. By extension, this curriculum initiative broadened students' understanding and application of indigenous methods of teaching and learning as part of a global experience. Such a curriculum represents a pathway to many other forms of non-Western indigenous knowledge of music, culture and pedagogy that can be mapped out as a journey along a multicultural route towards 'internationalising the curriculum'.

Dancing and listening : Odissi across cultures

I want to take the opportunity afforded by this conference on post-colonial writing to reflect upon the oral aspects of the transmission of knowledge in a research interview.I want to view the interview as a singular event of narration. I want to use the theme or 'content' of my interview with a young Bengali-Australian dancer to draw attention tothe interview 'form'. The interview occurred because of my interest in how this dancer had come to learn Odissi dance, how knowledge of Odissi had passed to her. In retrospect, I am trying to see myself as someone to whom, through the face-to-face interview, knowledge was 'passed' orally, not textually. I am trying to think about it in terms of some of the principles of orality discussed by Walter Ong (1982), and through the concept of 'enunciation' which foregrounds not the content of a statement but the 'position of the speaking subject in the statement.'

Dance is an oral culture. It is a set of practices transmitted from body to body. You cannot learn dancing from a book. The western researcher however learns a lot about dance of other cultures from books and articles. From my own reading I have been alerted to, and become conversant with, many of the complex negotiations of gendered, historical, national, class and aesthetic meanings at work in Classical Indian Dance practices.

I learned something of the limits of literacy, however, through the experience of interviewing Sunita (not her real name) about her learning and background in Odissi dance. She has had Odissi knowledge passed on to her in a quasi-traditional guru-sisya relationship. Her authority is in her dancing - she now embodies Odissi dance in her person - and her experience is in the oral modes of transmitting dancing knowledge. Through her telling me, through remembering out loud she was reenacting or rehearsing the 'orality' of her dance knowledge.

In my conversation with Sunita, then, wasn't it a question not of what she might say about Odissi, of what discourses she might deploy, but of what she as the subject of her own enunciations might say to me? It was also a question of how I might have listened to her and what I was able to hear.

Ultraviolet cues affect the foraging behaviour of blue tits

The function of avian ultraviolet (UV) vision is only just beginning to be understood. One plausible hypothesis is that UV vision enhances the foraging ability of birds. To test this, we carried out behavioural experiments using wild-caught blue tits foraging for cabbage moth and winter moth caterpillars on natural and artificial backgrounds. The light environment in our experiments was manipulated using either UV-blocking or UV-transmitting filters. We found that the blue tits tended to find the first prey item (out of four) more quickly when UV cues were present. This suggests that UV vision offers benefits to birds when searching for cryptic prey despite the prey and backgrounds reflecting relatively little UV Although there was no direct effect of UV on the time taken to find all four prey items in a trial, search performance in the absence of UV wavelengths tended to increase over the course of an experiment. This may reflect changes in the search tactics of the birds. To our knowledge, these are the first data to suggest that birds use UV cues to detect cryptic insect prey and have implications for our understanding of protective coloration.

Rapid behavioural adjustments to unfavourable light conditions in European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)

Although it is known that many birds possess ultraviolet (UV)-sensitive vision, most commercially housed poultry species, as well as species held in zoos, laboratories, or bred for show, are maintained under lighting that is deficient in UV wavelengths compared with normal daylight. UV-sensitive vision has been shown to be important in both foraging and mate-choice decisions. UV-poor conditions, in which information in this waveband is eliminated, could, therefore, present an important welfare issue. Eight European starlings were given a series of preference tests (eight hours per trial, for six days), in which they could choose to feed in one of four channels. Four experimental trials were carried out, during which the channels were covered in either UV-transmitting (UV+) or UV-blocking (UV-) filters, to determine whether birds had an initial preference for feeding in UV-rich environments and whether there was any change in their preference over time. There was an initial preference for the UV+ environment, but this preference declined very rapidly with familiarity, and was absent by the final trial. These results imply that starlings can rapidly adjust their feeding behaviour if faced with unfamiliar light environments and that any initial behavioural changes attributable to UV-deficient environments may be short-lived. However, further work is necessary to establish whether these adjustments occur across a range of species and contexts before any welfare concerns can be ruled out.

Ultraviolet vision and mate choice in the guppy (Poecilia reticulata)

Ultraviolet (UV) vision is well documented for many species of vertebrates. UV cues are known to be used in foraging, navigation and in mate choice. We conducted a series of behavioral experiments to investigate the role of UV perception in mate choice in both female and male guppies (Poecilia reticulata). In our experiments the visual appearance of potential mates was manipulated using either UV transmitting (UV+) or UV blocking (UV-) filters. Female guppies significantly preferred UV+ males. Male guppies tended to prefer UV- females, but their preferences were marginally nonsignificant. Further experiments investigating the role of luminance, indicate that UV wavelengths are probably being used for color discrimination rather than for detecting differences in brightness. These experiments raise the possibility that UV is used in mate assessment in different ways by male and female guppies. This may reflect the different strategies that the two sexes have in order to maximize reproductive success. To our knowledge, these are the first data showing that UV is used by any fish species in mate selection.

Beyond

Using the metaphor of transcendence in his work Beyond, Daniel Armstrong takes us to other-worldly experiences via the anecdotal behaviours of people using a telescope. Each person looking into the telescope reveals more about themselves through their physical viewing behaviours than the universe they are attempting to look at or into. Armstrong’s work examines that infi nite and unsettled space between the ‘here and now’ and the ‘what might be out there’.

Whisper to me

"Whisper to me" was a series of blurred photographs reproduced as digital prints. They seem to relive the challenges that the early naked-eye astronomers experienced before the space of the night sky was gradually extended by the use of the telescope.

"A lasting gift to his descendants” : family memory and the great war in Australia

This article examines the processes of remembering and transmitting experiences of the Great War within families of Australian veterans now passed on. It focuses on a recent boom in private publishing of ancestors’ personal letters and diaries and argues that these practices continue to reimagine and reshape family memories of the war. In so doing it exposes the range of family members implicated in family remembrance then and now, and so complicates any process by which a war almost beyond living memory is to become entirely understood by its public myths and representations.

PAPR reduction technique for LTE OFDMA systems

Long term evolution (LTE) is the final step toward the 4th generation (4G) of radio technologies designed to increase the capacity and speed of mobile networks. LTE uses orthogonal frequency division multiple access (OFDMA) for the downlink transmission and single carrier-frequency division multiple access (SC-FDMA) for uplink. OFDMA meets the 4G requirement for spectrum flexibility and enables cost-efficient solutions for very wide carriers with high peak rates. However, the potentially large peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of the transmitting signals has limited its application. This high PAPR causes interference when the OFDM signals are passed through an amplifier which does not have enough linear range. In this article, we investigate a clipping based PAPR reduction method for LTE OFDMA systems. Simulation results show that the clipping method is reduced PAPR significantly which decreases as the number of clip and filtering level is increased. As a results, increase the mean transmit power, and improve the power amplifier efficiency. This comes at the outlay of complexity, efficiency as well as cost.

Multi-input-multi-output antennas for radio frequency identification systems

In this chapter the authors discuss the physical insight of the role of wireless communication in RFID systems. In this respect, this chapter gives a brief introduction on the wireless communication model followed by various communication schemes. The chapter also discusses various channel impairments and the statistical modeling of fading channels based on the environment in which the RFID tag and reader may be present. The chapter deals with the fact that the signal attenuations can be dealt with up to some level by using multiple antennas at the reader transmitter and receiver to improve the performance. Thus, this chapter discusses the use of transmit diversity at the reader transmitter to transmit multiple copies of the signal. Following the above, the use of receiver combining techniques are discussed, which shows how the multiple copies of the signal arriving at the reader receiver from the tag are combined to reduce the effects of fading. The chapter then discusses various modulation techniques required to modulate the signal before transmitting over the channel. It then presents a few channel estimation algorithms, according to which, by estimating the channel state information of the channel paths through which transmission takes place, performance of the wireless system can be further increased. Finally, the Antenna selection techniques are presented, which further helps in improving the system performance.