What is the relationship between music and time? How does musical rhythm express our social experience of time? In Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, Mark Abel explains the rise to prominence in Western music of a new way of organising rhythm - groove. He provides a historical account of its emergence around the turn of the twentieth century, and analyses the musical components which make it work. Drawing on materialist interpretations of art and culture, Mark Abel engages with aesthetic (...) arguments, challenging in particular Adorno's critique of popular music. He concludes that groove does not simply reflect the temporality of contemporary society, but, by incorporating abstract time into its very structure, is capable of effecting a critique of it"--Provided by publisher. (shrink)

Marxists regard works of art as meaningful, and look for political meanings even when they are not addressing political subjects. But where does music’s meaning lie? The conventional view is that music is non-referential, capable only of supporting other artforms or of expressing emotions. Adorno rejects the idea of music as a language of emotions, and does not believe that music has universal grammatical and syntactical rules. Yet he claims that music has language characteristics which make it as political as (...) other artforms. What does he mean, and is he right? To answer those questions, we need to know how he understands language. This article examines how Adorno's view compares with the Marxist theory of language and consciousness developed by Valentin Voloshinov, and explores the extent to which approaching music from this direction might clarify a Marxist understanding of music and contribute to solving the thorny question of musical meaning. (shrink)

Ontologies are computational artifacts that model consensual aspects of reality. In distributed contexts, applications often need to utilize information from several distinct ontologies. In order to integrate multiple ontologies, entities modeled in each ontology must be matched through an ontology alignment. However, imperfect alignments may introduce inconsistencies. One kind of inconsistency, which is often introduced, is the violation of the conservativity principle, that states that the alignment should not introduce new subsumption relations between entities from the same source ontology. We (...) propose a two-step quadratic-time algorithm for automatically correcting such violations, and evaluate it against datasets from the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative 2019, comparing the results to a state-of-the-art approach. The proposed algorithm was significantly faster and less aggressive; that is, it performed fewer modifications over the original alignment when compared to the state-of-the-art algorithm. (shrink)