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Silent Sound Art: Performing the Unheard (2012)

Elen Flügge

This article is a reflection on silent sound art, exemplified here by the works of Peter Ablinger and Akio Suzuki, in the context of a partially historical con-sideration of the participatory subject in Installation Art, with a primary focus on artistic movements and selected works from the late 1950s to the early 1970s by John Cage, George Brecht, and La Monte Young.

Richard Wagner, Louis de Fourcaud, and a Path for French Opera in the 1880s (2012)

Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis

In a much-quoted interview with Richard Wagner conducted by the French critic Louis de Fourcaud in 1879, and published in different versions in 1880, 1884, and 1886, the composer allegedly advised the French to write operas drawing on their own legendary sources. Contemporary works such as d’Indy’s Fervaal, Chausson’s Le Roi Arthus, and Massenet’s Esclarmonde suggest that Fourcaud’s interview did indeed have a profound impact on the Wagnerian movement in France. However, a close examination of the sources reveals that his text owes much less to Wagner than scholars have previously assumed: in fact, evidence suggests that the most important part of the interview (that is, the advice to French composers) was added by Fourcaud himself after Wagner’s death.

Thematic Unity Across a Video Game Series (2011)

Jason Brame

Composer Koji Kondo’s music for both Super Mario Bros. (Nintendo, 1984) and The Legend of Zelda (Nintendo, 1986) is among the most recognized video game music ever written. Through the use of motivic and prolongational analysis, this article demonstrates how Kondo created a unity across the entire Zelda franchise, while making each game’s score unique by examining one musical element, the overworld theme, from each of the main entries in the Zelda series. Schenkerian analysis is used to identify structural and motivic relationships between the various themes. This article concludes with an examination of semiotic implications of this analysis and its impact on other aspects of the Zelda series and game music analysis as a whole.

Playing the Tune: Video Game Music, Gamers, and Genre (2011)

Tim Summers

This article proposes a particular approach to video game music by advocating a genre-based enquiry. Two generic levels are active in video game music: “interactive genre” (the type of game/interactive mechanism) and “environmental genre” (the “setting” of the game). The interaction between these levels produces the game’s music. By examining games within the same interactive genre, even if the environmental genre is markedly different, we can begin to uncover similar concerns, functions and methodologies of game music. Three interactive genres are briefly examined (survival horror games, strategy games, fighting games), in order to demonstrate how musicalstrategic similarities can be seen to weave through game genres.

Exploiting combinatorial relaxations to solve a routing & scheduling problem in car body manufacturing (2010)

Jörg Rambau Cornelius Schwarz

Motivated by the laser sharing problem (LSP) in car body manufacturing, we define the new general routing and scheduling problem (RSP). In the RSP, multiple servers have to visit and process jobs; renewable resources are shared among them. The goal is to find a makespan-minimal scheduled dispatch. We present complexity results as well as a branch-and-bound algorithm for the RSP. This is the first algorithm that is able to solve the LSP for industrially relevant problem scales.

The evolution of Saharan dust input on Lanzarote (Canary Islands) – influenced by human activity in the Northwest Sahara during the early Holocene? (2009)

Hans von Suchodoletz Hedi Oberhänsli Dominik Faust Markus Fuchs Cécile Blanchet Tobias Goldhammer Ludwig Zöller

An overall Holocene increase of Saharan dust input to the Canary Islands and to the North Canary Basin is accompanied by a strong coarsening of Saharan dust in loess-like sediments deposited on Lanzarote from ~7–8 ka. No similar coarsening events are indicated in investigations of the sedimentological record for the last 180 ka, a period showing several dramatic climate changes. Therefore a mobilisation of Holocene dust by anthropogenic activity in the northwest Sahara east of the Canary Islands is assumed. Although scarce archaeological data from the coastal area of that region does not point to strong anthropogenic activity during the early Holocene, a high density of unexplored archaeological remains is reported from the coastal hinterlands in the Western Sahara. Thus, the hypothesis of early anthropogenic activity cannot be excluded.

Loess-like and palaeosol sediments from Lanzarote (Canary Islands/Spain) —Indicators of palaeoenvironmental change during the Late Quaternary (2009)

Hans von Suchodoletz Peter Kühn Ulrich Hambach Michael Dietze Ludwig Zöller Dominik Faust

On Lanzarote (Canary Islands) Quaternary Saharan dust and weathered local volcanic material were trapped in Miocence to Pliocene valleys dammed by younger volcanic edifices. These sediments show sequences of alternating reddish/clayey and loess-like yellowish/silty material. In order to investigate if reddish/clayey layers contain material derived from local pedogenesis and if so, which pedogenetic processes were active, we performed sedimentological, micromorphological and environmental magnetic analyses. The analyses demonstrate that these layers contain material derived from local soils. These soils were characterised by clay formation, rubefication and the formation of superparamagnetic particles during periods of enhanced soil moisture. Thus, they can serve as natural archives in order to reconstruct the terrestrial palaeoclimatic history of Lanzarote. The distribution of soil material in the profiles shows that cold periods of the Late Quaternary were characterised by more humid conditions than today. Using palaeontological remains and a comparison with recent soils on Tenerife, we can roughly estimate maximal palaeoprecipitation values during more humid periods.

Geomorphological investigations of sediment traps on Lanzarote (Canary Islands) as a key for the interpretation of a palaeoclimate archive off NW Africa (2009)

Hans von Suchodoletz Dominik Faust Ludwig Zöller

On Lanzarote (Canary Islands) Late Quaternary Saharan dust and volcanic material were trapped in Miocence to Pliocene valleys dammed by volcanic lava flows. These trapped sediments are potentially interesting as they can be natural archives useful to reconstruct the terrestrial palaeoclimate history of the NW African margin. Nevertheless, slope wash processes altered the primarily eolian deposits, making climatic interpretation not straightforward. Geomorphological mapping, GIS calculations and sedimentological investigations were used to unravel these processes influencing the temporal resolution of the palaeoclimatic archive, demonstrating that they average the palaeoclimatic signal by some ka. Thus, despite the colluvial geomorphic environment, the valley fillings can be used for palaeoclimatic interpretation of events with a length of at least some ka. The youngest sediments, deposited since at least 2.5 ka, are anthropogenically triggered and thus cannot be used for palaeoclimatic interpretation. The results show that the input of Saharan dust at Lanzarote increased during the last 1.0 Ma and especially during the Early/Middle Holocene.

On the benefits of using NP-hard problems in Branch & Bound (2008)

Jörg Rambau Cornelius Schwarz

We present a Brand-and-Bound (B&B) method using combinatorial bounds for solving makespan minimization problems with sequence dependent setup costs. As an application we present a laser source sharing problem arising in car manufacturing.

Double and bordered alpha-circulant self-dual codes over finite commutative chain rings (2008)

Michael Kiermaier Alfred Wassermann

In this paper we investigate codes over finite commutative rings R, whose generator matrices are built from alpha-circulant matrices. For a non-trivial ideal I < R we give a method to lift such codes over R/I to codes over R, such that some isomorphic copies are avoided. For the case where I is the minimal ideal of a finite chain ring we refine this lifting method: We impose the additional restriction that lifting preserves self-duality. It will be shown that this can be achieved by solving a linear system of equations over a finite field. Finally we apply this technique to Z_4-linear double nega-circulant and bordered circulant self-dual codes. We determine the best minimum Lee distance of these codes up to length 64.

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