Hierarchical Tension Research Articles

Celebrating local heritage while marginalizing local language: the multilingual linguistic landscapes of Seongsu-dong in Seoul

ABSTRACT This study analyses the multilingual linguistic landscapes made up of languages, visual materials, and built environments in Seongsu-dong, where old industrial sites and new commercial places are indiscriminately juxtaposed. This study focuses particularly on (1) how languages are associated with different built environments of new commercial places and old industrial sites, (2) how the local industrial heritage is visually mobilised by new commercial places in ‘the pursuit of visibility’, and (3) how remaining industrial sites are both linguistically and visually marginalised. The languages, built environments, and visual materials, along with the users of the spaces, create contrasting semiotic aggregates. These aggregates expose the hierarchical tension between the commercial and the vernacular landscape in the neighbourhood. The commercial places highlight the local industrial heritage as globally trendy visual components, achieved through well-designed Roman alphabet letters or minimally inscribed Korean letters. This creates a cosmopolitan commercial landscape. In contrast, old industrial sites are filled with banal industrial texts in Korean, resulting in a vernacular landscape. The visual representation of the trendy industrial heritage, the use of Western-originating languages, and their cosmopolitan values combine to form a semiotic aggregate that reveals the underlying aspiration embedded in the town’s nickname, the Brooklyn of Seoul.

Cutting Edges: Professional Hierarchy vs. Creative Identity in Nicolas de Launay’s Fine Art Prints

In 1783, Nicolas De Launay copied Les Baignets by Jean-Honoré Fragonard, stating it was made “by his very humble and very obedient servant”, an evidence of the hierarchical tensions between painters and printmakers during the eighteenth-century. However, De Launay’s loyalty is not absolute, since a critical artistic statement is found at the edge: an illusory oval frame heavily adorned with leaves and fruits of Squash, Hazelnuts, and Oak. This paper wishes to acknowledge this meticulously engraved frame, and many more added to copies throughout De Launay’s successful career, as highly relevant in examining his ‘obedience’ and ‘humbleness’. With regard to eighteenth-century writings on botany and authenticity, and to current studies on the print market, I offer a new perspective in which engravers are appreciated as active commercial artists establishing an individual signature style. In their conceptual and physical marginality these decorations allow creative freedom which challenges concepts of art appropriation and reproduction, highly relevant then and today.

Making Erotic Thrillers: Labour, Power and Time in the Italian Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s

Using the example of the Italian film industry of the 1960s and 1970s and, in particular, popular erotic thriller cycles, the article focuses on different types of time periods closely associated with film production: the shooting stage and the phase of apprenticeship for newcomers. These labour temporalities were fraught with hierarchical tensions and power imbalances. Directors appropriated the length of film shooting as a means of occupational distinction. Under the pretext of apprenticeship, experienced mentors took advantage of moneyless trainees who lacked a personal network of supportive film practitioners. Apprentices weathered through this period in anticipation of fairly compensated freelance work.

A Computational Model of Tonal Tension Profile of Chord Progressions in the Tonal Interval Space.

In tonal music, musical tension is strongly associated with musical expression, particularly with expectations and emotions. Most listeners are able to perceive musical tension subjectively, yet musical tension is difficult to be measured objectively, as it is connected with musical parameters such as rhythm, dynamics, melody, harmony, and timbre. Musical tension specifically associated with melodic and harmonic motion is called tonal tension. In this article, we are interested in perceived changes of tonal tension over time for chord progressions, dubbed tonal tension profiles. We propose an objective measure capable of capturing tension profile according to different tonal music parameters, namely, tonal distance, dissonance, voice leading, and hierarchical tension. We performed two experiments to validate the proposed model of tonal tension profile and compared against Lerdahl’s model and MorpheuS across 12 chord progressions. Our results show that the considered four tonal parameters contribute differently to the perception of tonal tension. In our model, their relative importance adopts the following weights, summing to unity: dissonance (0.402), hierarchical tension (0.246), tonal distance (0.202), and voice leading (0.193). The assumption that listeners perceive global changes in tonal tension as prototypical profiles is strongly suggested in our results, which outperform the state-of-the-art models.

Assistive Model to Generate Chord Progressions Using Genetic Programming with Artificial Immune Properties

In Western tonal music, tension in chord progressions plays an important role in defining the path that a musical composition should follow. The creation of chord progressions that reflects such tension profiles can be challenging for novice composers, as it depends on many subjective factors, and also is regulated by multiple theoretical principles. This work presents ChordAIS-Gen, a tool to assist the users to generate chord progressions that comply with a concrete tension profile. We propose an objective measure capable of capturing the tension profile of a chord progression according to different tonal music parameters, namely, consonance, hierarchical tension, voice leading and perceptual distance. This measure is optimized into a Genetic Program algorithm mixed with an Artificial Immune System called Opt-aiNet. Opt-aiNet is capable of finding multiple optima in parallel, resulting in multiple candidate solutions for the next chord in a sequence. To validate the objective function, we performed a listening test to evaluate the perceptual quality of the candidate solutions proposed by our system. Most listeners rated the chord progressions proposed by ChordAIS-Gen as better candidates than the progressions discarded. Thus, we propose to use the objective values as a proxy for the perceptual evaluation of chord progressions and compare the performance of ChordAIS-Gen with chord progressions generators.

Essential tensions in interdisciplinary scholarship: navigating challenges in affect, epistemologies, and structure in environment–society research centers

Scholars have enumerated unique challenges to collaborative interdisciplinary research, many of which evade prescriptive solutions. Some of these challenges can be understood as “essential tensions,” necessary and persistent contradictory imperatives in the scientific process. Drawing from interviews with internationally renowned interdisciplinary environment–society research center leaders primarily located in United States academic institutions, we identified three hierarchical tensions in collaborative interdisciplinary research: (1) an epistemic tension between knowledge generation processes that blend multiple approaches into one unified intellectual perspective versus pluralistic processes that maintain multiple, discrete intellectual perspectives, (2) a structural tension between organizations that provide stability to persist and build unified knowledge, while maintaining the flexibility to experiment with novel organizational arrangements that foster innovation, and (3) “affective” tensions for individual researchers between the security of working within cohesive research communities versus attraction to the creative challenges in new intellectual communities. Our results indicate that these tensions are interdependent, similar to previous observations that disciplinary and interdisciplinary knowledge productions are linked. Rather than attempt to resolve tensions between dueling directives, leaders of interdisciplinary research centers can manage essential tensions with purpose through process-oriented and self-reflective management of the unique epistemic culture of the research centers they lead.

Developing a Universal Framework for Communication During Intraoperative Crises: Lessons Learned from Aviation

In their article on learning lessons from aviation, Bhangu et al. [1] recommend the inclusion of ‘‘surprise and startle’’ scenarios in surgical simulation training. We feel that, in addition to exposing trainees to the technical aspects of these scenarios, there is a need for a standardised communication framework during such events that surgeons universally can implement—a framework with similar intent to the WHO surgical safety checklist [2] but that provides an algorithm for how surgeons from any locality can express concern and communicate it to others on their team during high stress situations. The need for such a standardised language in aviation was exemplified by the experiences of Korean Air in the 1990s, when a series of flight crashes were attributed to a ‘‘mitigated speech’’ phenomenon, where there was a distinct lack of transparent, direct and effective communication both inter-cockpit (i.e. between the first pilot and the captain) and externally (with Air Traffic Control) due to cultural speech formalities [3]. In these cases, it was recognised that communication failure and not technical incompetence was the dominant factor leading to catastrophe. The introduction of a standardised language—in this case the use of a formalised English syntax over the more nuanced Korean language—helped combat cultural and hierarchical tensions within the cockpit as well as removing the language barrier when communicating externally. In situations of ‘‘surprise and startle’’ in the operating room, the use of a universally accepted code through which members of the surgical team can communicate, in English or otherwise, may similarly limit the impact of cultural and hierarchical constraints. This is particularly important given the diversification of the global surgical community and would be facilitated by the precedent already set by the WHO surgical checklist.

Cleansing the social body: Witchcraft accusation in an African society as an example of multi‐hierarchical victimage

As articulated by Burke, victimage arises from hierarchical tensions that occur between people who occupy different rungs of the same hierarchy. In this paper, we argue that victimage can also be a response to tensions that arise at the intersection of two or more overlapping (and possibly conflicting) hierarchies. Because those who participate in such victimage occupy different rungs of the intersecting hierarchies, their relative position with respect to one another differs from hierarchy to hierarchy. By resorting to victimage within a multi‐hierarchical arrangement, we contend that people make use of resources derived from their advantageous placement in one hierarchy to better their position within another. In order to develop a model of multi‐hierarchical victimage, we examine as an example of such a witchcraft accusation trial which took place among the Mijikenda of the Kenyan coast.

EXPLANATION, SOCIAL SCIENCE, AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION: A RESPONSE TO SEGAL WITH COMMENT ON THE ZYGON EXCHANGE

Abstract. In the issue of Zygon devoted to methodological reflection on the boundaries between natural science, social science, and theology (September 1990), Edward 0. Wilson pointed to the hierarchical tension between disciplines and antidisciplines. Working within this framework, Robert Segal outlined several “misconceptions of social science” held by religionists who fear it reduces, or “explains away” their subject. Philip Gorski, Nancey Murphy, and Kenneth Vaux suggested greater harmony but left Segal's challenge largely unaddressed. Religionists, says Segal, distrust social science because they think it ignores “the believer's point of view,” denies the “irreducibility” of religion, prefers materialist and mechanical explanations, and denies religious truth.Do religionists really claim all, or just some of these things? Are some perhaps not misconceptions, but accurate understandings of a real conflict?This article contends that distinctions need to be made; that at most, the humanistic assumptions of religionists compete with only one form of social science–reductionism; and further, that where conflict does arise, it is scientifically beneficial. Religionists differ from theologians, who argue from confessional premises, but the two are allied in opposing reductionism. Precisely because it is genuine, the debate with reductionist social science promises to advance understanding.