DJ

The global move toward reducing the usage of lead in electronics manufacturing industry is driving the industry to switch from tin-lead alloys to pure tin (Sn) for its component plating process. This transition has resulted in a reliability concern due to the formation of conductive Sn whiskers, which can grow from the component after the plating process within a few hours to months, with their length ranging from 10 micrometers up to several millimeters. The conductive Sn whiskers may cause current leakage or short circuits, leading to catastrophic failure in the field. This paper presents the results of an experimental study on Sn whisker formation based on the effects of annealing for 1 h at 150°C and environmental test conditions from the joint electron devices engineering council standards. This paper consisted of one temperature cycling test and two isothermal storage tests. The characterization results obtained confirm that temperature cycling and isothermal storage favor the formation of whiskers on Sn-plated copper lead frames. The average maximum length of the whiskers increased with the number of temperature cycles and duration of isothermal storage. It is also shown that annealing for 1 h at 150°C of the samples is effective in reducing the average maximum length of whiskers. Growth mechanisms of the Sn whiskers due to the effects of annealing and without annealing are also discussed.

The thesis of this essay can be stated quite directly: Slavoj Žižek, despite having little to say about mashup and remixing in any direct way, engages this new media phenomena in both theory and practice, providing contemporary culture with both a conceptual understanding of the mashup and a carefully executed illustration of its methodology. The examination of this will proceed by way of two movements. The first investigates how Žižek's work, especially his general interest in "short circuiting," provides theoretical insight for understanding the mashup and its cultural significance. The second turns things around, demonstrating how the mashup explains and describes Žižek's own compositional practices. In other words, the first part explains the mashup by way of Žižek, while the second explains Žižek by way of the mashup.

The contemporary use of the turntable as a sound creation device makes it a quintessential post-modern musical instrument, and the destruction of the technology has allowed artists to explore concepts ranging from it historical socioeconomic value to the exploitation of its current representation as a virtuosic musical instrument in hip-hop and DJ culture.

This study investigates the correlations between theories of intense emotional experiences and production techniques used in electronic dance music (EDM), commonly known as “build-up” and “drop”, which are designed to create tension and a heightened emotional intensity among clubbers. This is done by descriptive and interpretive music analysis, where spectrograms and a schematic model visually represent the dominant production techniques. Through a theoretical framework consisting of musical expectancy and gravity, an analysis of two recently produced EDM tracks suggests that i) extensive use of uplifters, ii) the “drum roll effect”, iii) large frequency changes, iv) removal and reintroduction of bass and bass drum, and v) a contrasting “breakdown” cause tension and anticipation, which seem to correlate with a possible intensification of emotional experience. This is furthermore discussed and more broadly related to the club experience, drawing on the psychological concepts of Peak Experience, Strong Experiences with Music and Absorption.

Nel corso degli anni Novanta le donne hanno consolidato la propria presenza in qualità di musiciste in tutti i generi musicali, dall’indierock al pop mainstream e, a cominciare dal Duemila, anche nell’ambito della produzione elettronica; tale consolidamento è riscontrabile precipuamente nell’affermazione della loro presenza anche aldilà delle posizioni femministe emerse dal punk negli anni Settanta e da allora perseguite in seno ai gruppi Riot Girl e Girrrl Power. Il 2005 ha visto una crescita esponenziale del numero di produttrici e dj donne, nonché di fondatrici di etichette di musica elettronica. Sebbene questo trend non sembri destinato a fermarsi è pur vero che, a ben guardare, la presenza delle dj all’interno di importanti festival – non orientati sul tema del gender - così come nella programmazione dei club, rimane nettamente inferiore a quella dei colleghi dj, raggiungendo, secondo alcune stime, un rapporto di 1 a 9.

While existing analytical frameworks (Chion 1994, Coulter 2009) provide basic classification tools for experimental audiovisual works, they fall short in elaborating the variety of compositional possibilities falling within the notion of “synchresis” (Chion 1994). I propose to delineate the various shades of synchresis through a case study analysis of the somewhat simpler relations between light and sound in media installation works using luminosonic objects: objects which appear to emit both sound and light in an integrated manner.
I will suggest a graphical framework for the analysis and composition of audiovisual relations between sound media and self-illuminating light objects, detailing various forms of integrated audiovisual dynamics. The framework will relate the compositional concepts of vertical harmonicity and horizontal counterpoint (Chion 1994) to the perceptual notion of “cross- modal binding” (Whitelaw 2008), thus linking compositional dynamics to perceptual effects and affects.

House music has had a considerable influence in shaping the sound of pop music from the late 1980s onwards. From underground dance events to the pop charts, traces of this aesthetic can be found in many guises. This book is a comparative study which traces a genealogy of house music across England, the Netherlands and US cities, such as Chicago, from the early 1980s to the first half of the '90s. In doing so, it maps some of the power structures that are at play in the uses of its specific technologies of production and consumption. The author, Hillegonda Rietveld, was already steeped in dance club culture before she decided to write this loving piece of academic prose about house. Taking critical cultural studies as a vehicle and house music as its aesthetic fuel, she ram raids boundaries of academic disciplines, fusing ideas like a meticulous DJing curator.

Recent years have seen not just a revival, but a rebirth of the analogue record. More than merely a nostalgic craze, vinyl has become a cultural icon. As music consumption migrated to digital and online, this seemingly obsolete medium became the fastest-growing format in music sales. Whilst vinyl never ceased to be the favorite amongst many music lovers and DJs, from the late 1980s the recording industry regarded it as an outdated relic, consigned to dusty domestic corners and obscure record shops. So why is vinyl now experiencing a 'rebirth of its cool'?

Dominik Bartmanski and Ian Woodward explore this question by combining a cultural sociological approach with insights from material culture studies. Presenting vinyl as a multifaceted cultural object, they investigate the reasons behind its persistence within our technologically accelerated culture. Informed by media analysis, urban ethnography and the authors' interviews with musicians, DJs, sound engineers, record store owners, collectors and cutting-edge label chiefs from a range of metropolitan centres renowned for thriving music scenes including London, New York, Tokyo, Melbourne, and especially Berlin, what emerges is a story of a modern icon.

Endorsements & Reviews:

“Vinyl is a state-of-the-art treatment of an unforgettable object and medium that raises many of the issues central to contemporary anthropology. Its subject-matter should make it appealing to students and general audiences, while its theoretical sophistication makes it relevant to scholars of music, technology, popular culture, and cultural objects.” –  Jack David Eller, Anthropology Review Database

“Bartmanski and Woodward have created a masterpiece that any record lover should have on their shelves” –  Record Collector magazine

“Bartmanski and Woodward … provide meticulous detail as to how materiality matters … Bartmanski and Woodward divide their book into chapters that fervently trace various aspects of vinyl: its history, its functionality and use as a medium, its production and physical properties, and its consumption. In each chapter, they attend to the materially mediated cultural meanings within which vinyl is entangled.” –  Robin Bartram, Northwestern University, Qualitative Sociology

“Vinyl culture is back, and it’s even more vibrant than it was in its heyday, before digitalization. Bartmanski and Woodward take us to the epicentres of this revolution, and let those who are behind it tell us about their passions for this iconic medium. This is an exemplary study of the social and sensory life of things." - David Howes, Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada

“In the age of the digital, with the ubiquitous smart phone and MP3 technologies providing consumers with instant access to global sounds irrespective of where they are, Vinyl explores the persistence of an old technology within the production and consumption of music. In doing so it demonstrates the complex ways in which material objects form a meaningful part of our everyday lives – not just through the sounds of vinyl but by how it feels and looks. The text is beautifully written, impassioned, yet critical. Welcome to the world of the post-digital.” –  Michael Bull, Professor of Sound Studies, University of Sussex, UK.

“A passionate ode to the analogue record, and testament to how vinyl embodies the content it mediates, with each record's unique journey etched into the material” –  Hillegonda C. Rietveld, The Times Higher Education

This book is a faithful reproduction of the Wikipedia article “VJing”, based upon the revision of July 25th 2010, last edited by 77.12.27.96. This book was produced as a physical outcome of the “wiki-sprint“, a collaborative writing workshop that was held in May 2010 in the frame of Mapping Festival, Geneva.

The book includes a prologue by Raphael DiLuzio and an introduction by Ana Carvalho. The final editing and layout took place in August 2010 during Hyperactivity, a summer lab at Centre d’art de Neuchâtel.




Aknowledgements
by Manuel Schmalstieg

This book is the outcome of a collective writing workshop that was held in Geneva between May 6th-13th 2010. Taking place in the context of Mapping Festival, an event dedicated to live audiovisual performance art, this writing sprint gathered a small but dedicated team of contributors who spent seven days discussing, expanding, translating and improving the Wikipedia article dedicated to the artistic practice ofV]ing.

There are several people without whom this project would not happen. I would like to thank in particular Justine Beaujouan and Boris Edelstein from the Mapping Festival, who shared our enthousiasm and provided financial backing, work-space, food and accomodation. The whole Mapping team has been of great assistance, notably Stef who has managed travel logistics for the foreign Wiki-Sprinters.

I must thank all the participants in the sprint for their dedication: Ana Carvalho who-for our luck-stayed a few days longer than planned due to the icelandic volcano ashes, Tom Bassford who brought some friction and controversy into the editing process, Carrie Gates who rescued the sprint with advanced sticky-notes technology, Raphael Di Luzio who managed to participate regardless the melting of the ice blocks, Carole Thibaud who did an amazing translation work (maybe another book to be published), not to forget the online contributors who did their best to synchronize across their respective time zones: Alex Berry, CHiKA and Xarene Eskandar (USA), Kenneth Feinstein (Singapore), and Elsa Vieira (Prague).

Gratitude goes also to Ilan Katin and LeCollagiste, who visited us during the sprint to share with us their personal philosophical views on VJing. Last but not least, we are indebted to the 370-something wikipedians who have worked on the previous iterations of this article since it was created in 2006.
Probably the idea of this wiki-sprint wouldn't materialize without the inspiring work of the Floss Manuals community led by Adam Hyde, who perfected the revolutionary concept of the «book-sprint» as a means of producing textual content through a collaborative process that has proved amazingly efficient and exciting.
On a more technical side, our work was facilitated by the open-source software tool Ether- Pad, a web-based collaborative real-time text editor (sadly discontinued by Google after its aquisition in December 2009) which has proved tremendously useful for our project. We thank the German Pirate Party for maintaing a free and independent EtherPad server hosted at <www.piratenpad.de>.

The editing of this book, several months after the Wiki-Sprint, was carried out in August 2010 during the Summerlab, a group residency hosted by the Centre d'Art de NeucMtel. I thank the team of CAN, Arthur De Pury, Marie Villemin and Marie Lea Zwahlen, for providing a perfect context for this editorial activity.
August 2010

UNIDAD XOCHIMILCO DIVISIÓN DE CIENCIAS SOCIALES Y HUMANIDADES DEPARTAMENTO DE EDUCACIÓN Y COMUNICACIÓN UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA METROPOLITANA 2 GRACIAS: Mamá, gracias por la vida y por enseñarme que ésta se vive más allá de lo que uno cree, Edwin, carnal ¿qué puedo decir? gracias por la música y las enseñanzas, Papá, donde quiera que estés te sigo escuchando, Ariadna... llegaste y esto no deja de ser un sueño, a la banda... los verdaderos cuates, en especial al H. Club de Toby, Pamita y Fabian. Lauro Zavala, hiciste que redescubriera el gusto por vivir y aprender, Alfredo Cid, por la enseñanza de lo que realmente se trata este asunto llamado vida, a Susana González, por escuchar a un perfecto desconocido y abrirle las puertas, al Seminario de Semiología Musical,

El arte, en general, ha sido y sigue siendo una herramienta saciadora de necesidades tanto humanas como inhumanas. Su naturaleza también le permite servir al conocimiento, a la justicia y hasta a la felicidad. Es, básicamente, racional y emancipatoria. Es gracias a esa racionalidad que nos alejamos de las bestias, a pesar de que la definición de razón sea provisoria, dinámica y escurridiza; debemos buscarla, inventarla. El arte así pretende entregar sus razones, que sean reconocidas, aceptadas y/o rechazadas, en base a otras razones.

"Based on ethnographic interviews, this paper examines how Japanese hip-hop DJs distinguish themselves in the global marketplace in ways that reflect on Japan’s two self-images: its impenetrable uniqueness and its adeptness at assimilating other cultures (cf. Ivy, Iwabuchi). Following the autoexoticist strategies of Takemitsu and Akiyoshi, DJ Krush and Shing02 draw on Japanese uniqueness by integrating Japanese instruments (e.g. shakuhachi, shamisen, taiko), genres (biwa narrative), and aesthetics (ma, imperfection) into their works; Evis Beats takes a more parodic approach. At the DMC World Championships, Japanese DJs including DJ Kentarō have competed on the basis of eclecticism and originality in assimilating multiple sound sources. While countering the stereotype of the Japanese as imitators, this emphasis on originality may place some contestants too far from prevailing trends, putting them at a disadvantage. Both strategies imply that Japanese artists experience anxieties regarding their authenticity, necessitating strategies to differentiate themselves."

"Based on ethnographic interviews, this paper examines how Japanese hip-hop DJs distinguish themselves in the global marketplace in ways that reflect on Japan’s two self-images: its impenetrable uniqueness and its adeptness at assimilating other cultures (cf. Ivy, Iwabuchi). Following the autoexoticist strategies of Takemitsu and Akiyoshi, DJ Krush and Shing02 draw on Japanese uniqueness by integrating Japanese instruments (e.g. shakuhachi, shamisen, taiko), genres (biwa narrative), and aesthetics (ma, imperfection) into their works; Evis Beats takes a more parodic approach. At the DMC World Championships, Japanese DJs including DJ Kentarō have competed on the basis of eclecticism and originality in assimilating multiple sound sources. While countering the stereotype of the Japanese as imitators, this emphasis on originality may place some contestants too far from prevailing trends, putting them at a disadvantage. Both strategies imply that Japanese artists experience anxieties regarding their authenticity, necessitating strategies to differentiate themselves."

A critical commentary that presents and contextualizes a film and video making practice spanning three decades. It locates a contemporary visual music practice within current and emerging critical and theoretical contexts and tracks back the history of this practice to the author’s initial screenings of work as part of the 1980’s British Scratch video art movement.

At the heart of the body of work presented here is an exploration and examination of methods and working practices in the encounter of music, sound and moving image.
Central to this is an examination of the affective levels that sound and image can operate on, in a transsensorial fusion, and political and cultural applications of such encounters, whilst examining  the epistemological regimes such work operates in.

A combination of factors has meant that work such as this, arising in the UK provinces, can fall below the historicizing and critical radar – these include the ephemeral and transitory nature of live performance work; the difficulties of documenting such work; the fragility and degeneration of emerging and quickly obsolescent formats; and a predominance of a London–centric focus on curating, screening and historicizing of experimental film and video art practices.

The author's film and video practice has been screened nationally and internationally over three decades, and has been recognized as exemplary practice both in the early 1980s at the inception of the Scratch movement and in more recent retrospectives. The critical commentary argues that this work contributes new knowledge of the history, contexts and practices of film and video art and audiovisual and visual music practices.

The current study examined links between psychological wellbeing and involvement in HipHop culture (Rap, DJing, Breakdancing, Graffiti, etc) with regards to intrinsic motivation. A mixed methods approach was chosen to identify motivational themes and link them to components of prevalent wellbeing theories. Level of involvement was correlated with wellbeing while examining the moderating effect of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations from quantitative and qualitative data. Motivational themes could be linked to all components of wellbeing and statistical results suggested that high involvement in HipHop is linked to wellbeing, moderated by intrinsic and extrinsic aspiration scores. However, mean wellbeing scores of the current sample do not exceed those of comparison samples. Possible explanations and apparent inherent characteristics of a HipHop sample are discussed and further research into the positive potential of HipHop is suggested.

Video art can be highly intermedial. The format allows image and sound to be recorded and projected simultaneously, giving the user the opportunity to create live, audiovisual work.  I argue that the type of audience engagement encouraged by video work has changed significantly since the medium became commercially available in 1965; and that we can understand these changes in terms of two contrasting forms of liminality.  The early period of video work was characterised by interactivity, intermediality and the closed-circuit feed.  These site-specific works were often included as part of multi-media events rather than appearing on their own as a unified genre: as a result, we can place the early years of video work within a temporal, historical liminality.  By contrast, more recent video pieces form a coherent, if varied, body of work.  Often shown on flat screens in darkened rooms, recent audiovisual video tends to offer predetermined audiovisual narratives that immerse visitors entirely.  Such works place visitors within a spatial liminality as they are asked to hover between video world and the space of the gallery.  This chapter suggests that, although context is vital to both early and more recent styles of video work, the activation of space and the audio-visual relationships enabled within it are nevertheless articulated and activated in very different ways.

In this article, spirituality is explored within a post-human context through a case study of the contemporary post-industrial dancing body at post-rave dance clubs and parties characterised by DJ produced techno-house
music. The mental state of this body is driven outside of daily perceived psychological boundaries by an amplified pulsating electronic rhythm, whereby such altered states of consciousness can be chemically enhanced by the use of dance
drugs. As the dance floor ‘peaks’, in the words of its technician, the DJ, the dancing crowd can reach a transcendental moment perceived as a timeless forever now. For example, Sylvan notes in Traces of Spirit that: ‘The first theme that stands out as nearly universal in the dance floor experience of the
rave subculture is that of trance’ (2002: 127). Such a state of trance, or peak experience, produces a subjective perception of spirituality that seems to exist outside of the boundaries of material reality. However, the discussion will show that experiences of spirituality are nevertheless produced within the embodied lived experience of specific material and cultural contexts. In this case, these contexts are provided by the gendered discursive field of global post-rave cultures and the politics of the music genre aesthetics of techno-house.

En una de las últimas publicaciones sobre el cine español -escrita por Román Gubern, José Enrique Monterde, Julio Pérez Perucha, Esteve Riambau y Casimiro Torreiro, y titulada Historia del cine español, Madrid, Cátedra, 1995-, que pretende ofrecer una visión histórica orgánica y de conjunto para cubrir las lagunas y deficiencias historiográficas de nuestro cine, encontramos la desagradable ausencia de cualquier referencia, por pequeña que sea, a los músicos cinematográficos españoles. El olvido no se justifica por la mala calidad de la música del cine español, o por la despreocupación de sus directores; tanto en épocas pasadas como en los últimos años, encontramos ejemplos de realizadores que han mostrado un gran interés por la banda sonora. Sin la presencia de músicos como unos pocos, cualquier aproximación histórica, por muy bien realizada que esté, se convierte en una 'sorda e incompleta historia del cine español'.

This independently published text was published as a special, limited edition of Department of Public Sound #2 (booklet) and includes a vinyl record with recordings of ‘The Weekend of Adventure’ during the sixth edition of the Opera Days Rotterdam (27-29 May 2011). The text elaborates on my notion of 'radical vocality' on the stage through associated theories and concepts of extended voice. As this text was commissioned by the experimental art centre De Player in Rotterdam in the context of the Opera Days Rotterdam (Operadagen Rotterdam), I develop my ideas through concrete examples of vocal performance artists and operatic experiments from the 'Who’s Afraid of Modern Opera' late night event at De Player. After a brief clarification of the notion of radical vocality and its recent history, I focus on the theory of the disembodied voice and its related notions (virtual, disembodied and ventriloquist voice). I discuss these theories in relation to the philosophically much contested split in the voice between body and language (as suggested by Michelle Duncan). I then open these theories up to an understanding of auditory space and the territorial implications of 'autonomous' sound in the experience of the listener through a discussion of the work of vocal performance artists seen at the Opera Festival in Rotterdam: American artist Charlemagne Palestine, German composer-author Frieder Butzmann, German vocal performer/composer Alex Nowitz and American singer/performance artist Stephanie Pan.

This thesis explores the interactions occurred during dance floor experience at after-parties involving the consumption of electronic music during DJ performances. This exploration is focused in the house music scene in the city of Oporto, Portugal, especially at the Lottus After-Hours, and it took place between the years 2016 and 2018. Resorting to ethnographic methods, such as participatory observation and interviews, this thesis discusses the dance floor experience as an act of mutual implication between different social, technological, and material aspects. Furthermore, the scope of this research explores the potential of design as the discipline capable to mediate between those aspects.
Through the thematic analysis of the data, this thesis disentangles relations and interactions among those aspects into seven themes: music, venue, audience, abilities, enthusiasm, stances, and journey. Subsequently, these themes are reassembled in four theoretical models: the material assemblage, the social assemblage, the performative assemblage, and the experiential assemblage. These four theoretical assemblages constitute our effort to explore the process of shared agency among social, material and technological aspects involved in the design of the dance floor experience. Finally, the four assemblages are operationalised, resulting in the proposal of a Dance Floor Model Canvas as an instrument for the analysis of the different factors involved in the design of dance floor experience. The aim of this model is to help other designers to understand, modify, and design similar club experiences and performances.
Keywords: After-Hours; Clubbing; Dance Floor; Design; DJ; Experience; Urban Ethnography.

Within EDM culture, audio tracks are typically considered as “unfinished” musical material with their aesthetic potential not realized until being used as part of a DJ performance in the club.  A reportedly very emotional part of such performances is “the drop” – referring to a moment, where a strong anticipative tension that has been build up by means of the formal track structure is increased even further by help of a so-called “breakdown”-part, additionally coined by intensive application of DJ handcraft (volume, filters, audio effects..), and is then finally released with the return of the base drum and the sounding “core theme” – often accompanied by collective feelings of ecstasy and happiness expressed by a cheering crowd on the dance floor. To experimentally explore the responsible generative mechanism, 18 participants with a personal preference for EDM listened to one of two versions of the same EDM audio track. The second was different only regarding an artificial prolongation of the last “breakdown”-part of the track, a strategy often employed by DJs to create a highly intensive “drop”.  Listeners were instructed to continuously express their emotional feelings by help of a 2-dimensional continuous response measurement instrument. Resulting time-series data were analyzed by multi-level regression techniques demonstrating a significantly longer retention of positive valence after the drop for the prolonged version only, while there were no differences regarding arousal. Findings are interpreted with regard to the concept of “contrastive valence” and future prospects of examining the emotional impact of related DJ performance techniques are discussed.

Popular culture is a mass culture which develops with the culture industry. It is more is more interesting to explore the benefits to the community rather considering it as an art form. Cultural erosion in which strong structures are suppressed and the weak structures disappear are not significant. Popular culture is directed by the directors who were educated with advanced and intensified techniques; and who do not have economic concerns. Popular culture appeared in Turkey and began to show its impact with the westernization movements in music. The closure of places of workship, the tekke and zaviye, where religious music was played, the repressive and insulting attitutudes towards the public and Ottoman classical music and westernization policies created an emptiness and obscurity in the musical background of the Turkish people. As a result, the work of the culture industry, which was equipped with advanced administration and marketing techniques, became easier. This period should be called the era of culture industry. It can be said that this era was highly Doi Number :http://dx.doi.org/10.9761/jasss_575

La sesión estará dedicada a dos obras que recogen imaginarios culturales relativos a "la hispanidad", "la latinidad", y la "occidentalidad"; pero también la violencia cotidiana, la migración, el narcocapitalismo, la influencia de los mass media en la construcción de realidad, la narratividad procesual de corpografías migrantes especialmente complejas (el paisaje y el territorio como cuerpo), diferentes formas de colonialidad del discurso, "audiotopías", nuevas propuestas dentro de la dramaturgia musical, identidades fronterizas y espiritualidad contemporánea; reunidas en El Niño del compositor estadounidense John Adams (video-oratorio, 2000) y Únicamente la verdad (videoópera, 2008) de la compositora mexicana Gabriela Ortiz.

We live in the age of remix. Not just an appropriative phase, but an era of remix as cultural mediation—where recombination is a fundamental approach to cultural exchange (Manovich 1). Remix is the language of the Information Age , the coinage of Post-Postmodernism , rooted in long-developing systems of commercialism and communication. The very fiber of our social connectivity rests in an endless rewrite of materials, mashups,  pastiche and database sensibilities, intrinsically tied to everything from Google searches to language, television, art and text.
Remix is a manipulation and integration of cultural space, wherein the author-reader generates (and regenerates) moments in a self-curated, postproduction world. The resulting experiential theater is populated by fragments drawn from diverse sources, spinning elements with a cross-cultural, archival impulse that is both eclipsing and fragmentary.  Remix in contemporary art is the ‘appropriation’  of the 21st century, no longer the re-photography of Richard Prince, but a mutable landscape that uses a vast media-archive of memory and material: referred to here as the Celestial Jukebox.  It is a manifestation of the filter bubble’s  “parallel but separate universes” and the ghost-in-the-machine of convergence culture (Pariser 5).  Remix is bigger than the art world, bigger than commerciality—an invisible, increasingly normalized framework that provides strategies for communication and interaction. Conscious use of remix allows contemporary artists like Jennifer & Kevin McCoy and Anthony Discenza to build an interrogative, self-reflective investigation of the Information Age itself. The artist becomes a cultural DJ, a manipulator of archival compulsions that leads to “a kind of hunter-gatherer milieu…” (Miller). Such artists draw from the Celestial Jukebox, remixing, mashing and re-contextualizing material—providing a “systematic reworking of a source,” grounding individual perspective in a de-centering of authorship (Manovich 3).  Investigating contemporary recombination also critically anchors my own body of video work, where remix and manipulation open dialogue about the nature of televisual space-time, recollection and iconographic culture.

In this article, Pieter Verstraete focuses on ‘auditory distress’ as a constitutive aspect of listening to the extent that it bears a new perspective on sound experiences in contemporary performance practice. As a departure point, he contends that sound is always distressing, however pleasurable the experience may be. He finds subsequent support for this claim in R. Murray Schafer’s Tuning of the World, and in Roland Barthes and Roland Havas’s chapter “Écoute”, which both appeared in 1977. Despite their different angles and objectives, both texts claim for an understanding of sound as spatially transgressing certain acoustic horizons, hearing thresholds and subjective boundaries, as the ear cannot be closed off at will. Therefore, we have produced psychological and cognitive mechanisms to deal with the continuous intervention of sound. In a rather throw-away remark in his book The Concept of Music (1990), Robin Maconie suggests in a similar vein that the activity of listening and hearing consists of keeping unwanted intensities at bay. Such drastic explanations of the workings of the ear made Hillel Schwartz to conclude in her chapter “The Indefensible Ear: A History” (2003) that the ear’s accumulative susceptibility and its lingering breakdown are the epitomes of our modern hearing culture. As such, our increasingly noisy soundscapes in the theatre and outside call for an awareness of our listening competences.

By bringing together such novel perspectives on sound and by contextualizing the historical validity of these claims, Verstraete maps out a conceptual framework to discuss the performative role of sound in relation to present-day cultures and politics of listening. He discusses the ramifications of this framework by means of a case study: The Wooster Group’s recent music drama interpretation of Francesco Cavalli’s La Didone (2007-2009). In this performance, the musical spaces of Cavalli’s original dramma per musica are complemented by the sound-effects of blips and beeps and disembodied voices from Mario Bava’s science-fiction film Terrore Nello Spazio (aka Planet of the Vampires from 1965). The continuous juxtaposition of these two diegetic worlds and respective narratives creates a schizophonic perspective that urges the listener to create new connections, a new synthesis between the sounds, texts and images in an attempt to ‘perceive it all’: a global or evenly hovering attention. Yet the auditory distress constantly disrupts the evident mechanisms that would compensate the auditory distress. As such, the constant split in looking and listening (acousmatization) stresses the unframeability of sound and the necessity of the spectator to position oneself through her or his modes of listening, constantly shifting the attention. In this way, La Didone highlights the effects of auditory distress, causing awareness for the attitudes and regimes in listening that give salience, coherence, meaning and relative ‘closure’ to our fragmented experiences, ultimately filtered by our auditory imagination as the basis of these mechanisms. This awareness, in turn, gives rise to a mode of relating and positioning of the spectator as listening subject.

Hence, the proposed conceptual framework aims to offer a new perspective on the listener in contemporary theatre performances. In particular, it explains how the spectator as listener feels a desire to relate to sounds or music within the context of theatre’s hypermedial mechanisms, offering him occasional flashes of awareness about his responsibility as a listening subject. The spectator’s urge to respond to the auditory distress and the theatre’s promise to provide resolution in this desire precisely constitute the performative power of sound in the theatre. Ultimately, with the help of the case study, the conceptual framework aims to anchor the discussion of sound in contemporary (music) theatre within the comprehensive though much contested space of aurality. Verstraete concludes with a proposal to relate the still ill-defined notion of aurality to an understanding of listening as a foremost discursive practice.

This study seeks to expand our understanding of how dubplate specials are produced, circulated, and culturally valued in the international reggae sound system culture of the dub diaspora by analysing the production and performance of “Chase the Devil” (2005), a dubplate special commissioned by the Finnish MPV sound system from Jamaican reggae singer Max Romeo. A dubplate special is a unique recording where, typically, a reggae artist re-records the vocals to one of his or her popular songs with new lyrics that praise the sound system that commissioned the recording. Scholars have previously theorized dubplates using Walter Benjamin’s concept of aura, thereby drawing attention to the exclusivity and uniqueness of these traditionally analog recordings. However, since the advent of digital technologies in both recording and sound system performance, what Benjamin calls the “cult value” of producing and performing dubplates has become increasingly complex and multi-layered, as digital dubplates now remediate prior aesthetic forms of the analog. By turning to ethnographic accounts from the sound system’s DJ selectors, I investigate how digital dubplates are still culturally valued for their aura, even as the very concept of aura falls into question when applied to the recording and performance of digital dubplates.

This study examines how the particular performance practices associated with reggae music have contributed to the localization of dancehall culture in Finland. At the core of this culture lies the concept of the sound system, which, in addition to a DJ, includes a master of ceremonies, or MC, who during a performance, in various ways, interacts with the audience. This article is especially concerned with how Finnish sound systems localize through their performances a particular understanding of reggae as a genre in Finland, and promote reggae as what I define as the dancehall continuum. Theoretically, this study draws on the study of folklore as performance and on sociological genre theory. The empirical material consists of interviews with sound system operators and discussions on an Internet message board. Additionally, a close reading of the written history of reggae is conducted. The study shows that Finnish sound systems do not only act as intermediaries of Jamaican music, but engage the local audience in the creation of a particular adaptation of dancehall culture in Finland.

"http://vimeo.com/69186535
The finale (part 3) of an improvised duet performed with FluxNoisations and circuit-bent radio
(for front on view of the complete performance visit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eBra9gd5QQ )

Joshua B. Mailman: FluxNoisations (sounds of wood, metal, water, sandpaper, sticks, etc. and live computer graphics controlled through infrared camera motion-capture and sensor gloves)

Luke T. Taylor: circuit-bend radio (dismantled analog radio played with wet hands)

No recordings, audio samples, or videos are used.
All sounds and graphics are generated in the moment of performance.

Joshua Banks Mailman and Luke Thomas Taylor present an extended improvised performance of high-tech and low-fi pulsating noise. The event includes improvised live computer graphics, a colorful spectacle projected on a large screen, controlled by spontaneous body- and hand-movements of Mailman, through his FluxNoisations interactive-dance system. Through this system, Mailman simultaneously generates and steers a stream of percussive-noise sound. Interacting with this, Taylor performs on his own devised noise instrument: a circuit board he plays with wet hands. Through micro-fluctuations of the movement, pressure, and moisture of Taylor's hands, the circuit board displays its hidden potential—a sound world with chaotic connectivity of rich noises, clicks, and glissandos.
"

This booklet presents the key players in today’s music theatre landscape in Flanders. Profiles of music theatre companies are presented against the backdrop of a number of essays and statements dealing with major developments and issues in Flemish music theatre. With a strong sense of historical background, this book zooms in on current issues in relation to music theatre today. How do we expect cultural policy to categorize a hybrid ‘genre’ such as music theatre? Is the international (festival) circuit open enough to young and emerging artists? How can the artistic symbiosis music theatre calls for be dealt with in different institutional contexts: in education and training, in the media, in policy environments?

My contribution focuses on the current state of music theatre in Flanders and its key players. I describe today's heterogeneity of music theatre as a self-sustaining discipline and the success of open and negative definitions that have always rather undone institutionalized understandings of the genre. I see this in relation to the development of postdramatic theatre, which caused a blurring of genre distinctions.

Imagine night clubs, ecstatic crowds and a DJ’s pounding bass lines. And now think of a lecture theatre. You see any parallels yet? Well, how about that a DJ is nothing when the crowd does not dance, and a professor is unhappy when students, er, don’t feel entertained? On the dark side of the aesthetic development of education to be considered in this editorial there is a definite trend towards entertainment: the portemanteau word “edutainment” refers to both education and entertainment and has received critique as some teachers seem to invest more effort in entertaining students rather than educating them (Billsberry, 2014).

"El Gallo is an opera for six actors and two string quartets commissioned by Teatro de Ciertos Habitantes, Mexico’s most successful international theatre company. As the composer I collaborated with them from 2007 until the premiere in 2009, since when we have performed it over 100 times in Europe, the US and Latin America. It has also been filmed and recorded. The six company members are from Japan, Iran, Guadeloupe, and Mexico; their director is half-Lebanese, a reflection on modern Mexican identities.

El Gallo is unusual in that it has no words. There is a libretto which reflects the specific phonetic sounds that are sung on each note. The text was partly devised by each performer and partly composed directly with the music – it is not a language in any form. This device allows the characters and the story to communicate to an international audience, whatever their language and culture without the aid of programme notes, surtitles or any form of translation. Antecedents include Dario Fo’s Grammelot and Peter Brook’s Orghast. Each character creates a complete and identifiably human character facing the specific tensions the narrative demands, with varying success. All but one of the singer-actors had no formal vocal training, yet their performance is without doubt operatic vocally. Failure is in fact celebrated and performed as an integral part of the story, which also reflects perhaps a specific Latin-American context.

“El Gallo” is perhaps untranslatable in English. The title refers to the cockerel, a ubiquitous Mexican symbol and also to the “frog in the throat” which apparently causes one of the singers to perpetrate the catastrophe at the climax of the story. As someone who lived in Mexico for six years I will take the opportunity to illustrate a vision of artistic identity from the perspective of an insider/outsider alongside excerpts from a filming of the show.
"

Electronic dance music (EDM), in all its myriad genre stratifications, is subject to an interesting dichotomy as a result of being a studio-based practice. On the one hand, the standard currency of the style is the finished recording. It is released by producers to be manipulated by DJs and disseminated to listeners through a wide variety of channels, but is essentially fixed. On the other hand, the processes of studio production that are used to create these recordings have an ephemerality that belies the concreteness of their product. In my fifteen plus years of experience as a producer, I have worked with a variety of gear from analogue to digital and hardware to software. As technology changes, so does studio technique. The creative possibilities that are afforded by the latest piece of equipment or software are intimately linked to the evolution of EDM genres. This forward drive in studio technology is also a key factor in a finished track being, in some ways, un-reproducible. When I started producing music, it was in a hybrid hardware/software studio. Working with tape delays or programming analogue synthesizers meant that each pass of a recording was often different. Lately I have been using a totally software-based studio, which is more sonically stable. Nonetheless, there is now the risk of programs being vulnerable to obsolescence as computer hardware and operating systems change. While finished recordings can be exactly and infinitely duplicated, the studio environments used to created them are actually quite ephemeral.

The global move toward reducing the usage of lead in electronics manufacturing industry is driving the industry to switch from tin-lead alloys to pure tin (Sn) for its component plating process. This transition has resulted in a reliability concern due to the formation of conductive Sn whiskers, which can grow from the component after the plating process within a few hours to months, with their length ranging from 10 micrometers up to several millimeters. The conductive Sn whiskers may cause current leakage or short circuits, leading to catastrophic failure in the field. This paper presents the results of an experimental study on Sn whisker formation based on the effects of annealing for 1 h at 150°C and environmental test conditions from the joint electron devices engineering council standards. This paper consisted of one temperature cycling test and two isothermal storage tests. The characterization results obtained confirm that temperature cycling and isothermal storage favor the formation of whiskers on Sn-plated copper lead frames. The average maximum length of the whiskers increased with the number of temperature cycles and duration of isothermal storage. It is also shown that annealing for 1 h at 150°C of the samples is effective in reducing the average maximum length of whiskers. Growth mechanisms of the Sn whiskers due to the effects of annealing and without annealing are also discussed.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=5929542&tag=1