Last letters & further records of martyred missionaries of the China Inland Mission / edited by Marshall Broomhall.

http://www.archive.org/details/lastlettersfurth00unknuoft

Khirbet et-Tannur Excavation Records

The Khirbet et-Tannur Excavation Records document the 1938 excavation of a Nabataean temple. The excavation was directed by Nelson Glueck. The collection includes level books, excavation diaries, artifacts, and photographs. The collection is being processed. A finding aid for the document portion of the collection is available.

SOUND PROPAGATION AND SCATTERING IN BUBBLY LIQUIDS

In the ocean, natural and artificial processes generate clouds of bubbles which scatter and attenuate sound. Measurements have shown that at the individual bubble resonance frequency, sound propagation in this medium is highly attenuated and dispersive. Theory to explain this behavior exists in the literature, and is adequate away from resonance. However, due to excessive attenuation near resonance, little experimental data exists for comparison. An impedance tube was developed specifically for exploring this regime. Using the instrument, unique phase speed and attenuation measurements were made for void fractions ranging from 6.2 × 10^−5 to 2.7 × 10^−3 and bubble sizes centered around 0.62 mm in radius. Improved measurement speed, accuracy and precision is possible with the new instrument, and both instantaneous and time-averaged measurements were obtained. Behavior at resonance was observed to be sensitive to the bubble population statistics and agreed with existing theory, within the uncertainty of the bubble population parameters. Scattering from acoustically compact bubble clouds can be predicted from classical scattering theory by using an effective medium description of the bubbly fluid interior. Experimental verification was previously obtained up to the lowest resonance frequency. A novel bubble production technique has been employed to obtain unique scattering measurements with a bubbly-liquid-filled latex tube in a large indoor tank. The effective scattering model described these measurements up to three times the lowest resonance frequency of the structure.

Totality of experience: sound, music and mythology in Gus Van Sant’s “Death Quartet”

Reflecting on Gus Van Sant’s films Gerry (2003) Elephant (2004) and Last Days (2005), the director’s long-term sound-designer Leslie Shatz observed that “You have to get into the totality of the experience and not just the dialogue”. Shatz’s comment expresses something fundamental about the experimental approach to cinema and to soundscapes undertaken by Van Sant in these three films, unofficially known as the “Death Trilogy”. This thesis contends that Van Sant makes deliberate aesthetic choices which do indicate a distinctly “auteurist” leaning. However, I also argue that intertextual elements, prior knowledge, and audience participation in meaningmaking enhance the experience of, and reveal the nuances in, the soundtracks themselves. This thesis aims to contribute to a growing body of work within filmmusic scholarship concerned with resisting a traditional bias in the field: that film music should be understood as a means of characterisation and as emotional signifier. The films of the “Death Quartet”, which includes Paranoid Park (2007), I believe, offer fertile ground on which to explore these new approaches. It is my contention that these films deconstruct the traditional approach to soundtracking and the relationship between soundtrack and character, and that only an approach sensitive to the aesthetic and philosophical functions of music and sound can adequately acknowledge their unique cinematic qualities.

Afro-Cuban Bata Drum Aesthetics: Developing Individual and Group Technique, Sound and Identity

The Lucumi religion (also Santeria and Regla de Ocha) developed in 19th-century colonial Cuba, by syncretizing elements of Catholicism with the Yoruba worship of orisha. When fully initiated, santeros (priests) actively participate in religious ceremonies by periodically being possessed or "mounted" by a patron saint or orisha, usually within the context of a drumming ritual, known as a toque de santo, bembe, or tambor. Within these rituals, there is a clearly defined goal of trance possession, though its manifestation is not the sole measure of success or failure. Rather than focusing on the fleeting, exciting moments that immediately precede the arrival of an orisha in the form of a possession trance, this thesis investigates the entire four- to six-hour musical performance that is central to the ceremony. It examines the brief pauses, the moments of reduced intensity, the slow but deliberate build-ups of energy and excitement, and even the periods when novices are invited to perform the sacred bata drums, and places these moments on an equal footing with the more dynamic periods where possession is imminent or in progress. This document approaches Lucumi ritual from the viewpoint of bata drummers, ritual specialists who, during the course of a toque de santo, exercise wide latitude in determining the shape of the event. Known as omo Ana (children of the orisha Ana who is manifest in drums and rhythms), bata drummers comprise a fraternity that is accessible only through ritual initiation. Though they are sensitive to the desires of the many participants during a toque de santo, and indeed make their living by satisfying the expectations of their hosts, many of the drummers' activities are inwardly focused on the cultivation and preservation of this fraternity. Occasionally interfering with spirit possession, and other expectations of the participants, these aberrant activities include teaching and learning, developing group identity or signature sound, and achieving a state of intimacy among the musicians known as "communitas."

One sound or two? Object-related negativity indexes echo perception.

The ability to isolate a single sound source among concurrent sources and reverberant energy is necessary for understanding the auditory world. The precedence effect describes a related experimental finding, that when presented with identical sounds from two locations with a short onset asynchrony (on the order of milliseconds), listeners report a single source with a location dominated by the lead sound. Single-cell recordings in multiple animal models have indicated that there are low-level mechanisms that may contribute to the precedence effect, yet psychophysical studies in humans have provided evidence that top-down cognitive processes have a great deal of influence on the perception of simulated echoes. In the present study, event-related potentials evoked by click pairs at and around listeners' echo thresholds indicate that perception of the lead and lag sound as individual sources elicits a negativity between 100 and 250 msec, previously termed the object-related negativity (ORN). Even for physically identical stimuli, the ORN is evident when listeners report hearing, as compared with not hearing, a second sound source. These results define a neural mechanism related to the conscious perception of multiple auditory objects.

Sound the alarm: fraud in neuroscience.

We expect scientists to follow a code of honor and conduct and to report their research honestly and accurately, but so-called scientific misconduct, which includes plagiarism, faked data, and altered images, has led to a tenfold increase in the number of retractions over the past decade. Among the reasons for this troubling upsurge is increased competition for journal placement, grant money, and prestigious appointments. The solutions are not easy, but reform and greater vigilance is needed.

Staggered-mesh computation for aerodynamic sound

For the numerical solution of the linearized Euler equations, an optimized computational scheme is considered. It is based on fully staggered (in space and time) regular meshes and on a simple mirroring procedure at the stepwise solid walls. There is no need to define ghost points into the solid ohjects that reflect the sound waves. Test results demonstrate the accuracy of the method that may be used for aeroacoustic problems with complex geometries.

A coarse grid extraction of sound signals for computational aeroacoustics

Sound waves are propagating pressure fluctuations, which are typically several orders of magnitude smaller than the pressure variations in the flow field that account for flow acceleration. On the other hand, these fluctuations travel at the speed of sound in the medium, not as a transported fluid quantity. Due to the above two properties, the Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes equations do not resolve the acoustic fluctuations. This paper discusses a defect correction method for this type of multi-scale problems in aeroacoustics. Numerical examples in one dimensional and two dimensional are used to illustrate the concept. Copyright (C) 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

An acoustic correction method for extracting sound signals

Sound waves are propagating pressure fluctuations and are typically several orders of magnitude smaller than the pressure variations in the flow field that account for flow acceleration. On the other hand, these fluctuations travel at the speed of sound in the medium, not as a transported fluid quantity. Due to the above two properties, the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations do not resolve the acoustic fluctuations. Direct numerical simulation of turbulent flow is still a prohibitively expensive tool to perform noise analysis. This paper proposes the acousticcorrectionmethod, an alternative and affordable tool based on a modified defect correction concept, which leads to an efficient algorithm for computational aeroacoustics and noise analysis.

A sound and complete reified temporal logic

There are mainly two known approaches to the representation of temporal information in Computer Science: modal logic approaches (including tense logics and hybrid temporal logics) and predicate logic approaches (including temporal argument methods and reified temporal logics). On one hand, while tense logics, hybrid temporal logics and temporal argument methods enjoy formal theoretical foundations, their expressiveness has been criticised as not power enough for representing general temporal knowledge; on the other hand, although current reified temporal logics provide greater expressive power, most of them lack of complete and sound axiomatic theories. In this paper, we propose a new reified temporal logic with a clear syntax and semantics in terms of a sound and complete axiomatic formalism which retains all the expressive power of the approach of temporal reification.