Separate Voices Research Articles

The Challenge of Quantification: An Interdisciplinary Reading

The present work looks at what we call “the multiverse of quantification”, where visible and invisible numbers permeate all aspects and venues of life. We review the contributions of different authors who focus on the roles of quantification in society, with the aim of capturing different and sometimes separate voices. Several scholars, including economists, jurists, philosophers, sociologists, communication and data scientists, express concerns or identify critical areas of our relationship with new technologies of ‘numericization’. While mindful of the important specificities of the different families of quantification, we use our broad and holistic canvas to explore possible spaces for a more systematic investigation of incumbent and novel quantifications, as to increase communication among disciplinary communities, and among these and society, in the pursuit a democratic agency and self-defence.

Counting or discriminating the number of voices to assess binaural fusion with single-sided vocoders.

For single-sided deafness cochlear-implant (SSD-CI) listeners, different peripheral representations for electric versus acoustic stimulation, combined with interaural frequency mismatch, might limit the ability to perceive bilaterally presented speech as a single voice. The assessment of binaural fusion often relies on subjective report, which requires listeners to have some understanding of the perceptual phenomenon of object formation. Two experiments explored whether binaural fusion could instead be assessed using judgments of the number of voices in a mixture. In an SSD-CI simulation, normal-hearing listeners were presented with one or two "diotic" voices (i.e., unprocessed in one ear and noise-vocoded in the other) in a mixture with additional monaural voices. In experiment 1, listeners reported how many voices they heard. Listeners generally counted the diotic speech as two separate voices, regardless of interaural frequency mismatch. In experiment 2, listeners identified which of two mixtures contained diotic speech. Listeners performed significantly better with interaurally frequency-matched than with frequency-mismatched stimuli. These contrasting results suggest that listeners experienced partial fusion: not enough to count the diotic speech as one voice, but enough to detect its presence. The diotic-speech detection task (experiment 2) might provide a tool to evaluate fusion and optimize frequency mapping for SSD-CI patients.

Cadence formulas in instrumental music of the Renaissance and early Baroque in the context of that time’s theory of music and composition practice

Cadence (ending) formulas are one of the most intriguing phenomena in music. They occur in works of all historical periods and styles and they have a variety of forms: from melodic and harmonic turns to rhythmic or even dynamic ones. However, this issue is important not only from the perspective of theory of music or composition technique but also performance practice as the way how a singer or instrument player understands the functioning of separate elements of a piece will impinge on the sound shape of the work presented to the public. Reading the extramusical message hidden in the structure of a piece should be regarded particularly significant for the interpretation of pieces written in times when adding precise performance guidelines in the score was not practiced. In case of compositions written in the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries, the way how ending formulas functioned was a result of the specificity of that time’s modal system and the principles of polyphonic composition, in which the role of melodic (horizontal) thinking prevailed over the harmonic (vertical) one. The issue of cadences gains special importance while analysing instrumental works in which the absence of verbal text hinders the division of the piece into segments. It only becomes possible thanks to analysing the structure of the piece, including the allocation of modal ending formulas in separate voices of the composition. Howsoever the topic of cadences in music of the 16th and 17th centuries has been discussed many times in the literature on the subject, it has had no satisfactory presentation related to that time’s instrumental repertoire. The present article is an attempt to elaborate on the deliberations on the topic of modal cadence formulas in instrumental works from the 16th and the first half of the 17th centuries. Its first part has an introductory character and it touches on the notion of cadence in modern theoretical-musical and encyclopaedic texts compared to composition theory and practice in the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. The second part of the article is an analysis of selected instrumental works from the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th centuries meant for different types of line-ups – the four-voice canzona by Florentio Maschera, canzona by Girolamo Frescobaldi for solo instrument with basso continuo and one of the ricercati by Giovanni Bassano meant for solo melodic instrument without accompaniment.

A preliminary look at relationships between married gay men and lesbians and their parents-in-law: Five case studies

With marriage between lesbians and between gays now legal in the United States, it is important to gain an understanding of how in-law relationships function for this population. Five case studies, part of a larger study of in-law relationships, are presented that help further knowledge of the potential obstacles that some couples may face in relation to their in-laws. Common experiences include relationships improving over time; struggling with acceptance; feeling closer to parents-in-law because other adult children or adult children-in-law have fallen out of favor; recognizing the significant role that the child-in-law’s spouse plays in the relationship between the child-in-law and the parent-in-law; understanding the role that the larger community plays; considering both parents-in-law as separate voices in the in-law dyad; and experiencing feelings of ambivalence that arise between family members. Practice implications for clinicians are included as are implications for future research.

NATURE AND THE SPECIFIC FEATURES OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLYPHONIC HEARING

Polyphonic hearing is a component of musical hearing. Polyphonic hearing implies the ability to perceive a simultaneous motion of two or more separate voices within the general sound fabric of a musical piece. Polyphonic hearing can be developed like all other sides of musical hearing. The development of polyphonic hearing can be enhanced by different work forms at the lessons in sol-fa: intoning, analysis by ear, many-voiced music dictation. The development of different sides of musical hearing during the process of work on solfeggio is really essential for a future musician-professional. Research aim: to determine the specific features of polyphonic hearing and characterize its developmental stages.On the basis of long pedagogical experience, this paper reveals the specificity of polyphonic hearing, identifies and characterizes its developmental stages in the process of work on sol-fa.

Auditory scene reproduction for tele-operated robot systems

ABSTRACTIn a tele-operated robot environment, reproducing auditory scenes and conveying 3D spatial information of sound sources are inevitable in order to make operators feel more realistic tele-presence. In this paper, we propose a tele-presence robot system that enables reproduction and manipulation of auditory scenes. This tele-presence system is carried out on the basis of 3D information about where targeted humans are speaking, and matching with the operator's head orientation. We employed multiple microphone arrays and human tracking technologies to localize and separate voices around a robot. In the operator site, separated sound sources are rendered using head-related transfer functions (HRTF) according to the sound sources' spatial positions and the operator's head orientation that is being tracked real time. Two-party and three-party interaction experiments indicated that the proposed system has significantly higher accuracy when perceiving direction of sounds and gains higher subjective scores in sense of presence and listenability, compared to a baseline system which uses stereo binaural sounds obtained by two microphones mounted on the humanoid robot's ears.

The originality of the modern Ukrainian church oeuvre: on an example of the chants «All-night Vigil» Olena Yunek. Formulation of the problem

The originality of the modern Ukrainian church oeuvre: on an example of the chants «All-night Vigil» Olena Yunek. Formulation of the problem

The originality of the modern Ukrainian church oeuvre: on an example of the chants «All-night Vigil» Olena Yunek. Formulation of the problem

The originality of the modern Ukrainian church oeuvre: on an example of the chants «All-night Vigil» Olena Yunek. Formulation of the problem

In and out of Flow! improvisatory decision-making in dance and spoken word

Abstract Flow! is an open-stage performance event that sees dancers in close conversation with spoken word artists. From its roots in the United States, slam poetry has become a cultural phenomenon, touching the hearts and minds of those involved in the hip hop genre and that of modern literature. Over the years, the lines between this form of performance and other arts have begun to blur. Flow! takes this a step further, allowing the spoken word to entwine itself with the human body. This event sees a succession of duets and group performances, teaming up poets with dancers to showcase their art forms collaboratively. Each pair locks, pops, spits and rhymes their way through a spontaneous set. Using the experience of previous Flow! artists and workshop participants, and examples of other projects and research into improvisatory practices and dance/spoken word collaboration across the United Kingdom, we look at elements of divided attention for the artists and the audience. We expand this to include the time lapse that can occur when one art form responds to another in order to inform a discussion around a dancer’s improvisatory decision-making process. To do this, we analyse the concepts used in Flow! as three separate voices, offering differing perspectives on how the dancer’s mind responds to new spoken word stimuli.

A POLYPHONIC DICTATION AS A FORM OF WORK ON HARMONIOUS HEARING

Harmonious hearing is one kind of musical hearing that manifests itself in relation to a simultaneous sounding of consonances (a complex of sounds of different pitch) and mutual relationships between consonances.
 
 A polyphonic music dictation is one of the most important and complicated forms of work for the development of harmonious hearing during sol-fa classes at a higher education establishment. The skill of remembering a polyphonic dictation and quickly fixing the heard music involves an organic combination of listening to separate sounds and to the harmonious vertical of sounds, as well as their functional interaction, which promotes the development of musical thinking in general.
 
 The given research is concerned with the comparison of the methodological recommendations for fixing polyphonic dictations, as well as with working out the algorithm of the polyphonic dictation notation.
 
 Research aim: to study the principles of a polyphonic dictation and specificity of its notation.
 
 Work on a polyphonic dictation implies an organic combination of hearing separate voices and the harmonious vertical, comprehending each moment of sounding and their functional-logical interconnection.

Neural representation of a melodic motif: Effects of polyphonic contexts

In music, a melodic motif is often played repeatedly in different pitch ranges and at different times. Event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that the mismatch negativity (MMN) reflects memory trace processing that encodes two separate melodic lines (“voices”) with different motifs. Here we investigated whether a single motif presented in two voices is encoded as a single entity or two separate entities, and whether motifs overlapping in time impede or enhance encoding strength. Electroencephalogram (EEG) from 11 musically-trained participants was recorded while they passively listened to sequences of 5-note motifs where the 5th note either descended (standard) or ascended (deviant) relative to the previous note (20% deviant rate). Motifs were presented either in one pitch range, or alternated between two pitch ranges, creating an “upper” and a “lower” voice. Further, motifs were either temporally isolated (silence in between), or temporally concurrent with two tones overlapping. When motifs were temporally isolated, MMN amplitude in the one-pitch-range condition was similar to that in the two-pitch-range upper voice. In contrast, no MMN, but P3a, was observed in the two-pitch-range lower voice. When motifs were temporally concurrent and presented in two pitch ranges, MMN exhibited a more posterior distribution in the upper voice, but again, was absent in the lower voice. These results suggest that motifs presented in two separate voices are not encoded entirely independently, but hierarchically, causing asymmetry between the upper and lower voice encoding even when no simultaneous pitches are presented.

Extracting the neural representation of tone onsets for separate voices of ensemble music using multivariate EEG analysis.

Natural soundscapes of everyday life, for example, communication in a crowded get-together or noisy environment, challenge our proficiency in organizing sounds into perceptually meaningful sequences. All the more, music might spark our processing capabilities, as it provides acoustic scenes with a large number of concurring sound sources. Yet, when listening to music we are able to organize the complex soundscape into streams, segregate foreground and background, recognize voices, melodies, patterns, motifs, and switch our attention between different aspects of a piece of music. Auditory stream segregation, the perceptional process which underlies this capability, has fascinated researchers for many years, resulting in numerous studies exploring its mechanisms and determinants. In a nutshell (for a detailed review, see Moore & Gockel, 2002), the segregation of a complex audio signal into streams can occur on the basis of many different acoustic cues (Van Noorden, 1975); it is assumed to rely on processes at multiple levels of the auditory system, and it reflects a number of different processes, some of which are stimulus-driven while others are of more general cognitive nature, that is, involving attention and/or knowledge (Bregman, 1994).Electrophysiological indices of auditory stream segregation have been detected in several approaches (Sussman, 2005; Sussman, Horvath, Winkler, & Orr, 2007; Winkler, Takegata, & Sussman, 2005; Yabe et al., 2001; for an overview, see Snyder & Alain, 2007). One line of research focused on the mismatch negativity (MMN) as neural index for a distinct perceptional state of stream segregation by constructing tone sequences such that only a perceptual segregation into two streams would allow a MMNgenerating sound pattern to emerge. Following a similar principle, neural steady-state responses were found to reflect the formation of separate streams (Chakalov, Draganova, Wollbrink, Preissl, & Pantev, 2013) in magnetoencephalography (MEG). Using electroencephalogram (EEG), an influence of frequency separation of consecutive tones on the N1-P2 complex amplitudes was reported (Gutschalk et al., 2005; Snyder, Alain, & Picton, 2006). Critically, this trend correlated with the perception of streaming in individual participants; a similar effect was reported for the N1 component.This suggests that the amplitude of early auditory event-related potential (ERP) components like the N1-P2 complex can inform about the perceptional state with respect to segregation/coherence of complex auditory stimuli. Because the N1-P2 complex as a sensory-obligatory auditory-evoked potential can be utilized without imposing a complex structure, for example, an oddball paradigm, on the stimulus material, it may be promising for investigating auditory stream segregation in more naturalistic listening scenarios.In the domain of speech processing, cortical onset responses that reflect changes in the waveform envelope (termed envelopefollowing responses [EFRs]) have been a target of interest for a long time (Kuwada, Batra, & Maher, 1986; Purcell, John, Schneider, & Picton, 2004; Aiken & Picton, 2006). Several approaches and methods aiming at extracting EFRs in naturalistic listening scenarios from continuous EEG or MEG have been proposed (Aiken & Picton, 2008; Kerlin, Shahin, & Miller, 2010; Lalor, Power, Reilly, & Foxe, 2009; Lalor & Foxe, 2010; O'Sullivan, 2015). These methods have provided a distinct picture of the brain signals following the speech waveform envelope and, in particular, been utilized to study the human cocktail party problem of understanding speech in noisy settings. In the domain of music processing a marked reflection of the sound envelope has been detected in the EEG signal of short segments of naturalistic music (Schaefer, Farquhar, Blokland, Sadakata, & Desain, 2011). Unsupervised approaches (Cong et al., 2012; Thompson, 2013) have confirmed that note onsets leave a reflection in the listener's EEG consistently across subjects and stimuli. …

Influence of virtual room acoustics on choir singing.

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted)The aesthetic appreciation of a choir performance heavily relies on both the singers' skills and the acoustical characteristics of the venue. Choir directors usually know that choral performances are greatly influenced by room acoustics, while the choir singers experience the difference between singing in a small room for practice and performing in a comparatively large space like a concert hall. Clearly, it would be beneficial for musicians to understand both the effect of room acoustical features on their performance and how best to adjust tempo, phrasing, dynamics, and musical parameters with respect to a given venue's acoustical environment.Investigations into the interplay of acoustics and architecture in ancient Greek and Roman theaters reveal that architects from this early period, such as Vitruvius, were already aware of the physical aspects of sound wave propagation and general aspects of room acoustics (Declercq & Dekeyser, 2007; Farnetani, Prodi, & Pompoli, 2008). In later times, scholars like Athanasius Kircher (1602- 1680) systematically explored the characteristics of acoustic spaces through various experiments on the reflection of sound, as documented in Part IV of the ninth book of his Musurgia Universalis (Kircher, 1650).Likewise, early composers were knowledgeable about the acoustical features of the locations in which their music was performed (in churches, concert halls, chambers, open-air, etc.). Indeed, the room size of a venue was reflected in certain composition rules, the way of instrumentation, and specific styles of performance of that time. For instance, in contrast to traditional (unison) Gregorian chants, melodic lines (with separate voices) in Renaissance polyphony were often composed in a specific manner to avoid stylistically unsuitable dissonances that could occur due to late early reflections and very long reverberation times in large rooms (e.g., Wilson, 1959).Additionally, composers of the late Renaissance and early Baroque period developed the Venetian polychoral style by placing groups of singers at different positions in a church in order to adapt to the acoustical conditions of (large) churches in Venice (e.g., Zarlino, 1558). Though this kind of musical conceptualization remains a special case of interaction between music and architec- ture, it shows that composers had a considerable knowledge of the influence of room acoustics. Later on, musicians and composers like Quantz (1752) and Mozart (1756) provided a number of recommendations regarding room size and how to adjust the style of performance (e.g., adjustments) to the acoustical characteristics of a venue. For instance, Quantz (1752) recommends playing slower in large rooms compared to playing in small chambers to preserve the intelligibility of the music.Taking into account the important role of acoustics for music performances, it is surprising that not much research has been done in this area from the musicians' point of view as compared to the listener's perspective which is a crucial factor in designing concert halls. Gade (1989a, 1989b), as one of the rare architectural acousticians who has considered acoustic conditions in concert halls from the musician's perspective, suggested a few objective parameters like support and hearing each other that are linked to the subjective impressions of musicians regarding room acoustics during concerts.Empirical studies on the influence of room acoustics on solo music performance revealed that up to 50% of a performance feature's variance such as, or loudness may be explained by room acoustical parameters (Scharer Kalkandjiev & Weinzierl, 2013). Solo musicians seem to intuitively adjust their performance to the room's acoustical situation, with tempo being one of the parameters significantly influenced by the specific reverberation time (RT) of the music venue (Scharer Kalkandjiev & Weinzierl, 2015; Ueno, Kato, & Kawai, 2010; Kato, Ueno, & Kawai, 2015). …

Supplemental Material for Extracting the Neural Representation of Tone Onsets for Separate Voices of Ensemble Music Using Multivariate EEG Analysis

Supplemental Material for Extracting the Neural Representation of Tone Onsets for Separate Voices of Ensemble Music Using Multivariate EEG Analysis

Implementation of Plagiarism Analysis System through Digital Conversion Processing of Sound Source

The melody in music can only be assessed by the assessor’s emotions so it can only be subjective and cannot be expressed in standardized numbers. Therefore nobody can know for sure if two songs are plagiarized or not. In this paper, we attempt to realize a plagiarism analysis system of musical content that can provide judging grounds for plagiarism – usually analyzed in consideration of human emotions - using IT technology. To protect music copyright, both knowledge of music and IT technology is compulsory to create a music plagiarism analysis system. First, by understanding factors of the musical content and analyzing plagiarism between two separate but similar voices. We tried to invent a system that measures the level of similarity. For this we considered the digital music factors for the analysis of voices and searched for methods to use IT technology for judging plagiarism. For an efficient analysis of plagiarism, we utilized the music string provided by JFugue, and designed a plagiarism analysis system for musical content and proposed an abstract syntax tree (AST).

Can Listeners Hear How Many Singers are Singing? The Effect of Listener’s Experience, Vibrato, Onset, and Formant Frequency on the Perception of Number of Simultaneous Singers

This study investigated whether listener's experience, presence/absence of vibrato, formant frequency difference, or onset delay affect the ability of experienced and inexperienced listeners to segregate complex vocal stimuli. Repeated measures factorial design. Two sets of stimuli were constructed: one with no vibrato and another with vibrato. For each set, each stimulus was synthesized at four pitches: A3, E4, B4, and F5. Stimuli were synthesized using formant patterns appropriate for the vowel |ɑ|. Frequencies for formants one through four were systematically varied from lower to higher in an attempt to simulate the acoustic results of corresponding changes in vocal tract length. Four formant patterns were synthesized (patterns A-D). Three pairs were created at each pitch, pairing the formants AB (mezzo-soprano/mezzo-soprano), CD (soprano/soprano), and AD (mezzo-soprano/soprano). Each of these three pairs was constructed in three separate conditions: simultaneous onset; the first voice in the pair with an onset delay of 100 milliseconds; and the second voice in the pair with an onset delay of 100 milliseconds. Using a scroll bar, listeners rated how difficult it was for them to hear each stimulus pair as two separate voices. The most difficult combinations to segregate were produced with no vibrato and used simultaneous onset. The easiest conditions to segregate were combinations including a "soprano-like" formant pattern (D) in the vibrato condition. Overall, listener's experience did not affect the perceived difficulty of segregation; however, in the presence of vibrato cues, inexperienced listeners did not use delay cues as an aid in segregation in the same manner as did experienced listeners. Once vibrato was removed from the experimental context, inexperienced listeners were able to use delay to aid in segregation in a similar manner to experienced listeners. Presence/absence of vibrato, formant pattern difference, and onset delay interact in a complex manner to affect the perceived difficulty of voice segregation.

Voices Inside Schools: When Boys Won't Be Boys: Discussing Gender with Young Children

In this Voices Inside Schools essay, Hannah Katch and Jane Katch reflect on gender roles and how they are enacted in the classroom. When Timothy, a student in Jane's kindergarten class, refuses to count himself as one of the boys during a math lesson,Jane begins a conversation about social constructions of gender with her daughter,Hannah. Writing in separate voices, Jane, whose narrative appears in plain text, and Hannah, whose narrative appears in italics, raise critical questions about the rigidity of gender roles and the importance of discussing gender with young children.

No Ideas but in Things: Photography at Learning's Limit

Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 film La Chinoise is rife with images of books and reading: students with books in their hands or engrossed alone with a text, tableaux of couples entwined with each other and their slim volumes, the actress Anne Wiazemsky peeking, gun in hand, through a wall of Mao's little red books, creating an unforgettable visual link between violence and knowledge. Godard's interest lies in a critique of comfortable bourgeois students playacting at violence and revolution, but it also connects to issues of learning, pedagogy, and the levels of inherent or underwriting coercion they contain. La Chinoise was also the title of a 2002 gallery exhibition. The show began a conversation between the two authors of this essay, a project that resulted in the two distinct but interdependent essays that follow. Subsequent encounters with the photographs of Rainer Ganahl and the text Towards a Philosophy of Photography, by Vilém Flusser, furthered the exchange. The alternating structure of this paper allows common queries and sources to circulate through two associated and separate voices.

James Merrill's Polyphonic Muse

James Merrill's Polyphonic Muse Timothy Materer University of Missouri-Columbia Early in his career, James Merrill considered the influence of the modernist poets "something to react against" (Collected Prose 51). Merrill thought that T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams revealed a "drift toward the more or less monumental" that obscured the human scale of their work. In Merrill's view, they began their careers writing "small, controllable" poems, but then each produced—in The Waste Land, The Cantos, Notes toward a Supreme Fiction, and Paterson—a "huge, unruly text that grapples ravenously with everything under the sun" (351). When he read Elizabeth Bishop, the intimate tone of her poetry seemed the "antidote to those ambitious and daunting 'giants' of modernism" (155, 163). When finishing his long poem The Changing Light at Sandover (1982), however, Merrill realized that his poetic development had come to resemble that of the modernists. He admitted in 1980 that, following the modernist tendency toward the monumental, he "felt a similar pressure at work in my own case" (351). The pressure that led Merrill to write the "huge, unruly text" of The Changing Light at Sandover included the desire to grapple with a variety of subjects. But more significant, as we will see in Merrill's own description of his development, was his desire to get beyond the limited sense of self and the constrained voice of his early [End Page 207] poetry. Like Eliot's Prufrock or Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, whom Pound described as "consciousness disjunct" (201), Merrill's poetic personae were limited by their alienated self-consciousness. Merrill's A Different Person (1993), a memoir that centers on the years 1950–52, describes his early career in the familiar terms of a young poet finding his own voice. 1 Dissatisfied with the voice of his early poems, he experimented by dramatizing aspects of the self as separate voices before he conceived of the poem as a medium for voices independent of the conscious self. In his one-act poetic play The Bait (1953) and long lyric poems such as "The Thousand and Second Night" and "From the Cupola" (Nights and Days, 1966), he experimented with a variety of speakers. In The Changing Light, he created a long poem that can be characterized in Mikhail Bakhtin's terms as a "polyphonic" work of layered voices. Merrill's ambition to speak in his own voice developed into the need to express the multiple selves or voices within him. Merrill's conception of himself as an "author" became more complex as he explored his poetic and sexual nature. A Different Person allows us to see why Merrill remarked on "how little choice I had in the matter" of his poetic development because of the complex psychological factors that went into it (Collected Prose 351). A Different Person links his growth as a poet to his growing understanding of his sexual nature. Finding his voice, his poetic muse, and a sense of his inner femininity were all linked. Merrill recalls making progress on The Bait only after he had made its narrator a woman, because "words came more easily to me in a woman's voice than in a man's" (Different Person 251). This statement seems surprising because, especially in the fifties, Merrill's poetry did not appear to speak in a feminine voice or create a feminine persona. Even though Merrill's love poems were written to other men, a reader of that time would be likely to assume that they were written by a man to a woman. As Merrill wrote in A Different Person, the [End Page 208] obscurity of his early poems had the effect of "masking . . . the gender of my loves" (183). Such masking and obscurity in his early poetry were limitations Merrill wanted to escape by finding a more authentic self and poetic voice. By leaving New York for Europe and eventually settling in Rome, he hoped to remake his poetry by remaking himself and becoming...

"Playing a Game of Worlds": Postmodern Time and the Search for Individual Autonomy in Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire

This article enters the ongoing critical debate surrounding Pale Fire, as to whether the apparent structure of the novel can be taken at face value. Do the central characters, John Shade and Charles Kinbote, constitute separate voices within the novel, as poet and commentator respectively, or is one in fact the fictional creation of the other? Arguing that the dispute arises out of a set of critical assumptions that negate at least some of the possible implications of Nabokov's own views of art's purpose and function, the essay asserts that Nabokov's disbelief in objective reality renders the entire Shade/Kinbote debate irrelevant. By focusing upon the consequent challenges presented by radical subjectivity and linguistic indeterminacy in an always-fictional world, the essay suggests that Nabokov's art, rather than being diminished by an exploration of its relationships to post-structuralism, is in fact reaffirmed as a transcendent act of the human spirit.