Abstract
In the small but growing literature on the philosophy of country music, the question of how we ought to understand the genre’s notion of authenticity has emerged as one of the central ...questions. Many country music scholars argue that authenticity claims track attributions of cultural standing or artistic self-expression. However, careful attention to the history of the genre reveals that these claims are simply factually wrong. On the basis of this, we have grounds for dismissing these attributions. Here, I argue for an alternative model of authenticity in which we take claims about the relative authenticity of country music to be evidence of ‘country’ being a dual-character concept in the same way that it has been suggested of punk rock and hip-hop. Authentic country music is country music that embodies the core value commitments of the genre. These values form the basis of country artists’ and audiences’ practical identities. Part of country music’s aesthetic practice is that audiences reconnect with, reify, and revise this common practical identity through identification with artists and works that manifest these values. We should then think of authenticity discourse within country music as a kind of game within the genre’s practice of shaping and maintaining this practical identity.
Abstract
Groove, as a musical quality, is an important part of jazz and pop music appreciative practices. Groove talk is widespread among musicians and audiences, and considerable importance is ...placed on generating and appreciating grooves in music. However, musicians, musicologists, and audiences use groove attributions in a variety of ways that do not track one consistent underlying concept. I argue that there at least two distinct concepts of groove. On one account, the groove is “the feel of the music” and, on the other, the groove is the psychological feeling (induced by music) of wanting to move one’s body. Further, I argue that recent work in music psychology shows that these two concepts do not converge on a unified set of musical features. Finally, I also argue that these two concepts play different functional roles in the appreciative practices of jazz and popular music. This should cause us to further consider the mediating role genre plays for aesthetic concepts and provides us with a reason for adopting a more communitarian approach to aesthetics that is attentive to the ways in which aesthetic discourse serves the practices of different audiences.
Genres inform our appreciative practices. What it takes for a work to be a good work of comedy is different than what it takes for a work to be a good work of horror, and a failure to recognize this ...will lead to a failure to appreciate comedies or works of horror particularly well. Likewise, it is not uncommon to hear people say that a film or novel is a good work, but not a good work of x (where x is the genre of that work). A work can be good all things considered, but genre membership provides us with an additional set of evaluative criteria over and above those of the medium, which colors how we interpret and appreciate the work. Given this importance, it is not surprising that philosophers of art have been interested in providing an account of what, exactly, a genre is. Despite this interest, there is not widespread agreement about what it takes for something to be a genre, nor what kinds of considerations are relevant in determining whether a work is a member of that genre. Beyond this, we might also want to know to what degree we ought to consider genre in evaluating a work of art and why it should matter at all. Here, I explore the variety of recent theories that philosophers have taken up on the topic of genre and why we should ultimately think of genres as artistic practices rather than the alternatives.
The problem of genre explosion Malone, Evan
Inquiry (Oslo),
10/2022, Volume:
ahead-of-print, Issue:
ahead-of-print
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Genre discourse is widespread in appreciative practice. It should be no surprise then, that philosophers of art have also been interested in genre and in genres. However, in their accounts, ...philosophers have so far focused on capturing all of the categories of art that we think of as genres and have focused less on ensuring that only the categories we think are genres are captured by those theories. Each of these theories populates the world with far too many genres because they call a wide class of mere categories of art genres. I call this the problem of genre explosion. In this paper, I survey the existing accounts of genre and describe the kinds of considerations they employ in determining whether a work is a work of a given genre. After this, I demonstrate the ways in which the problem of genre explosion arises for all of these theories and discuss some solutions those theories could adopt that will ultimately not work. Finally, I argue that the problem of genre explosion is best solved by adopting a social view of genres, which can capture the difference between genres and mere categories of art.
Purpose - To seek to produce low-voltage, soft mechanical actuators entirely via freeform fabrication as part of a larger effort to freeform fabricate complete electromechanical devices with lifelike ...and or biocompatible geometry and function.Design methodology approach - The authors selected ionomeric polymer-metal composite (IPMC) actuators from the literature and the authors' own preliminary experiments as most promising for freeform fabrication. The authors performed material formulation and manual device fabrication experiments to arrive at materials which are amenable to robotic deposition and developed an SFF process which allows the production of complete IPMC actuators and their fabrication substrate integrated within other freeform fabricated devices. The authors freeform fabricated simple IPMC's, explored some materials performance interactions, and preliminarily characterized these devices in comparison to devices produced by non-SFF methods.Findings - Freeform fabricated IPMC actuators operate continuously in air for more than 4 h and 3,000 bidirectional actuation cycles. The output stress scaled to input power is one to two orders of magnitude inferior to that of non-SFF devices. Much of this difference may be associated with process-sensitive microstructure of materials. Future work will investigate this performance gap.Research limitations implications - Device performance is sufficient to continue exploration of SFF of complete electromechanical devices, but will need improvement for broader application. The feasibility of the approach for producing devices with complex, non-planar geometry has not been demonstrated.Practical implications - This work demonstrates the feasibility of freeform fabricating IPMC devices, and lays groundwork for further development of the materials and methods.Originality value - This work constitutes the first demonstration of complete, functional, IPMC actuators produced entirely by freeform fabrication.
Purpose - Solid freeform fabrication (SFF) has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing, even to allow individuals to invent, customize, and manufacture goods cost-effectively in their own homes. ...Commercial freeform fabrication systems - while successful in industrial settings - are costly, proprietary, and work with few, expensive, and proprietary materials, limiting the growth and advancement of the technology. The open-source Fab@Home Project has been created to promote SFF technology by placing it in the hands of hobbyists, inventors, and artists in a form which is simple, cheap, and without restrictions on experimentation. This paper aims to examine this.Design methodology approach - A simple, low-cost, user modifiable freeform fabrication system has been designed, called the Fab@Home Model 1, and the designs, documentation, software, and source code have been published on a user-editable "wiki" web site under the open-source BSD License. Six systems have been built, and three of them given away to interested users in return for feedback on the system and contributions to the web site.Findings - The Fab@Home Model 1 can build objects comprising multiple materials, with sub-millimeter-scale features, and overall dimensions larger than 20 cm. In its first six months of operation, the project has received more than 13 million web site hits, and media coverage by several international news and technology magazines, web sites, and programs. Model 1s are being used in a university engineering course, a Model 1 will be included in an exhibit on the history of plastics at the Science Museum London, UK, and kits can now be purchased commercially.Research limitations implications - The ease of construction and operation of the Model 1 has not been well tested. The materials cost for construction (US$2,300) has prevented some interested people from building systems of their own.Practical implications - The energetic public response to the Fab@Home project confirms the broad appeal of personal freeform fabrication technology. The diversity of interests and desired applications expressed by the public suggests that the open-source approach to accelerating the expansion of SFF technology embodied in the Fab@Home project may well be successful.Originality value - Fab@Home is unique in its goal of popularizing and advancing SFF technology for its own sake. The RepRap project in the UK predates Fab@Home, but aims to build machines which can make most of their own parts. The two projects are complementary in many respects, and fruitful exchanges of ideas and designs between them are expected.
It has been over two decades since Miranda Fricker labeled epistemic injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their capacity as a knower. The philosophical literature has proliferated with variants ...and related concepts. By considering cases in popular music, we argue that it is worth distinguishing a parallel phenomenon of art-interpretive injustice, in which an agent is wronged in their creative capacity as a possible artist. In section 1, we consider the prosecutorial use of rap lyrics in court as a central case of this injustice. In section 2, we distinguish art-interpretive injustice from other categories already discussed in the recent literature. In section 3, we discuss the relationship between genre discourse and identity prejudice. The case for recognizing the category of art-interpretive injustice is that it allows one to recognize a class of harms as being importantly related in ways that one would otherwise overlook.
On the Oddly Satisfying Malone, Evan
Contemporary aesthetics,
01/2017, Volume:
15
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
What does it mean for something to be oddly satisfying? There is much about everyday aesthetic experiences that seems obviously satisfying, but what can we say about those subtle experiences which so ...often flutter past our conscious endorsement, and whose value seems ineffable and, frankly, odd? I am thinking, here, of the lid to the board game box which rests gently on the trapped air inside before softly and evenly settling on the box, and the perfectly sized book-jacket that sits taut on the resting hardback, never to get caught on a precarious corner and tear. For you, there might be something immensely satisfying about the makeup compact that snaps shut with a clean crisp click that communicates the finality of the act, or you might find your daily moment of transcendental bliss in streaming videos of folks pressure-washing their driveways.
In this dissertation, I defend a communitarian, practice-based, theory of genre and aesthetic value. I argue that theories of aesthetic value and art ontology within analytic philosophy have been too ...focused on the intentions of individual artists, the features of individual works, and the aesthetic experience of individual audience members. Accordingly, philosophical accounts of genre also follow this model. However, taking genre seriously means recognizing that they are social categories. If this is right, then philosophy of art ought to pay closer attention to the ways in which genres (as social categories) mediate aesthetic practices, values, and concepts. By thinking about genres in terms of communities of aesthetic practice, we can better understand the ways in which communities create new aesthetic predicates and norms, generate and negotiate the nature of new practical identities, and develop unique ethical norms which govern their artistic practices. The first chapter surveys existing accounts of genre (whether explicit or implied) and defends a more communitarian approach grounded in the aesthetic practices of communities. This chapter raises a handful of novel problems for existing theories and draws on social and political philosophy in developing my own view. Chapter 2 argues that extant communitarian theories of genre, like the genres-as-traditions model, fail to fully capture the role of audience-members and fans play in the development of a genre. This chapter draws heavily on literature in media studies and focuses on the role of online communities in seeding genres through curation (as opposed to the common view in which genres are fixed through artistic production). Chapter 3 then argues that aesthetic predicates are mediated in a way that broader accounts of those predicates should be sensitive to. In the service of this argument, I draw on musicological and psychological literature to differentiate the concept of musical groove along genre lines. Chapter 4 turns to the way in which artists and audiences within a genre can coalesce around a common practical identity, and how they negotiate amongst themselves the nature of that practical identity. Here I pay special attention to the country music community and examine the way in which discourse about authenticity is used to enforce the genre’s practical identity. Finally, in Chapter 6, I apply the communitarian approach that I have advocated for to hip-hop music. By thinking about the genre in terms of community practices, and by drawing on social psychological and media studies literature, I provide an account of the ethical norm which prevents rap artists from covering one another and explain how such a norm would develop.
A major challenge in tissue engineering is the generation of cell-seeded implants with structures that mimic native tissue, both in anatomic geometries and intratissue cell distributions. By ...combining the strengths of injection molding tissue engineering with those of solid freeform fabrication (SFF), three-dimensional (3-D) pre-seeded implants were fabricated without custom-tooling, enabling efficient production of patient-specific implants. The incorporation of SFF technology also enabled the fabrication of geometrically complex, multiple-material implants with spatially heterogeneous properties that would otherwise be challenging to produce. Utilizing a custom-built robotic SFF platform and gel deposition tools, alginate hydrogel was used with calcium sulfate as a crosslinking agent to produce pre-seeded living implants of arbitrary geometries. The process was determined to be sterile and viable at 94 +/- 5%. The GAG and hydroxyproline production was found to be similar to that of other implants fabricated using the same materials with different shaping methods. The geometric fidelity of the process was quantified by using the printing platform as a computerized measurement machine (CMM); the RMS surface roughness of printed samples in the z-dimension was found to be 0.16 +/- 0.02 mm.
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