Using iPods or portable CD players, millions of people take their music with them every day to modify their daily experiences. Encased in headphones, they listen to music for entertainment, but also use it, among other things, as a buffer between themselves and the world outside, and to manage their moods. What is it about music that makes it useful in different ways to so many people? Have people always used music in these ways, or only since the technology of the Walkman and then the mp3 player made music portable? In this wide-ranging exploration of how and why we use portable music, Andrew Williams sheds new light on the role music plays in our everyday lives. Portable Music and Its Functions will be of use to students and scholars of sociology and cultural studies as well as of musicology.
This collection brings together philosophers, sociologists, musicologists and students of culture who theorize music through cultural practices as diverse as opera and classical music, jazz and pop, avant-garde and DIY musical cultures, music festivals and isolated listening through the iPod, rock in urban heritage and the piano in East Asia.
This handbook examines how electrical technologies and their corresponding economies of scale have rendered music and sound increasingly mobile-portable, fungible, and ubiquitous. Highly interdisciplinary, the two volumes of the Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies consider the devices, markets, and theories of mobile music, and its aesthetics and forms of performance.
Perhaps you've invented the next big breakthrough. If so, congratulations. Now the next test begins. How do you protect such an invention? How do you ensure that such protection adds value to your invention? And ultimately, how do you ensure that you get properly compensated for your invention? This textbook will teach these and other core patent concepts. The reader will follow the life of a patent, including how to conduct an inventor disclosure, write a patent application, and respond to actions from the USPTO, to eventually pursuing one or more profit options, such as litigation, brokering, or licensing. The focus of the textbook is on adding value to IP portfolios by implementing patent strategies at every phase of the patent process. The goal is to enable the reader to formulate and carry out such strategies. Keep inventing. Keep protecting.
Listening to, buying and sharing music is an immensely important part of everyday life. Yet recent technological developments are increasingly changing how we use and consume music. This book collects together the most recent studies of music consumption, and new developments in music technology. It combines the perspectives of both social scientists and technology designers, uncovering how new music technologies are actually being used, along with discussions of new music technologies still in development. With a specific focus on the social nature of music, the book breaks new ground in bringing together discussions of both the social and technological aspects of music use. Chapters cover topics such as the use of the iPod, music technologies which encourage social interaction in public places, and music sharing on the internet. A valuable collection for anyone concerned with the future of music technology, this book will be of particular interest to those designing new music technologies, those working in the music industry, along with students of music and new technology.
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Ubiquitous Musics offers a multidisciplinary approach to the pervasive presence of music in everyday life. The essays address a variety of situations in which music is present alongside other activities and does not demand focused attention from (sometimes involuntary) listeners. The contributors present different theoretical perspectives on the increasing ubiquity of music and its implications for the experience of listening. The collection consists of nine essays divided into three sections: Histories, Technologies, and Spaces. The first section addresses the historical origins of functional music and the debates on how reproduced music, including a wide range of styles and genres, spread so quickly across so many environments. The second section focuses on more contemporary sound technologies, including mobile phones in India, the role of visible playback technology in film, and listening to portable digital players. The final section reflects on settings such as malls, stores, gyms, offices and cars in which ubiquitous musics are often present, but rarely thought about. This last section - and ultimately the whole collection - seeks to foster a wider understanding of listening practices by lending a fresh, critical ear.
* Explains in plain English how to evaluate online music services, download music, select a portable player, turn a PC into an audio jukebox, burn custom CDs, and create and edit music files from commercial CDs * Apple iTunes reported 50 million music downloads as of March 2004, and the new Napster had 5 million downloads after just 4 months of operation * Covers the leading online pay music sites (iTunes, Napster, Rhapsody) as well as free alternatives (with advice on what's legal and what's not) and profiles Apple's iPod and other top portable players.
Creative Design Engineering: Introduction to an Interdisciplinary Approach presents the latest information on a field that has traditionally been primarily concerned with how to make things. However, as technology has advanced, and we have no shortage of things, a new challenge for today's engineers is what to make. In tackling this, our approaches to engineering design have come under the spotlight. This book presents solutions to this topic in different sections that highlight the basic concerns associated with innovation. First, design is considered a kind of universal human act. Second, it is an interdisciplinary approach that brings together perspectives from fields such as cognitive science and science of knowledge is adopted. Third, the scope of the discussion also includes the process of creating an initial idea for a new product (called the pre-design phase), as well as the use of the product in society (the post-design phase). Design engineers and researchers in engineering design will find this a user-friendly route to understanding the importance of creativity to engineering and how to implement new techniques to improve design outcomes. The book has been translated from the original Japanese book titled Sozo Dezain Kogaku [Creative Design Engineering] (published by the University of Tokyo Press 2014). - Draws on research in industrial design, art, and cognitive science to present a concept of creativity which breaks free of traditional engineering thinking - Deconstructs design as a human activity to increase our understanding, helping us create outstanding engineering projects and systems - Includes discussion points to help the reader not only explore the concepts in the book, but also apply them to their own design contexts
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second European Symposium on Ambient Intelligence, EUSAI 2004, held in Eindhoven, The Netherlands in November 2004. The 36 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 90 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on ubiquitous computing: sofware architectures, communication, and distribution; context sensing and machine perception; human computer interaction in ambient intelligence environments; and algorithms, ontologies, and architectures for learning and adaptation.
