La scrittura dell'interpretazione: Teoria e pratica della trascrizione musicale durante gli ‘anni veneziani’ di Bruno Maderna (1946-1952)

La definizione di «scrittura dell’interpretazione» comprime in una sola locuzione la descrizione dell’oggetto principale del nostro studio, ovvero il problema della trascrizione musicale, descritta, non tanto come un determinato genere musicale, quanto come una ragione di osmosi e interferenze tra il fatto compositivo e quello interpretativo. Ad una traversata di quel territorio ci si appresta incentrando la trattazione intorno alla figura e all’opera del giovane compositore e direttore Bruno Maderna, autore di diverse trascrizioni della cosiddetta musica antica (dall’Odhecaton A, Monteverdi, Viadana, Frescobaldi, Legrenzi, ed altri ancora). Attraverso gli esempi presentati si intende mostrare come l’approccio maderniano alla trascrizione musicale si giustifichi a partire dalla sua stessa teoria e pratica dell’interpretazione musicale, più che in base a concetti forti definiti sul versante della scrittura, quali ad esempio quelli di analisi e parodia. Pari attenzione si offre al contesto storico degli anni in cui egli gravita, opera e si afferma come musicista (1946-1952 circa), dedicando ampio spazio alle figure di Gian Francesco Malipiero, Angelo Ephrikian e Luigi Nono, autori a loro volta di trascrizioni e revisioni di opere del Cinquecento, del Seicento e del Settecento. Intorno ai loro rapporti viene fornita una documentazione significativa, in buona parte inedita o poco conosciuta dagli studiosi, resa disponibile grazie alle ricerche d’archivio di cui si avvantaggia la nostra trattazione.

La promozione dell'inclusione nei sistemi scolastici attraverso l'intervento di cooperazione internazionale: l'esperienza di El Salvador

La ricerca si colloca all’interno di un complesso intervento di cooperazione internazionale realizzato in El Salvador tra il 2009 e il 2014. Il Progetto di cooperazione è stato promosso dal Dipartimento di Scienze dell’Educazione dell’Università di Bologna e finanziato dalla Cooperazione Italiana. L’esperienza studiata rappresenta un esempio di promozione dell’inclusione nei sistemi scolastici di Paesi del Sud del mondo e si propone due obiettivi: 1) analizzare il processo di cambiamento della prospettiva di intervento promossa dalla cooperazione internazionale, evidenziando la dimensione educativa che sostiene processi di empowerment e ownership delle istituzioni locali; 2) contribuire al dibattito sull’ “inclusive education”, sostenendo processi di inclusione scolastica e sociale rivolti a tutti coloro che si trovano in situazione di svantaggio psico-fisico e/o socio-culturale. Le politiche locali del Ministero dell’Educazione dal 2009 hanno promosso un modello educativo con l’obiettivo di garantire il diritto all’educazione per tutti nella scuola pubblica. Lo studio costituisce un'indagine di tipo valutativo sul processo di sviluppo della scuola inclusiva in El Salvador, supportato dall’intervento di cooperazione internazionale. La ricerca utilizza in modo integrato strumenti di natura quantitativa (questionari) e qualitativa (interviste). Dai dati raccolti emerge come il processo di cooperazione sia stato caratterizzato dal principio della pari dignità tra esperti internazionali e autorità politiche e tecniche locali. Inoltre, la ricerca ha consentito di verificare come la cultura dell'inclusione si sia radicata in modo diffuso nella percezione della missione della scuola e il suo ruolo tra i protagonisti del sistema scolastico. Alla luce dei risultati, appare fondamentale continuare a investire sulla formazione tecnica delle figure chiave del sistema educativo; facilitare il processo di inclusione dei disabili nelle scuole regolari con una parallela trasformazione delle scuole speciali in centri di supporto all’integrazione; promuovere una sinergia di azione formativa tra il ministero, mondo accademico e della formazione professionale.

La competenza comunicativa in giapponese: indagine empirica sulle difficoltà frequenti degli apprendenti italofoni in interazioni orali

Smooth intercultural communication requires very complex tasks, especially when participants are very different in their cultural and linguistic backgrounds: this is the case of native Italian and Japanese speakers. A further difficulty in such a context can be found in the usage of a foreign language not mastered perfectly by speakers, which is the case for Italian intermediate learners of Japanese. The aim of this study is therefore to identify the linguistic difficulties common among Italian learners of Japanese as a foreign language and to further examine the consequences of incorrect pragma-linguistic deliveries in actual conversations. To this end, a series of linguistic aspects selected on the basis of the author's experience have been taken into consideration. Some aspects are expected to be difficult to master because of linguistic differences between Italian and Japanese, while some may be difficult due to their connection to the specific Japanese cultural context. The present study consists of six parts. The Introduction presents the state of the art on the research topic and defines the purpose of this research. Chapter 1 outlines the linguistic aspects of the Japanese language investigated in the study, specifically focusing on the following topics: writing system, phonology, loan words, numbers, ellipsis, levels of speech and honorifics. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the environment of teaching Japanese as a foreign language in the university setting in Italy. In Chapter 3 the first phase of the research is described, i.e. an online survey aimed at identifying the most problematic linguistic aspects. Chapter 4 presents the second phase of this study: a series of oral interactions between Japanese and Italian native speakers, conversing exclusively in Japanese, focusing on the management of misunderstandings with the use of actual linguistic data. The Conclusion outlines the results and possible future developments.

Studi verdiani, traduzione e nuove tecnologie: Costruzione e analisi di due corpora bilingui paralleli di libretti d'opera

L’obiettivo del presente lavoro è illustrare la creazione di due corpora bilingui italiano-inglese di libretti d’opera di Giuseppe Verdi, annotati e indicizzati, e descrivere le potenzialità di queste risorse. Il progetto è nato dalla volontà di indagare l’effettiva possibilità di gestione e consultazione di testi poetici tramite corpora in studi translation-driven, optando in particolare per il genere libretto d’opera in considerazione della sua complessità, derivante anche dal fatto che il contenuto testuale è fortemente condizionato dalla musica. Il primo corpus, chiamato LiVeGi, si compone di cinque opere di Giuseppe Verdi e relativa traduzione inglese: Ernani, Il Trovatore, La Traviata, Aida e Falstaff; il secondo corpus, nominato FaLiVe, contiene l’originale italiano dell’opera Falstaff e due traduzioni inglesi, realizzate a circa un secolo di distanza l’una dall’altra. All’analisi del genere libretto e delle caratteristiche principali delle cinque opere selezionate (Capitolo 1), segue una panoramica della prassi traduttiva dei lavori verdiani nel Regno Unito e negli Stati Uniti (Capitolo 2) e la presentazione delle nozioni di Digital Humanities e di linguistica computazionale, all’interno delle quali si colloca il presente studio (Capitolo 3). La sezione centrale (Capitolo 4) presenta nel dettaglio tutte le fasi pratiche di creazione dei due corpora, in particolare selezione e reperimento del materiale, OCR, ripulitura, annotazione e uniformazione dei metacaratteri, part-of-speech tagging, indicizzazione e allineamento, terminando con la descrizione delle risorse ottenute. Il lavoro si conclude (Capitolo 5) con l’illustrazione delle potenzialità dei due corpora creati e le possibilità di ricerca offerte, presentando, a titolo d’esempio, due case study: il linguaggio delle protagoniste tragiche nei libretti di Verdi in traduzione (studio realizzato sul corpus LiVeGi) e la traduzione delle ingiurie nel Falstaff (attraverso il corpus FaLiVe).

How internet telephony could improve communication for hearing-impaired individuals

To test, whether modern Internet telephony with a broadband transmission (0.1-8 kHz) of speech improves speech perception in comparison to conventional telephony (0.3-3.5 kHz) in hearing-impaired and normal-hearing adults.

Feminist Tigers and Patriarchal Lions: Rhetorical Strategies and Instrument Effects in the Struggle for Definition and Control over Development in Nepal

This article offers an analysis of a struggle for control of a women’s development project in Nepal. The story of this struggle is worth telling, for it is rife with the gender politics and neo-colonial context that underscore much of what goes on in contemporary Nepal. In particular, my analysis helps to unravel some of the powerful discourses, threads of interest, and yet unintended effects inevitable under a regime of development aid. The analysis demonstrates that the employment of already available discursive figures of the imperialist feminist and the patriarchal third world man are central to the rhetorical strategies taken in the conflict. I argue that the trans-discursive or “borderland” nature of development in general and women’s development in particular result in different constructions of “development” goals, means and actors based not only on divergent cultural categories but on historically specific cultural politics. I argue further that the apolitical discourse of development serves to cloak its inherently political project of social and economic transformation, making conflicts such as the one that occurred in this case not only likely to occur but also likely to be misunderstood.

Crestal bone loss and oral implants

A consensus meeting was arranged to critically analyze whether the high figures of peri-implantitis at machined implants that recently have been reported in the literature are valid also for modern implants.

Immigrants in the Czech Republic (With Special Reference to Ukrainian Workers and "Western" Firms Operating in Prague)

International migration has increased rapidly in the Czech Republic, with more than 150,000 legally registered foreign residents at the end of 1996. A large proportion of these are in Prague - 35% of the total in December 1996. The aim of this project was to enrich the fund of information concerning the "environment", reasons and "mechanisms" behind immigration to the Czech Republic. Mr. Drbohlav looked first at the empirical situation and on this basis set out to test certain well-known migration theories. He focused on four main areas: 1) a detailed description and explanation of the stock of foreign citizens legally settled in Czech territory, concentrating particularly on "economic" migrants; 2) a questionnaire survey targeting a total of 192 Ukrainian workers (98 in the fall 1995 and 94 in the fall 1996) working in Prague or its vicinity; 3) a second questionnaire survey of 40 "western" firms (20 in 1996 and 20 in 1997) operating out of Prague; 4) an opinion poll on how the Czech population reacts to foreign workers in the CR. Over 80% of economic immigrants at the end of 1996 were from European countries, 16% from Asia and under 2% from North America. The largest single nationalities were Ukrainians, Slovaks, Vietnamese and Poles. There has been a huge increase in the Ukrainian immigrant community over both space (by region) and time (a ten-fold increase since 1993), and at 40,000 persons this represents one third of all legal immigrants. Indications are that many more live and work there illegally. Young males with low educational/skills levels predominate, in contrast with the more heterogeneous immigration from the "West". The primary reason for this migration is the higher wages in the Czech Republic. In 1994 the relative figures of GDP adjusted for parity of purchasing power were US$ 8,095 for the Czech Republic versus US$ 3,330 for the Ukraine as a whole and US$ 1,600 for the Zakarpatye region from which 49% of the respondents in the survey came. On an individual level, the average Czech wage is about US$ 330 per month, while 50% of the Ukrainian respondents put their last monthly wage before leaving for the Czech Republic at under US$ 27. The very low level of unemployment in the latter country (fluctuating around 4%) was also mentioned as an important factor. Migration was seen as a way of diversifying the family's source of income and 49% of the respondents had made their plans together with partners or close relatives, while 45% regularly send remittances to Ukraine (94% do so through friends or relatives). Looking at Ukrainian migration from the point of view of the dual market theory, these migrants' type and conditions of work, work load and earnings were all significantly worse than in the primary sector, which employs well educated people and offers them good earnings, job security and benefits. 53% of respondents were working and/or staying in the Czech Republic illegally at the time of the research, 73% worked as unqualified, unskilled workers or auxiliary workers, 62% worked more than 12 hours a day, and 40% evaluated their working conditions as hard. 51% had no days off, earnings were low in relation to the number of hours worked. and 85% said that their earnings did not increase over time. Nearly half the workers were recruited in Ukraine and only 4% expressed a desire to stay in the Czech Republic. Network theories were also borne out to some extent as 33% of immigrants came together with friends from the same village, town or region in Ukraine. The number who have relatives working in the Czech Republic is rising, and many wish to invite relatives or children to visit them. The presence of organisations which organised cross-border migration, including some which resort to organising illegal documents, also gives some support for the institutional theory. Mr. Drbohlav found that all the migration theories considered offered some insights on the situation, but that none was sufficient to explain it all. He also points out parallels with many other regions of the world, including Central America, South and North America, Melanesia, Indonesia, East Africa, India, the Middle East and Russia. For the survey of foreign and international firms, those chosen were largely from countries represented by more than one company and were mainly active in market services such as financial and trade services, marketing and consulting. While 48% of the firms had more than 10,000 employees spread through many countries, more than two thirds had fewer than 50 employees in the Czech Republic. Czechs formed 80% plus of general staff in these firms although not more than 50% of senior management, and very few other "easterners" were employed. All companies absolutely denied employing people illegally. The average monthly wage of Czech staff was US$ 850, with that of top managers from the firm's "mother country" being US$ 6,350 and that of other western managers US$ 3,410. The foreign staff were generally highly mobile and were rarely accompanied by their families. Most saw their time in the Czech Republic as positive for their careers but very few had any intention of remaining there. Factors in the local situation which were evaluated positively included market opportunities, the economic and political environment, the quality of technical and managerial staff, and cheap labour and low production costs. In contrast, the level of appropriate business ethics and conduct, the attitude of local and regional authorities, environmental production conditions, the legal environment and financial markets and fiscal policy were rated very low. In the final section of his work Mr. Drbohlav looked at the opinions expressed by the local Czech population in a poll carried out at the beginning of 1997. This confirmed that international labour migration has become visible in this country, with 43% of respondents knowing at least one foreigner employed by a Czech firm in this country. Perception differ according to the region from which the workers come and those from "the West" are preferred to those coming from further east. 49% saw their attitude towards the former as friendly but only 20% felt thus towards the latter. Overall, attitudes towards migrant workers is neutral, although 38% said that such workers should not have the same rights as Czech citizens. Sympathy towards foreign workers tends to increase with education and the standard of living, and the relatively positive attitudes towards foreigners in the South Bohemia region contradicted the frequent belief that a lack of experience of international migration lowers positive perceptions of it.

A two-microphone noise reduction system for cochlear implant users with nearby microphones. Part II: Performance Evaluation

Users of cochlear implants (auditory aids, which stimulate the auditory nerve electrically at the inner ear) often suffer from poor speech understanding in noise. We evaluate a small (intermicrophone distance 7 mm) and computationally inexpensive adaptive noise reduction system suitable for behind-the-ear cochlear implant speech processors. The system is evaluated in simulated and real, anechoic and reverberant environments. Results from simulations show improvements of 3.4 to 9.3 dB in signal to noise ratio for rooms with realistic reverberation and more than 18 dB under anechoic conditions. Speech understanding in noise is measured in 6 adult cochlear implant users in a reverberant room, showing average improvements of 7.9–9.6 dB, when compared to a single omnidirectional microphone or 1.3–5.6 dB, when compared to a simple directional two-microphone device. Subjective evaluation in a cafeteria at lunchtime shows a preference of the cochlear implant users for the evaluated device in terms of speech understanding and sound quality.

Das Internet als Forschungsinstrument für die Afrikanistik

L’internet est reconnue de manière générale comme un instrument de recherche valable. Bien que les langues africaines ne soient pas bien représentées sur internet il y a assez d’informations qui peuvent être découvertes dans la recherche sur terrain virtuel. Des petits vocabulaires et des descriptions de plusieurs langues africaines sont écrits par des auteurs individuels, des départements d’universités et des agences de voyages. Des textes en langues africaines sont en majorité publiés par des missionaries ou des ONGs. Ces données tendent à refléter les variantes standards des langues utilisées. Ce sont des contributions dans des forums qui sont témoins d’un langage proche de la langue parlée. On recherche les données linguistiques en utilisant les noms des langues respectives combinés avec des termes tels que “langue”, “grammaire”, “cours” ou le nom d’un auteur comme terme de recherche. Des chaînes de mots (en guillemets) qui sont très courantes dans le langage parlé et/ou écrit peuvent constituer de bons termes de recherche pour trouver des textes ou des contributions dans des forums.

Cochlear implantation in children and adults in Switzerland

The cochlear implant (CI) is one of the most successful neural prostheses developed to date. It offers artificial hearing to individuals with profound sensorineural hearing loss and with insufficient benefit from conventional hearing aids. The first implants available some 30 years ago provided a limited sensation of sound. The benefit for users of these early systems was mostly a facilitation of lip-reading based communication rather than an understanding of speech. Considerable progress has been made since then. Modern, multichannel implant systems feature complex speech processing strategies, high stimulation rates and multiple sites of stimulation in the cochlea. Equipped with such a state-of-the-art system, the majority of recipients today can communicate orally without visual cues and can even use the telephone. The impact of CIs on deaf individuals and on the deaf community has thus been exceptional. To date, more than 300,000 patients worldwide have received CIs. In Switzerland, the first implantation was performed in 1977 and, as of 2012, over 2,000 systems have been implanted with a current rate of around 150 CIs per year. The primary purpose of this article is to provide a contemporary overview of cochlear implantation, emphasising the situation in Switzerland.

NEW TOOLS FOR MONITORING GAMMA CAMERA UNIFORMITY

Detector uniformity is a fundamental performance characteristic of all modern gamma camera systems, and ensuring a stable, uniform detector response is critical for maintaining clinical images that are free of artifact. For these reasons, the assessment of detector uniformity is one of the most common activities associated with a successful clinical quality assurance program in gamma camera imaging. The evaluation of this parameter, however, is often unclear because it is highly dependent upon acquisition conditions, reviewer expertise, and the application of somewhat arbitrary limits that do not characterize the spatial location of the non-uniformities. Furthermore, as the goal of any robust quality control program is the determination of significant deviations from standard or baseline conditions, clinicians and vendors often neglect the temporal nature of detector degradation (1). This thesis describes the development and testing of new methods for monitoring detector uniformity. These techniques provide more quantitative, sensitive, and specific feedback to the reviewer so that he or she may be better equipped to identify performance degradation prior to its manifestation in clinical images. The methods exploit the temporal nature of detector degradation and spatially segment distinct regions-of-non-uniformity using multi-resolution decomposition. These techniques were tested on synthetic phantom data using different degradation functions, as well as on experimentally acquired time series floods with induced, progressively worsening defects present within the field-of-view. The sensitivity of conventional, global figures-of-merit for detecting changes in uniformity was evaluated and compared to these new image-space techniques. The image-space algorithms provide a reproducible means of detecting regions-of-non-uniformity prior to any single flood image’s having a NEMA uniformity value in excess of 5%. The sensitivity of these image-space algorithms was found to depend on the size and magnitude of the non-uniformities, as well as on the nature of the cause of the non-uniform region. A trend analysis of the conventional figures-of-merit demonstrated their sensitivity to shifts in detector uniformity. The image-space algorithms are computationally efficient. Therefore, the image-space algorithms should be used concomitantly with the trending of the global figures-of-merit in order to provide the reviewer with a richer assessment of gamma camera detector uniformity characteristics.

Unconscious word stem completion priming in a mirror-masking paradigm

The aim of this study was to investigate unconscious priming by the use of a spatial mirror-masking paradigm. Words and nonwords with no under-length letters are mirrored at their horizontal axis. The results are figures of geometric-like forms that contain letters in their upper part. In the three experiments reported in this study, a priming procedure used such mirrored words and nonwords as primes. Participants were ignorant of the nature of the construction of the stimuli. Perceptual reports of the participants revealed that they did not realize that words were hidden in the primes. Nevertheless, they showed priming in all three experiments. Priming effects were replicated with prime–target SOAs of between 1 and 3 s. Functional dissociations were found between ignorant and informed participants. Informed groups showed perceptual and semantic priming, while ignorant groups showed only perceptual priming.