Like most other Australian languages, Warlpiri – a Pama-Nyungan language of the Ngumpin-Yapa group – is rich in figurative expressions that include a body-part noun. In this article we examine the collocations involving two body parts:langa‘ear’, which mostly relates to cognition; andmiyalu‘belly’, which mostly relates to emotion. Drawing on an extensive Warlpiri database, we analyse the semantic, figurative and syntactic dimensions of these collocations. We note how reflexive variants of certain collocations impose a non-literal aspectual reading, as also observed in (...) Romance and Germanic languagesinter alia. The article also highlights differences between the range of body-based emotion metaphors found in Warlpiri, and that reported for the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of Australia. We hypothesize that these differences sometimes reflect grammatical differences. In particular, Warlpiri allows body-part nouns in syntactic functions that rarely found in non-Pama-Nyungan languages, due to the prevalence of body-part noun incorporation in the latter group. (shrink)

The ear is one of our sensory organs that allow us to perceive our surroundings. We perceive with it the voices that the objects possess by means of the waves within the mass of air surrounding us. In this sense, the ear has an important value for being. In the Qur'an, besides being an ear or a sensory organ, it reveals a person who reflects his level of consciousness and perception, revealing his awareness. It is not just the voices heard; (...) the ear is special importance in understanding what is being said and what is said. Other sense organs and mold are mentioned together because of the feature. Of course, the word "voice" is also on the agenda when the ear is concerned. The verses found at the base of the basic qualities that man should possess present important dynamics about sound. Beyond being a symptom of voice being an inherent symptom, the latest discovery is pointing to the dimension of telling the apocalypse. This study tries to show in what context the hearing aid ear is expressed in the verses and its distinctive features, and its associated value, as well as its inherent value. (shrink)

Job’s body is ‘portrayed’ in a text that can be nothing more than audible. Compared with the eyes of Job (mentioned 49 times explicitly), his ears (mentioned 13 times, i.e., four times less than his eyes, perhaps because his ears are less visible) play a much more subtle role, underlying even his final confession in 42:5-6, where it seems/sounds that his eyes gave him (only) his final in-‘sight’. That leaves the impression that his ears give him access (...) to the second-hand testimony of tradition but his eyes to his own, personal experience. The hypothesis of this study is that a psychoanalytical perspective can give additional meaning to this polarity and cooperation of the senses for both the main character and recipient of the book of Job in that Job’s (in)sight depends on the foundation of the aural experience, even the musical experience.Contribution: A psychoanalytical perspective adds to the breadth and depth of insight gained from studying the role of the sensory experience in the narrative about the psychic and spiritual development of the protagonist in the Book of Job. (shrink)

On the Soul II 8, 420a3–12 is always explained as if Aristotle there considered the ears to be the seat of the faculty of hearing. However, Aristotle there identifies the instrument of sense perception not with external parts of the visible body but with the soul’s instrumental body, situated in the heart and connected with the ears. That also appears to be the case in Generation of Animals V 2.

'No writer has probed the riddle of the Other with more patience and insight than Jacques Derrida.

Right-ear advantage refers to the observation that when two different speech stimuli are simultaneously presented to both ears, listeners report stimuli more correctly from the right ear than the left. It is assumed to result from prominent projection along the auditory pathways to the contralateral hemisphere and the dominance of the left auditory cortex for the perception of speech elements. Our study aimed to investigate the role of attention in the right-ear advantage. We recorded magnetoencephalography data while participants listened (...) to pairs of Japanese two-syllable words. The amplitudes of the stimuli were modulated at 35 Hz in one ear and 45 Hz in the other. Such frequency-tagging allowed the selective quantification of left and right auditory cortex responses to left and right ear stimuli. Behavioral tests confirmed the right-ear advantage, with higher accuracy for stimuli presented to the right ear than to the left. The amplitude of the auditory steady-state response was larger when attending to the stimuli compared to passive listening. We detected a correlation between the attention-related increase in the amplitude of the auditory steady-state response and the laterality index of behavioral accuracy. The right-ear advantage in the free-response dichotic listening was also found in neural activities in the left auditory cortex, suggesting that it was related to the allocation of attention to both ears. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Extra Ear:Ear on the Arm BlenderStelarc Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.Blender. Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Stelarc. Collaborator Nina Sellars stands with the Blender during an installation photograph. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 2.Blender (3D Model). Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Image: Adam Fiannaca. The installation itself stands at just over 1.6 meters high and is anthropomorphic in (...) scale and structure. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 3.Blender. Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Stelarc. Every few minutes the Blender automatically circulates or "blends" its contents via a system of compressed air pumps and a pneumatic actuator. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas.[End Page 117] Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 4.Ear Scaffold. Los Angeles, Melbourne 2006. Photographer: Nina Sellars. The preoperative scaffolding that was surgically placed below the skin's surface of performance artist Stelarc. Text credit: R. Ferro. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 5.Blender (Biomaterial). Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Cameron Jones. Both artists, Stelarc and Nina Sellars, undertook liposuction operations specifically for the purpose of this new work and have succeeded in securing the sanitized isolation and, most importantly, the legal ownership of the remnants of the procedures. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 6.Hole Hooks Forceps. As a guest at Cornell University's conference "Digital Bodies" in 2001, Stelarc spoke of his desire to implant an ear that could pick up sound. His plans become a reality in the photograph taken during surgery. Text credit: R. Ferro. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 7.Extra Ear: Ear on the Arm. Los Angeles, Melbourne 2006. Photographer: Nina Sellars. Stelarc's future plans are to implant Bluetooth technology into the Ear on the Arm in a subsequent surgery so that the ear will pick up sound which will be transmitted via the Internet. Text credit: R. Ferro. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 8.Blender (Sterile Hood). Teknikunst—Meat Market, Melbourne 2005. Photograph: Stelarc. The biomaterials are now housed within the Blender's industrial casing, on exhibition at the Meat Market Gallery B in North Melbourne until August 18. Text credit: K. Conden and A. Douglas.[End Page 118]Stelarc- Biographical NotesStelarc is an Australian artist who has performed extensively in Japan, Europe, and the USA—including new music, dance festivals, and experimental theater. He has used medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, Virtual Reality systems, and the Internet to explore alternate, intimate, and involuntary interfaces with the body. He has performed with a THIRD HAND, a VIRTUAL ARM, a VIRTUAL BODY and a STOMACH SCULPTURE. He has acoustically and visually probed the body—having amplified brainwaves, blood-flow and muscle signals and filmed the inside of his lungs, stomach, and colon, approximately two meters of internal space. He has done twenty-five body SUSPENSIONS with insertions into the skin, in different positions and varying situations in private gallery spaces and in remote locations.For FRACTAL FLESH, as part of Telepolis in 1995, he developed a touch-screen interfaced Muscle Stimulation System, enabling remote access, actuation, and choreography of the body. Performances such as PING BODY and PARASITE (1996, 1997) probe notions of telematic scaling and the engineering of external, extended, and virtual nervous systems for the body using the Internet. In 1998 for Kampnagel, he completed EXOSKELETON—a pneumatically powered six-legged walking machine actuated by arm gestures. During 2000, he completed an EXTENDED ARM—a manipulator with eleven degrees-of-freedom that extends his arm to primate proportions and a MOTION PROSTHESIS—an intelligent, compliant servo-mechanism that enables the performance of precise, repetitive, and accelerated prompting or programming of the arms in real time. In 2002, with the collaboration of the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems Group, COGs, University of Sussex, and TNTU, the HEXAPOD robot prototype was developed. The six-legged MUSCLE MACHINE was constructed with the assistance of The Nottingham Trent University Engineering team, using fluidic rubber muscle actuators. The PROSTHETIC... (shrink)

Emergent philosophising is the spontaneous, tentative philosophical thinking and questioning of young children. Those who work with young children can, with practice, develop an ear for their emergent philosophising. I call this ‘listening philosophically’. In this article I report on a qualitative study of preschool education students at the University of Crete as they learn the art of listening philosophically.

"Life is full of absurdities, and human misperception of such absurdities leads to a state of unrest and fear that require meaning and direction for a happy life. F. Pasqualino addresses here samples of existential absurdities, and discusses solutions offered: Taoism offers in its paradoxes a natural self-help resource. Buddhism offers a natural wisdom that is informed by a supernatural impersonal Absolute. Hinduism offers a plethora of personal gods who embody the impersonal Absolute. The Judeo-Christian-Islamic wisdom teaches a personal Absolute (...) God whose being is distinct from, but involved with human and non-human beings. The unifying feature of these wisdoms is: Obedience to, and love of, the Absolute can rectify human misperception of life's absurdities, dissipate fear, and provide meaning, value and a serene life. Jesus Christ, the incarnate Absolute in Christian theology, chose to become an exemplar innocent victim for love, thus giving the most absurd but victoriously redeeming love that provides a new and sublime perspective on life's absurdities. G. Lahood's translation and commentary make the Italian masterpiece available to an English-speaking audience"--. (shrink)

In recent years, more and more people are applying Convolutional Neural Networks to the study of sound signals. The main reason is the translational invariance of convolution in time and space. Thereby the diversity of the sound signal can be overcome. However, in terms of sound direction recognition, there are also problems such as a microphone matrix being too large, and feature selection. This paper proposes a sound direction recognition using a simulated human head with microphones at both ears. (...) Theoretically, the two microphones cannot distinguish the front and rear directions. However, we use the original data of the two channels as the input of the convolutional neural network, and the resolution effect can reach more than 0.9. For comparison, we also chose the delay feature (GCC) for sound direction recognition. Finally, we also conducted experiments that used probability distributions to identify more directions. (shrink)

An archeology of auditory surveillance combined with an analysis of representations of spying in works of literature, music, and film that provide philosophical reflections on the drives that animate listening: the drive for mastery and the death drive.

"Hooray! Professor Lucy Green's classic text is now available, in its second edition, to a new generation. The first edition contributed to the development of a new field, the sociology of music education. But the argument is of wider interest, and has been useful to me in better understanding the mechanics of the professional life as applicable to the working player." Robert Fripp, King Crimson RESPONSES TO THE FIRST EDITION OF MUSIC ON DEAF EARS: "This is a fine book (...) indeed. The clarity of mind shining through the text is apparent, and the concern with music, musical experience and the development of children in our schools is self-evident.. Musicians and educators would do well to reflect upon these ideas and the inherent challenges to our comfortable but essentially problematic ways of thinking about and responding to music." Keith Swanwick, Music and Letters "The argument, necessarily simplified here, is powerfully and cogently made. It not only impinges on educational practice but is one of the best general discussions of musical meaning and ideology I have read." Richard Middleton, Popular Music "This analysis has considerable explanatory power, especially in regard to the response of school pupils to various musical styles.. I recommend this interesting and uncomfortable book not just to music teachers but to all those musicians and music lovers who think at all about the nature of their art." Christopher Small, British Journal of Music Education. (shrink)

Podcasts have been described as “a cinema for the ears” and this application of a visual rhetoric to describe an audio-only experience results in an attempt to define what is still a relatively new medium. I argue that it is possible to consider something cinematic without the presence of moving images. Assertions in favour of the cinematic nature of podcasts often employ the visual imagination of listeners evoked by heightened audio characteristics that a particular podcast may possess. By focusing (...) on film-centred podcasts specifically, which, in terms of content and form, are implicitly and often explicitly concerned with properties of the cinematic, I argue for a more conceptual analysis of the idea of a visual form of audio. While many film-oriented podcasts provide a supplementary celebration of cinema culture rather than manifesting a unique cinematic experience of their own, there are examples of film-centred podcasts that attempt to actualise what I will call an “audio-cinematic” experience, deploying the creative potential of the podcast to manifest an experiential aura that evokes a cinematic imagination. I analyse the sonic dimensions of audio-cinematic podcasts including my work with Neil Fox on The Cinematologists Podcast. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with the problem of speaking past one another due to an asymmetry of the interlocutors' backgrounds. When individuals with different levels of relative privilege interact, the party with relative privilege may fail to engage with what is being communicated. I take up critical Gadamerian hermeneutics to ask how we, as individuals with relative privilege, can 'unstop' our ears so that the burden of explanation does not (unfairly) remain on those we hurt by our mishearing/non-hearing. I (...) offer two methods to achieve this 'unstopping': 'critical self-knowledge' through Quassim Cassam's 'Vice Epistemology' framework and 'critical world-knowledge' through the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (Max Horkheimer and Jürgen Habermas, specifically). I then take up contemporary critical hermeneutics (Lorenzo Simpson) to show how, through the application of the critical methods, one might be able to achieve a useful, cross-cultural dialogue. This is imperative given our inexorably multi-cultural world today. (shrink)

This essay analyzes the historical development of otology in relation to music. It illustrates the integral role of music perception and appreciation in the study of hearing, where hearing operates not simply as a scientific phenomenon but signifies particular meaningful experiences in society. The four historical moments considered—Helmholtz’s piano-keyed cochlea, the ear phonautograph, the hearing aid, and the cochlear implant—show how the sounds, perceptions, and instruments of music have mediated and continue to mediate our relationships with hearing. To have an (...) ear, one does not just bear a physiological hearing mechanism; one experiences the aesthetics of musical sound. (shrink)

Unlike sonographic examinations, sonic fetal heartbeat monitoring has received relatively little attention from scholars in the social sciences. Using the case of fetal heartbeat monitoring as part of midwifery prenatal care in Germany, this contribution introduces music as an analytical tool for exploring the aesthetic dimensions of obstetrical surveillance practices. Based on ethnographic stories, three orchestrations are compared in which three different instruments help audiences to listen to what becomes fetal heartbeat music and to qualify fetal and pregnant lives in (...) relation to each other. In the Doppler-based orchestration, audible heartbeat music is taken as a sign of a child in need of parental love and care cultivated to listen. The Pinard horn makes esoteric fetal music that can be appreciated by the midwife as a skilled instrumentalist alone and helps to enact a child hidden in the belly. The cardiotocograph brings about soothing music and a reassuring relationship with a child but also durable scripts of juridical beauty. This material-semiotic analysis amplifies how well-being is shaped in midwifery prenatal care practices. (shrink)

Psychological eudaimonism is the view that we are constituted by a desire to avoid the harmful. This entails that coming to see a prospective or actual object of pursuit as harmful to us will unseat our positive evaluative belief about that object. There is more than one way that such an 'unseating' of desire may be caused on an intellectualist picture. This paper arbitrates between two readings of Socrates' 'attack on laziness' in the Meno, with the aim of constructing a (...) model of moral education based on PE's implied moral psychology. In particular, we argue against the view that when we come to see - through prudential reasoning - that our blatant evaluative beliefs and desires disserve eudaimonism, we will no longer perceive their intentional objects as choice-worthy. We suggest, instead, that it is by experiencing shame that we cease to see the intentional objects of our evaluative beliefs and desires as worthy of pursuit. This form of 'hydraulic education' bypasses reason-responsiveness altogether. As such, it only allows for practical norms to be derived from the nature of agency indirectly, namely by enabling the use of discursive practical reasoning. (shrink)

Summary In 1670, the Bolognese mathematician Pietro Mengoli published his Speculationi di musica, a highly original work attempting to found the mathematical study of music on the anatomy of the ear. His anatomy was idiosyncratic and his mathematics extraordinarily complex, and he proposed a unique double mechanism of hearing. He analysed in detail the supposed behaviour of the subtle part of the air inside the ear, and the patterns of strokes made on the eardrum by simultaneous sounds. Most strikingly, he (...) divided the musical octave into a continuous set of regions which he colour-coded to show their effects on a listener. His work did not find its way into the mainstream of seventeenth-century mathematical studies of music, but when examined in its context it has the potential to shed light on that discipline, as well as being of considerable interest in its own right. Here, I focus on the anatomical and mathematical basis of Mengoli's work. (shrink)

Why did Bernhard Riemann, arguably the most original mathematician of his generation, spend the last year of life investigating the mechanism of hearing? Fighting tuberculosis and the hostility of eminent scientists such as Hermann Helmholtz, he appeared to forsake mathematics to prosecute a case close to his heart. Only sketchy pages from his last paper remain, but here we assemble some significant clues and triangulate from them to build a broad picture of what he might have been driving at. Our (...) interpretation is that Riemann was a committed idealist and from this philosophical standpoint saw that the scientific enterprise was lame without the “poetry of hypothesis”. He believed that human thought was fundamentally the dynamics of “mind-masses” and that the human mind interpenetrated, and became part of, the microscopic physical domain of the cochlea. Therefore, a full description of hearing must necessarily include the perceptual dimensions of what he saw as a single manifold. The manifold contains all the psychophysical aspects of hearing, including the logarithmic transformations that arise from Fechner’s law, faithfully preserving all the subtle perceptual qualities of sound. For Riemann, hearing was a unitary physical and mental event, and parallels with modern ideas about consciousness and quantum biology are made. A unifying quantum mechanical model for an atom of consciousness—drawing on Riemann’s mind-masses and the similar “psychons” proposed by Eccles—is put forward. (shrink)

In his treatise On Isis and Osiris, Plutarch tries to explain the meaning of a statue or image of Zeus in Crete, which had no ears. An Egyptian or Egyptianizing image with separate ears, perhaps on a stele, incomprehensible to Greeks, but common in Egypt, might have given rise to Plutarch’s bafflement and fantasy interpretation.Dans son traité De Iside et Osiride, Plutarque essaie d’expliquer la signification d’une statue ou d’une image de Zeus en Crète, qui n’avait aucune oreille. (...) Une image égyptienne ou « égyptianisante » avec des oreilles séparées, peut-être sur une stèle, incompréhensible aux Grecs mais commune en Égypte, pourrait avoir provoqué la perplexité de Plutarque et son interprétation fantaisiste. (shrink)

Sounds are all around us, all the time. We constantly engage in listening: to the everyday sounds of the streets on our way to work, to the black-bird's soft nattering an early morning in spring, to a teacher's tiresome talk. Nature speaks to us with a thousand voices, and a place sounds of its inhabitants. Normally, we take our ability to hear as a matter of course; hearing is an implicit and mostly unreflected engagement in our daily activities. As educators, (...) however, we cannot take our students' capability of listening for granted. One problem of education, Angelo Caranfa argues, is that it fails to teach the significance of listening and silence. The present predominant focus on discourse and critical thinking... (shrink)