Tolstoy, stories, and facilitating insight in end of life care: Exploring ethics through vicarious experience (with Glackin M and Henry R)

Facilitating moral insight in end of life care can be challenging, and the purpose of this paper is to illustrate how this can be nurtured by means of creative literature. Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych is presented as an example of such literature. Aristotle's Nichomean Ethics provides the philosophical underpinning for the method used. Sources also include the nursing literature, and students' evaluations of the impact of Tolstoy's novella on their ability to perceive the ethical issues arising in end of life care. Comments from evaluations were analysed and significant themes emerged. Students' comments clearly support the suggestion that use of this novella has facilitated insight into ethical issues at the end of life. Evaluations also indicate that vicarious experience gained through reading this novella has helped to nurture sensitivity and professional insight into the importance of compassion and offering ‘comfort’ to the dying person.

Punishment, blame and stigma after conflict: the experience of politically motivated former prisoners in Northern Ireland

This paper examines the relationship between the politics of blame in post-conflict Northern Ireland and the treatment of politically motivated former prisoners. Using the examples of direct and indirect discrimination in the areas of employment and access to mental health services, the paper considers how the discursive operation of blaming produces evasions and attributions of guilt. It argues that such blaming practices have very real material consequences for the allocation or withholding of goods and burdens in the community. The paper notes also that the ‘cause of victims’ is often appropriated by the press and other political actors for their own purposes, frequently to block the provision of public goods to one particular group of ex-combatants: ex-politically motivated prisoners. It concludes by posing a series of questions about blaming, justice and the moral authority of the victim in a transitional justice context. The claim of the paper is simply to offer some starting points for understanding the relationship between processes of blame, stigma and social exclusion.

Digital Musical Interactions: Performer-System Relationships and their Perception by Spectators

This article adopts an ecological view of digital musical interactions, first considering the relationship between performers and digital systems, and then spectators’ perception of these interactions. We provide evidence that the relationships between performers and digital music systems are not necessarily instrumental in the same was as they are with acoustic systems, and nor should they always strive to be. Furthermore, we report results of a study suggesting that spectators may not perceive such interactions in the same way as performances with musical instruments. We present implications for the design of digital musical interactions, suggesting that designers should embrace the reality that digital systems are malleable and dynamic, and may engage performers and spectators in different modalities, sometimes simultaneously.

Autobiography and Invention: Towards a Critical Understanding of Identity, Dialogue and Resistance in Improvised Musics

In this article I will argue that acts of improvisation are not productively understood in opposition to other practices which form our wider musical culture. Improvisation might be better understood as both rooted in, but not limited by, personal and cultural memory. Improvisational activities are legible to the performer and audience through a shared understanding of social norms, but only become a singular instance of improvisation through unique performative actions. This tension between experience and invention is played out in a dialogue between performer and listener, demanding a response that crucially takes the form of self-articulation, or autobiography. Finally, I contend that it is from this position that improvisation offers the possibility to transgress established personal and cultural identities.

The Uncertainty of Experience: On George Brecht's Event Scores

George Brecht, an artist best known for his associations with Fluxus, is considered to have made significant contributions to emerging traditions of conceptual art and experimental music in the early 1960s. His Event scores, brief verbal scores that comprised lists of terms or open-ended instructions, provided a signature model for indeterminate composition and were ‘used extensively by virtually every Fluxus artist’. This article revisits Brecht’s early writings and research to argue that, while Event scores were adopted within Fluxus performance, they were intended as much more than performance devices. Specifically, Brecht conceived of his works as ‘structures of experience’ that, by revealing the underlying connections between chanced forms, could enable a kind of enlightenment rooted within an experience of a ‘unified reality’.

A Framework for the Evaluation of Digital Musical Instruments

At the outset of a discussion of evaluating digital musical instruments, that is to say instruments whose sound generators are digital and separable though not necessarily separate from their control interfaces (Malloch, 2006), it is reasonable to ask what the term evaluation in this context really means. After all, there may be many perspectives from which to view the effectiveness or otherwise of the instruments we build. For most performers, performance on an instrument becomes a means of evaluating how well it functions in the context of live music making, and their measure of success is the response of the audience to their performance. Audiences evaluate performances on the basis of how engaged they feel they have been by what they have seen and heard. When questioned, they are likely to describe good performances as “exciting,” “skillful,” “musical.” Bad performances are “boring,” and those which are marred by technical malfunction are often dismissed out of hand. If performance is considered to be a valid means of evaluating a musical instrument, then it follows that, for the field of DMI design, a much broader definition of the term “evaluation” than that typically used in human-computer interaction (HCI) is required to reflect the fact that there are a number of stakeholders involved in the design and evaluation of DMIs. In addition to players and audiences, there are also composers, instrument builders, component manufacturers, and perhaps even customers, each of whom will have a different concept of what is meant by “evaluation.”