Keola is a mermaid - and bound for marriage to a foreign human prince. Unable to face a life cut off from the ocean with a man she despises, she chooses freedom at a terrible cost. Posing as a human wavesinger to remain hidden from her pursuers, she finds work on the ship of the dashing captain Anaar Kahlani. Anaar is searching for a mythical treasure and believes that Keola is the key to finding it. Amidst the hunt for fame and fortune, Anaar begins to fall for the mysterious wavesinger. Confronted with a secret and a dangerous revelation, she must decide what price she is willing to pay for untold riches - and for love. When Keola's past catches up with her, can they survive the oncoming storm together, or will the trials ahead demand more of them than they are willing to sacrifice?
Kara Hendricks and Jordan Ferguson have been best friends since kindergarten. That is until Jordan started hanging out with a new “cool” crowd and decided Kara was a popularity liability. Devastated, Kara feels betrayed and abandoned by everyone—even God. Yet for all the hurt and insecurity, these dark blue days contain a life-changing secret. Kara has the chance to discover something about herself that she never knew before. This first book in the teen fiction series TrueColors deals with self-worth, identity, and loneliness. Includes discussion questions.
In Wild Blue Media, Melody Jue destabilizes terrestrial-based ways of knowing and reorients our perception of the world by considering the ocean itself as a media environment—a place where the weight and opacity of seawater transforms how information is created, stored, transmitted, and perceived. By recentering media theory on and under the sea, Jue calls attention to the differences between perceptual environments and how we think within and through them as embodied observers. In doing so, she provides media studies with alternatives to familiar theoretical frameworks, thereby challenging scholars to navigate unfamiliar oceanic conditions of orientation, materiality, and saturation. Jue not only examines media about the ocean—science fiction narratives, documentary films, ocean data visualizations, animal communication methods, and underwater art—but reexamines media through the ocean, submerging media theory underwater to estrange it from terrestrial habits of perception while reframing our understanding of mediation, objectivity, and metaphor.
This book is a survey and analysis of how deep learning can be used to generate musical content. The authors offer a comprehensive presentation of the foundations of deep learning techniques for music generation. They also develop a conceptual framework used to classify and analyze various types of architecture, encoding models, generation strategies, and ways to control the generation. The five dimensions of this framework are: objective (the kind of musical content to be generated, e.g., melody, accompaniment); representation (the musical elements to be considered and how to encode them, e.g., chord, silence, piano roll, one-hot encoding); architecture (the structure organizing neurons, their connexions, and the flow of their activations, e.g., feedforward, recurrent, variational autoencoder); challenge (the desired properties and issues, e.g., variability, incrementality, adaptability); and strategy (the way to model and control the process of generation, e.g., single-step feedforward, iterative feedforward, decoder feedforward, sampling). To illustrate the possible design decisions and to allow comparison and correlation analysis they analyze and classify more than 40 systems, and they discuss important open challenges such as interactivity, originality, and structure. The authors have extensive knowledge and experience in all related research, technical, performance, and business aspects. The book is suitable for students, practitioners, and researchers in the artificial intelligence, machine learning, and music creation domains. The reader does not require any prior knowledge about artificial neural networks, deep learning, or computer music. The text is fully supported with a comprehensive table of acronyms, bibliography, glossary, and index, and supplementary material is available from the authors' website.
Regain your confidence at work, transform your sensitivity into a superpower Being highly attuned to your emotions, your environment, and the behavior of others can be the keys to success, but they can also lead to overthinking, overworking, and overgiving. It’s time to Trust Yourself. Over the last decade, award-winning human behavior expert and executive coach Melody Wilding, LMSW has helped thousands of Sensitive Strivers (highly sensitive, high-achieving professionals and leaders) get out of their own way. And now, in this groundbreaking book, Wilding offers practical, research-based strategies to reclaim control of your career and reach your full potential. You’ll discover: PRACTICAL STRATEGIES to harness your sensitivity and emotional intelligence, turning them into a superpower in the workplace. PROVEN TECHNIQUES to quiet your inner critic and make decisions with confidence. STEP-BY-STEP GUIDES to set healthy boundaries and protect your energy from difficult co-workers CONCRETE, ACTIONABLE TOOLS to develop resilience, bounce back from setbacks, and navigate workplace challenges with grace. WORD-FOR-WORD SCRIPTS to push back on extra work, promote your accomplishments, and more. Through her refreshingly approachable yet deeply empathetic approach, Wilding offers a life-changing roadmap that has helped readers across the globe to break the cycle of self-sabotage and self-doubt by transforming your perceived weaknesses into your biggest strengths.
Twelve-year-old Merryn lives with her fisherman father in a little cottage by the sea. Each day, her father braves the tumultuous waves and returns home in time for dinner. One stormy evening, he doesn’t come back. Merryn has a vision that he’s been dragged underwater by a terrifying sea creature, and he needs her help. Determined to rescue him, Merryn builds a tiny submarine and embarks on a journey through the undersea worlds she’s only heard about in her father’s lullabies. As she faces the dangers and wonders of the world below the waves, she realizes that her father’s stories were all real. Readers can also experience Merryn’s daring journey firsthand in the new Song of the Deep video game from acclaimed developer Insomniac Games.
“A claustrophobic suspense novel of immense propulsive power.”—Kim Stanley Robinson A Canticle for Leibowitz meets The Hunt for Red October in We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep, a lyrical and page-turning coming-of-age exploration of duty, belief, and the post-apocalypse from breakout newcomer Andrew Kelly Stewart. Remy is a Chorister, rescued from the surface world and raised to sing in a choir of young boys. Remy is part of a strange crew who control the Leviathan, an aging nuclear submarine, that bears a sacred mission: to trigger the Second Coming when the time is right. But Remy has a secret too—she’s the submarine’s only girl. Gifted with the missile’s launch key by the Leviathan’s dying caplain, she swears to keep it safe. Safety, however, is not the priority of the new caplain, who has his own ideas about the mission. When a surface-dweller is captured during a raid, Remy’s faith becomes completely overturned. Now, her last judgement may transform the fate of everything. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The last time you whistled a tune or hummed a song-why did you choose that one? You may not consider yourself a musical person, but your little act of unintended music may be the key to unlocking within you a wealth of unsuspected creativity-a kind of creativity that goes way beyond music, too. Lane Arye, PhD, a musician himself, focuses on the music that people do not intend to make. Using the highly regarded psychological model called Process Work, developed by Arnold Mindell, PhD, Arye has been teaching students around the world how to awaken their creativity, using music as the starting point, but including all art forms and ways of expression. The unintentional appears at moments when some hidden part of us, something beyond our usual awareness, suddenly tries to express itself. If we start paying attention to what is trying to happen rather than to what we think should happen, we open the door to self-discovery and creativity. Sometimes what we regard as "mistakes" in self-expression are in fact treasures. The book is rich with real-life stories, ideas, and practical techniques for unlocking creativity, which Arye dispenses with humor, insight, and enthusiasm.
"[An] illuminating memoir." —Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, The New York Times The story of a composer's life in the Alaskan wilderness and a meditation on making art in a landscape acutely threatened by climate change In the summer of 1975, the composer John Luther Adams, then a twenty-two-year-old graduate of CalArts, boarded a flight to Alaska. So began a journey into the mountains, forests, and tundra of the far north—and across distinctive mental and aural terrain—that would last for the next forty years. Silences So Deep is Adams’s account of these formative decades—and of what it’s like to live alone in the frozen woods, composing music by day and spending one’s evenings with a raucous crew of poets, philosophers, and fishermen. From adolescent loves—Edgard Varèse and Frank Zappa—to mature preoccupations with the natural world that inform such works as The Wind in High Places, Adams details the influences that have allowed him to emerge as one of the most celebrated and recognizable composers of our time. Silences So Deep is also a memoir of solitude enriched by friendships with the likes of the conductor Gordon Wright and the poet John Haines, both of whom had a singular impact on Adams’s life. Whether describing the travails of environmental activism in the midst of an oil boom or midwinter conversations in a communal sauna, Adams writes with a voice both playful and meditative, one that evokes the particular beauty of the Alaskan landscape and the people who call it home. Ultimately, this book is also the story of Adams’s difficult decision to leave a rapidly warming Alaska and to strike out for new topographies and sources of inspiration. In its attentiveness to the challenges of life in the wilderness, to the demands of making art in an age of climate crisis, and to the pleasures of intellectual fellowship, Silences So Deep is a singularly rich account of a creative life.
