This book is about music improvisation. It forges exciting and provocative new links between a range of theories and practices in texts that explore topics as varied as object-oriented ontology, game theory, ethical responsibility and breath. In improvisatory fashion, this book has been edited so that it weaves the texts amongst each other, subversively inserting a tactile piece of text – a text interlaced, as a woven cloth, among the contributing authors. The writings in this volume are both timely and diverse, exploring as they do an array of interdisciplinary and critical discourses, thereby illuminating the field of improvisation from different perspectives within the radical and diverse contexts that undercut contemporary improvisation studies and practices. It consists of eight chapters as researched by practising musicians and theorists and an introduction by one of the most inspiring improvisers of our generation – Evan Parker.

Invasive software composition as a new, component-based way to construct software systems is presented. To improve reuse, this method regards software components as greybox and integrates them during composition. Components are distinct in design, but are merged in implementations, leading to highly integrated and more efficient systems. Building on a minimal set of program transformations, composition operator libraries can be developed that parameterize, extend, connect, mediate, and aspect-weave components. Invasive software composition unifies several software engineering techniques such as generic programming, architecture systems, inheritance, and aspect-oriented programming. The book is centered around the JAVA language and a freely available demonstrator library called COMPOST. The book provides a wealth of material for researchers, students and professional software architects alike.

Perspectives on the voice and technology, from discussions of voice mail and podcasts to reflections on dance and sound poetry. Voice has returned to both theoretical and artistic agendas. In the digital era, techniques and technologies of voice have provoked insistent questioning of the distinction between the human voice and the voice of the machine, between genuine and synthetic affect, between the uniqueness of an individual voice and the social and cultural forces that shape it. This volume offers interdisciplinary perspectives on these topics from history, philosophy, cultural theory, film, dance, poetry, media arts, and computer games. Many chapters demonstrate Lewis Mumford's idea of the “cultural preparation” that precedes technological innovation—that socially important new technologies are foreshadowed in philosophy, the arts, and everyday pastimes. Chapters cover such technologies as voice mail, podcasting, and digital approximations of the human voice. A number of authors explore the performance, performativity, and authenticity [(or 'authenticity effect') of voice in dance, poetry, film, and media arts]; while others examine more immaterial concerns—the voice's often-invoked magical powers, the ghostliness of disembodied voices, and posthuman vocalization. [The chapters evoke an often paradoxical reassertion of the human in the use of voice in mainstream media including recorded music, films, and computer games. Contributors Mark Amerika, Isabelle Arvers, Giselle Beiguelman, Philip Brophy, Ross Gibson, Brandon LaBelle, Thomas Levin, Helen Macallan, Virginia Madsen, Meredith Morse, Norie Neumark, Andrew Plain, John Potts, Theresa M. Senft, Nermin Saybasili, Amanda Stewart, Axel Stockburger, Michael Taussig, Martin Thomas, Theo van Leeuwen, Mark Wood

Popular Mechanics inspires, instructs and influences readers to help them master the modern world. Whether it’s practical DIY home-improvement tips, gadgets and digital technology, information on the newest cars or the latest breakthroughs in science -- PM is the ultimate guide to our high-tech lifestyle.

How were women represented in Greek tragedy? This question lies at the heart of much modern scholarship on ancient drama, yet it has typically been approached using evidence drawn only from the thirty-two tragedies that survive complete - neglecting tragic fragments, especially those recently discovered and often very substantial fragmentary papyri from plays that had been thought lost. Drawing on the latest research on both gender in tragedy and on tragic fragments, the essays in this volume examine this question from a fresh perspective, shedding light on important mythological characters such as Pasiphae, Hypsipyle, and Europa, on themes such as violence, sisterhood, vengeance, and sex, and on the methodology of a discipline which needs to take fragmentary evidence to heart in order to gain a fuller understanding of ancient tragedy. All Greek is translated to ensure wide accessibility.

There is growing recognition and understanding of music’s fundamentally spatial natures, with significances of space found both in the immediacy of musical practices and in connection to broader identities and ideas around music. Whereas previous publications have looked at connections between music and space through singular lenses (such as how they are linked to ethnic identities or how musical images of a city are constructed), this book sets out to explore intersections between multiple scales and kinds of musical spaces. It complements the investigation of broader power structures and place-based identities by a detailed focus on the moments of music-making and musical environments, revealing the mutual shaping of these levels. The book overcomes a Eurocentric focus on a typically narrow range of musics (especially European and North American classical and popular forms) with case studies on a diverse set of genres and global contexts, inspiring a range of ethnographic, text-based, historical, and practice-based approaches.

These text are territories, dark forests, places to dwell. Sheets of language superimpose and recurrent words and images begin to fall upon one another like the bricks or sticks of an imagined palace waiting to be explored Where is this palace? Somewhere on an island between San Francisco, California and Medellin, Columbia. This palace is empty, the builder has left. But one can hear a melody drifting down its halls. If you have a little time, if you are one of the readership's unabashed children, take up your flashlight and enter this attempt to whistle things as they are, simultaneous and spiraling, full of leaves and laughter, women walking doodles in the morning, confusion as fusion considered, and the breeze that lifts us up into the trees.

In the first book to examine the overlooked relationship between musical improvisation and philosophical hermeneutics, Sam McAuliffe asks: what exactly is improvisation? And how does it relate to our being-in-the-world? Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics answers these questions by investigating the underlying structure of improvisation. McAuliffe argues that improvising is best understood as attending and responding to the situation in which one find itself and, as such, is essential to how we engage with the world. Working within the hermeneutic philosophical tradition – drawing primarily on the work of Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jeff Malpas – this book provides a rich and detailed account of the ways in which we are all already experienced improvisers. Given the dominance of music in discussions of improvisation, Part I of this book uses improvised musical performance as a case study to uncover the ontological structure of improvisation: a structure that McAuliffe demonstrates is identical to the structure of hermeneutic engagement. Exploring this relationship between improvisation and hermeneutics, Part II offers a new reading of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, examining the way in which Gadamer's accounts of truth and understanding, language, and ethics each possess an essentially improvisational character. Working between philosophy and music theory, Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics unveils the hermeneutic character of musical performance, the musicality of hermeneutic engagement, and the universality of improvisation.