“In The Good Old Days of Long Ago": Echoes of Vaudeville and Minstrelsy in the Music of Uncle Dave Macon

Uncle Dave Macon provided an essential link between nineteenth-century, urban popular stage music (especially the minstrel show and vaudeville) and commercialized country music of the 1920s. He preserved through his recordings a large body of songs and banjo techniques that had their origins in urban-based, nineteenth-century vaudeville and minstrelsy. Like the minstrel and vaudeville performers of the nineteenth century, Macon told jokes and stories, employed attention-grabbing stage gimmicks, marketed himself with boastful or outrageous slogans, and dressed with individual flair. At the same time, Macon incorporated many features from the rural-based folk music of Middle Tennessee. Overall, Macon’s repertoire, musical style, and stage persona (which included elements of the rube, country gentleman, and old man) demonstrated his deep absorption, and subsequent reinterpretation, of nineteenth-century musical traditions. Macon’s career offers a case study in how nineteenth-century performance styles, repertoire, and stage practices became a part of country music in the 1920s. As an artist steeped in two separate, but overlapping, types of nineteenth-century music—stage and folk—Macon was well-positioned to influence the development of the new commercial genre. He brought together several strains of nineteenth-century music to form a modern, twentieth-century musical product ideally suited to the new mass media of records, radio, and film. By tracing Macon’s career and studying his music, we can observe how the cross-currents of rural and popular entertainment during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries interacted to form the commercial genre we now know as country music.

Expresiones populares en la música electroacústica latinoamericana: la inclusión de músicas de tradición popular en la composición electroacústica

La composición académica siempre ha buscado la manera de nutrirse de las músicas de tradición popular y es posible rastrear, en la historia de la música occidental, muchos compositores que han recurrido al uso de éstas -- Es importante seguir observando y estudiando los procesos creativos que mantienen vivas ambas prácticas musicales y las expresiones artísticas que continúan explorando diversas maneras de establecer relaciones entre lo académico y lo popular -- Mi intención es mostrar diferentes vías para hacer inclusión de elementos sonoros que hagan referencia a músicas y/o contextos de tradición popular en la composición de música electroacústica y ver su incidencia en el discurso musical -- Se establecerán categorías para la identificación y análisis de lo que llamaré Objeto Sonoro Popular y se notará la manera en que éste es utilizado y manipulado por diferentes compositores en Latinoamérica y, particularmente en Colombia

Disruptive Ambient Music: Mobile Phone Music Listening as Portable Urbanism

This article explores the use of mobile phones as portable remediated sound devices for mobile listening — from boom boxes to personal stereos and mp3 players. This mode of engaging the city through music playing and listening reveals a particular urban strategy and acoustic urban politics. It increases the sonic presence of mobile owners and plays a role in territorialisation dynamics, as well as in eliciting territorial controversies in public. These digital practices play a key role in the enactment of the urban mood and ambience, as well as in the modulation of people’s presence — producing forms of what Spanish architect Roberto González calls portable urbanism: an entanglement of the digital, the urban and the online that activates a map of a reality over the fabric of the city, apparently not so present, visible and audible

Evolution of classifiers for pitch estimation of piano music using cartesian genetic programming

Pitch Estimation, also known as Fundamental Frequency (F0) estimation, has been a popular research topic for many years, and is still investigated nowadays. The goal of Pitch Estimation is to find the pitch or fundamental frequency of a digital recording of a speech or musical notes. It plays an important role, because it is the key to identify which notes are being played and at what time. Pitch Estimation of real instruments is a very hard task to address. Each instrument has its own physical characteristics, which reflects in different spectral characteristics. Furthermore, the recording conditions can vary from studio to studio and background noises must be considered. This dissertation presents a novel approach to the problem of Pitch Estimation, using Cartesian Genetic Programming (CGP).We take advantage of evolutionary algorithms, in particular CGP, to explore and evolve complex mathematical functions that act as classifiers. These classifiers are used to identify piano notes pitches in an audio signal. To help us with the codification of the problem, we built a highly flexible CGP Toolbox, generic enough to encode different kind of programs. The encoded evolutionary algorithm is the one known as 1 + , and we can choose the value for . The toolbox is very simple to use. Settings such as the mutation probability, number of runs and generations are configurable. The cartesian representation of CGP can take multiple forms and it is able to encode function parameters. It is prepared to handle with different type of fitness functions: minimization of f(x) and maximization of f(x) and has a useful system of callbacks. We trained 61 classifiers corresponding to 61 piano notes. A training set of audio signals was used for each of the classifiers: half were signals with the same pitch as the classifier (true positive signals) and the other half were signals with different pitches (true negative signals). F-measure was used for the fitness function. Signals with the same pitch of the classifier that were correctly identified by the classifier, count as a true positives. Signals with the same pitch of the classifier that were not correctly identified by the classifier, count as a false negatives. Signals with different pitch of the classifier that were not identified by the classifier, count as a true negatives. Signals with different pitch of the classifier that were identified by the classifier, count as a false positives. Our first approach was to evolve classifiers for identifying artifical signals, created by mathematical functions: sine, sawtooth and square waves. Our function set is basically composed by filtering operations on vectors and by arithmetic operations with constants and vectors. All the classifiers correctly identified true positive signals and did not identify true negative signals. We then moved to real audio recordings. For testing the classifiers, we picked different audio signals from the ones used during the training phase. For a first approach, the obtained results were very promising, but could be improved. We have made slight changes to our approach and the number of false positives reduced 33%, compared to the first approach. We then applied the evolved classifiers to polyphonic audio signals, and the results indicate that our approach is a good starting point for addressing the problem of Pitch Estimation.

Clinicopathological And Immunohistochemical Evaluation Of Oral And Oropharyngeal Squamous Cell Carcinoma In Chilean Population.

In oral and oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma (OCSCC and OPSCC) exist an association between clinical and histopathological parameters with cell proliferation, basal lamina, connective tissue degradation and surrounding stroma markers. We evaluated these associations in Chilean patients. A convenience sample of 37 cases of OCSCC (n=16) and OPSCC (n=21) was analyzed clinically (TNM, clinical stage) and histologically (WHO grade of differentiation, pattern of tumor invasion). We assessed the expression of p53, Ki67, HOXA1, HOXB7, type IV collagen (ColIV) and carcinoma-associated fibroblast (α-SMA-positive cells). Additionally we conducted a univariate/bivariate analysis to assess the relationship of these variables with survival rates. Males were mostly affected (56.2% OCSCC, 76.2% OPSCC). Patients were mainly diagnosed at III/IV clinical stages (68.8% OCSCC, 90.5% OPSCC) with a predominantly infiltrative pattern invasion (62.9% OCSCC, 57.1% OPSCC). Significant association between regional lymph nodes (N) and clinical stage with OCSCC-HOXB7 expression (Chi-Square test P < 0.05) was observed. In OPSCC a statistically significant association exists between p53, Ki67 with gender (Chi-Square test P < 0.05). In OCSCC and OPSCC was statistically significant association between ki67 with HOXA1, HOXB7, and between these last two antigens (Pearson's Correlation test P < 0.05). Furthermore OPSCC-p53 showed significant correlation when it was compared with α-SMA (Kendall's Tau-c test P < 0.05). Only OCSCC-pattern invasion and OPSCC-primary tumor (T) pattern resulted associated with survival at the end of the follow up period (Chi-Square Likelihood Ratio, P < 0.05). Clinical, histological and immunohistochemical features are similar to seen in other countries. Cancer proliferation markers were associated strongly from each other. Our sample highlights prognostic value of T and pattern of invasion, but the conclusions may be limited and should be considered with caution (small sample). Many cases were diagnosed in the advanced stages of the disease, which suggests that the diagnosis of OCSCC and OPSCC is made late.

Oral Pemphigus Vulgaris After Chilean Earthquake.

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Characterizing chaotic melodies in automatic music composition

In this paper, we initially present an algorithm for automatic composition of melodies using chaotic dynamical systems. Afterward, we characterize chaotic music in a comprehensive way as comprising three perspectives: musical discrimination, dynamical influence on musical features, and musical perception. With respect to the first perspective, the coherence between generated chaotic melodies (continuous as well as discrete chaotic melodies) and a set of classical reference melodies is characterized by statistical descriptors and melodic measures. The significant differences among the three types of melodies are determined by discriminant analysis. Regarding the second perspective, the influence of dynamical features of chaotic attractors, e.g., Lyapunov exponent, Hurst coefficient, and correlation dimension, on melodic features is determined by canonical correlation analysis. The last perspective is related to perception of originality, complexity, and degree of melodiousness (Euler's gradus suavitatis) of chaotic and classical melodies by nonparametric statistical tests. (c) 2010 American Institute of Physics. [doi: 10.1063/1.3487516]

Music and faith: The religious scene in the Brazilian phonographic market

This text discusses the phonographic segment of religious music in Brazil in its two main manifestations, linked respectively to the Catholic and Protestant traditions. The text offers a brief history of both traditions, as well as a description of their main recording companies and artists of greatest prominence. In its final part. the text presents the strategies that bring together recording companies and independent artists, as well as ponders over Brazil`s independent musical production as a whole.

The Effects of Live, Taped and No Music on People Experiencing Posttraumatic Amnesia

This study compared the effects of live, taped, and no music, on agitation and orientation levels of people experiencing posttraumatic amnesia (PTA). Participants (N = 22) were exposed to all 3 conditions, twice over 6 consecutive days. Songs used in the live and taped music conditions were identical and were selected based on participants' own preferred music. Pre and posttesting was conducted for each condition using the Agitated Behavior Scale (Corrigan, 1989) and the Westmead PTA Scale (Shores, Marosszeky, Sandanam, Batchelor, 1986). Participants' memory for the music used was also tested and compared with their memory for pictorial material presented in the Westmead PTA Scale. Results indicate that music significantly reduced agitation (p

The knowledge gap: A perspective on trade, industry, technology and policy from pre-war Australian music technology manufacturing (1903-30)

Australia struggles to achieve economic competitiveness, prevent expansion of the trade deficit and develop value-added production despite applications of policy strategies from protectionism to trade liberalisation. This article argues that these problems were emerging at the turn of the century, and that an investigation of music technology manufacturing in the first two decades of this century reveals fundamental problems in the conduct of relevant policy analysis. Analysis has focused on the trade or technology gap which is only symptomatic of an underlying knowledge gap. The article calls for a knowledge policy approach which can allow protection without the negative effects of isolation from global markets and without having to resort to unworkable utopian free-trade dogma. A shift of focus from a 'goods traded' view to a knowledge transaction (or diffusion) perspective is advocated.

Pursuing the popular in Australian history

No abstract