If Music Be the Food of Love:An Acoustic ‘Fourth World’ in Ong Keng Sen’s Awaking”

Staged as an attempt to ‘bring together Shakespeare’s plays and Tang Xian Zu’s classical Kunqu opera, The Peony Pavilion,’ (Ong, Programme Notes) Awaking stands as Singapore Director Ong Keng Sen’s most recent and prominent attempt at engaging issues of the intercultural through music and sound. While Ong’s previous intercultural projects sought to explore the politics of intercultural performance through the exchange, layering, confrontation and inter-mixing of Asian performance modes as visual aesthetics, Awaking is a performance at the borders of theatrical and musical conventions, as it features the music and musicians as central performative devices of staging the intercultural. Northern Kunqu opera, Chinese classical music and Elizabethan folk tunes from Shakespeare’s plays were re-moved, re-contextualised, and juxtaposed to explore ‘differing yet connected philosophies on love, death, and the afterlife’ (Awaking, Publicity). These humanist and ‘universal’ themes found expression in the ‘universal’ language of music. Through a study of the musicalities and sonic expressions of Awaking, the paper seeks to explore the implications of such cultural-musical juxtapositions. The paper engages, specifically, with the problematics and possibilities of music as a ‘universal language’ as implied by Ong’s concordance of Eastern and Western sounds in the final act. It further considers the politics of an intercultural soundscape and the acoustemologies of such an intercultural approach.

Zeros and Os:Silence, Absence and Erasure in an Intercultural O-thello

The performative function of sound and music has received little attention in performance theory and criticism and certainly much less so in studies of intercultural theatre. Such an absence is noteworthy particularly since interculturalism is an appropriative Western theatrical form that absorbs Eastern sources to re-create the targeted Western mise en scene. Consequently, a careful consideration of the employment of sound and music are imperative for sound and music form the vertebrae of Asian traditional performance practices. In acoustemological and ethnomusicological studies, sound and music demarcate cultural boundaries and locate cultures by an auditory (dis)recognition. In the light of this need for a more considered understanding of the performative function of sound and music in intercultural performance, this paper seeks to examine the soundscapes of an intercultural production of Shakespeare’s Othello – Desdemona. Directed by Singaporean Ong Keng Sen, Desdemona was a re-scripting of Shakespeare’s text and a self-conscious performance an identity politics. Staged with a multi-ethnic, multi-national cast, Desdemona employed various Asian performance traditions such as Sanskrit Kutiyattam, Myanmarese puppetry, and Korean p’ansori to create the intercultural spectacle. The spectacle was not only a visual aesthetic but an aural one as well. By examining the soundscapes of fractured silences and eruptive cultural sounds the paper hopes to establish the ways in which Desdemona performs absences and erasures of ‘Asia’ in a simultaneous act of performing an Asian Shakespeare.

Thou art a strange fellow:Dissonance and Discordance in Intercultural Shakespeares

Any performance of the intercultural necessarily, and always, advances the question of the cultural since it involves the inter-action and interplay of unique and particular cultural performance styles and modes. Intercultural theatre, according to Pavis, is a hybrid theatrical form “drawing upon performance traditions traceable to distinct cultural areas. The hybridization is very often such that the original forms can no longer be distinguished.” The result of this collaboration of forms is, however, often not a ‘hybrid’ where cultural texts work cohesively and in unison to produce a harmonious mise en scene. Instead, intercultural performances are performances at the interstices and at the intersections of cultures. They raise problems of authorship, authority and performance unities and expose a sense of cultural foreignness. Consequently, intercultural performance can be said to be meta-theatre that queries the construction of culture since it places alongside performance traditions that confront.

Music, as performative unit, is a significant line of action by which the intercultural spectacle is constructed. Integral to Western theatre, and certainly more so in traditional Asian performance forms, the deliberate ‘fusion’ and ‘blending’ of musical styles in intercultural performances underscore not a harmony of diverse sounds but the possible dissonance and discordance already performed by the visual and verbal texts. The paper thus seeks to examine, in particular, the musical elements in intercultural performances such as Ong Keng Sen’s Lear (Theatreworks, 1999) and explore the ways in which music could possibly intensify the confrontation of performative texts resulting in a disruption of performance unities. When watching and listening to Lear, the question of the ‘local’ thus arises not merely with identification and alienation from what is seen but also what is familiar and foreign to one’s ears.

Judging pain in newborns:facial and cry determinants

Explored the facial and cry characteristics that adults use when judging an infant's pain. Sixteen women viewed videotaped reactions of 36 newborns subjected to noninvasive thigh rubs and vitamin K injections in the course of routine care and rated discomfort. The group mean interrater reliability was high. Detailed descriptions of the infants' facial reactions and cry sounds permitted specification of the determinants of distress judgments. Several facial variables (a brow bulge, eyes squeezed shut, and deepened nasolabial fold constellation, and taut tongue) accounted for 49% of the variance in ratings of affective discomfort after controlling for ratings of discomfort during a noninvasive event. In a separate analysis not including facial activity, several cry variables (formant frequency, latency to cry) also accounted for variance (38%) in ratings. When the facial and cry variables were considered together, cry variables added little to the prediction of ratings in comparison to facial variables. Cry would seem to command attention, but facial activity, rather than cry, can account for the major variations in adults' judgments of neonatal pain.

Creating a Circus of Words, Music, and Sound: From Roaratorio to Owenvarragh

This article documents the creation of a work by the authors based on a score written by the composer John Cage entitled 'Owenvarragh: A Belfast Circus on The Star Factory.' The article is part of a documentary portfolio in the journal which also includes a volume of the poetry created by Dowling in accordance with the instructions of the Cage score, and a series of documentary videos on the creation of the work and its first performance. Cage's score is based on his work 'Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan's Wake' (1979) and it provides a set of detailed instructions for the musical realisation of a literary work. The article documents this first fully realised version of the score since Cage first produced 'Roaratorio' in 1979. The work, which was motivated by the Cage centenary year in 2012, musically realises Carson's book 'The Star Factory' (1998), a novelestic autobiography of Carson's Belfast childhood. The score required the creation of a fixed media piece based on over 300 field recordings of the sounds and places mentioned in the book, a volume of poetry created from the book which is recited to form the rhythmic spine of the work, and the arrangement of a performance including these two components along with live musical performance by the authors in collaboration with three other musicians under their direction, and a video installation created for the work. The piece has been performed three times: in association with the Sonorities 2012 Festival at Queen's University of Belfast (March 2012), at The Belfast Festival at Queen's (October 2012), and in the Rymer Auditoium of the University of York (June 2013).

Additional information:

The work which the article documents was conceived by Monaghan and Dowling, and the project was initiated by Monaghan after a she received a student prize to support its development and first performance. Elements of the project will be included in her PhD dissertation for which Dowling is a supervisor. Monaghan created the fixed media piece based on over 300 field recordings, the largest single aspect of realising Cage's score. Dowling was responsible for initiating the collaboration with Ciaran Carson, and for two other components: the creation of a volume of poetry derived from the literary work which is recited in the performance, and the creation of and supervision of the technical work on a video which accompanies the piece. The co-authors consulted closely during the work on these large components from May 2011 until March 2012 when the first performance took place. The co-authors also shared in numerous other artistic and organisational aspects of the production, including the arrangement and performnance of the music, musical direction to other performers, and marketing.

The Existence of the Past

My goal in this paper is to address what I call the ‘Incoherence’ objection to the growing universe theory of time. At the root of the objection is the thought that one cannot wed objective temporal becoming with the existence of a tenseless past—which is apparently what the growing universe theorist tries to do. To do so, however, is to attribute both dynamic and static aspects to time, and, given the mutual exclusivity of these two aspects—so the thought goes—incoherence results. My solution to the problem is to offer an alternative account of past existence that is compatible with a dynamic conception of time. I take as my starting point Adams’ suggestion that the past exists in virtue of the existence of thisnesses of past individuals. I first seek to defend this suggestion, before developing it further, in order to provide a satisfactory response to the Incoherence objection. The result is a new growing universe theory which avoids the Incoherence objection but which has some surprising features of its own. Chief among these is the rejection of present events. I argue, however, that such a rejection is a necessary consequence of endorsing the growing universe theory, and that it is not as counter-intuitive as it initially sounds.

Rapid formation of robust auditory memories: Insights from noise

Before a natural sound can be recognized, an auditory signature of its source must be learned through experience. Here we used random waveforms to probe the formation of new memories for arbitrary complex sounds. A behavioral measure was designed, based on the detection of repetitions embedded in noises up to 4 s long. Unbeknownst to listeners, some noise samples reoccurred randomly throughout an experimental block. Results showed that repeated exposure induced learning for otherwise totally unpredictable and meaningless sounds. The learning was unsupervised and resilient to interference from other task-relevant noises. When memories were formed, they emerged rapidly, performance became abruptly near-perfect, and multiple noises were remembered for several weeks. The acoustic transformations to which recall was tolerant suggest that the learned features were local in time. We propose that rapid sensory plasticity could explain how the auditory brain creates useful memories from the ever-changing, but sometimes repeating, acoustical world. © 2010 Elsevier Inc.

So Great Is Their Love

A soundscape composition intended for installation in a sound art exhibition. This short project is a contribution to practice-led research that questions that nature of authorial identity, and the composer's responsibility for the sounds produced. First made public in The Braid, Ballymena, 25 September 2013

A Hamiltonian approach to simulation of acoustic systems involving nonlinear interactions

Nonlinear interactions take place in most systems that arise in music acoustics, usually as a result of player-instrument coupling. Several time-stepping methods exist for the numerical simulation of such systems. These methods generally involve the discretization of the Newtonian description of the system. However, it is not always possible to prove the stability of the resulting algorithms, especially when dealing with systems where the underlying force is a non-analytic function of the phase space variables. On the other hand, if the discretization is carried out on the Hamiltonian description of the system, it is possible to prove the stability of the derived numerical schemes. This Hamiltonian approach is applied to a series of test models of single or multiple nonlinear collisions and the energetic properties of the derived schemes are discussed. After establishing that the schemes respect the principle of conservation of energy, a nonlinear single-reed model is formulated and coupled to a digital bore, in order to synthesize clarinet-like sounds.

Auditory observation of stepping actions can cue both spatial and temporal components of gait in Parkinson's disease patients

Objectives: A common behavioural symptom of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is reduced step length (SL). Whilst sensory cueing strategies can be effective in increasing SL and reducing gait variability, current cueing strategies conveying spatial or temporal information are generally confined to the use of either visual or auditory cue modalities, respectively. We describe a novel cueing strategy using ecologically-valid ‘action-related’ sounds (footsteps on gravel) that convey both spatial and temporal parameters of a specific action within a single cue.
Methods: The current study used a real-time imitation task to examine whether PD affects the ability to re-enact changes in spatial characteristics of stepping actions, based solely on auditory information. In a second experimental session, these procedures were repeated using synthesized sounds derived from recordings of the kinetic interactions between the foot and walking surface. A third experimental session examined whether adaptations observed when participants walked to action-sounds were preserved when participants imagined either real recorded or synthesized sounds.
Results: Whilst healthy control participants were able to re-enact significant changes in SL in all cue conditions, these adaptations, in conjunction with reduced variability of SL were only observed in the PD group when walking to, or imagining the recorded sounds.
Conclusions: The findings show that while recordings of stepping sounds convey action information to allow PD patients to re-enact and imagine spatial characteristics of gait, synthesis of sounds purely from gait kinetics is insufficient to evoke similar changes in behaviour, perhaps indicating that PD patients have a higher threshold to cue sensorimotor resonant responses.

Processing of short auditory stimuli:The rapid audio sequential presentation paradigm (RASP)

Human listeners seem to be remarkably able to recognise acoustic sound sources based on timbre cues. Here we describe a psychophysical paradigm to estimate the time it takes to recognise a set of complex sounds differing only in timbre cues: both in terms of the minimum duration of the sounds and the inferred neural processing time. Listeners had to respond to the human voice while ignoring a set of distractors. All sounds were recorded from natural sources over the same pitch range and equalised to the same duration and power. In a first experiment, stimuli were gated in time with a raised-cosine window of variable duration and random onset time. A voice/non-voice (yes/no) task was used. Performance, as measured by d', remained above chance for the shortest sounds tested (2 ms); d's above 1 were observed for durations longer than or equal to 8 ms. Then, we constructed sequences of short sounds presented in rapid succession. Listeners were asked to report the presence of a single voice token that could occur at a random position within the sequence. This method is analogous to the "rapid sequential visual presentation" paradigm (RSVP), which has been used to evaluate neural processing time for images. For 500-ms sequences made of 32-ms and 16-ms sounds, d' remained above chance for presentation rates of up to 30 sounds per second. There was no effect of the pitch relation between successive sounds: identical for all sounds in the sequence or random for each sound. This implies that the task was not determined by streaming or forward masking, as both phenomena would predict better performance for the random pitch condition. Overall, the recognition of familiar sound categories such as the voice seems to be surprisingly fast, both in terms of the acoustic duration required and of the underlying neural time constants.

Moving with Beats and Loops: The Structure of Auditory Events and Sensorimotor Timing

Traditionally, audio-motor timing processes have been understood as motor output from an internal clock, the speed of which is set by heard sound pulses. In contrast, this paper proposes a more ecologically-grounded approach, arguing that audio-motor processes are better characterized as performed actions on the perceived structure of auditory events. This position is explored in the context of auditory sensorimotor synchronization and continuation timing. Empirical research shows that the structure of sounds as auditory events can lead to marked differences in movement timing performance. The nature of these effects is discussed in the context of perceived action-relevance of auditory event structure. It is proposed that different forms of sound invite or support different patterns of sensorimotor timing. Hence, the temporal information in looped auditory signals is more than just the interval durations between onsets: all metronomes are not created equal. The potential implications for auditory guides in motor performance enhancement are also described.

(Dis‑)Harmony in movement: effects of musical dissonance on movement timing and form

While the origins of consonance and dissonance in terms of acoustics, psychoacoustics and physiology have been debated for centuries, their plausible effects on movement synchronization have largely been ignored. The present study aims to address this by investigating whether, and if so how, consonant/dissonant pitch intervals affect the spatiotemporal properties of regular reciprocal aiming movements. We compared movements synchronized either to consonant or to dissonant sounds, and showed that they were differently influenced by the degree of consonance of the sound presented. Interestingly, the difference was present after the sound stimulus was removed. In this case, the performance measured after consonant sound exposure was found to be more stable and accurate, with a higher percentage of information/movement coupling (tau-coupling) and a higher degree of movement circularity when compared to performance measured after the exposure to dissonant sounds. We infer that the neural resonance representing consonant tones leads to finer perception/action coupling which in turn may help explain the prevailing preference for these types of tones.

Session organiser/chair: Architecture, Infrastructure and the Making of Modern Ireland

‘A free Ireland would drain the bogs, would harness the rivers, would plant the wastes, would nationalise the railways and the waterways, would improve agriculture, would protect fisheries, would foster industries, would promote commerce, and beautify the cities …’ (Padraig Pearse, ‘From a Hermitage’, 1913)

Somewhat unusually in his often romantic writings Padraig Pearse – poet, pedagogue and revolutionary – chose to describe the future of an independent Ireland in terms of infrastructure and technological processes. Terence Brown’s locating of this excerpt at the beginning his seminal work Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922-2002 highlights the simultaneous and interlinking construction of both a new physical and cultural landscape for an independent modern nation. Lacking any significant industrial complex, the construction of new infrastructures in Ireland was seen throughout the 20th century as a key element in the building of the new State, just as the adoption of an international style modernism in architecture was perceived as a way to escape the colonial past. For Paul N. Edwards modernity and infrastructure are intimately connected.

‘infrastructures simultaneously shape and are shaped – in other words, co-construct – the condition of modernity. By linking macro, meso, and micro scales of time, space and social organisation, they form the stable foundation of modern social worlds’ (2003: 186).
Simultaneously omnipresent and invisible – infra means beneath – Edwards also points out that infrastructure tends only to become apparent when it is either new or broken. Interpreting the meso scale as being that of the building, this session calls for papers that critically and analytically investigate aspects of the architectures of infrastructure in 20th-century Ireland. Like the territory they explore these papers may range across scales to oscillate between a concern for the artefact and its physical landscape, and the larger, often hidden systems and networks that co-define this architecture.