Absolute pitch, besides the psychological and neurological interests it has, raises some conceptual difficulties that can teach us about the richness of our notion of musical tone and various aspects of its identification. It is argued that when AP is conceived under a slim notion of identifying the pitch of a crude sound, it is hardly meaningful and has no significance in music comprehension. The rich notion, which is the meaningful and important one, involves knowing the position (...) of a tone in a tone-space and its relations. This is presented as experiential: hearing and identifying tones under concepts and relations that are experienced rather than figured out or derived on the basis of crude identification of bare tones. Since many of these concepts and relations are musically meaningful, this rich notion of identification is thus connected to musical understanding and aesthetic appreciation of a musical work. It may also be claimed to be vital in passing between different sense modalities, and can explain various aspects of AP and puzzles connected with it. (shrink)

Wittgenstein was apparently looking for someone else. It was because he had not been successful that he had knocked at the Leavises’ door, to bide his time there before he looked again. On entering the house, he immediately peered through the window into the street. Yet after a moment he turned and said abruptly: “You’ve got a gramophone, I see—I don’t suppose you’ve anything worth playing.” And “Then,” so Leavis continues the description,with a marked change of tone, he exclaimed “Ah!”: (...) from the repository just at hand he pulled out the album of Schubert’s Great C Major Symphony and put the first record on the machine. A moment after the music began to sound he lifted the tone-arm, altered the speed, and lowered... (shrink)

Three experiments explored online recognition in a nonspeech domain, using a novel experimental paradigm. Adults learned to associate abstract shapes with particular melodies, and at test they identified a played melody’s associated shape. To implicitly measure recognition, visual fixations to the associated shape versus a distractor shape were measured as the melody played. Degree of similarity between associated melodies was varied to assess what types of pitch information adults use in recognition. Fixation and error data suggest that adults naturally (...) recognize music, like language, incrementally, computing matches to representations before melody offset, despite the fact that music, unlike language, provides no pressure to execute recognition rapidly. Further, adults use both absolute and relative pitch information in recognition. The implicit nature of the dependent measure should permit use with a range of populations to evaluate postulated developmental and evolutionary changes in pitch encoding. (shrink)

Autistic individuals have been observed to demonstrate high intelligence through musical communication, leading to many empirical studies on this topic. Absolute Pitch has been a captivating phenomenon for researchers, although there has been disagreement regarding AP percentages among the population and appropriate testing methods for AP. This study analyzed data collected from 118 people, using a pitch matching paradigm designed specifically to be inclusive of those who are likely to have note-naming difficulty due to communication challenges. Thirty-eight (...) participants were autistic individuals, 32% of which were considered to have severe language impairment. Twelve other participants had other developmental disorders. All but 1 of the 38 autistics demonstrated exceptional and instantaneous pitch matching abilities on piano. Ten of the 12 with other developmental disorders demonstrated this ability, and approximately half of neurotypicals were able to exhibit this ability. Our numbers indicate that with a more inclusive paradigm for assessing AP, it may be demonstratable in close to 50% of the population, and near 100% in the autistic population. This testing method represents a neurodiversity-friendly and fully inclusive, non-verbal paradigm for demonstrating AP. (shrink)

Vocal music and spoken language both have important roles in human communication, but it is unclear why these two different modes of vocal communication exist. Although similar, speech and song differ in certain design features. One interesting difference is in the pitch intonation contour, which consists of discrete tones in song, vs. gliding intonation contours in speech. Here, we investigated whether vocal phrases consisting of discrete pitches (song-like) or gliding pitches (speech-like) are remembered better, conducting three studies implementing auditory (...) same-different tasks at three levels of difficulty. We tested two hypotheses: that discrete pitch contours aid auditory memory, independent of musical experience (“song memory advantage hypothesis”), or that the higher everyday experience perceiving and producing speech make speech intonation easier to remember (“experience advantage hypothesis”). We used closely matched stimuli, controlling for rhythm and timbre, and we included a stimulus intermediate between song-like and speech-like pitch contours (with partially gliding and partially discrete pitches). We also assessed participants' musicality to evaluate experience-dependent effects. We found that song-like vocal phrases are remembered better than speech-like vocal phrases, and that intermediate vocal phrases evoked a similar advantage to song-like vocal phrases. Participants with more musical experience were better in remembering all three types of vocal phrases. The precise roles of absolute and relative pitch perception and the influence of top-down vs. bottom-up processing should be clarified in future studies. However, our results suggest that one potential reason for the emergence of discrete pitch–a feature that characterises music across cultures–might be that it enhances auditory memory. (shrink)

Este artículo pretende constituir una breve reflexión crítica sobre los usos políticos de la violencia masculina sobre las mujeres, y de cómo, por tanto, una cuestión indudablemente fundamental, enfatizada por los movimientos de las mujeres y tratada por mucha literatura de inclinación feminista, puede ser utilizada dentro de un marco de referencia que se presta a legitimar políticas de seguridad, más que a facilitar el hallazgo de una respuesta adecuada al problema. Me ayudaré de ejemplos extraídos de lo que ocurre (...) en Italia, aunque es sabido que esta instrumentalización es común en muchos otros contextos culturales y políticos, y que es coherente con una modalidad de gobierno hoy hegemónica, el neoliberalismo. Mi tesis def iende que este uso ha sido facilitado por el colapso, tanto lingüístico como cultural, de toda la temática que tiene que ver con la relación asimétrica entre los sexos en el ámbito de la “violencia”. Este colapso, a su vez, puede interpretarse, desde mi punto de vista, como uno de los productos del avance de la hegemonía de la racionalidad política neoliberal durante los últimos treinta años. (shrink)

This author reviews some of the issues on which legal feminism has worked as well as the current status of the discussion, especially in Italian feminism. This is the case of family relationships, procreation and abortion, violence against women and security policies, prostitution, work in the labour market, the limits to citizenship and the confluence of feminism and the claims of cultural identities. With the assumption that legal feminism does not mean only “studies on women” but involves a crucial perspective (...) to discuss any subject, the author also reviews the relationship between feminism, law and gender. (shrink)

Background: Studies on autistic strengths are often focused on what they reveal about autistic intelligence and, in some cases, exceptional and atypical reasoning abilities. An emerging research trend has demonstrated how interests and strengths often evident in autism can be harnessed in interventions to promote the well-being, adaptive, academic and professional success of autistic people. However, abilities in certain domains may be accompanied by major limitations in others, as well as psychiatric and behavioral issues, which may challenge their inclusion in (...) support programs. Objectives: To provide an in-depth, pragmatic, real-life example of the psychological and psychiatric management of interests and strengths in an autistic adolescent. Method: An autistic teenager, C.A., with above-average calendar calculation and musical abilities, received psychiatric, neuropsychological, and language standardized and clinical assessments, combined with a measurement of his musical and calendar calculation abilities. C.A. and his parents then received psychiatric and psychological support over a 14-month period, targeting their perceptions of C.A.’s interests, strengths, and co-occurring difficulties. Results: C.A. had a verbal IQ within the intellectual disability range and a non-verbal IQ in the low mean range. Modest calendar calculation, absolute pitch, and matrix abilities coexisted with severe receptive and expressive language disorder. The discrepancy between his abilities in areas of strengths and his limitations in other domains led to anxiety, frustration, and sometimes behavioral issues. Displacing the focus from academic performance to interests, as well as promoting the use of his strengths to develop new skills independently of their short-term adaptive benefits yielded positive effects on C.A.’s self-assessment, quality of life, and behavior at follow up. Discussion: The appealing idea that abilities mostly found in autistic people, such as calendar calculation, can be directly harnessed into academic achievement and lead to paid employment may have detrimental effects, especially when such abilities are modest and associated with other limitations. These abilities should be primarily used to maximize well-being and quality of life, independently of their short-term adaptive function, which may or may not be positive. (shrink)

Many factors are thought to increase the chances of misrecognizing a word in ASR, including low frequency, nearby disfluencies, short duration, and being at the start of a turn. However, few of these factors have been formally examined. This paper analyzes a variety of lexical, prosodic, and disfluency factors to determine which are likely to increase ASR error rates. Findings include the following. (1) For disfluencies, effects depend on the type of disfluency: errors increase by up to 15% (absolute) (...) for words near fragments, but decrease by up to 7.2% (absolute) for words near repetitions. This decrease seems to be due to longer word duration. (2) For prosodic features, there are more errors for words with extreme values than words with typical values. (3) Although our results are based on output from a system with speaker adaptation, speaker differences are a major factor influencing error rates, and the effects of features such as frequency, pitch, and intensity may vary between speakers. (shrink)

continent. 2.2 (2012): 155–158 Michel Serres. Biogea . Trans. Randolph Burks. Minneapolis: Univocal Publishing. 2012. 200 pp. | ISBN 9781937561086 | $22.95 Conveying to potential readers the significance of a book puts me at risk of glad handing. It’s not in my interest to laud the undeserving, especially on the pages of this journal. This is not a sales pitch, but rather an affirmation of a necessary work on very troubled terms: human, earth, nature, and the problematic world we (...) made. It is this world that aspirates the silence (so to speak), and therefore the subject which, along with the development of the “made world” exports the excess augmentation of the cosmically missing, this silence of the natural, et cetera. Had we learned from Locke that lesson of “labor,” to consume what we need… but perhaps we need more than what matters? Serres’ Biogea has several functions on this manner, if it is indeed a book to be consumed. First, readers searching for novelistic entertainment have a place to dwell. Biogea deserves a place in your back pocket; biographical generosity and poetic fluidity should satisfy most textual fetishes. For lay philosophers who want to refresh their acumen, Biogea deserves a place on the book shelf, one already reads a sorely needed postmodern tune-up here. Serres’ style is clearly French; he leaves few cheese crumbs on his words, rather preciseness and breathing in the work give way to a sweeping manner that breaks the narrative line of sight. A circular narrative and anachronistic fragmentation of terms allows an abyssal atmosphere to swell, if only to pump into the book the externality of its broader text. Biogea aspires to a higher standard and the book, at times, is thinking this negentropic problem too. Univocal, the publisher, has crafted a book appropriate for the hands to hold and the translations are an achievement of an otherwise difficult writer to translate. Terms are the conditions of a broader text. It is important to note that Serres’ content is as much a thinking of terminal ports. There is a regard for the transportation technology of the written word. For me, this is the mark of genius, a craftiness that tells of a book device that I may trust. Serres is an accomplished thinker and a necessary voice to check the putative trendiness of anti-postmodernist and market-driven theory of endless cultural liquidation. Offering interventions on subjectivity as an open system we are given a chance to affirm the human, not merely to discard it, but to engage its poetic image emotion, the calibratory silent sense of the analogic world; the terms on which we base our efforts. 1 The human is the center of its own negation, constantly mediating it. Something deeper at stake appears in the work then, and it is quite obvious from the onset. Certainly, a book is an intensification of possible text and those who brought this actual book into existence have captured a rarity in regards to the subject matter and artistic accomplishment. I mentioned terms as conditions, so let us understand Biogea as bio-yea, a yes to bios . An affirmation of living and accepting presence for all of its defiance of images, words, and things temporal. Therefore Serres’ existence and its existants plays parts; out of linearity and still like a porous bone pumping blood it manufactures into the fleshy life it becomes. Starting from a man named silence chaos emerges, or the man “Old Taciturn” takes up a journey anticipating a great flood. In other words, a development akin to the one in Genesis. In dealing with this ancestral occupation, fusing Genesis with contemporary philosophical terms, Serres initiates this anachronistic fragmentation under the forming subjectivity of his own autobiography. This mutation in the open system is precisely one of Serres’ terms. There an abyss is at work, stated, but also measured by heels on the ground—the abyss dispatching earthen tensions, that which plays our tunes, that which we abide by and recognize in volcanoes, rivers, oceans, earthquakes and weaponry in the battles of the world. Set in later stages of the book, such tensions are harnessed through scientific principles in an attempt to unify the terms of natural force if only to terminate the world. Thus the elevation of the earth into the world is clearly set forth. Here already, and few pages in, a resonance is set forth under appellations such as the river Garonne, a subjectivity as much as it is inhuman, the river is the inhuman that makes us human. I get the sense that Serres is taking up a challenge issued by Wallace Stevens; namely, that the great poems of heaven and hell have been written, but that only the poem of the earth has resisted composition. 2 On this level we cannot avoid the killing factor of silence, given that our cognition blocks its pure, radical obliteration. Thus a silence of attunement to the earth is in a novel dialectic of the rithmic and rhythm. A technological world, a triumph of termination is set forth. If a text imposes its will given the reader who authorizes it, it is made to convey or convect a presupposition to a reader or its inhabitant(s). Text is therefore both, in-content, contenting, contentedness, and in reading it, a way to navigate self-destruction (dis-content). Here then would one note that the “inhuman” reveals itself, “an aperiodic rhythm of lovers and beloved…the sea as our friend…but as our enemy…maternal vivifying sea.” The sea is an open book, or vaginal birth canal, where the engagement of text comes forth: “…woman sea, open vulva.” One sees like the sea, but only after it, when the uninhabitable truth of inhabiting it switches the polarity of the sailors soul: “I was seeing like the sea” (9-11). In other words, we are invited to embrace the nonsense of the visible. At this point I am taken to Jean-François Lyotard’s work The Inhuman , specifically the first entry on negentropy that would be congruent with Serres’ thematic. 3 The human being exports, deports, or transplants its relation through text, through the system— and this is its sense or relation to silence, to music. Unaware of Serres’ proximity to this work, the concept of gender interrelation as regards a solar catastrophe runs clear. It would be, on this basis, that Serres references his peers, the other texts that, as mentioned above, are discarded in philosophy today. For students of philosophy what we have here is perhaps a gift, a needed project. If silence and death are at work, there is a political valence to deal with, and here, much like the domain of the text and the dominion of the reader, we confront the world of natural, fluid violence. The anti-postmodernist critique is in part based on a weak idea that the loss of ideology, of a world vision, motivates the “correlationist” project. 4 Serres seems to offer another way to view this when he notes that whereas persons “sometimes kill,” it is clearly “the collective” that “always kills” (17). What is the collective today, if not an organizing function we never see yet acts in its favor in the name of truth? One feels a sense of enigma here, if only to link to what Stevens remarked of communism as a “grubby faith,” providing this applies for capitalism as well, namely any ideology of progress overly interested in absolutes. Here we get the sense that the inhuman, silence, this type of killing, always killing, could not be matched by human-made, political dynamos. Or that if it comes to an equilibrium, a catastrophe is never too far from us to read with our heels. We are left to note that the forces of nature presuppose and permeate political systems, the more these systems obtain force, the more the system takes upon itself the proper name of nature that motivates its dissemination, albeit falsely. This note, that in an age of ecocide and technological captivity (sustainability and transparency) political regimes won’t grow our soul-learning ears any larger than our tongues, stands clear to us. The promise of technological desubjectification is here pushed aside. Regarding politics, Serres illustrates this fact: Where did this corpse come from? Who was it? Who killed it? I don’t know. I won’t try to find out. I refuse to get vengeance for it. And I only see Garonne. For our victims, today, are the rivers, too. Their waters have irrigated my life, enchanted my thought, invigorated my body; I’ve known them to be threatening, untamable, as dangerous as the sea when it rages. Yes, murderous. They decided to control their courses; dams, sometimes senseless, destroying sites and valleys, reduced entire populations to servile displacements; programs for the irrigation of thirsty farmland, often beneficial of course, completed their drying up.(22) Serres enters into his idea concerning the captivity of language from the natural into a world system: For thousands of years, we have been licking things with our tongues, covering and daubing them so as to appropriate things for ourselves. If language boils down to a convention, this convention took place between the speakers without consulting the thing named, become as a result the property of those who covered it in this way with their drawn or voiced productions. Malfeasance analyzes these acts of appropriation. Thus every inert object, every living thing as well, sleeps under the covers of signs, a little in the way that, today, a thousand posters shouting messages and ugly riots of color drown, with their filthy flood, the landscapes, or better, exclude them from perception because the meaning, almost nil, of this false language and these base images forms an irresistible source of attraction to our neurons and eyes. This appropriation covers the world’s beauty with ugliness. (38-39) Technological concealment coming to bear, we begin to get a sense of another commentary on the condition of sensing, driving home the necessity of a text dealing with such subject matter to be what its terms insist. Thus toward new openings: The new opening. As low beneath our feet as you like, the Biogea opens us to another space, high enough for us to be able to acquire a wisdom there, that of redeveloping this same place differently from our fathers, this place that’s still politically cut up by old hatreds, beneath the flood of tears and blood that we call history. Without this soft place, spiritually very old, but newly conceived in this way, without the juridical construction of a common good, opposed to our filthy ownership, I don’t see how our planet, hard, will survive. Hardness that depends on a softness, material belonging that depends on this temporary rented location (51). Serres enters into a summit on the content and the structure of his work. Archimedes is brought in with the concept of three volcanoes. Meaning fire, but as well earth, water, air. For it was Archimedes’ war machines that sought to lift the earth, thus bringing in the question of principles of science: “can a principle be invented while controlling its consequences?” (66-7). May the earth be put in a sentence, terminated by terminology, appellations, gone wild? By means of these element-dominating laws, this old physicist began to tear nature away from the ancient myths; by a strange return, today we’re plunging our successes back into the anxieties and terrors from which that ancient physics was born. Yes, our new history of science and technology is plunging, today, as though in a loop, into the fundamental human myths from which Empedocles’ first laws came. A major progression and a regression on the nether side of the origins. Consequently, the contemporary time requires that we try to return to that unity in which the principles of hate and love are at the same time human, living, inert and global. We will never attain a deontology of our knowledge and actions without thinking the subjective, the objective, the collective, and the cognitive all together simultaneously. Here, hate and love are the result of these four components.(71) Working then on the concept of fire-starting mirrors to the atomic annihilation of the Second War, Serres works into the subjectivity in question on the matter of rhythm—say rithmic— precisely at that point: Knowledge is changing today. The all-political is dying; the monarchy of the sciences said to be hard is coming to a close. The science of the things of the world will have to communicate just as much as the things of the world do, which do it much better than humans do, who don’t always want to do it. Let’s celebrate two changes this morning. The first one strikes a new blow to our narcissism. No, knowledge and the world don’t resemble our analytical enjoyments of refined cutting up, of endless debates and of exclusions full of hate. They, on the contrary, form a bloc and a sum, alliance and alloys. Uniting the fields of knowledge among themselves the way the things are connected among themselves, the second newness puts into place sets united by interlacing, webs and simplexes that combine with the things of the world, themselves combined, the combined knowledge that understands them.(130-1) Biogea closes on its opening flood thematic, approaching the initial telos of Genesis. Here the trees are brought into a position with atmosphere, the opaque abyssal reservoir, the tomb of the sun, sea in the polarity of the earthen heaven and hell. The poem of the earth then is silent but deadly, indeed, as funny as that phrase is, mainly a tomb gas. The meaning of the living and the non-meaning of things converge in the muteness of the world; this meaning and non-meaning plunge there and come out, the ultimate eddy. Mundus patet: through a fissure, through an opening, a fault, a cleft come noises, calls as small as these apertures. I’m listening, attentive, I’m translating, I’m advancing in the scaled-down meaning and science. Mundus patet: should the world open greatly, it will launch me into its silence. The totality remains silent. Knowledge expanded in elation. White origin of meaning, fountain of joy. (198) Final Remarks One test of a review is the long term trajectory the referee thinks the book will have. I see Serres’ text lending greatly into the vision of Biogea . In fact, in the vision of the novel inquiries of Stephen Jay Gould’s work there is something to be thought on the level of the individual and the species; namely, that humanity and its uniqueness is in its deferral, its thinking and naming, a thinking surrounded by silence that filters into everything, that pulls us through the world, the kinetic pulse we recognize, and all of that we cleave away in the base philosophical maxim of difference itself. Unique individuals are spatial creatures: we dwell, and we ought to get good at it. Yet this is an imaginative space that, if you are crazy enough to believe it, de-term-ine the conditions of its own terms. That is why we are not merely creating spaces on the acceleration of time, or so this ignoramus thinks, to accidentally transcend. Imagination already has this insatiable silence that we drink up and fail to manifest. Space is timeless. The imagination itself, shared by humans for themselves, their objects, and the species as a whole, is a non-defined space of relation; a whole human trajectory as part of nature, and part of worlds that are the other side of thinking nature, the consequence of it, at least our attempt to do so. Our survival is based on our deliberation, our caution, our natural deconstructive sense toward this silence that is already part of the song, sung, singing of this century without end. Good books will let us inhabit this space and recognize a form of life. Serres’ text moves toward dwelling, as noted, in masterful and accessible ways. The pitched battles are the falling replays of anemic and dead politics. As soon as we realize there is humanity, we may be able to enjoy the end of it, our inhuman capability of listening to silence. NOTES 1. See Michel Serres. The Parasite . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2007. 2. Wallace Stevens, “Imagination as Value” [ca. 1945], in Collected Poetry and Prose . New York: The Library of America. 1997. 724-39. 3. Jean-François Lyotard. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time . Trans. Geoffrey Bennington & Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1992. 4. See the introduction: Quentin Melliassoux. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency . Trans. Ray Brassier. New York: Continuum. 2008. EDITOR'S NOTE: This review was updated on August 8, 2012. Substantial edits include block quotes from the book under review as well as the inclusion of comments from the author. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:139. COULD AN IMPRESSION BE A PROCESS? Processes are of two main kinds, depending on whether the process has or lacks culmination. I am concerned with non-culminating processes, e.g., with a burning fuse sans explosion. This is reported as secondary by any good dictionary, derived from the head, or culminating, sense of 'process'. An ontological criterion for 'process' is as follows: something is absolutely unchanging, if it is unchanging (...) in every sense of the word. Those who hold that, e.g., a monotonous sound is absolutely unchanging hold that in an absolutely unchanging universe there is no reason why there should not be such a sound. Like any absolutely unchanging existent, a sound is caught, so to speak, in an instantaneous freeze on all change. Those who opt for process hold that change is, so to speak, of its essence. Hence, in an absolutely unchanging world, there could not be a process. The question I wish to raise is not whether there are processes, and certainly not whether Hume opts for processes. It is doubtful that Hume entertained the question of process. Indeed, that is the point. One of Hume's main commentators, R. W. Church, holds that Hume's perceptual atoms, defined by his dictum that distinguishability mutually entails separability, as well as their philosophical relations, are incompatible with the thesis that "experiences exist not in succession but in process." Church goes on to say that it is "difficult to see how... 'process' can have meaning for Hume. He plainly holds perceptions and their contents to be successive merely. I begin by considering Church's reason why Hume must reject processes, and then consider an additional reason drawn from Hume's account of time. Specifically, 140. divisibility òf time terminates in unchanging atoms. The essence of process is change. Hence, no temporal atom is a process. Neither reason, I argue, suffices for holding that impressions and processes are mutually exclusive. Hume holds that distinguishability mutually entails separability. Church holds that this dictum defines Hume's perceptual atomism. To highlight the atomism it is supposed to define, he rewords it, as follows: "Whatever is distinguishable is intrinsically self-identical and therefore self-contained." What does this rewording mean? According to Church, Hume, in the body of the Treatise, holds that resemblance is qualitative identity distributed, numerically, over many complexes. "On Hume's theory of abstract ideas, 'resemblance' is a verbal term referring (in virtue of habits of association) to any case of a qualitative 4 identity numerically distributed." Further, the qualitative identity in question is not relative to any difference from another quality, Bradley to the contrary notwithstanding. Difference, for Hume, is incompatible with relation and it is itself not a relation. It follows, according to Church, that Hume's absolute self-identity mutually entails self -containment. So much for Church's version of Hume's perceptual atomism. Is it incompatible with process, as Church claims? A trombone's slide illustrates non-culminating process with succession. Let us use it as a basis for an account. A trombone's slide is unbroken not only qua sound but qua pitch. Nevertheless, it incorporates pitch multiplicity. By "successive merely" does Church mean that the transition from pitch to pitch must be broken, contrary to what is heard, and, for this reason, Hume cannot account for the slide qua process? If so, he is mistaken. 141. Distinguishability mutually entails separability for Hume, but this does not mean that the transition from pitch to pitch cannot be experienced as a slide. In fact, it is easy to show that a trombone's slide conforms to Hume's dictum, by reason of the just noticeable difference and Hume's philosophical relation of contiguity in time. We are dealing with three notions: first, distinction, and, in particular, how pitches in the slide are distinguished. Second, separability, and, in particular, how separation corresponding to distinction is guaranteed by the fact of process. Third, slide, and, in particular how Hume's philosophical relation of temporal contiguity, coupled with the just noticeable difference, guarantees phenomenal slide. I take up these three notions in the order mentioned. The distinction between two pitches in the trombone's slide is... (shrink)

Regardless of unpredictable and contingent geopolitical events such as last year’s surprising rejection of the European Constitution in France and the Netherlands, this coming year will certainly witness a large surge in patriotism. The Winter Olympics in February, and the World Cup in the summer, both promise to whip national sentiments into a fever pitch. One other thing is certain, though: journals of philosophy and ethics will continue to debate the virtues of cosmopolitanism, as this number of Ethical Perspectives (...) does through its contributions below.Why is this? Why do philosophers and academics hold on to this idea of cosmopolitanism, an idea utterly lacking in the convictions of the general public? Is it perhaps because the first cosmopolitans were in fact philosophers? The first to identify himself as a cosmopolitan was Diogenes the Cynic, and Plato’s dialogues paint many of the Sophists in cosmopolitan hues. Although people generally support the idea of internationalism as far as it promotes trade, travel, and football tournaments, once it begins to meddle in internal affairs, as it does with outsourcing and transnational constitutions, they tend to fall back upon the patria. They killed Socrates for corrupting the youth of Athens, not the youth of the world.Whether it is the service and manufacturing industries of Asia and India ‘stealing’ American jobs, or widespread fears of Brussels’ legendary bureaucrats, the non-academic public consistently turns from its tepid embrace of cosmopolitanism to patriotism whenever threatened. Are we too quick to label this as self-interest or even selfishness? Or is there something else at work in the debate between cosmopolitanism and patriotism? Some approaches to cosmopolitanism are certainly guilty of an absolute removal of difference, of wishing away the nation state, of replacing it with an international body based on purely universal principles, and of wiping away the competencies of nations on many levels. The call for the world state can come across as an appeal for an anodyne and internationalist homogeneity based on a clinical morality that, for all its sensitivity, runs roughshod over the well-engrained cultural, legal, and social beliefs of many peoples.Clearly, this is what many Europeans fear, and to a large degree, Americans as well in their dislike for the International Court of Justice. Even the economic hegemony of outsourcing removes national power, and replaces it with pure economic rationality.Our contributors below do not advocate these reductions, although some may point to them. Key to each contribution below is sensitivity to the world as it is, to its need for difference even in the face of an ever-increasing globalisation that sometimes is connected with cosmopolitanism. Yet, every proponent of cosmopolitanism must sketch how it is possible in practice. Of course, an obvious problem is how to dwell consequently as a cosmopolitan. Not many contemporary cosmopolitans would be prepared to follow Diogenes’ commitment to rootlessness: living in exile after having been included in a forgery conviction aimed at his father, the ascetic Diogenes called a barrel his home. Such was his drive to live a levelled life that he cast away his only bowl upon seeing a poor peasant boy drinking from cupped hands. Today’s cosmopolitan leads a much more prosaic life, and hence the problem with cosmopolitanism begins as something mundane. Does not a cosmopolitan still pay national taxes? Does not a cosmopolitan still need a national passport and second country visas? But, the questions quickly turn ontological: how can one shed oneself of one’s nationality, of one’s belonging, as if it is just an accident of one’s own constitution, instead of as an important property of one’s own constitution? In other words, belonging is important: a citizen of the world still values citizenship. Clearly, the absolute cosmopolitan reduction is an absurdity: one is always rooted, in some sense. Even cosmopolitanism is rooted in a specific Western mindset, and is no self-evident preference of human existence.As Rudi Visker’s contribution so clearly shows through an investigation of the narcissism of minor differences, these questions revolve around the question of confrontation with alterity. What I am, in no small way plays off what I am not. I cannot be everything, if I am something. Freud’s analysis of minor differences reveals that members of a group identify with that group on the basis these minor differences. What is self-evident to a particular culture marks that culture off from another culture, a culture that by definition does not share the same set of the self-evident. To be a foreigner, as any ex-patriot can attest, is to stand outside of the self-evident, whether this means interpreting gestures, understanding commercial practices, or, as Freud would have it, staying on the correct side of national taboos. There is thus a dialectic of inner and outer, a dialectic which refuses a reduction of one to the other. As Visker puts it, recognising the stranger within oneself is quite different than recognising the stranger outside of oneself, and to confuse these as being the same is not only to misunderstand the very issue at stake, it is also a dangerous trivialisation of difference.But clearly, there is something viable and laudable in the idea of cosmopolitanism, since it stresses the universal moral community of humanity. Cosmopolitanism is an attempt to see all human subjects as subject to the same moral law. Indeed, the sort of federation to which cosmopolitanism leads, at least in a modified Kantian expression as Bert van Roermund tells us, even gives us good grounds to recognise the legitimacy and moral equivalence of states. Importantly, the international legal order does not draw its power from any supranational force, but from the choice of independent national actors to recognise it. Hence, this cosmopolitan order depends on nationhood, and good standing within this order depends on the degree to which a country decides to participate. Again, the universal here depends on well-rooted particularity, a particularity able to choose for the universal.What do we do, then, with outlaw nations, those nations that are hostile to the choice for the universal? Through a clear reading of Hegel, Paul Cobben proposes that the metric for a state’s legality is the measure to which it permits the moral freedom of its citizens to bloom. A free person requires a free legal order; only in such can a person obtain the full measure of human rights due. States that do not permit this blooming are illegitimate; they contradict the nature of the human person, and citizens dwelling under the yoke of these have the right to ask for outside assistance in removing this illegitimate power above them. However, for this plea to be met, two conditions must obtain: the oppressed people must have the wherewithal to form a political order after the removal of the illegitimate state, and the action must be grounded in the principles and support of a legal community, which in essence would be a world federation of states. In fact, it is morally incumbent upon all legal states to aim at such a world federation, upon pain of contradiction.Our duty to others does not end with the politically oppressed; the economically oppressed also lay a moral claim upon us. So, as Toon Vandevelde asks in his contribution, what about the global poor? The poor are hungry and in need of shelter and a future, but to address these issues at the level of rights is in a way heartless: what good does it do to legislate that everyone has the right to food, when this right can never be called upon, or enforced, in any meaningful sense? Moreover, approaches that demand non-prioritised generosity not only ignore the fundamental economic fact of scarcity, they also run the risk of creating the moral hazard of dependence on charity. The true cosmopolitan approach is the recognition of our common humanity and of our concomitant duty to help others as far as this help does not endanger us. This duty is compounded by the marginalisation of the poor through globalisation, a globalisation that they did not ask for. The extent of our help is indeterminate, but its direction is clear: it must aim to integrate those poor who wish it within our international systems, and so to ease their own transitions from poverty.Both Gil Anidjar and Maria Bonnafous-Boucher continue this theme of economy, but each from a highly specific viewpoint. Indeed, their contributions are perhaps somewhat darker, delving into an aspect of the unspoken underneath the choice for the universal. Anidjar begins with the relation between religion and economy within the interplay of Judaism and Christianity, whereas Bonnafous-Boucher focuses on the development of political economy through a Foucaultian lens. Although highly distinct contributions, both share the insight that the economy is now the central theme of our power structures, and that economy, isolated from questions of morality or justice, must likewise play a decisive role within the structure of cosmopolitanism, or, at minimum, the political unity of peoples. For, national government long ago ceded to a promiscuous mix of governance, and religion to economy. This nexus enthrones governance as an economic rationale stripped of all other trappings, and inscribes any possible cosmopolitanism within a framework of an aggressive capitalism, a kind of economic theology, a kind of hegemony in which state boundaries are essentially liquefied. Capital, after all, knows no boundaries. (shrink)

Although the presence or absence of a pitch accent clearly can play an important role in signaling the discourse and information structure of an utterance, whether the form of an accent determines the type of information it conveys is more controversial. We used an eye‐tracking paradigm to investigate whether H*, which has been argued to signal new information, evokes different eye fixations than L+H*, which has been argued to signal the presence of contrast. Our results demonstrate that although listeners (...) interpret these accents differently, their interpretive domains overlap. L+H* creates a strong bias toward contrast referents whereas H* is compatible with both new and contrast referents. (shrink)

This paper examines the representationalist view of experiences in the light of the phenomena of perfect and relative pitch. Two main kinds of representationalism are identified - environment-based and cognitive role-based. It is argued that to explain the relationship between the two theories a distinction should be drawn between various types of implicit and explicit content. When investigated, this distinction sheds some light on the difference between the phenomenology of perfect and relative pitch experiences and may be usefully (...) applied to describe the nature of experiences in the other sense modalities. (shrink)

The ongoing generation of expectations is fundamental to listeners’ experience of music, but research into types of statistical information that listeners extract from musical melodies has tended to emphasize transition probabilities and n‐grams, with limited consideration given to other types of statistical learning that may be relevant. Temporal associations between scale degrees represent a different type of information present in musical melodies that can be learned from musical corpora using expectation networks, a computationally simple method based on activation and decay. (...) Expectation networks infer the expectation of encountering one scale degree followed in the near (but not necessarily immediate) future by another given scale degree, with previous work suggesting that scale degree associations learned by expectation networks better predict listener ratings of pitch similarity than transition probabilities. The current work outlines how these learned scale degree associations can be combined to predict melodic continuations and tests the resulting predictions on a dataset of listener responses to a musical cloze task previously used to compare two other models of melodic expectation, a variable‐order Markov model (IDyOM) and Temperley's music‐theoretically motivated model. Under multinomial logistic regression, all three models explain significant unique variance in human melodic expectations, with coefficient estimates highest for expectation networks. These results suggest that generalized scale degree associations informed by both adjacent and nonadjacent relationships between melodic notes influence listeners’ melodic predictions above and beyond n‐gram context, highlighting the need to consider a broader range of statistical learning processes that may underlie listeners’ expectations for upcoming musical events. (shrink)

Some sounds have pitch, some do not. A tuba’s notes are lower pitched than a flute’s, but the fuzz from an untuned radio has no discernible pitch. Pitch is an attribute in virtue of which sounds that possess it can be ordered from “low” to “high”. Given how audition works, physics has taught us that frequency determines what pitch a sound auditorily appears to have.

In Cavell (1994), the ability to follow and produce Austinian examples of ordinary language use is compared with the faculty of perfect pitch. Exploring this comparison, I clarify a number of central and interrelated aspects of Cavell's philosophy: (1) his way of understanding Wittgenstein's vision of language, and in particular his claim that this vision is "terrifying," (2) the import of Wittgenstein's vision for Cavell's conception of the method of ordinary language philosophy, (3) Cavell's dissatisfaction with Austin, and in (...) particular his claim that Austin is not clear about the nature and possible achievements of his own philosophical procedures, and (4) Cavell's notion that the temptation of skepticism is perennial and incurable. Cavell's reading of Wittgenstein is related to that of John McDowell. Like McDowell, Cavell takes Wittgenstein to be saying that the traditional attempt to justify our practices from an external standpoint is misguided, since such detachment involves losing sight of those conceptual and perceptual capacities in terms of which a practice is understood by its engaged participants. Unlike McDowell, however, Cavell consistently rejects the idea that philosophical clearsightedness can or should free us from that fear of groundlessness which motivates the traditional search for external justification. (shrink)

Renaissance philosopher, mathematician, and theologian Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464) said that there is no proportion between the finite mind and the infinite. He is fond of saying reason cannot fully comprehend the infinite. That our best hope for attaining a vision and understanding of infinite things is by mathematics and by the use of contemplating symbols, which help us grasp "the absolute infinite". By the late 19th century, there is a decisive intervention in mathematics and its philosophy: the philosophical (...) mathematician Georg Cantor (1845-1918) says that between the realm of the finite and the absolute infinite, there is an intermediate realm partaking in properties in a certain sense of both the finite and the infinite: the transfinite realm. Like the finite, the transfinite realm is a realm of mathematical objects, numbers, and knowledge. Like the absolute infinite, the transfinite is a form of infinity insofar as transfinite sets and numbers transcend any finite number. Echoing Cusanus and neo-Platonism, Cantor says that the transfinite sequence of all ordinals is a symbol of the absolutely infinite, that is, God. This paper considers how the doctrine of symbolism and the philosophers' different commitments to the laws of logic, especially the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), enables these thinkers to articulate a transcendental apophatic approach to divinity. (shrink)

Height-pitch associations are claimed to be universal and independent of language, but this claim remains controversial. The present study sheds new light on this debate with a multimodal analysis of individual sound and melody descriptions obtained in an interactive communication paradigm with speakers of Dutch and Farsi. The findings reveal that, in contrast to Dutch speakers, Farsi speakers do not use a height-pitch metaphor consistently in speech. Both Dutch and Farsi speakers’ co-speech gestures did reveal a mapping of (...) higher pitches to higher space and lower pitches to lower space, and this gesture space-pitch mapping tended to co-occur with corresponding spatial words (high-low). However, this mapping was much weaker in Farsi speakers than Dutch speakers. This suggests that cross-linguistic differences shape the conceptualization of pitch and further calls into question the universality of height-pitch associations. (shrink)

Highlighting Hegel's conceptual realism Hoffmann focuses on an undervalued move in his dialectic: inversion. Easily proving completeness for Kant's table of categories, Hoffmann shows how metabolic dialectic substantiates Hegel's claim for his _Logic_: it is indeed the science of absolute form!