Journal articles on the topic 'Chosen listening levels'

Purpose The objective of this study was to describe chosen listening levels (CLLs) for recorded music for listeners with hearing loss in aided and unaided conditions. Method The study used a within-subject, repeated-measures design with 13 adult hearing-aid users. The music included rock and classical samples with different amounts of audio-industry compression limiting. CLL measurements were taken at ear level (i.e., at input to the hearing aid) and at the tympanic membrane. Results For aided listening, average CLLs were 69.3 dBA at the input to the hearing aid and 80.3 dBA at the tympanic membrane. For unaided listening, average CLLs were 76.9 dBA at the entrance to the ear canal and 77.1 dBA at the tympanic membrane. Although wide intersubject variability was observed, CLLs were not associated with audiometric thresholds. CLLs for rock music were higher than for classical music at the tympanic membrane, but no differences were observed between genres for ear-level CLLs. The amount of audio-industry compression had no significant effect on CLLs. Conclusion By describing the levels of recorded music chosen by hearing-aid users, this study provides a basis for ecologically valid testing conditions in clinical and laboratory settings.

In the process of teaching listening, anxiety is believed as a negative factor contributing to the students’ poor listening comprehension and quite possibly the affective factor that the most persistently hinders the learning process. Thus, investigating its existence and delving its factors become salient in order to help the students overcome their listening learning barriers. This present study attempts to depict the condition of the students’ listening anxiety in an Academic Listening (AL) class in an Indonesian tertiary context. 20-items of Foreign Language Listening Anxiety’s (hereafter, FLLA) questionnaire were administered to 97 students taking that course. Having finished analyzing the levels of students’ listening anxiety, in-depth interviews were conducted to four students who were considered having high listening anxiety to disclose the underlying factors. The research result revealed three pivotal issues; a) 54.6% of the students had a relatively high level of listening anxiety, 18.5% had moderate listening anxiety, and 26.8% had a low level of listening anxiety; b), 75% of the chosen measured items showed an extreme level of the students’ listening anxiety, and c) the major factor contributing the listening anxiety was inadequate listening proficiency involving the inability to deal with the rapid speech rate and range of lexical choices.

Nowadays, most learners, especially students at The Asian International School, have plenty of opportunities for learning English vocabulary from the earliest possible age. However, the students in general faced lots of difficulties in vocabulary learning. Thus, the study was conducted with the purpose to investigate to what extent extensive listening affected the students’ vocabulary learning and their listening habits. Eighty participants were chosen by using convenience sampling and divided into two groups: a control group and an experimental group. The two groups took a pretest to measure their vocabulary knowledge with Listening Vocabulary Levels Test. Then, besides studying the school’s formal English curriculum, the control group practiced intensive listening while the experimental group practiced extensive listening. All the participants were required to submit one listening journal each week to report what they have done as their listening habits. Finally, they took a posttest (Listening Vocabulary Levels Test) after 12 weeks practicing. The results showed that extensive listening could help to increase the participants’ receptive vocabulary knowledge significantly, including word meanings and word aural forms. Additionally, the more the participants practiced extensive listening, the higher improvement they somewhat had on receptive vocabulary knowledge. The participants tended to practice listening by using visual materials and self-selected materials in their listening habits. To sum up, extensive listening affected impressively the participants’ vocabulary learning that aspires for the study to propose suggestions for future studies so that administrators, teachers, and students could receive huge pedagogical implications of extensive listening.

AbstractMost young adults report using personal audio systems (PAS) with earphones as part of their daily activities. PAS exposure is intermittent and research examining the levels these young adults are listening to is increasing. On average, preferred listening levels are below what would be considered at risk in an occupational setting.The purpose of this study was to evaluate how two questions predicted preferred listening level in young adults with normal hearing; specifically, whether these young adults could identify if they listen at a high level or not.One hundred and sixty young adults (111 women, 49 men) with normal hearing completed a questionnaire that had questions about PAS listening habits and then had preferred listening level assessed using a probe microphone system while listening to 1 hour of music through earphones.Otoscopy, tympanometry, and pure-tone thresholds were completed in a randomly determined test ear. As part of the Risk Factors Survey, two closed-set questions were completed. First, “For a typical day, what is the most common volume used during this day?” with the following response options “Low,” “Medium/Comfortable,” “Loud,” or “Very Loud.” And second, “Do you listen to your personal music system at a volume where you…” with the following response options “Easily hear people,” “Have a little trouble hearing people,” “Have a lot of trouble hearing people,” or “Cannot hear people.” Using a probe microphone, chosen listening level (A-weighted, diffuse-field correction and a conversion to free-field equivalent [L DFeq]) was calculated over 1 hour while the participant listened to music with earphones. Sensitivity and specificity were determined to see how well young adults could identify themselves as listening at a high level (>85 dBA) or not. Linear regression analyses were performed to determine the amount of variance explained by the two survey questions as predictors of measured L DFeq.Almost half of the participants reported a longest single use of a PAS as <1 hour daily and more than half reported listening at a medium/comfortable volume and had a little trouble hearing people. Mean L DFeq was 72.5 dBA, with young adult men having a significantly higher mean L DFeq (76.5 dBA) compared with young adult women (70.8 dBA). Sensitivity was 88.9% and specificity was 70.6% for the question asking about volume on a typical day. For the question asking about being able to hear other people while listening to music sensitivity was 83.3% and specificity was 82.5%. Two variables, listening volume on a typical day and sex, accounted for 28.4% of the variability associated with L DFeq; the answer to the question asking about being able to hear others and sex accounted for 22.8% of the variability associated with L DFeq.About 11% of young adults in the present study listen to a PAS with earphones at a high level (>85 dBA) while in a quiet background. The participants who do report listening at a high level, however, do well at self-reporting this risk behavior in survey questions.

This study tries to investigate the impact(s) of genre-based teaching (GBT) on Iranian EFL learners� listening proficiency as well as to discover if GBT equally affects the listening proficiency of EFL learners at different proficiency levels. To fulfill this objective, 84 EFL learners were chosen. They were divided into Group A and Group B. Groups A and B consisted of 40 and 44 participants, respectively. Group A was divided into experimental and control groups and performed two listening proficiency tests for pre and posttest. Findings of one-way ANCOVA revealed that experimental group performed better than the control group due to using GBI. As indicated by the proficiency test, Group B was also divided into proficient and less-proficient groups; each one performed two listening tests for pre and posttest. Consequences of one-way ANCOVA showed both groups enhanced from pretest to posttest, however; the proficient group performed outstandingly better than the less-proficient group. The results of this study generally demonstrated that GBT is a pivotal and fundamental factor for improving listening comprehension.

The three papers in this ‘suite’ have a special background and context. At the 2010 conference SoundActs in Aarhus the three panellists were each given the task to provide a paper with an analysis of the same sound object, thus exhibiting and contrasting different scholarly approaches to sound studies. The object was selected by Torben Sangild, who was familiar with the chosen context: the signature of the US radio programme and podcast Radiolab. The two other participants did not know the context and chose to analyse the sound object without further contextual investigation. This object was chosen for several reasons. First of all, it is brief (less than 17 seconds), which meant that it was possible to make a detailed analysis; at the same time, though, it is relatively complex, which means that it can accommodate three different analyses. It is a sound object with a global audience, taken from one of the most popular podcasts worldwide, accessible on the internet. Finally, it is a piece of functional sound design, rather than a work of art, which raises the question of context more clearly. The result is three rather different approaches: 1) a process analysis, observing analytical listening strategies towards the constructed object, 2) a vocal analysis, regarding the sound object as a polyphony of voices, and 3) a contextual analysis, framing the sound object as a radio signature. Ola Stockfelt analyses the sound object as something that is constructed via his own repeated listening process – as a scholarly-analytical analysis of the subjective act of creating meaning. He draws on presumptions and prejudices, demonstrating the impossibility of a purely structural listening. The analysis relates these hermeneutical reflections to formal musicological observations of harmony, timbre, space and rhythm in some detail. Ansa Lønstrup’s paper analyses the sound object as a polyphony of voices. Her analysis is inspired by two phenomenologists: Don Ihde, whose notion of ‘voice’ is understood in a more general sense as the voices of all things, and Lawrence Ferrara, who methodologically operates within tree levels of investigation: 1) the syntax, 2) the semantic and 3) the ontology level. Accordingly, this analysis is conducted, as if the sound object was performed by a vocal ensemble oscillating ‘between a musical and a speech act’. Torben Sangild’s paper focuses on the concrete function of the sound object as a radio signature. This prompts a generic analysis and a semantic model of radio signatures in general, eclectically employing formal, indexical, gestural, discursive and contextual levels of meaning. The analysis of the Radiolab signature focuses on the overall gesture of tension and release as well as the semantic elements in a constellation with the content and style of the radio programme. After the three individual contributions, a brief summary and conclusion will follow, answering any questions that may arise in the process.

This study aims to investigate the attempts of six EFL teachers at various colleges and faculties of Kuwait University to develop their EFL students’ oral skills. In a qualitative method using semi-structured interviews, the EFL teachers described their students’ levels of English as very good or good, but they needed to encourage their students to use their oral English widely so that they could, therefore, improve it to better levels. The qualitative method was chosen to get in-depth details and information about the individual experiences of the experienced teachers. The findings showed that the participants used various strategies and techniques, such as using supplementary materials, using drama, listening to tape recorders, working in language labs, having group discussions (with or against), etc. The data also revealed that the improvement of oral skills of EFL students at Kuwait University had been successfully achieved.

AbstractPrevious research in cochlear implant (CI) recipients with bilateral severe-to-profound sensorineural hearing loss showed improvements in speech recognition in noise using remote wireless microphone systems. However, to our knowledge, no previous studies have addressed the benefit of these systems in CI recipients with single-sided deafness.The objective of this study was to evaluate the potential improvement in speech recognition in noise for distant speakers in single-sided deaf (SSD) CI recipients obtained using the digital remote wireless microphone system, Roger. In addition, we evaluated the potential benefit in normal hearing (NH) participants gained by applying this system.Speech recognition in noise for a distant speaker in different conditions with and without Roger was evaluated with a two-way repeated-measures design in each group, SSD CI recipients, and NH participants. Post hoc analyses were conducted using pairwise comparison t-tests with Bonferroni correction.Eleven adult SSD participants aided with CIs and eleven adult NH participants were included in this study.All participants were assessed in 15 test conditions (5 listening conditions × 3 noise levels) each. The listening conditions for SSD CI recipients included the following: (I) only NH ear and CI turned off, (II) NH ear and CI (turned on), (III) NH ear and CI with Roger 14, (IV) NH ear with Roger Focus and CI, and (V) NH ear with Roger Focus and CI with Roger 14. For the NH participants, five corresponding listening conditions were chosen: (I) only better ear and weaker ear masked, (II) both ears, (III) better ear and weaker ear with Roger Focus, (IV) better ear with Roger Focus and weaker ear, and (V) both ears with Roger Focus. The speech level was fixed at 65 dB(A) at 1 meter from the speech-presenting loudspeaker, yielding a speech level of 56.5 dB(A) at the recipient's head. Noise levels were 55, 65, and 75 dB(A). Digitally altered noise recorded in school classrooms was used as competing noise. Speech recognition was measured in percent correct using the Oldenburg sentence test.In SSD CI recipients, a significant improvement in speech recognition was found for all listening conditions with Roger (III, IV, and V) versus all no-Roger conditions (I and II) at the higher noise levels (65 and 75 dB[A]). NH participants significantly benefited from the application of Roger in noise for higher levels, too. In both groups, no significant difference was detected between any of the different listening conditions at 55 dB(A) competing noise. There was also no significant difference between any of the Roger conditions III, IV, and V across all noise levels.The application of the advanced remote wireless microphone system, Roger, in SSD CI recipients provided significant benefits in speech recognition for distant speakers at higher noise levels. In NH participants, the application of Roger also produced a significant benefit in speech recognition in noise.

This paper investigates foreign language listening anxiety (FLLA) in line with social and interpersonal anxiety studies. Language-learning anxiety has been conceptualized as a unique, situation-specific entity, and recent research in second language acquisition (SLA) has examined anxiety with respect to such skill domains as reading and writing as well as in terms of spoken interaction. Too much emphasis on specificity, however, might have led researchers and practitioners to miss common features of anxiety as affective processes under tension. A Japanese translation of the Foreign Language Listening Anxiety Scale (FLLAS), which was created for Korean learners of English by Kim (2000), was administered to 452 Japanese learners. Data reduction through factor analysis indicated that this construct, as measured by the FLLAS, has three factors which were labeled Emotionality, Worry, andAnticipatory Fear. University major and gender were chosen as independent variables, and only the levels of the former were found to be significantly different in terms of one of the factors, Emotionality. Math students experienced more arousal of fear than social science students in this dimension of the FLLAS. 本論では、日本人大学生の英語のリスニングに関する不安感を因子分析と分散分析を用いて研究する。韓国語を母国語とする学習者向けに開発されたスケールを基にして作成した日本語版尺度を用い、この心理的概念の適切なモデルの構築を目指し、三つの因子を仮定する。また、専攻分野によって学生の不安感の構成にも統計的有意差が見られることも報告する。

The present study aims to see whether music (cheerful and sad) tuned to different frequencies (432 Hz vs. 440 Hz) cause different effects on the listener’s emotions. In the research, the effects of cheerful and sad music samples at different frequencies were examined within the framework of variables such as Heart Rate Variability (HRV), emotions felt and mood. The study was carried out with a total of 51 participants (31 women comprising 60.8% of the study group, and 20 men comprising 39.2% of the study group) who have not received music education. The average age of the participants is 22.19 (S = 1.08, range = 20-25). In the study, the activation levels of the autonomic nervous system were assessed using Heart Rate Variability (HRV), whereas the moods of the participants before listening music were assessed using the Profile of Mood States (POMS) scale. Finally, The Geneva Emotional Music Scales (GEMS) was used to assess the potential emotions and mood state to appear after listening music. All music samples used in the study (one cheerful and one sad per participant) were chosen by the relevant participant. The conversion of the samples recorded at 440 Hz tuning frequency, to 432 Hz was carried out with a Max/MSP patch designed specifically for the study. The findings of the study show that the cheerful and sad music tuned to different frequency levels (432 Hz vs. 440 Hz) do not induce significant variation in sympathetic and parasympathetic activation levels. However, regardless of the tuning, the participants who listened cheerful music reported higher levels of relaxation after listening. Moreover, again regardless of the tuning, according to GEMS results, the participants experienced higher levels of sublimity compared to unease, and also higher levels of unease compared to vitality. The analysis regarding cheerful music, in turn, found that the participants, this time, experienced higher levels of vitality compared to sublimity, and higher levels of sublimity compared to unease. In the most comprehensive analysis with no reference to the cheerful or sad character of the sample, the participants who listened 440 Hz pieces reported rather negative mood after listening music compared to the participants who listened 432 Hz pieces. Moreover, men were observed to report even higher levels of negative mood after listening 440 Hz pieces, compared to their mood after listening 432 Hz pieces. All the findings thus reached imply that different tunes lead to variation in reported moods, even though they do not bring about changes in sympathetic and parasympathetic activation levels. ​Extended English summary is in the end of Full Text PDF (TURKISH) file. Özet Bu çalışmanın amacı, 432 Hz ve 440 Hz frekanslara göre ayarlanmış müziklerin (neşeli ve hüzünlü) duygu oluşumunda bir fark yaratıp yaratmayacağını değerlendirmektir. Farklı frekanslardaki neşeli ve hüzünlü müzik örneklerinin yarattığı etkiler, Kalp Hızı Değişkenliği (KHD), hissedilen duygular ve duygu durumu gibi değişkenler çerçevesinde incelenmiştir. Araştırma, müzik eğitimi almayan 31'i (%60.8) kadın, 20'si (%39.2) erkek toplam 51 kişiyle gerçekleştirilmiştir. Katılımcıların genel yaş ortalaması 22.19’dur (S = 1.08, ranj = 20-25). Çalışmada otonom sinir sistemi aktivasyonunu değerlendirmek için Kalp Hızı Değişkenliği (KHD) ölçümü; müzik dinleme öncesi anlık duygu durumunu (mood) değerlendirmek için Duygu Durumu Profili Ölçeği (POMS) ve müzik dinleme sonrası oluşan muhtemel duyguları değerlendirmek için Cenova Duygu Müzik Ölçeği (GEMS) kullanılmıştır. Çalışmada kullanılan bütün müzik örnekleri (bir neşeli, bir hüzünlü) her bir katılımcının kendisi tarafından belirlenmiştir. 440 Hz akort frekansına göre kaydedilmiş örneklerin 432 Hz frekansa dönüştürülmesi çalışmaya özgü geliştirilmiş bir Max/MSP patch uygulaması ile yapılmıştır. Bulgular, farklı frekanslara (432 Hz ve 440 Hz) göre dinlenen neşeli ve hüzünlü müziklerin, sempatik ve parasempatik aktivasyon düzeyleri arasında anlamlı bir fark yaratmadığını göstermiştir. Ancak akort türünden bağımsız olarak, neşeli müzik dinleyen katılımcılar müzik dinleme sonrası daha fazla gevşeme hissettiklerini bildirmişlerdir. Bunun yanı sıra katılımcıların, akort türünden bağımsız olarak GEMS ölçeğine göre hüzünlü müzik dinleme sonrası yücelik (sublimity) duygusunu canlılık (vitality) ve huzursuzluk (unease) duygusundan daha fazla hissettiği; huzursuzluk duygusunu ise canlılık duygusundan daha fazla hissettiği belirlenmiştir. Neşeli müzik için yapılan analiz sonucunda katılımcıların neşeli müzik dinleme sonrası canlılık duygusunu yücelik ve huzursuzluk duygularından daha fazla hissettiği; yücelik duygusunu ise huzursuzluk duygusundan daha fazla hissettiği görülmüştür. En genel değerlendirmede müzik türünden bağımsız olarak, 440 Hz ile müzik dinleyen katılımcıların 432 Hz ile müzik dinleyen katılımcılara göre müzik dinleme sonrası olumsuz duygu durumunun daha yüksek olduğu; ayrıca erkeklerin kadınlara göre 440 Hz müzikleri dinleme sonrası olumsuz duygu durumunun 432 Hz müzikleri dinleme sonrası olumsuz duygu durumundan daha yüksek olduğu görülmüştür. Elde edilen tüm bulgular akort türünün sempatik ve parasempatik aktivasyon düzeyleri arasında bir farklılaşma yaratmasa da duygu durumu üzerinde bir farklılaşmaya neden olduğunu ima etmektedir.

The present study tested whether the pupillary response can be applied to study the variation in processing load during simultaneous interpretation. In Experiment 1, the global processing load in simultaneous interpretation as reflected in the average pupil size was compared to that in two other language tasks, listening to and repeating back an auditorily presented text. Experiment 1 showed clear differences between the experimental tasks. In Experiment 2, the task effect was replicated using single words as stimuli. Experiment 2 showed that momentary variations in processing load during a lexical translation task are reflected in pupil size. Words that were chosen to be more difficult to translate induced higher levels of pupil dilation than did easily translatable words. Moreover, repeating back words in a non-native language was accompanied by increased pupil dilations, in comparison to repetition in the subject's native language. In sum, the study lends good support to the use of the pupillary response as an indicator of processing load.

With Corona Virus Disease 2019 (Covid-19), a major change to the remote education arrangements has arisen. As it is clear, the pandemic has got side effects, especially in the scope of education and English as foreign language (EFL) teaching. Students at all levels were encouraged to continue learning despite the difficulties they had throughout the crisis. This study aims to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the field of EFL, particularly by revealing the viewpoints of secondary school students on pandemic remote education and its impact on their English language learning process. Thus, it was designed as qualitative research; interviews were held to probe indepth into their perceptions on EFL teaching throughout pandemic remote education. Interviews were conducted with thirty secondary school students chosen voluntarily. The participants were chosen from different schools. The data obtained from the interviews were analysed through qualitative content analysis by NVivo 8 software program. The results revealed that participants declared that most of the teachers used course books and gave pencil-paper assignments. It was also highlighted that teachers emphasised reading and listening skills in their lessons rather than writing and speaking. Another significant finding of the study is that the participants preferred face-to-face foreign language teaching to remote teaching. Nevertheless, they admitted that online language teaching has several advantages comparing to traditional face-to-face education besides its challenges such as technical, economic, contextual, and individual problems. Lastly, several noteworthy suggestions were made regarding teachers, policymakers, families, and students themselves.

Music listening may evoke meaningful emotions in listeners and may enhance certain health benefits. At the same time, it is important to consider individual differences, such as musical taste, when examining musical emotions and in considering their possible health effects. In a field experiment, 21 women listened to their own preferred music on mp3-players daily for 30 minutes during a two week time period in their own homes. One week they listened to their own chosen relaxing music and the other their own chosen energizing music. Self-reported stress, emotions and health were measured by a questionnaire each day and salivary cortisol was measured with 6 samples two consecutive days every week. The experiment group was compared to a control group (N = 20) who were instructed to relax for 30 minutes everyday for three weeks, and with a baseline week when they relaxed without music for one week (before the music intervention weeks). The results showed that when participants in the experiment group listened to their own chosen music they reported to have experienced significantly higher intensity positive emotions and less stress than when they relaxed without music. There was also a significant decrease in cortisol from the baseline week to the second music intervention week. The control group’s reported stress levels, perceived emotions and cortisol levels remain stable during all three weeks of the study. Together these results suggest that listening to preferred music may be a more effective way of reducing feelings of stress and cortisol levels and increasing positive emotions than relaxing without music. Keywords: music, emotions, stress, cortisol levelsSpanishEstudio experimental de Campo de los efectos de la Escucha de Musica seleccionada por uno mismo en las emociones, el stress y los niveles de cortisol.Marie Helsing, Daniel Västfjäll, Pär Bjälkebring, Patrik Juslin, Terry Hartig La escucha musical puede evocar emociones significativas en los oyentes y puede lograr algunos beneficios en la salud. Al mismo tiempo, es importante considerar las diferencias individuales, como por ejemplo el gusto musical, cuando examinamos las emociones musicales y al considerar sus posibles efectos en la salud. En este experimento de campo 21 mujeres escucharon su música preferida 30 minutos por dia durante 2 semanas utilizando reproductores de mp3 en sus propias casas. Una semana escucharon la música que eligieron como relajante y la semana siguiente la música que eligieron como energizante. Los auto-reportes de stress, emociones y salud fueron medidos con cuestionarios diarios a la vez que se midió el nivel de cortisol en saliva con 6 muestras tomadas durante dos días consecutivos cada semana. El grupo experimental fue comparado con el grupo control (N=20) que habían sido instruidas para realizar relajación durante 30 minutos todos los días durante tres semanas y con una semana de base en la cual se relajaban sin música (antes de las semanas de intervención musical). Los resultados mostraron que cuando las participantes del grupo experimental escucharon su propia música, reportaron haber experimentado significativamente una mayor intensidad de emociones positivas y menor stress que cuando se relajaron sin música. Hubo también una disminución significativa en el cortisol desde la semana de base a la segunda semana con la intervención musical. El grupo control reportó que los niveles de stress , percepción emocional y niveles de cortisol permanecieron estables durante las tres semanas del estudio. Estos resultados sugieren que escuchar música preferida puede ser una forma más efectiva de reducir la sensación de stress y los niveles de cortisol y de incrementar las emociones positivas que la relajación sin música. Palabras clave: Escucha musical , cortisol , respuesta al stress GermanDie Effekte vom Hören selbst gewählter Musik auf Emotionen, Stress und Cortisol Level: Eine experimentelle Feldstudie Marie Helsing, Daniel Västfjäll, Pär Bjälkebring, Patrik Juslin, Terry Hartig Musikhören kann beim Hörer bedeutsame Emotionen auslösen und gewisse Gesundheitsvorteile bewirken. Gleichzeitig ist es wichtig, individuelle Unterschiede, wie den musikalischen Geschmack, zu beachten, wenn man musikalische Emotionen untersucht und deren mögliche gesundheitliche Effekte betrachtet. In einem Feldexperiment hörten 21 Frauen ihre selbst gewählte Musik über einen mp3 Spieler täglich 30 Minuten während einem Zeitraum von 2 Wochen in ihrem eigenen Zuhause.Eine Woche lang hörten sie ihre selbst gewählte entspannende Musik, in der anderen Woche selbst gewählte energetisierende Musik. Selbstberichteter Stress, Emotionenund Gesundheit wurden mithilfe eines Fragebogens täglich, der Cortisolspiegel mit 6 Beispielen an zwei aufeinander folgenden Tagen wöchentlich gemessen. Die experimentelle Gruppe wurde mit einer Kontrollgruppe verglichen (N=20), die angewiesen wurde, 3 Wochen lang täglich 30 Minuten zu entspannen; mit einer baseline-Woche, während der sie eine Woche lang ohne Musik entspannten (vor der Musik-Interventionswoche). Die Ergebnisse zeigten, dass die Teilnehmer der experimentellen Gruppe berichteten, sie hätten bei ihrer selbst gewählten Musik signifikant höhere intensive positive Emotionen und weniger Stress, als wenn sie ohne Musik entspannten. Außerdem fand sich eine signifikante Abnahme des Cortisols von der baseline-Woche zur 2. Woche mit Musikintervention. Die von der Kontrollgruppe berichteten Stresslevel, erlebten Emotionen und der Cortisolspiegel blieben während all der drei Studienwochen stabil. Zusammengefasst lassen diese Resultate vermuten, dass Hören von selbst gewählter Musik eine effektivere Möglichkeit darstellt, Gefühle von Stress und Cortisollevel zu reduzieren und positive Gefühle zu erzeugen, wie Entspannung ohne Musik.Keywords: Musikhören, Cortisol, Stressresponse ItalianStudio Sperimentale sul Campo degli Effetti Legati all’Ascolto della Musica Auto-Selezionata sulle Emozioni, Stress, Livello del Cortisolo Marie Helsing, Daniel Västfjäll, Pär Bjälkebring, Patrik Juslin, Terry HartigAscoltare musica può suscitare emozioni e può dare benefici alla salute. Allo stesso tempo però è importante prendere in considerazione le differenze individuali ,come il gusto musicale, quando si indaga sulle emozioni musicali, e considerare il loro possible effetto sulla salute. In un esperimeto sul campo 21 donne hanno ascoltato la loro musica preferita, su lettori mp3, ogni giorno, nelle loro case, per 30 minuti lungo un periodo di tempo di 2 settimane. Una settimana hanno ascoltato musica rilassante e l’alta settimana musica energizzante. Stress, emozioni e salute sono stati misurati da un questionario ogni giorno e il cortisolo della salia è stato misurato con 6 campioni due giorni consecutivi ogni settimana. Il gruppo di sperimentazione è stato messo a confroto con un altro gruppo di controllo (N= 20) al quale è stata assegnata una settimana di controllo di relax senza musica e dopo hanno avuto istruzione di rilassarsi per 30 minuti ogni giorno per tre settimane. I risultati hanno mostrato che quando i partecipanti del gruppo hanno ascoltato la loro musica essi hanno riferito di aver avuto meno stress e di aver vissuto emozioni positive in un livello significativamente piú alto rispetto a quando si rilassavano senza musica. C’è stata anche una diminuzine significativa del cortisolo nel passaggio tra la settimana di controllo alla settimana in cui è stata introdotta la musica. Il gruppo di controllo ha riportato livelli di stress, emozioni percepite e livelli di cortisolo stabili durante tutte e tre le settimane dello studio. Tutti questi risultati ci suggeriscono che rilassarsi ascoltando la nostra musica preferita può essere un modo molto efficace per ridurre i livelli di stress e di cotisolo ed aumentare le emozioni positive, rispetto a rilassarsi senza musica. Parole Chiave: ascoltare musica, cortisolo, stress Chinese聆聽自選音樂對情緒、壓力及皮質醇水平效用之實驗性實地研究聆聽音樂能激發對聆聽者而言具有意義的情緒，並有益於促進健康。於此同時，當評估音樂對情緒及健康可能帶來的影響時，考慮到個別差異(如：個人的音樂品味)至關重要。在一個實地研究中，21位女性連續兩週，每天30分鐘在家聆聽她們喜歡的音樂mp3，其中一週，他們聆聽自己選擇的放鬆音樂，另一週則聆聽自選的活力音樂。在自陳問卷中每天測量壓力值、情緒與健康狀態，並每週連續兩天測量六個唾液皮質醇樣本。在音樂介入之前，以一週沒有聆聽音樂的放鬆作為基線期，將實驗組的結果與連續三週每天進行30分鐘放鬆的控制組(N=20)比較，結果顯示和未聆聽音樂的放鬆經驗相比，實驗組的參與者表示，在她們聆聽自選音樂的時候，感受到明顯較高強度的正向情緒以及較少的壓力。同時，與第一週的基線期相比，皮質醇在第二週音樂開始介入後也顯著降低。相對的，控制組的自陳壓力值、情緒感知及皮質醇程度在研究進行的三週之中皆保持穩定。研究結果建議，在放鬆時聆聽個人偏好的音樂比沒有聆聽音樂更能有效降低壓力感與皮質醇程度，並增加正向情緒 。 Japanese自分で選んだ音楽を聴くことによる、感情、ストレス、 コルチゾール値への影響についての実験的実地調査Marie Helsing, Daniel Västfjäll, Pär Bjälkebring, Patrik Juslin, Terry Hartig 音楽鑑賞は鑑賞者の有意義な感情を喚起し一定の健康利益を高める可能性がある。同時に、音楽感情を調査、またそれらの健康への影響の可能性を考察する際には、音楽の嗜好など、個人差を考慮することが重要である。実地調査では、21人の女性が各自の好む音楽を一日30分、2週間、MP3プレイヤーを使って自宅で聴いた。一週間は自分で選択したリラックスする音楽を、もう一週間は自分で選択した活力を与える音楽を聴いた。自己申告によるストレス、感情、健康がアンケートを使って毎日計測され、唾液内のコルチゾール値は、毎週2日連続して６つのサンプルを使って計測された。実験グループは毎日30分のリラクゼーションを3週間行ったコントロール群 (N=20) と比較され、コントロール群はベースラインとなる週（リラクゼーションを始める前の週）に音楽なしのリラクゼーションも行った。結果は、実験グループ参加者が好みの音楽を聴いている時、著しく高い強さでポジティブな感情を経験し、音楽なしでリラックスしている時よりもストレスが少ないということを示した。また、コルチゾール値は、ベースライン週に比べて音楽介入のあった2週目の方が有意に減少していた。コントロール群では、ストレスレベル、感情知覚、コルチゾール値が、調査中3週間において安定を保持したことが報告された。これらの結果を合わせると、好みの音楽を聴くことはよりストレス感情とコルチゾール値を減少させ、音楽なしのリラクゼーションよりもポジティブな感情を増加させることが示唆される。キーワード：音楽鑑賞、コルチゾール、ストレス反応 Korean개인선곡 음악감상이 정서, 스트레스, 코티졸 레벨에 미치는 영향에 대한 임상 실험 연구Marie Helsing, Daniel Västfjäll, Pär Bjälkebring, Patrik Juslin, Terry Hartig음악을 듣는 것은 듣는 사람에게 중요한 정서를 이끌어 낼 수 있으며 특정한 건강 혜택들을 증진시킬 수 있다. 동시에, 음악적 정서를 조사할 때, 또한 그것들이 건강에 끼칠 수 있는 영향들을 고려할 때 음악적 취향과 같은 개인차를 고려해야 한다. 임상 실험에서, 21명의 여성들은 자신의 집에서 2주 동안 매일 30분씩 MP3 플레이어로 자신이 좋아하는 음악을 들었다. 첫 일주일 동안, 그들은 자신이 선택한 이완 음악을 들었고, 두 번째 일주일간은 자신이 선택한 에너지를 주는 음악을 들었다. 매일 질문지로 자신이 보고한 스트레스, 감정, 건강 등을 평가했고, 매주 2일 연속 6개의 샘플을 가지고 타액내 코티졸을 측정했다. 실험집단은 3주 동안 매일 30분씩 이완을 시키라고 지시를 받은 통제 집단(N=20)과 비교했으며, 음악 중재 전 일주일 동안 음악 없이 이완을 시켰던 때를 기초선 주간(baseline week)으로 정했다. 그 결과, 실험 집단의 참가자들은 음악없이 이완을 시켰던 때보다 자신이 선택한 음악을 들었을 때 유의미하게 더 높은 강도의 긍정적 정서와 더 적은 스트레스를 경험했다고 보고했다. 또한 기초선 주간으로부터 두 번째 음악 중재 주까지 코티졸의 유의미한 감소도 있었다. 통제 집단이 보고한 스트레스 수준, 인식한 감정, 코티졸 레벨은 3주 간의 연구 기간 내내 안정적이었다. 이런 결과들을 종합했을 때, 선호하는 음악을 듣는 것이 음악 없이 이완을 시키는 것보다 긍정적인 정서를 증가시켜주고 스트레스 감정과 코티졸 수준을 줄여주는 보다 효과적인 방법이 될 수 있음을 제안한다. 키워드: 음악 감상, 코티졸, 스트레스 반응

Past research assessing perception of voice onset time (VOT) in stops suggests that perceptual acuity improves as a function of age, with adults showing steeper labeling functions and narrower boundary widths. Most work has used synthetic stimuli varying a single acoustic cue, so extending such findings to natural speech may not be straightforward. Perceptual judgments may also be influenced by distributional properties of the dataset, e.g., VOT distributions along a continuum and/or the number of productions in each VOT category. This study will assess how distributional characteristics of naturally produced child speech stimuli, collected from six 2–3-year-old English-speaking children, might influence adult and child labeling behavior. Six exemplars per child were chosen with short-lag /b d/, short-lag /p t/, long-lag /b d/, long-lag /p t/. For each POA and VOT group, /b d/ and /p t/ VOTs were bimodally distributed (shorter for voiced targets), separated by a 5 ms gap. We will seek listening data from 20 adults and 20 children (aged 6–8). We anticipate high and similar accuracy levels for both groups when VOT values are appropriate for the target, but clearer group differences for inappropriate VOTs.

With regard to the role of English in Indonesia that is mainly used for academic purpose, it is important to sharpen the two skills, reading and writing, more than the other two skills, listening and speaking. Based on that fact, this study focuses on reading skills, especially in reading comprehension skills. Reading comprehension skill is closely related to literacy levels that nowadays considered important by educational institution. The data was taken from reading comprehension questions in English USBN question sheet and the students’ answer sheets. The participants are students of XII grade of SMK NU Ungaran that are randomly chosen. The result of this study showed that Out of 50 students, 59% of them are best cope with editing task, followed by 56% in dealing with reading comprehension task, 50% of gap-filling task, 48% with short answer task and the least is 22% in vocabulary task. This meant that the proficiency level of reading comprehension of students in XII grade SMK NU Ungaran still needs to elevate. They were still lack in term of vocabulary and understanding the ideas implicitly delivered in the text.

<b><i>Background:</i></b> This study investigates the effect of classical music, music of patients’ own choice, or no music on pain reduction during elective cystoscopy. <b><i>Objectives:</i></b> The aim of the study was to describe the effect of listening to classical music, music of patients’ own choice, or no music on patient’s pain and satisfaction rates when carrying out an elective cystoscopy and the effect on the assessment capability of the performing urologist. <b><i>Design, Setting, and Participants:</i></b> This randomized trial included 127 patients undergoing elective cystoscopy at the Urological Department of the University Clinic of Munich between June 2019 and March 2020. <b><i>Outcome Measurements and Statistical Analysis:</i></b> Patients were assigned randomly to 3 groups: group I: listening to standardized classical music (<i>n</i> = 35), group II: listening to music according to the patients’ choice (<i>n</i> = 34), and control group III: no music (<i>n</i> = 44). Prior to cystoscopy, anxiety levels were assessed by the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI). The Visual Analog Scale (VAS, range 1–100) was used for a self-assessment of pain, discomfort, and satisfaction. Statistical analysis was done with Spearman’s rank correlation and <i>t</i>-tests. <b><i>Results and Limitations:</i></b> The median age was 63 (range 27–91) years. The duration of cystoscopy was 5.7 (1–30) min. Patients had undergone a median of 2.3 cystoscopies in the past. Between giving informed consent and cystoscopy, patients had to wait for a median of 64 (0–260) min. The median VAS pain score was significantly lower in group I at 1.7 and group II at 2.3 versus 5.2 in the control group III (<i>p</i> &#x3c; 0.001). The control group III had significantly worse pain and patient satisfaction rates compared with groups I and II. Group I had a significant lower VAS pain score than groups II and III (<i>p</i> &#x3c; 0.001). Classical music also increased the assessment capability of the preforming urologist. <b><i>Conclusions:</i></b> Listening to music during elective cystoscopy significantly reduces pain and distress and leads to higher patient and surgeon satisfaction. We recommend listening to classical music or music chosen by the patients during outpatient flexible/rigid cystoscopy in daily clinical routine. <b><i>Patient Summary:</i></b> In this study, we found that patients who listened to classical music or music of their own choice while undergoing a cystoscopy showed significant reduction of pain and distress.

This study has two parts: phase I designed activities to support all students’ learning preferences, and phase II used open-ended questions and activities based on these preferences to develop students’ mathematical critical thinking skills in polynomials at all performance levels (i.e., high-achieving, fair-achieving, and low-achieving students). This research used an embedded mixed-method design. The subjects selected were 28 out of 98 seventh graders at a boys’ junior high school in Bangkok, Thailand, who were chosen by cluster random sampling technique. The instruments, which were validated by five experts, included a questionnaire, lesson plans, exit tickets, interview protocols, and tests of critical thinking skills in polynomials. The content validity was assessed via expert judgment, and reliability was assessed by item analysis. The quality and effectiveness of the instruments were acceptable. The research results showed the following: (1) most students at all performance levels prefer activities in which they can learn from participating in classroom activities, such as games, activities with real-life applications, and activities involving listening instead of reading and writing, and (2) critical thinking skills in high-achieving and fair-achieving students were at the fair level, while those of low-achieving students were poor. Analysis was the highest critical thinking subskill among high-achieving and low-achieving students, while interpretation was the highest subskill in among fair-achieving students. Open-ended questions and activities based on students’ preferences appear to be practical for developing critical thinking skills among students of all achievement levels.

Abstract Objective – This study was designed to assess users' reactions to two newly re-designed spaces – one intended for quiet study and the other for group study – in the busiest library branch of a large research university. The researchers sought to answer the following questions: For which activity (group work, quiet study, and lounging or relaxing) do the users feel the space is most effective? Which furniture pieces do users prefer and for which activities? How are these spaces being used? Methods – Researchers used a mixed-methods approach for this study. Two methods – surveys and comment boards – were used to gather user feedback on preference for use of the space and users’ feelings about particular furniture types. A third method – observation – was used to determine which of the particular areas and furniture pieces occupants were using most, for which activities the furniture was most commonly used, and what types of possessions occupants most often carried with them. Results – User opinion indicated that each of the spaces assessed was most effective for the type of activity for which it was designed. Of the 80% of respondents that indicated they would use the quiet study space for quiet study, 91% indicated that the space was either "very effective" or "effective" for that purpose. The survey results also indicated that 47% of the respondents would use the group study space for that purpose. The observation data confirmed that the quiet study space was being used primarily for individual study; however, the data for the group study space showed equal levels of use for individual and group study. Users expressed a preference for traditional furniture, such as tables and desk chairs, over comfortable pieces for group work and for quiet study. One exception was a cushioned reading chair that was the preferred item for quiet study in 23% of the responses. The white boards were chosen as a preferred item for group study by 27% of respondents. The observations showed similar results for group study, with the three table types and the desk chair being used most often. The lounge chairs and couch grouping was used most often for individual study, followed by the tables and desk chairs. Conclusion – By combining user feedback gathered through surveys and comment boards with usage patterns determined via observation data, the researchers were able to answer the questions for which their assessment was designed. Results were analyzed to compare user-stated preferences with actual behaviour and were used to make future design decisions for other library spaces. Although the results of this study are institutionally specific, the methodology could be successfully applied in other library settings.

High-stakes and high-volume English language proficiency tests typically rely on multiple-choice questions (MCQs) to assess reading and listening skills. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, more institutions are using MCQs via online assessment platforms, which facilitate shuffling the order of options within test items to minimize cheating. There is scant research on the role that order and sequence of options plays in MCQs, so this study examined the results of a paper-based, high-stakes English proficiency test administered in two versions. Each version had identical three-option MCQs but with different ordering of options. The test-takers were chosen to ensure a very similar profile of language ability and level for the groups who took the two versions. The findings indicate that one in four questions exhibited significantly different levels of difficulty and discrimination between the two versions. The study identifies order dominance and sequence priming as two factors that influence the outcomes of MCQs, both of which can accentuate or diminish the power of attraction of the correct and incorrect options. These factors should be carefully considered when designing MCQs in high-stakes language proficiency tests and shuffling of options in either paper-based or computer-based testing.

- The contemporary, multi-lingual psychoanalytic culture is a complicated and pluralistic mix, which may prompt high levels of theoretical and technical confusion. The paper describes some of the experiences, made during the first decade of a psychoanalyst's work, which have contributed to the construction of the Author's way of listening and working. The so called "third ear" will be discussed, here, as a metaphor alluding to the psychoanalyst's working models (combinations of theories and technique) and in particular to her/his internal setting. The approach chosen to describe this latter, will be historical in two different perspectives: conceptual and personal. The historical understanding of the psychoanalytic traditions is useful in balancing different theoretical perspectives and in avoiding the often complementary phenomena of getting lost on one hand, and of becoming closed and fanatic on the other. The second focus will be on the personal and never complete work that has to be done, in order to assimilate/elaborate other people's ideas - the patients' thoughts and phantasies, the teachers' and supervisors' perspectives and the colleagues' and peers' views and remarks.Key words: psychoanalytic training, internal setting, group's dynamics, third ear, gamma function, ręverieParole chiave: formazione analitica, setting interno, dinamiche gruppali, terzo orecchio, funzione gamma, ręverie.

This article describes senior high school students' social skills in learning physics by applying the problem-posing approach. This study conducted by implementing a pre-experimental method of the One-Shot Case Study. The samples of this study were 38 students from XII Science class who chosen from a population of 240 students at grade X, XI, and XII at one of the senior high schools in Tapanuli Selatan. The data of students' social skills collected through observation sheets of social skills with five aspects of indicators, namely being consistent with doing tasks, encouraging participation, taking turns and sharing tasks, listening actively, and asking questions. The data analyzed by calculating the average score of students social from each indicator. The score of each indicator of the students' social skills was varied for every meeting, ranging from very high, high, moderate, low to very low, and so was the number of students for each criterion of social skills on each meeting. The results concluded that the profile of social skills in learning physics through a problem-posing approach revealed various levels of mastery of the students' social skills. The variety could be observed from the ability of social skills on each indicator and the number of students for each criterion of social skills in each meeting.

One of the frequently quoted reasons for the rejection of hearing aids is amplification of background noise. The relationship between hearing aid use and toleration of background noise was assessed. Four groups of elderly subjects (at least 65 years old) and one group of young subjects with normal hearing participated in the study. Each group consisted of 15 subjects. The young subjects and elderly subjects in one group with relatively good hearing were tested for comparison with the hearing-impaired subjects. Elderly subjects in the three remaining groups had acquired hearing losses and had been fitted with hearing aids. The subjects were assigned to three groups on the basis of hearing aid use: full-time users, part-time users, and nonusers. The amount of background noise tolerated when listening to speech was tested. The speech stimulus was a story read by a woman and set at an individually chosen most comfortable level. The maskers were a babble of voices, speech-spectrum noise, traffic noise, music, and the noise of a pneumatic drill. There was a significant interaction between groups and noises. The full-time users tolerated significantly higher levels of music and speech-spectrum noise than part-time users and nonusers. In addition, the full-time users, but not the part-time users, assessed themselves as less handicapped in everyday functions when they wore hearing aids than when they did not wear their hearing aids

The relationship between perceived pitch and harmonic spectrum in complex tones is ambiguous. In this study, 31 professional orchestra musicians participated in a listening experiment where they adjusted the pitch of complex low-register successively presented tones to unison. Tones ranged from A0 to A2 (27.6–110 Hz) and were derived from acoustic instrument samples at three different dynamic levels. Four orchestra instruments were chosen as sources of the stimuli; double bass, bass tuba, contrabassoon, and contrabass clarinet. In addition, a sawtooth tone with 13 harmonics was included as a synthetic reference stimulus. The deviation of subjects’ tuning adjustments from unison tuning was greatest for the lowest tones, but remained unexpectedly high also for higher tones, even though all participants had long experience in accurate tuning. Preceding studies have proposed spectral centroid and Terhardt’s virtual pitch theory as useful predictors of the influence of the envelope of a harmonic spectrum on the perceived pitch. However, neither of these concepts were supported by our results. According to the principal component analysis of spectral differences between the presented tone pairs, the contrabass clarinet-type spectrum, where every second harmonic is attenuated, lowered the perceived pitch of a tone compared with tones with the same fundamental frequency but a different spectral envelope. In summary, the pitches of the stimuli were perceived as undefined and highly dependent on the listener, spectrum, and dynamic level. Despite their high professional level, the subjects did not perceive a common, unambiguous pitch of any of the stimuli. The contrabass clarinet-type spectrum lowered the perceived pitch.

Peak performance appears to emerge from a brain that is both talented in the chosen profession and firmly established in higher values. To the extent one can remain anchored in the higher values of selflessness, peak performances can be maintained. The moment values degrade, even at the level of thoughts and feelings, performance is adversely affected. Higher values could be quantitatively measured in terms of applied neuroscience by sensorimotor rhythm values that appear at CPz (or above the default network in the brain). CPz refers to a location on the scalp, defined by the International 10–20 system, along the midline between central (Cz) and parietal (Pz) vertices. The higher the amplitude of SMR, the greater the self-regulation over one's own default network. This would amount to the individual's staying in a passive listening mode; this allows the real-time input from the environment to trigger action, rather than one's actions being skewed by one's own prerogatives. More critically, interpretations become more sensitive as resources dedicated to perceptions diminish. It has been empirically observed that as the SMR values increase (provided the Z-scores are largely within a normative database with respect to people performing at their peak), people gain regulation, control, and mastery over emotional, executive, and sensory quiescence, respectively. The individual Alpha frequency is also maintained above 8–9 µV in the eyes open condition and task condition, as one improves proficiency even over sensory quiescence. Wellness at the physical, emotional, and intellectual levels is accompanied by enhanced performance at each stage of sustainable growth.

Murottal adalah pembacaan Al-Quran yang sesuai dengan tajwidnya ditambah dengan tartil (perlahan, tidak tergesa-gesa dengan mahraj yang jelas dan benar) dan dilagukan berdasar atas ilmu nagham. Sama halnya dengan terapi musik, banyak penelitian sebelumnya yang membuktikan bahwa salah satu efek Murottal Al-Quran adalah dapat menurunkan tingkat stres. Tujuan penelitian ini adalah mengetahui pengaruh murottal Al-Quran terhadap tingkat stres orang dewasa. Penelitian ini dilakukan dengan menggunakan metode scoping review yang merupakan pencarian data melalui penelitian-penelitian sebelumnya dengan memfiltrasi penelitian-penelitian tersebut berdasar atas PICOS: Population, Intereention, Clontrol and Study. Pada penelitian ini, artikel-artikel yang di-review berasal dari jurnal nasional dan internasional yang berkaitan dengan pengaruh murottal Al-Quran terhadap stres. Berasal dari negara Malaysia dengan jumlah total artikel sebanyak 3 dan menggunakan dua database: Google Scholar dan Pubmed. Hasil scoping review ini menunjukkan bahwa mendengarkan murottal Al-Quran dapat menurunkan tingkat stres yang ditandai dengan penurunan hormon stres dan peningkatan gelombang alfa otak. Dapat ditarik kesimpulan bahwa terdapat pengaruh murottal Al-Quran terhadap tingkat stres. Scoping Review: the Effect of Listening to Murottal Al-Quran on the Stress Level of Adults Murottal is the recitation of the Quran according to its tajwid coupled with tartil (slowly, not in a hurry with clear and correct mahraj) and is chanted based on the study of nagham. The same with music therapy, many previous studies have shown that one of the effects of Murottal Al-Quran is reducing stress levels. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of the murottal Al-Quran on the stress level of adults. This research was conducted using scoping review method, which is the search for data through previous studies by filtering these studies based on PICOS: Population, Intervention, Control and Study. In this study, the articles reviewed was chosen from national and international journals related to the influence of Murottal Al-Quran on stress. These articles are from Malaysia with a total of 4 articles, using two databases: Google Scholar and Pubmed. The results of this scoping review shown that listening to murottal Al-Quran reduces stress level characterized by the decrease in stress hormone and the increase in brain alpha waves. Therefore, it can be that there is influence of murottal Al-Quran on stress.

Background: A deficit in the processing of auditory information may underlie problems in understanding speech in the presence of background noise, degraded speech, and in following spoken instructions. Children with auditory processing disorders are challenged in the classroom because of ambient noise levels and maybe at risk for learning disabilities. Purpose: 1) Set up and execute screening protocol for auditory processing performance (APP) in primary school children. 2) Construct database for APP in the classroom. 3) Set critical limits for deviant performance. Our hypothesis is that screening for APP in the classroom identifies pupils at risk for auditory processing disorders. Research Design, Sample, and Methods: Study consisted of two phases. Phase 1: 2,015 pupils were selected from fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-graders using stratified random sampling with the proportional allocation method. Male and female students were equally represented. Otoscopic examination, screening audiometery, and screening tests for auditory processing (AP) abilities (Pitch Pattern Sequence Test [PPST], speech perception in noise [SPIN] right, SPIN left, and Dichotic Digit Test) were conducted. A questionnaire emphasizing auditory listening behaviors (ALB) was answered by classroom teacher. Phase 2 included 69 pupils who were randomly selected based on percentile scores of phase 1. Students were examined for the corresponding full version AP tests in addition to Auditory Fusion Test-Revised and masking level difference. Intelligence quotient and learning disabilities were evaluated. Results: Phase 1: Results are displayed in frequency polygons for10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles score for each AP test. Fourth-graders scored significantly lower than fifth- and sixth-graders on all tests. Males scored lower than females on PPST. A composite score was calculated to represent a summed score performance for PPST, SPIN right ear, SPIN left ear, and Dichotic Digit Test. Scores <10th percentile were chosen to describe the poorest performance on screening. Performance was graded from 0 to 4 according to composite score; a score of 4 refers to scores <10th percentile on all four tests, while a 0 score designates performance ≥ the 10th percentile on all tests. ALB questionnaire scores of the sample screened varied significantly with sex and grade. Statistical analysis of phase 2 showed no statistical difference between mean score for Group 0 and clinic norms on all AP tests. Group 1 showed consistent poor performance in both the screening and full version SPIN test. Group 2 scored significantly lower on all screening tests, but not significantly different in some of the full version tests. Groups 3 and 4 showed significantly worse performance than clinic norms on all screening and full version tests. Auditory Fusion Test-Revised mean thresholds were statistically higher for groups with composite scores from 1 to 4. Masking level difference mean score was only significantly different for Group 4. ALB questionnaire results correlated to composite score categories. Dyslexia was a comorbid condition with Groups 2–4. Conclusion: AP skills in primary education maybe classified as robust abilities that endure challenging listening conditions, vulnerable abilities that manifest in challenging conditions, and poor abilities that manifest in even the best listening conditions. Composite score concept provides adequacy in grading AP skills.

AbstractIt has been substantiated that Academic English must be an integral component of ESL students’ study at foreign languages departments to achieve success as professionals and be ready to realize themselves in a demanding world of today. We have defined the main problem on the way to it, namely the insufficient provision of the Academic English discipline in curricula of foreign language departments or its absence. The necessity to elaborate a syllabus for Academic English discipline being taught throughout all the course of study has been substantiated. Educational programs of Academic English in a number of foreign educational establishments of Great Britain, the USA, Canada and Australia have been analyzed and their defining features have been outlined. Strategies and conditions for effective teaching of Academic English have been characterized. It has been defined that in general, in spite of slight differences in the topics covered by different EAP programs, all of them are aimed at: developing strategies and vocabulary for reading and understanding academic texts; finding, understanding, describing and evaluating information for academic purposes; developing active listening and effective note-taking skills; building on language skills to describe problems and cause-and-effect; gathering a range of information, using the skills learned, to integrate it into a written report; engaging in peer-to-peer feedback before finalising one’s piece of academic work. Requirements for students’ achievements at the end of the course have been determined. As a basis for Academic English syllabus elaboration has been chosen a course by M. Hewings and C. Thaine (upper-intermediate and advanced levels). On its basis we have defined units to be covered by the course as well as skills to be developed. Recommendations as to better and more efficient teaching of the discipline have been outlined.

The Lupon Tagapamayapa (LT) of the two barangays in Sarangani Province- Barangay Baliton in Glan and Barangay Upo in Maitum- were studied as to the skills and strategies they employ in resolving petty conflicts as a means of communication towards building peace in the community. Using qualitative-content analysis, multiple sources of data were used namely FGD, KII, Venn Diagram and Observation with video and note taking. It was found out that the LTs of both barangays Baliton (mostly populated by Blaan indigenous people) and Upo (with the Tboli natives)—applied similar processes and procedures in resolving conflicts prescribed by the Local Government Code such as: Greetings and Introduction, Conflict Settlement Proper and The Settlement and Resolution. On language use and communication skills, both LTs demonstrated competence both in verbal and non-verbal communications. In verbal communication, the LT used carefully chosen words, aphorism, rhetorical question and analogy; while in non-verbal communication, the LT regulated the tone and volume of the voice, used appropriate hand gestures and eye contact. Further, the LT employed strategies such as collaboration, compromise, spiritual advice, and active listening. Land conflict is the most common case resolved by the LT. This is followed by debts and assault. Misunderstanding and differences in principles and value judgment are the most common factors that cause conflicts in the community. Aside from these, jealousy, theft, selfishness, vices, and broken relationships were also identified. The study also revealed factors that could hinder or facilitate the conflict resolution, which were differing goals and levels of compromise and frustration. With the personal, interpersonal, cultural, and structural changes among the members of the LT, the study recommends further research on the competence of LT among remote communities and or other indigenous groups in Mindanao for a broader and more enhanced justice system in the barangays. Read full article here.

This article devotes to the practical use of intonational constructions, which are based on emotional speech of main Dostoevsky’s characters. Three autobiographical pieces of work were taken into account: “The notes from death house”, “White nights” and “Netochka Nezvanova”. The first composition of the Great Russian writer was created from his memories when Dostoevsky was imprisonment in Omsk (1850-1854). The death sentence for Dostoevsky's participation in the revolutionary movement, lately changed into imprisonment, being in shackles with other criminals, close acquaintance with the suffering of people made the writer to review his attitude to life. Deep writer’s thoughts, they are colorful and vivid descriptions of life in prison, touching stories about peoples’ destinies. On contrary, “White nights” and “Netochka Nezvanova” are the most poetic stories. “White nights” is a sentimental novel, written by Fyodor Dostoevsky’s flashbacks. He rises the problem of alienation of the individual, and the second work the author highlights the idea of cruel human nature.“I was named a psychologist: this is not true, I am only a realist in the highest sense, i.e I represent all the depths of the human soul” Fyodor Dostoevsky.No doubt, the works I have chosen are not devoid the emotionality, which is the subject of our scientific research. Through the means of continuous sampling, an emotional dialogical speech of the characters was revealed. Using the system of intonational scheme of the Russian linguist E. A. Bryzgunova, the passages of dialogical speech were analyzed and intonated. This work can serve as a teaching aid at the lessons of Russian as a foreign language. It will allow to form the linguistic competence of foreign students of the first and second certification levels, to master all kinds of speech activity, namely: listening, speaking, reading and writing, and finally, to get closer to the work of the great writer F. Dostoyevsky.

Music is a common resource for the regulation of emotions, moods, and stress. This study aimed at determining the individual and relative impact on stress reduction of two of the main factors involved in musical affect regulation: regulation strategies and music itself. The current study took place in an experimental setting and followed a factorial within-subjects design. First, the participants ( n = 34) filled in an online survey where they identified their self-perceived “adequate”/“inadequate” music examples for the purpose of reducing stress and self-perceived “adequate”/“inadequate” strategies for the same purpose. In the lab they went through a stress induction procedure and then were instructed to calm down. They did so by listening to their “adequate”/“inadequate” music and employing the “adequate”/“inadequate” strategy, depending on the experimental condition. The primary outcome measure was self-reported tension, complemented by self-reported energy and valence, skin conductance levels (SCL), startle blink amplitudes, and risk aversion. The results showed that both music and strategy had a strong significant effect on the self-reported tension. Additionally, music had strong significant effects on energy, valence, SCL, and risk aversion. Pairwise comparisons revealed that the condition “adequate strategy-adequate music” was consistently more beneficial for stress reduction than condition “inadequate strategy-inadequate music”. However, it did not outperform all the other conditions, nor did the “inadequate strategy-inadequate music” underperform all the others. Moreover, close inspection of the results showed a larger impact of music on the short-term outcomes of self-regulation in comparison to strategy. These findings suggest that successful affective regulation depends on the adequacy of the chosen strategies and music, but that music is more determinant for the affective outcomes in the short term. The results are discussed considering previous research and the implications for the understanding of musical affect regulation are explored.

Purpose: African Unity has had a long history since the 1960s when most African countries attained Independence. Two major views occurred in the form of moderates who preferred a gradual step towards African Unity and radicals who favored a now-now step towards Unity. The moderates’ camp was led by Julius Nyerere of Tanzania while the radicals’ camp was led by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana. The competing views did not alienate Africans in the quest for unity. They only differed in the pace at which to attain African Unity but were all for Unity. The study examines how the competing views went on side by side and finally as situation come to indicate the moderate view is gaining the upper hand. History has vindicated the moderates as what is actually going on in the name of African Unity is the building of blocks in the form of Regional Economic Communities(RECs) through which African Unity is attained. Apart from touching the whole of Africa, an indicative example is chosen from the East African Community (EAC) as evidenced by the fast-tracking towards integration levels and also the pace at which foreign countries are vying to join the Community. Methodology: The researcher engaged with interviewees in the cadres of political analysts and scientists and jotted down the ideas pertaining to the two views on African Unity. Literature about African Unity gave a useful touch to the problem in question. Lectures on African Unity compiled in the media like you tube provided another source not forgetting speeches through the same media from persons who were/are actually acquainted with both Nyerere and Nkrumah. Findings: The outcome of opinions from interviewees, reading literature on African Unity, listening to lectures and speeches from the mass media depicted in general that the majority of Africans preferred a cautious gradual approach and that the process is especially evident in East Africa where cautious fast-tracking and new admissions are the norms hence indicative of Nyerere’s thinking for a gradual approach towards African Unity. Unique Contribution to Theory, Practice and Policy: The achievements attained in the quest towards Unity so far are very much inclined on the block pattern of integration.

Based on a neo-Confucian vision that the monarch's mandate relied on listening to his people's grievances, the Chosŏn state (1392–1910) empowered subjects regardless of gender or status to address grievances to the sovereign that had not been rectified in lower courts. Contrary to the preconceived notion that women of the Chosŏn were silent subjects outside their domestic boundary, their petitioning activity shows that women, irrespective of their status, had the same legal capacity as their male counterparts to appeal grievances at local and capital levels. This article focuses on women's petitions and their linguistic practices to show how their petitioning activity complicated the gender dynamics of Confucian society. While the gender hierarchy was reinforced through women's narrative strategy as they appropriated the discourse of domesticity, I posit that women as legal agents were regendering legal identity by constructing a sense of personhood via their petitioning practice. Through articulating their gendered narratives, women struggled to defend not only themselves and their own sense of morality but also their entire family.

AbstractSixty target words were selected from two sets of graded readers. One set contained three readers with the same title,The Railway Children, and the other set, three books about Sherlock Holmes. Students chose one of the two sets to read and were given a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a five-week delayed posttest on their acquisition of spelling, aural meaning, written meaning, and use. Five fixed factors (time, frequency of word occurrence, glossing, word frequency levels, and four dimensions of vocabulary knowledge) in vocabulary learning and a random variable (the participants) were analyzed with generalized linear mixed models. The results show that the odds of improvements in the knowledge of written and aural meanings were significantly better than those for the knowledge of spelling and use. Significant interaction effects were found between time and other fixed factors, except for glossing. Pedagogical implications of the results are discussed.

This study examined the effect of maternal behaviours on 3 – 6 years old children who had aggressive behaviour. Using the mixed-method, the study surveyed and interviewed the mothers of 124 preschoolers in Nam Dinh province, Vietnam. The results showed that more 1\5 of participants assessed that their children exhibited medium and high levels of aggressive behavior. Most mothers chose strict discipline such as threaten, scolding their children, punish, and spanking. Although these behaviours of mothers have contributed to limit the children’s aggression quickly, they can have negative effect on children’s development in the future. Other mothers chose gentle behaviors such as listening to their children explain and sharing with them; gently talk to the children about their feelings and dissatisfaction with their behaviors; and ignore, pretend not to care about the children’s behaviors. However, they could not ensure the principles of education, so there was no the desired educational effect. The finding will be the basis for educators to build appropriate measures to help children develop their personalities from the preschool age.

Abstract Background. It is well known through several studies that listening to music can reduce the anxiety of patients. However, most of the previous studies focused only on the psychological effects of patients and some physiological effects such as blood pressure, pain. Moreover, previous studies played music that is not related to personal preferences. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether reducing the patient's anxiety through music selected by patients can improve the patient's surgical experience and the relationship between the patient and doctor. Methods. We randomly assigned 304 breast cancer patients who underwent surgery between September 2020 to April 2021 into a music therapy group(MG) and a control group(CG). Among them, 290 people completed the study. MG (n = 150) listened to the patient's chosen music after entering the operating room until induction of anesthesia, while CG (n = 140) wore earmuffs for noise block in the operating room instead of music. All patients measured anxiety scores over time by numeric rating scale. Treatment satisfaction and patient-doctor depth of relationship scale(PDDRS) were also assessed after surgery. In addition, surgical satisfaction and intimacy with patients were evaluated in the surgeon. Result. The anxiety scores immediately after entering the operating room were not significantly different between the two groups(MG: 4.62 ± 2.44, CG: 4.61 ± 2.45, p = .984). However, the anxiety levels before anesthesia induction of MG patients was 3.36 ± 2.32, which was significantly lower than that of CG patients (3.90 ± 2.26) (p = .047). There was no difference between the groups in PDDRS evaluated for patients after surgery (MG: 26.25 ± 5.529, CG: 25.56 ± 5.918, p = .338) while the degree of intimacy with the patient stated by the surgeon was significantly higher in MG (MG: 7.59 ± 0.89, CG: 7.30 ± 1.05, p = .013). Satisfaction with treatment experience of patients was 18.01 ± 1.78 in MG, which was significantly higher than 17.65 ± 1.59 in CG (p = .040). Especially among the detailed items, the experience in the operating room was evaluated more positively in MG as 4.21 ± 0.79 than 3.91 ± 0.78 in CG (p = .001). The difference in the anxiety-reducing effect of music therapy in the subgroup without surgery history was larger than with a history of surgery, but there was no statistical significance. Similarly, the difference in the anxiety reduction effect in the subgroup with low preoperative anxiety level was greater than that in the subgroup with high anxiety, but this was also not statistically significant (Table 1). People evaluated the experience of surgery more positively as the degree of anxiety reduction in the operating room was greater (Spearman's correlation coefficients = -0.124, p = .035). Conclusion. Personalized selected music in the operating room before anesthesia can effectively lower the patient's anxiety and has the potential to positively change the patient’s satisfaction with surgery. Patients with no surgical history, low pre-operative anxiety can more benefit from personalized music therapy. It is expected to create an opportunity for the patient with breast cancer who anticipate receiving surgery to improve their compliance to treatment by strengthening intimacy with the surgeon. Table 1.Subgroup analysis for anxiety-reducing effect of music in operating roomGroupNMean ± SDDifference between groupP value between groupP value for interactionOverallCG140-0.71±1.560.55.005MG150-1.26±1.68Surgical historyNoCG53-0.38 ± 1.690.75.012.428MG67-1.13 ± 1.49YesCG87-0.92 ± 1.450.44.076MG83-1.36 ± 1.83Pre-Op. GAD-7&lt; 5 pointsCG85-0.55 ± 1.470.73.003.215MG91-1.28 ± 1.57≥5 pointsCG55-0.97 ± 1.670.25.416MG59-1.22 ± 1.86 Citation Format: Yohan Joo, Seockhoon Chung, Seonok Kim, Saebyeol Lee, Sei-Hyun Ahn, Jongwon Lee, BeomSeok Ko, Jisun Kim, Il Yong Chung, Byung Ho Son, Hee Jeong Kim. The effects of preoperative personalized music therapy associated with the patient-doctor relationship and surgical experience of patients with breast cancer (MARS) [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 2021 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium; 2021 Dec 7-10; San Antonio, TX. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2022;82(4 Suppl):Abstract nr P4-10-18.

Background: During the revision of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) C63.19 and the development of the ANSI/Telecommunications Industry Association–1083 hearing aid compatibility standards, it became evident that additional data concerning user acceptance of interfering magnetic noises generated by wireless and cordless telephones were needed in order to determine the requirements for telecoil-coupling compatibility. Purpose: Further insight was needed into the magnetic signal-to-noise (S/N) ratios required to achieve specific levels of telephone usability by hearing aid wearers. (A companion article addresses magnetic signal level requirements.) Research Design: Test subjects used their own hearing aids. The magnetic signals were applied through large magnetic head-worn coils, selected for the field orientation appropriate for each hearing aid. After adjusting their aid's volume control to an acoustic speech reference, the subjects adjusted the applied magnetic signal level to find their Most Comfortable Level (MCL). Each subject then adjusted the levels of six of eight different representative interfering noises to three levels of subjective telephone usability: “usable for a brief call,” “acceptable for normal use,” and “excellent performance.” Each subject's objective noise audibility threshold in the presence of speech was also obtained for the various noise types. Study Sample: The 57 test subjects covered an age range of 22 to 79 yr, with a self-reported hearing loss duration of 12 to 72 yr. All had telecoils that they used for at least some telecommunications needs. The self-reported degree of hearing loss ranged from moderate to profound. Data Collection and Analysis: A guided intake questionnaire yielded general background information for each subject. A test control box fed by prepared speech and noise recordings from computer files enabled the subject or the tester, depending on the portion of the test, to select A-weighting-normalized noise interference levels in 1.25 dB steps relative to the selected MCL. For each subject for each tested noise type, the values for the selected S/N ratios were recorded for the three categories of subjective usability and the objective noise threshold. Results: About half of the test subjects needed a minimum 21 dB S/N ratio for them to consider their listening experience “acceptable for normal use” of a telephone. With a 30 dB S/N ratio, about 85% of the subjects reported normal use acceptability. Significant differences were apparent in the measured S/N user requirements among the noise types, though, indicating a deficiency in an A-weighted level measurement's ability to consistently predict the subjective acceptability of the various noises. An improved weighting function having both spectral and temporal components was developed to substantially eliminate these predictive inconsistencies. Conclusions: The interfering noise level that subjects chose for a telephone usability rating of “excellent performance” matched closely their objectively measured noise audibility threshold. A rating of “acceptable for normal use” was typically achieved at a 4 dB higher noise level, and a rating of “usable for a brief call,” at a 10.4 dB higher noise level. These results did not relate significantly to noise type or to the subject's aided noise-in-speech hearing acuity.

The ballad as a narrative genre of the chamber-vocal music. Logical reason for research. The relevance of the topic of the present research is due to the fact that in music the interaction of purely musical and extra-musical phenomena continues to remain in the focus of increased attention of the researchers who represent both musicology and other areas of humanitarian knowledge. This interaction has a synergistic effect, which lies in the fact that the combination of the simultaneous influence of words and music, integrated into a single whole, leads to a significantly greater effect of these factors together, rather than separately. Such emergence is clearly manifested during all types of musician’s activities – composing, performing, listening, but has not yet been sufficiently developed in musical science. And the need for a connection between musical science and practice directs our attention to such types of synergistic interaction in music, and one of the most basic is the interaction of music itself (of purely musical, sound patterns) and the verbal text (of the sphere of extramusical – specific images, characters, events, etc.). One of the concepts associated with the verbal text, which has its own specific qualities, is the “narrative”, and the study of the narrativeness as a special property (or a complex of properties) of a vocal musical composition with a narrative text, its potential, performance specifics and characteristics of perception by the listener seems relevant both in theoretical and practical directions. Innovation. The article is devoted to a chamber-vocal ballad, one of the genre indicators of which is the narrativeness. The narrativeness is understood as a special quality of a musical composition, in particular, a vocal one, which relies on narration (both verbal and achieved by means of musical expression). The narrative narration is connected, on the one hand, with eventfulness, plot; on the other hand, it is characterized by an emotional and ethical assessment of the reflected events. In the vocal music, the conductor of the narrative is the word, however, only those genres of the vocal music can be defined as narrative, where the verbal text itself has narrative qualities. The vocal ballad is such among the genres of the vocal music, and its literary origin and narrativeness as the main genetic trait determined the corresponding narrative specificity. The narrativeness as a genre factor in the ballad is the result of the synthesis of a narrative verbal text and the corresponding eventfulness of a vocal composition (an extra-musical component) and the specifics of their musical embodiment (a musical component). As one of its tasks the concert practice of a vocal ballad performer has the realization of the narrativeness as a quality of the performing-composing interpretation, which represents the understanding and presentation of the artistic potential of a musical composition. The narrativeness can manifest itself at different levels of the musical text of the ballad, usually enhancing the emotional and ethical assessment of the events. Objectives. The purpose of the present research is to reveal the specifics of the narrativeness of the chamber-vocal genre of the ballad. Methods. The main methods of the presented research are genre and systemic. The genre method is associated with the need to characterize the chamber-vocal genre of the ballad in connection with the chosen perspective of studying the meaning and action of the narrative in it. The systemic method makes it possible to identify and systematize the peculiarities of the interaction of the extra-musical narrative and the means of musical expression in a specific genre, namely, the chamber-vocal ballad. Results and Discussion. The movement into the inter-disciplinary field remains a promising growth point in modern research in the sphere of humanities, where different areas of knowledge actively interact and share their experience. This also applies to musicology. Active assimilation of knowledge from other sciences helps to see from a new perspective many problems, the study of which by traditional methods has practically exhausted its potential. One of the concepts that can help in the study of the patterns of interaction between words and music in musical art is the “narrative” as a special quality of the verbal text. The narrative involved in the field of musical science receives additional scientific “saturation”, scientific meanings and research perspectives. The development of an integrative scientific approach for two disciplines such as linguistics and musicology goes beyond their case studies and focuses on connecting the laws of “musical structures” to the analysis of the verbal text: for example, such concepts as tension and decline, open and closed form, the lyrical, harmonic content, etc. The need to comprehend the dynamic nature of the narrative text leads to an expansion of the horizon of research related to the concepts of the birth of the text and the perception of the text, and the theory of musical forms is the closest to the narratology in this regard. Indeed, the organization of verbal and musical communication obeys the general laws of dynamism and temporality: the basis of both linguistic and musical structures is the procedural nature of the development of information. The convergence of musicality and narrativeness has led to the development of such a concept as a “musical intrigue” in the works of the French narratologists R. Barony, F. Revaz and others. In musical science, there is a concept that, in our opinion, is associated with a “musical intrigue”, but is more capacious and better explaining the narrative in music of both, a purely musical and extramusical nature – this is musical “eventfulness” (N. Gerasimova-Persidskaya, A. Ivko, and A. Durnev), which is understood broadly and multi-dimensionally, both in connection with the events “introduced” to music with the word, and with purely musical “events” – harmonic, rhythmic, intonational, timbre-acoustic, etc. Such musical eventfulness, unfolded in the narration with a sequential presentation of the events from the “third” person and an emotional assessment of the happening things – both in the verbal and musical text, is most clearly represented in the chamber-vocal genre of the ballad. Owing to the literary origin of the genre and its original narrative nature, it has retained its narrative nature in music (this applies to both the vocal and instrumental ballads). Most often, the musical text in the vocal ballad is subordinated to the verbal one, it is an illustration of the events that are taking place and at the same time enhances their emotional assessment. Conclusions. The narrativeness in the vocal music is primarily related to its extra-musical source. The narrativeness as a special quality of a narrative eventful text is characterized by an emotional attitude and a corresponding assessment, which is dictated from the outside (by the “storyteller”) to the person at whom the narrative is directed – in the sphere of musical practice this is the listener. Since the text (the word) is used in the vocal music, here we should talk about the narrative with all the specifics of its action. Very various texts are used in the vocal music, and not all of them are narrative, therefore, the narrativeness as a genre quality in its pure form can be traced in the genre of the vocal ballad due to its literary origin and narrative character. That is why the most indicative vocal genre in the aspect of the narrativeness is such a genre of the chamber-vocal music as the ballad. The nature of the narrativeness: in the vocal ballad it determines the verbal text, and the means of musical expression, as a rule, embody both the events reflected in the text and their emotional assessment. The prospects for the study of the narrativeness in musical art are associated not only with the characteristics of the interaction of musical and extra-musical principles in the vocal music (both in the chamber music and in the large genres), but also with the study of manifestations of the narrativeness in instrumental music, especially in such compositions that are not associated with extra-musical manifestations even in minimal form (program headers and the like). In addition, since the narrativeness is associated with a “storyteller”-intermediary between the source of information and its recipient, it can be argued that the narrativeness in musical art is also associated with the performing art as one of its tasks, literally or figuratively.

Background and Aim: High-level sounds in recreational activities are known as one of the leading causes of developing noise-induced hearing loss, particularly in adolescents and young adults. Thus, this study aimed to explore the practicality of a hearing preservation education program in modifying listening behaviors concerning recreational noise exposure and Personal Listening Device (PLD) use in adolescents and young adults. Methods: Two hundred students, both male and female (n=100, each) between 15 and 18 years old were chosen to participate. These students engaged in the hearing preservation education program and filled in pre-education, post-education, and follow-up questionnaires. The questionnaire assessed the students’ awareness, intention, attitudes, and motivation concerning recreational noise exposure and safe PLD usage. The materials were prepared by an expert panel of audiologists and then remarked as comprehensible by teachers of the target age group. Results: There were significant differences in preferred volume levels and preferred listening levels of PLD, as well as the duration of PLD usage among pre-education, post-education, and follow-up questionnaire measurements (p<0.001). Notably, education significantly altered the students’ awareness, intention, attitudes, and motivation concerning recreational noise exposure among the three experimental conditions (p<0.001). Conclusion: Providing a fundamental guide and effective education to adolescents and young adults will help them to use PLD safely, expand their awareness and knowledge, and consequently revise their attitudes and listening behaviors. Keywords: Noise-induced hearing loss; personal listening device; recreational noise; hearing preservation; young adult and adolescent

Orientation: Active listening is the single most important contributor to effective communication by managers; however, this is the skill they seem to struggle with the most. Other important skills for effective communication include feedback and the ability to deal with interference.Research purpose: This study’s primary objective was to determine the effectiveness of managers’ listening and feedback skills and their ability to deal with interference during the listening and feedback phases of the communication process as perceived by subordinates with varying educational backgrounds.Motivation for the study: The aim was to improve managers’ communication with their subordinates.Research design, approach and method: The research followed a quantitative descriptive design. A self-administered questionnaire was compiled, a non-probability convenience sample was chosen and 931 usable responses were acquired.Main findings: The results showed that subordinates perceived their managers’ communication competencies to be marginally above average. Managers’ listening and feedback skills were perceived to be better by graduate-level subordinates than by those with only a Grade 12 qualification. Subordinates with a postgraduate degree also had better perceptions of these skills than those with a Grade 12 qualification, although this finding was not statistically significant.Practical and managerial implications: Managers need to be aware that their communication competencies are crucial to their business’s success. Additionally, their subordinates’ perception of the effectiveness of their communication varies according to varying educational levels. Therefore, managers are advised to consciously make greater efforts in their communication with subordinates with lower qualifications.Contribution or value-add: In conclusion, this article will make managers more knowledgeable about potential challenges they may encounter during the communication process regarding listening skills, feedback skills and propensity to deal with interference.

While online education has been with us for more than 20 years, and many faculty are proficient at designing and teaching highly interactive, intellectually stimulating asynchronous classes, other faculty have chosen to remain focused on their teaching in the classroom. However, COVID-19 has rapidly and without warning ushered all higher ed teaching and learning into emergency remote environments. By now, many who support faculty in transitioning courses have received varying levels of participation and are examining ways to increase support opportunities. But one question might linger: What might be happening with practitioners who appear to be silent?or reluctant to engage with the kinds of support provided?perhaps faculty who might really benefit?

The English language is an instrument to acquire newknowledge in science, mathematics, humanities and social sciences since the world of knowledge in these areas is generally available in English. Hence, it is being maintained and continuously studied. This study investigated the relationship of students’ hemispheric dominance with English language performance and creativity levels in the context of 423 students randomly chosen from the freshmen population of the thirteen colleges at the Western Mindanao State University, Philippines. For this end, the study employed Descriptive - Correlation Method through which the respondents were asked to complete the six tests, namely: the Hemispheric Dominance Test, the Listening and Reading Comprehension Tests, the Speaking and Writing Skill Tests, and the Torrance Test of Creative Thinking – Figural Form B, Research Edition. Pearson r results revealed that correlation coefficients of -.0.13 between hemispheric dominance and language performance and 0.011 between the former and creativity were not significant at p< .05. This led to the conclusion that the respondents’ hemispheric dominance was not significantly related to their English language performance and their creativity level. Generally, the left-brained, the right-brained or the whole-brained students may be good or poor in the language and in the creativity tests. Keywords - Educational Psychology, hemispheric dominance, leftbrained, right-brained, whole-brained, English language performance, receptive skills, productive skills, creativity level, descriptive research, Zamboanga City, Philippines

The article under consideration present some review of the present days textbooks created by Ukrainian specialists for teaching English in Maritime higher educational establishments. The authors attempt to analyze the existing manuals keeping in mind the needs of the future maritime engineers and the requirements of the International Maritime Organization, teaching methods are also meant. It is stressed in the article that the approach to teaching maritime engineers differ a lot from that of teaching other maritime specialists because besides general English communicative skills and maritime English they are supposed to be aware of technical terminology quite well. We make a quick review of the problems the teacher faces when working with the engineer students. The enumeration of the topics are supposed to be tackled upon in English classes is done. We touch upon the absence of one National English Standard for engine room department personal and discuss the problems it arises. It is underlined the achievements of Ukrainian Maritime English specialists are significant: the number of the textbooks and other teaching means in the field are getting larger every year what is more important their quality is getting higher as well. We have chosen these two series of textbooks for our review as they demonstrate complex approach to teaching the language and if accompanied with some extra tasks and listening and video activities they are the best one to use as basic for maritime engineers. Among the most authorized and widely used textbooks are the series of works by O. Bogomolov: there are 3 textbooks worked out for different levels. Some other series of textbooks we would like to mention are works of teachers who work in Kherson Maritime State Academy. Other series of textbooks under review are created by the group of the authors headed by V. Kudryavtseva. As it has been underlined in the preface to these textbooks, the purpose of the manuals is the development of professional communication skills of maritime engineers.

الملخص هدفت هذه الدراسة إلى الكشف عن دور وسائل النشر التكنولوجي في نشر وتوثيق الموروث الغنائي العربي، وأثر ذلك على تعلم دارسي الموسيقا ونظريات الموسيقا العربية، وحاولت تحديد الإجابة عن الأسئلة البحثية الآتية: السؤال الأول: ما دور وسائل النشر التكنولوجي في نشر وتوثيق الموروث الغنائي العربي؟ السؤال الثاني: ما أثر الاستماع للموروث الغنائي العربي بواسطة وسائل النشر التكنولوجي على تعلم دارسي الموسيقا نظريات الموسيقا العربية؟ وللإجابة عن هذه الأسئلة، اختيرت عينة قصدية مكونة من طلبة قسم الفنون الموسيقية في كلية الفنون والتصميم في الجامعة الأردنية. ولتحقيق أغراض الدراسة تم إعداد استبانة، وجلسات مع الطلبة، وعمل اختبار لهم بعد هذه الجلسات في النظريات الموسيقية العربية. وقد أظهرت النتائج دورا واضحا ومهما لوسائل النشر التكنولوجي في نشر وتوثيق الموروث الغنائي العربي، مما عاد بالفائدة على تعلم دارسي الموسيقا لنظريات الموسيقية العربية، وهذا ما أظهرته نتائج الاختبار. وفي ضوء هذه النتائج أوصت الدراسة أنه يمكن استغلال وسائل النشر التكنولوجي، للاستماع إلى الموروث الغنائي العربي، ونشره وتوثيقه على المستويين العربي والعالمي. وتشجيع الطلبة على الاستماع إلى الموروث الغنائي العربي الذي يحمل طابع المقامات الموسيقيّة العربيّة، للاستعانة به في تذليل الصعوبات التي يمكن أن تواجه الطلبة في دراسة وتعلم النظريات الموسيقية العربية. الكلمات المفتاحية: وسائل النشر التكنولوجي، نشر، توثيق، الموروث الغنائي العربي، النظريات الموسيقية العربية. Abstract This study aimed to reveal the role of technological dissemination media in the dissemination and documentation of the Arab lyrical heritage and the impact on learning the Arabic musical theories by music learners. It tried to determine the answer to the following research questions: The first question: What is the role of technological publishing media in spreading and documenting the Arab lyrical heritage? The second question: What is the impact of listening to the Arab lyrical heritage through the means of technological dissemination on the learning of music theories of Arabic music? To answer these questions, an intentional sample was chosen, made up of students from the Department of Musical Arts in the Faculty of Art and Design at the University of Jordan. In order to achieve the objectives of the study, a questionnaire was prepared, and sessions with the students were prepared, and after these sessions an examination was made for them in Arab musical theories. The results showed a clear and important role for the means of technological publishing in disseminating and documenting the Arabic lyrical heritage, which benefited music learners in learning Arabic musical theories, and this is what the test results showed. In light of these results, the study recommended that the means of technological publishing could be used to listen to the Arab lyrical heritage, publish it and document it on the Arab and international levels. Encouraging students to listen to the Arab heritage, which bears the character of Arab musical maqams, in order to use it to overcome the difficulties that students may face in studying and learning Arab musical theories. Keywords: means of technological publishing, publishing, documentation, Arab lyrical heritage, Arab musical theories

IntroductionThis essay considers three design projects as microprotests. Reflecting on the ways design practice can generate spaces, sites and methods of protest, we use the concept of microprotest to consider how we, as designers ourselves, can protest by scaling down, focussing, slowing down and paying attention to the edges of our practice. Design microprotest is a form of design activism that is always collaborative, takes place within a community, and involves careful translation of a political conversation. While microprotest can manifest in any design discipline, in this essay we focus on visual communication design. In particular we consider the deep, reflexive practice of listening as the foundation of microprotests in visual communication design.While small in scale and fleeting in duration, these projects express rich and deep political engagements through conversations that create and maintain safe spaces. While many design theorists (Julier; Fuad-Luke; Clarke; Irwin et al.) have done important work to contextualise activist design as a broad movement with overlapping branches (social design, community design, eco-design, participatory design, critical design, and transition design etc.), the scope of our study takes ‘micro’ as a starting point. We focus on the kind of activism that takes shape in moments of careful design; these are moments when designers move politically, rather than necessarily within political movements. These microprotests respond to community needs through design more than they articulate a broad activist design movement. As such, the impacts of these microprotests often go unnoticed outside of the communities within which they take place. We propose, and test in this essay, a mode of analysis for design microprotests that takes design activism as a starting point but pays more attention to community and translation than designers and their global reach.In his analysis of design activism, Julier proposes “four possible conceptual tactics for the activist designer that are also to be found in particular qualities in the mainstream design culture and economy” (Julier, Introduction 149). We use two of these tactics to begin exploring a selection of attributes common to design microprotests: temporality – which describes the way that speed, slowness, progress and incompletion are dealt with; and territorialisation – which describes the scale at which responsibility and impact is conceived (227). In each of three projects to which we apply these tactics, one of us had a role as a visual communicator. As such, the research is framed by the knowledge creating paradigm described by Jonas as “research through design”.We also draw on other conceptualisations of design activism, and the rich design literature that has emerged in recent times to challenge the colonial legacies of design studies (Schultz; Tristan et al.; Escobar). Some analyses of design activism already focus on the micro or the minor. For example, in their design of social change within organisations as an experimental and iterative process, Lensjkold, Olander and Hasse refer to Deleuze and Guattari’s minoritarian: “minor design activism is ‘a position in co-design engagements that strives to continuously maintain experimentation” (67). Like minor activism, design microprotests are linked to the continuous mobilisation of actors and networks in processes of collective experimentation. However microprotests do not necessarily focus on organisational change. Rather, they create new (and often tiny) spaces of protest within which new voices can be heard and different kinds of listening can be done.In the first of our three cases, we discuss a representation of transdisciplinary listening. This piece of visual communication is a design microprotest in itself. This section helps to frame what we mean by a safe space by paying attention to the listening mode of communication. In the next sections we explore temporality and territorialisation through the design microprotests Just Spaces which documents the collective imagining of safe places for LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual, and Queer) women and non-binary identities through a series of graphic objects and Conversation Piece, a book written, designed and published over three days as a proposition for a collective future. A Representation of Transdisciplinary ListeningThe design artefact we present in this section is a representation of listening and can be understood as a microprotest emerging from a collective experiment that materialises firstly as a visual document asking questions of the visual communication discipline and its role in a research collaboration and also as a mirror for the interdisciplinary team to reflexively develop transdisciplinary perspectives on the risks associated with the release of environmental flows in the upper reaches of Hawkesbury Nepean River in NSW, Australia. This research project was funded through a Challenge Grant Scheme to encourage transdisciplinarity within the University. The project team worked with the Hawkesbury Nepean Catchment Management Authority in response to the question: What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows? Listening and visual communication design practice are inescapably linked. Renown American graphic designer and activist Sheila de Bretteville describes a consciousness and a commitment to listening as an openness, rather than antagonism and argument. Fiumara describes listening as nascent or an emerging skill and points to listening as the antithesis of the Western culture of saying and expression.For a visual communication designer there is a very specific listening that can be described as visual hearing. This practice materialises the act of hearing through a visualisation of the information or knowledge that is shared. This act of visual hearing is a performative process tracing the actors’ perspectives. This tracing is used as content, which is then translated into a transcultural representation constituted by the designerly act of perceiving multiple perspectives. The interpretation contributes to a shared project of transdisciplinary understanding.This transrepresentation (Fig. 1) is a manifestation of a small interaction among a research team comprised of a water engineer, sustainable governance researcher, water resource management researcher, environmental economist and a designer. This visualisation is a materialisation of a structured conversation in response to the question What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows? It represents a small contribution that provides an opportunity for reflexivity and documents a moment in time in response to a significant challenge. In this translation of a conversation as a visual representation, a design microprotest is made against reduction, simplification, antagonism and argument. This may seem intangible, but as a protest through design, “it involves the development of artifacts that exist in real time and space, it is situated within everyday contexts and processes of social and economic life” (Julier 226). This representation locates conversation in a visual order that responds to particular categorisations of the political, the institutional, the socio-economic and the physical in a transdisciplinary process that focusses on multiple perspectives.Figure 1: Transrepresentation of responses by an interdisciplinary research team to the question: What are the risks to maximising the benefits expected from increased environmental flows in the Upper Hawkesbury Nepean River? (2006) Just Spaces: Translating Safe SpacesListening is the foundation of design microprotest. Just Spaces emerged out of a collaborative listening project It’s OK! An Anthology of LBPQ (Lesbian, Bisexual, Pansexual and Queer) Women’s and Non-Binary Identities’ Stories and Advice. By visually communicating the way a community practices supportive listening (both in a physical form as a book and as an online resource), It’s OK! opens conversations about how LBPQ women and non-binary identities can imagine and help facilitate safe spaces. These conversations led to thinking about the effects of breaches of safe spaces on young LBPQ women and non-binary identities. In her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed presents Queer Feelings as a new way of thinking about Queer bodies and the way they use and impress upon space. She makes an argument for creating and imagining new ways of creating and navigating public and private spaces. As a design microprotest, Just Spaces opens up Queer ways of navigating space through a process Ahmed describes as “the ‘non-fitting’ or discomfort .... an opening up which can be difficult and exciting” (Ahmed 154). Just Spaces is a series of workshops, translated into a graphic design object, and presented at an exhibition in the stairwell of the library at the University of Technology Sydney. It protests the requirement of navigating heteronormative environments by suggesting ‘Queer’ ways of being in and designing in space. The work offers solutions, suggestions, and new ways of doing and making by offering design methods as tools of microprotest to its participants. For instance, Just Spaces provides a framework for sensitive translation, through the introduction of a structure that helps build personas based on the game Dungeons and Dragons (a game popular among certain LGBTQIA+ communities in Sydney). Figure 2: Exhibition: Just Spaces, held at UTS Library from 5 to 27 April 2018. By focussing the design process on deep listening and rendering voices into visual translations, these workshops responded to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s idea of the “outsider within”, articulating the way research should be navigated in vulnerable groups that have a history of being exploited as part of research. Through reciprocity and generosity, trust was generated in the design process which included a shared dinner; opening up participant-controlled safe spaces.To open up and explore ideas of discomfort and safety, two workshops were designed to provide safe and sensitive spaces for the group of seven LBPQ participants and collaborators. Design methods such as drawing, group imagining and futuring using a central prototype as a prompt drew out discussions of safe spaces. The prototype itself was a small folded house (representative of shelter) printed with a number of questions, such as:Our spaces are often unsafe. We take that as a given. But where do these breaches of safety take place? How was your safe space breached in those spaces?The workshops resulted in tangible objects, made by the participants, but these could not be made public because of privacy implications. So the next step was to use visual communication design to create sensitive and honest visual translations of the conversations. The translations trace images from the participants’ words, sketches and notes. For example, handwritten notes are transcribed and reproduced with a font chosen by the designer based on the tone of the comment and by considering how design can retain the essence of person as well as their anonymity. The translations focus on the micro: the micro breaches of safety; the interactions that take place between participants and their environment; and the everyday denigrating experiences that LBPQ women and non-binary identities go through on an ongoing basis. This translation process requires precise skills, sensitivity, care and deep knowledge of context. These skills operate at the smallest of scales through minute observation and detailed work. This micro-ness translates to the potential for truthfulness and care within the community, as it establishes a precedent through the translations for others to use and adapt for their own communities.The production of the work for exhibition also occurred on a micro level, using a Risograph, a screenprinting photocopier often found in schools, community groups and activist spaces. The machine (ME9350) used for this project is collectively owned by a co-op of Sydney creatives called Rizzeria. Each translation was printed only five times on butter paper. Butter paper is a sensitive surface but difficult to work with making the process slow and painstaking and with a lot of care.All aspects of this process and project are small: the pieced-together translations made by assembling segments of conversations; zines that can be kept in a pocket and read intimately; the group of participants; and the workshop and exhibition spaces. These small spaces of safety and their translations make possible conversations but also enable other safe spaces that move and intervene as design microprotests. Figure 3: Piecing the translations together. Figure 4: Pulling the translation off the drum; this was done every print making the process slow and requiring gentleness. This project was and is about slowing down, listening and visually translating in order to generate and imagine safe spaces. In this slowness, as Julier describes “...the activist is working in a more open-ended way that goes beyond the materialization of the design” (229). It creates methods for listening and collaboratively generating ways to navigate spaces that are fraught with micro conflict. As an act of territorialisation, it created tiny and important spaces as a design microprotest. Conversation Piece: A Fast and Slow BookConversation Piece is an experiment in collective self-publishing. It was made over three days by Frontyard, an activist space in Marrickville, NSW, involved in community “futuring”. Futuring for Frontyard is intended to empower people with tools to imagine and enact preferred futures, in contrast to what design theorist Tony Fry describes as “defuturing”, the systematic destruction of possible futures by design. Materialised as a book, Conversation Piece is also an act of collective futuring. It is a carefully designed process for producing dialogues between unlikely parties using an image archive as a starting point. Conversation Piece was designed with the book sprint format as a starting point. Founded by software designer Adam Hyde, book sprints are a method of collectively generating a book in just a few days then publishing it. Book sprints are related to the programming sprints common in agile software development or Scrum, which are often used to make FLOSS (Free and Open Source Software) manuals. Frontyard had used these techniques in a previous project to develop the Non Cash Arts Asset Platform.Conversation Piece was also modeled on two participatory books made during sprints that focussed on articulating alternative futures. Collaborative Futures was made during Transmediale in 2009, and Futurish: Thinking Out Loud about Futures (2015).The design for Conversation Piece began when Frontyard was invited to participate in the Hobiennale in 2017, a free festival emerging from the “national climate of uncertainty within the arts, influenced by changes to the structure of major arts organisations and diminishing funding opportunities.” The Hobiennale was the first Biennale held in Hobart, Tasmania, but rather than producing a standard large art survey, it focussed on artist-run spaces and initiatives, emergant practices, and marginalised voices in the arts. Frontyard is not an artist collective and does not work for commissions. Rather, the response to the invitation was based on how much energy there was in the group to contribute to Hobiennale. At Frontyard one of the ways collective and individual energy is accounted for is using spoon theory, a disability metaphor used to describe the planning that many people have to do to conserve and ration energy reserves in their daily lives (Miserandino). As outlined in the glossary of Conversation Piece, spoon theory is:A way of accounting for our emotional or physical energy and therefore our ability to participate in activities. Spoon theory can be used to collaborate with care and avoid guilt and burn out. Usually spoon theory is applied at an individual level, but it can also be used by organisations. For example, Hobiennale had enough spoons to participate in the Hobiennale so we decided to give it a go. (180)To make to book, Frontyard invited visitors to Hobiennale to participate in a series of open conversations that began with the photographic archive of the organisation over the two years of its existence. During a prototyping session, Frontyard designed nine diagrams that propositioned ways to begin conversations by combining images in different ways. Figure 5: Diagram 9. Conversation Piece: p.32-33One of the purposes of the diagrams, and the book itself, was to bring attention to the micro dynamics of conversation over time, and to create a safe space to explore the implications of these. While the production process and the book itself is micro (ten copies were printed and immediately given away), the decisions made in regards to licensing (a creative commons license is used), distribution (via the Internet Archive) and content generation (through participatory design processes) the project’s commitment to open design processes (Van Abel, Evers, Klaassen and Troxler) mean its impact is unpredictable. Counter-logical to the conventional copyright of books, open design borrows its definition - and at times its technologies and here its methods - from open source software design, to advocate the production of design objects based on fluid and shared circulation of design information. The tension between the abundance produced by an open approach to making, and the attention to the detail of relationships produced by slowing down and scaling down communication processes is made apparent in Conversation Piece:We challenge ourselves at Frontyard to keep bureaucratic processes as minimal an open as possible. We don’t have an application or acquittal process: we prefer to meet people over a cup of tea. A conversation is a way to work through questions. (7)As well as focussing on the micro dynamics of conversations, this projects protests the authority of archives. It works to dismantle the hierarchies of art and publishing through the design of an open, transparent, participatory publishing process. It offers a range of propositions about alternative economies, the agency of people working together at small scales, and the many possible futures in the collective imaginaries of people rethinking time, outcomes, results and progress.The contributors to the book are those in conversation – a complex networks of actors that are relationally configured and themselves in constant change, so as Julier explains “the object is subject to constant transformations, either literally or in its meaning. The designer is working within this instability.” (230) This is true of all design, but in this design microprotest, Frontyard works within this instability in order to redirect it. The book functions as a series of propositions about temporality and territorialisation, and focussing on micro interventions rather than radical political movements. In one section, two Frontyard residents offer a story of migration that also serves as a recipe for purslane soup, a traditional Portuguese dish (Rodriguez and Brison). Another lifts all the images of hand gestures from the Frontyard digital image archive and represents them in a photo essay. Figure 6: Talking to Rocks. Conversation Piece: p.143ConclusionThis article is an invitation to momentarily suspend the framing of design activism as a global movement in order to slow down the analysis of design protests and start paying attention to the brief moments and small spaces of protest that energise social change in design practice. We offered three examples of design microprotests, opening with a representation of transdisciplinary listening in order to frame design as a way if interpreting and listening as well as generating and producing. The two following projects we describe are collective acts of translation: small, momentary conversations designed into graphic forms that can be shared, reproduced, analysed, and remixed. Such protests have their limitations. Beyond the artefacts, the outcomes generated by design microprotests are difficult to identify. While they push and pull at the temporality and territorialisation of design, they operate at a small scale. How design microprotests connect to global networks of protest is an important question yet to be explored. The design practices of transdisciplinary listening, Queer Feelings and translations, and collaborative book sprinting, identified in these design microprotests change the thoughts and feelings of those who participate in ways that are impossible to measure in real time, and sometimes cannot be measured at all. Yet these practices are important now, as they shift the way designers design, and the way others understand what is designed. By identifying the common attributes of design microprotests, we can begin to understand the way necessary political conversations emerge in design practice, for instance about safe spaces, transdisciplinarity, and archives. Taking a research through design approach these can be understood over time, rather than just in the moment, and in specific territories that belong to community. They can be reconfigured into different conversations that change our world for the better. References Ahmed, Sara. “Queer Feelings.” The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2004. 143-167.Clarke, Alison J. "'Actions Speak Louder': Victor Papanek and the Legacy of Design Activism." Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 151-168.De Bretteville, Sheila L. Design beyond Design: Critical Reflection and the Practice of Visual Communication. Ed. Jan van Toorn. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Akademie Editions, 1998. 115-127.Evers, L., et al. Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. 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"Introduction: Material Preference and Design Activism." Design and Culture 5.2 (2013): 145-150.Jonas, W. “Exploring the Swampy Ground.” Mapping Design Research. Eds. S. Grand and W. Jonas. Basel: Birkhauser, 2012. 11-41.Kagan, S. Art and Sustainability. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011.Lenskjold, Tau Ulv, Sissel Olander, and Joachim Halse. “Minor Design Activism: Prompting Change from Within.” Design Issues 31.4 (2015): 67–78. doi:10.1162/DESI_a_00352.Max-Neef, M.A. "Foundations of Transdisciplinarity." Ecological Economics 53.53 (2005): 5-16.Miserandino, C. "The Spoon Theory." <http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com>.Nicolescu, B. "Methodology of Transdisciplinarity – Levels of Reality, Logic of the Included Middle and Complexity." Transdisciplinary Journal of Engineering and Science 1.1 (2010): 19-38.Palmer, C., J. Gothe, C. Mitchell, K. Sweetapple, S. McLaughlin, G. Hose, M. Lowe, H. Goodall, T. Green, D. Sharma, S. Fane, K. Brew, and P. Jones. “Finding Integration Pathways: Developing a Transdisciplinary (TD) Approach for the Upper Nepean Catchment.” Proceedings of the 5th Australian Stream Management Conference: Australian Rivers: Making a Difference. Thurgoona, NSW: Charles Sturt University, 2008.Rodriguez and Brison. "Purslane Soup." Conversation Piece. Eds. Frontyard Projects. Marrickville: Frontyard Projects, 2018. 34-41.Schultz, Tristan, et al. "What Is at Stake with Decolonizing Design? A Roundtable." Design and Culture 10.1 (2018): 81-101.Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: ZED Books, 1998. Van Abel, Bas, et al. Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. Bis Publishers, 2014.Wing Sue, Derald. Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation. London: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. XV-XX.

In recent times there has been a notable increase in the number of first novels by young Australian authors which have attained international release. Some mentionable titles would be Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded, Andrew McGahan's Praise and Fiona Capp's Night Surfing. These novels, which come brimming with language particular to Australia and to the sub-cultural groupings represented in the texts, seem to have found an eager overseas readership despite what would ordinarily be seen as their untranslatable content. The high levels of culturally-specific brand names, slang, vulgarities and references to popular culture used in these novels should be a hindrance to the effective comprehension of the narratives themselves as well as the culture they portray. Making the specificities of a culture comprehensible to the outside world will always be a difficult task, but the advent of on-line publishing has introduced some interesting possible tactics and some entirely new hurdles for future translators to consider. It is problematic to attempt to define a 'culture', and homogeneous languages and cultures do not truly exist, but with every international transfer comes the act of translation which must suppose a certain empirically assessible definition of the psychological space between the source culture of the text and that of its target audience. Texts to be sold internationally are carefully selected and often meticulously renovated to be made comprehensible to a chosen target readership. The notion of a such a reading market presupposes levels of shared knowledge between the two cultures: it requires an assessment of sameness and difference in order to define which portions of the text need to be translated. Translation theorist Anthony Pym has asserted the notion that all texts belong to certain peoples or situations and thereby resist translation due to the necessity for the texts to undergo a change of values (beyond the linguistic) when moved away from their apparently rightful place (Pym 102). This suggests that any text has a natural home where the ideal reader probably resides. Thus, even the movement of a text between groups who share a language (for example, from Australia to England or the USA) will require a certain amount of translation to be maximally accessible for the foreign reader. On-line publishing destabilises the levels of control available to publishers and translators. The apparent concerns of royalty payments and copyright are currently under observation, but there is also the radical alteration of the notion of a target book-buying market. A text published electronically is basically available to the world. There are no physical frontiers or issues of stock availability to prevent the text from being read by anyone, anywhere, who has a basic grasp of the language being used in the particular document (and more and more search engines even provide a translation facility that overcomes some of that initial language barrier). Thus, an Australian text can be read by any reader of English irrespective of cultural background or supposed suitability as a receiver. Under the controlled conditions made possible by working towards assumed receiving markets, translators have developed a series of coping mechanisms to overcome the dilemmas of translation difficulties. In some cases, a translator may domesticate a text by exchanging a word for an option which is vaguely similar but is more comprehensible to the target culture (an example might be the replacement of 'vegemite' with 'peanut butter' as was the case in the recent French translation of Sally Morgan's My Place). A second option is to retain the word in its original form, forcing readers to investigate the meaning elsewhere. This works positively for the diligent reader, but there is also a level of reading at which the reader may be happy to 'skip over' the laborious sections while still 'getting the gist' of the storyline. This does little for the development of greater awareness about the source culture or for an understanding of a particular term's appropriateness within the context of the narrative. A third method is to make use of footnotes within the text to explain any untranslatable passages. Opportunities exist here for adding historical data and brief asides which may broaden the reader's understanding of the narrative. Even pictures or maps may be added to help create an ideal reader and collapse the space of potential misunderstanding between the two cultures. This is a positive approach in pedagogical terms but few publishers wish to produce a text which is three times longer than the original. There is also the risk here, as Pym has stated, of rendering the text more sociological than narrative (Pym 87). In addition, the eye's constant retreat to the bottom of the page makes the text disjointed and may sacrifice poetic allusions. One exciting advantage of electronic publishing, in terms of translatability of culturally-specific language, is the potential for the use of hypertext links as a sort of intratextual footnote. While preserving the basic form of the original text and not visually disrupting the narrative, Internet links can be used to provide immediate access to all manner of educational information. To illustrate these points, one need only look at one of the Australian novels in question, Nick Earls's Zigzag Street, which has recently been translated into German and has been warmly embraced by readers of English around the world. Barely a page can be turned in this text without the reader discovering another culturally-specific reference. The following haphazardly abridged portion of Chapter 37 is exemplary of the frequency of such problematic language: The car doesn't start...I call the RACQ...I sit out on the bonnet with a big pile of toast with Vegemite on it...me and my old Laser...I drive and I sing along to Triple J... At around 2 o'clock I walk up to Wee Willie Winkie's on Waterworks Road...and I buy a packet of Tim Tams...I buy a banana Paddle Pop and eat it on the way home. Zigzag Street has been released in English outside of Australia without alteration despite Earls's usage of terms which may not even resonate with Australian readers outside the text's Brisbane home, let alone with other English-speaking communities. This humorous tale of a young man's personal development in the face of adversity has engaged readers world-wide, yet press coverage and fan mail still query the real meanings of strange and exotic words like 'Tim Tam'. What hypertext offers is a space-saving, non-disruptive opportunity to imbue a text with additional information about seemingly untranslatable terms. If Zigzag Street were published electronically and came with Internet links, the reader might have the opportunity to more extensively understand the implications of the Australian vernacular in use. Tim Tams, for example, have a social role beyond their being a biscuit (as virtual currency in offices and the providers of solace to the downtrodden and dumped). This is an intracultural meaning attributed to that particular signifier which could not be understood without explanation. The reader can no doubt judge that Triple J is some form of music, but a jump to the Triple J Website allows him or her to say 'this is a radio station, primarily aimed at young people, it supports certain political agendas, it plays a certain type of music...', thus understanding the motivations of the character, the events of the story and, importantly, a little bit more about the source culture. The use of hypertext links cannot fully translate culturally-specific references, only first-hand experience of the culture can do that. But in the few examples made apparent in the short paragraph from Zigzag Street, hypertext provides a level of comprehension of the text beyond that which is possible through traditional footnotes. The reader is able to partially experience the source culture of the text (by at least knowing what a Tim Tam looks like or by listening to Triple J -- whose site now comes with a RealAudio feature) rather than standing at a distance making vague and frequently misguided assumptions about the culture or conducting an unproductive reading which simply ignores the culturally-specific terminology. In terms of form and the retention of a smooth narrative flow, the text is not technically disjointed. At the same time however, the reading of text will be a non-linear experience at the discretion of the reader. It has been said that this is reflective of the way we usually approach a text; that is, jumping between thoughts which we then associate with each other to build a network of concepts. Hypertext parallels human cognition in this way and allows for deeper exploration and interpretation of the text's culture of origin (Balasubramanian 5). Though entertaining, the translations of food and brand names may seem like flippant examples. Yet, it is easy to see the importance of the principles if they were appropriated to cases of historical data or ideologies which may be wrongly interpreted by the international reading market. (This is not to say that Tim Tams are not very, VERY important social documents.) Of course no reading of the text will arrive at the reader without mediation in terms of the links chosen for the site. As with all translations, there are political and ethical decisions to be made in conjunction with the semantic ones. It should also be stated that the advantages lie mainly in the domain of intralingual translation projects and that few novels are currently published in their entirety on the Internet. There are, however, many abstracts, short stories, journals and other documents laden with similar levels of cultural information which can benefit from this innovation. The introduction of the Internet has reduced the physical distance between cultural groupings by making information about any given culture immediately available to the entire world. It is translation, however, that initiates the reduction in the psychological space between cultures. Innovative use of the Internet's potential for translation could make intercultural communication a much smoother and more interesting project resulting in a feeling for the reader of inclusion, rather than intrusion on the source culture of a text. References Balasubramanian, V. "Hypertext -- An Introduction." State of the Art Review of Hypermedia Issues and Applications. 1998. 20 Oct. 1998 <http://www.isg.sfu.ca/~duchier/misc/hypertext_review/chapter1.php>. Earls, Nick. Zigzag Street. Sydney: Transworld, 1996. Pym, Anthony. Translation and Text Transfer. Frankfurt: Verlag Peter Land, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Lara Cain. "'What the Hell is a Tim Tam?' Reducing the Space between Cultures through Electronic Publishing." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.4 (1998). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/timtam.php>. Chicago style: Lara Cain, "'What the Hell is a Tim Tam?' Reducing the Space between Cultures through Electronic Publishing," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1, no. 4 (1998), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/timtam.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Lara Cain. (1998) 'What the hell is a Tim Tam?' Reducing the space between cultures through electronic publishing. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1(4). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9811/timtam.php> ([your date of access]).

A considerable body of research has examined stress and wellbeing in athletes (e.g., Arnold et al., 2017). In contrast, similar experiences in sports coaches have received considerably less attention although these are widely exposed to numerous stressors which can potentially influence their well-being and performance. In 2017, a meta-analysis (Norris et al., 2017) highlighted various stressors influencing the performance of coaches. These include external scrutiny from the public and media, the need to constantly maintain high standards during training and competition and organizational stressors relating to administration, finances, overload, and environment. Regarding the elite football setting specifically, coaches must regularly deal with stressors such as job insecurity (Bentzen et al., 2020) and cope with the stress and adversity associated to a highly pressurized workplace environment (Knights and Ruddock-Hudson, 2016). These stressors can cause anxiety, in addition to sleep disturbance, thus there is a clear need to help coaches find ways to deal with such difficulties. In clinical health settings, music-based therapeutic interventions are systematically shown to help improve sleep quality (Chen et al., 2021) and anxiety levels (Umbrello et al., 2019). In sports settings, listening to music demonstrated a positive effect in reducing pre-competition anxiety levels in a cohort of elite shooters (John, Verma, Khanna, 2012) and amateur athletes (Elliott et al., 2014) respectively. Yet to our knowledge no study has investigated the potential benefits of music in sports coaches. In this preliminary study, we investigated 1) the feasibility of implementing a novel smartphone music application in a cohort of elite soccer coaches, and 2) its effectiveness in helping them fall asleep and reducing anxiety levels. A total of 10 elite French soccer coaches (age 28.4 ± 3.9 years, working in clubs belonging to the 4 highest standards of football in France: Ligue 1: n=1, Ligue 2: n=3, Division 3: n=1 and Division 4: n=5) were invited to participate in the present study which was also proposed as part of their personal development plan during a year-long elite coach development course. Prior to their inclusion, participants were informed about the implementation of the study by means of an information document and oral presentation by the research team and were asked to sign an informed consent form to participate. The participants were asked to download the music application (Music Care©, Paris, France) on their personal smartphone/tablet and provided with a headphone set. This music application is typically used in health care settings (see www.music-care.com/en/clinical-evidence.html for list of related research works) and offers personalized music listening according to the patient’s therapeutic need (pain, anxiety, sleep) and musical preferences (e.g., classic, jazz, traditional…). The music sequences (each 20min duration) aim to progressively bring the user into a state of relaxation, and naturally treat pain, anxiety, and sleep disorders. Each participant was instructed to use the application at home in the morning on waking up (choice of anxiety or awakening session) and in the evening prior to falling asleep (sleep session) over a 1-month period. They were asked to record the date, time and duration of each session in a personal diary. Following the sleep session, participants were also requested to respond to the question: did the session help you to fall asleep: yes, no or I don’t know? Finally, immediately before and at the end of each anxiety/awakening session, participants used a Likert scale to rate their current anxiety level (0=no anxiety to 10=maximal anxiety). Data are presented as means, standard deviations and range values unless stated. Owing to the non-normality of the dataset collected for the pre-post session anxiety score ratings, Wilcoxon’s signed-rank non-parametric test was used to compare mean data (significance level, p<0.05). Cohen’s Effect Sizes were also calculated and classified as trivial (<0.2), small (>0.2–0.6), moderate (>0.6–1.2), large (>1.2–2.0) and very large (>2.0–4.0). The BiostaTGV (INSERM, France) package was used for all statistical calculations. Results showed that out of the 10 participants, two did not choose to download the application while among the remaining 8, 2 did not record any information on their music sessions. Regarding the 6 remaining participants, half completed at least one session per day over the 30-day period while an average of 25 sessions were completed per participant (range: 18 to 29). In total, 150 sessions were completed by the participants of which 64% (n=96) were used to aid sleep, 19% (n=28) anxiety and 17% (n=26) wake-up respectively. Each music session was completed in its entirety (20mins duration) on 99.3% occasions. Of the 96 sleep-related sessions completed, 62.5% (n=60) were considered by the participants to have aided them in falling asleep (Figure 1). The comparison of anxiety levels demonstrated a significant reduction in mean values for the pre- versus post-session scores: 6.0±1.0 vs. 4.3±1.5, -28%, p < 0.0001, effect size=1.2 (large). To the best of our knowledge, this investigation is the first to report the feasibility of implementing a novel therapeutic music smartphone application in a group of elite soccer coaches and determine its effects on their current anxiety levels and helping them fall asleep. Altogether, 40% of coaches (4 out of 10) chose not to use the application which is greater than the 20% drop-out rates frequently reported in randomised controlled studies. However, half of the 6 remaining participants completed at least one music session per day over the 30-day period while an average of 25 sessions (with nearly all listened to in their entirety) were completed per participant demonstrating in our opinion a satisfactory level of feasibility. The coaches most often chose sleep sessions (64% of the total) of which nearly two thirds were considered to have helped them to fall asleep. Anxiety sessions were less frequently utilised but nevertheless helped to significantly reduce the coaches’ current anxiety levels (-28% reduction). These positive results follow those observed in clinical health settings (Chen et al., 2021; Umbrello et al., 2019) and athletes (Elliot et al., 2014, John et al., 2012). As such, we suggest that music can be used by elite soccer coaches as a tool to aid anxiety and falling asleep. Further research is nevertheless required to determine why not all the coaches used the application or tended to use it for sleep rather than anxiety purposes. Similarly, a stronger experimental approach employing a longitudinal randomized controlled study design, a larger sample size to increase statistical power in addition to inclusion of qualitative (e.g., questionnaires) and quantitative (e.g., physiological responses) metrics is necessary. We estimate that to achieve a statistical power level of 90%, a sample size of 62 participants (accounting for a 20% drop out rate) would be necessary for a future randomized controlled study.

Introduction Generative algorithms have been used for many years by computer musicians like Iannis Xenakis (Xenakis) and David Cope (Cope) to make complex electronic music composition. Advances in computer technology have made it possible to design music algorithms based upon specific pitch, timbre and rhythmic qualities that can be manipulated in real time with a simple interface that a child can control.jam2jam (Brown, Sorensen, & Dillon) is a shareware program developed in java that uses these ideas and involves what we have called Networked Improvisation, which ‘can be broadly described as collaborative music making over a computer network’ (Dillon & Brown). Fig. 1: jam2jam interface (download a shareware version at http://www.explodingart.com/.) Jamming Online With this software users manipulate sliders and dials to influence changes in music in real time. This enables the opportunity for participants to interact with the sound possibilities of a chosen musical style as a focused musical environment. Essentially by moving a slider or dial the user can change the intensity of the musical activity across musical elements such as rhythm, harmony, timbre and volume and the changes they make will respond within the framework of the musical style parameters, updating and recomposing within the timeframe of a quaver/eighth note. This enables the users to play within the style and to hear and influence the shape and structure of the sound. Whilst real time performance using a computer is not new, what is different about this software is that through a network users can create virtual ensembles, which are simultaneously collaborative and interactive. jam2jam was developed using philosophical design principals based on an understanding of ‘meaning’ gained by musicians drawn from both software, live music experiences (Dillon, Student as Maker) and research about how professional composers engage with technology in creative production (Brown, Music Composition). New music technologies have for centuries provided expressive possibilities and an environment where humans can be playful. With jam2jam users can play with complex or simple musical ideas, interact with the musical elements, and hear the changes immediately. When networked they can have these musical experiences collaboratively in a virtual ensemble. Background The initial development of jam2jam began with a survey of the musical tastes of a group of children between the ages of 8-14 in a multi racial community in Delaware, Ohio in the USA as part of the Delaware Children’s Music Festival in 2002. These surveys of ‘the music they liked’ resulted in the researchers purchasing Compact Discs and completing a rule based analysis of the styles. This analysis was then converted into numerical values and algorithms were constructed and used as a structure for the software. The algorithms propose the intensity of range of each style. For example, in the Grunge style the snare drum at low intensity plays a cross stick rim timbre on the second and fourth beat and at high intensity the sound becomes a gated snare sound and plays rhythmic quaver/eighth note triplets. In between these are characteristic rhythmic materials that are less complex than the extreme (triplets). This procedure is replicated across five instruments; drums, percussion, bass, guitar and keyboard. The melodic instruments have algorithms for pitch organisation within the possibilities of the style. These algorithms are the recipes or lesson plans for interactive music making where the student’s gestures control the intensity of the music as it composes in real time. A simple interface was designed (see fig. 1) with a page for each instrument and the mixer. The interface primarily uses dials and sliders for interaction, with radio buttons for timbrel/instrument selection. Once the software was built and installed students were observed using it by videotaping their interaction and interviewing both children and teachers. Observations, which fed into the developmental design, were drawn on a daily basis with the interface and sound engine being regularly updated to accommodate students and teacher requirements. The principals of observation and analysis were based upon a theory of meaningful engagement (Brown, “Modes”, Music Composition; Dillon, “Modelling”, Student as Maker). These adjustments were applied to the software, the curriculum design and to the facilitators’ organisational processes and interactions with the students. The concept of meaningful engagement, which has been applied to this software development process, has provided an effective tool for identifying the location of meaning and describing modes of creative engagement experienced through networked jamming. It also provided a framework for dynamic evaluation and feedback which influences the design with each successive iteration. Defining a Contemporary Musicianship Networked improvisational experiences develop a contemporary musicianship, in which the computer is embraced as an instrument that can be used skillfully in live performance with both acoustic/electric instruments and other network users. The network itself becomes a site for a virtual ensemble where users can experience interaction between ‘players’ in real time. With networked improvisation, cyberspace becomes a venue. Observations have also included performances between two distant locations and ones where computers on the network simultaneously ‘jammed’ with ‘live’ acoustic performers. The Future The future of networked jamming is exciting. There is potential for these environments to replicate complex musical systems and engage participants in musical understandings, linking gesture and sound with concepts of musical knowledge that are constructed within the algorithm and the interface. The dynamic development of Networked Jamming applications involve designs which apply philosophical and pedagogical principles that encourage and sustain meaningful engagement with music making. These are sufficiently complex to allow the revisiting of musical experiences and knowledge at increasingly deeper levels. Conclusion jam2jam is a proof of concept model for networked jamming environments, where people and machines play music in collaborative ensembles. Network jamming requires a contemporary musicianship, which embraces the computer as an instrument, the network as an ensemble and cyberspace as venue for performance. These concepts facilitate access to the ensemble performance of complex musical structures through simple interfaces. It provides the opportunity for users to be creatively immersed in the simultaneous act of listening and performance. jam2jam represents an opportunity for music-makers to have interactive experiences with musical knowledge in a way not otherwise previously available. It enables children, adults and the disabled to enter into a collaborative community where technology mediates a live ensemble performance. The experience could be an ostinato pumping out hip-hop or techno grooves, a Xenakis chaos algorithm, or a minimal ambient soundscape. With the development of new algorithms, a sample engine and creative interface design we believe this concept has amazing possibilities. The real potential of this concept lies in the access that the users have to meaningful engagement with ensemble performance in the production of music, in real time, even with limited previous experience or dexterity. References Brown, A. “Modes of Compositional Engagement.” Paper presented at the Australasian Computer Music Conference-Interfaces, Brisbane, Australia. 2000. ———. Music Composition and the Computer: An Examination of the Work Practices of Five Experienced Composers. Unpublished PhD, University of Queensland, Brisbane, 2003. ———, A. Sorensen, and S. Dillon. jam2jam (Version 1) Interactive generative music making software. Brisbane: Exploding Art Music Productions, 2002. Cope, D. “Computer Modelling of Musical Intelligence in EMI.” Computer Music Journal 16.2 (1992): 69-83. Dillon, S. “Modelling: Meaning through Software Design.” Paper presented at the 26th Annual Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Music Education, Southern Cross University Tweed Heads, 2004. ———, and A. Brown. “Networked Improvisational Musical Environments: Learning through Online Collaborative Music Making.” In Embedding Music Technology in the Secondary School. Eds. J. Finney & P. Burnard. Cambridge: Continuum Press, In Press. Dillon, S. C. The Student as Maker: An Examination of the Meaning of Music to Students in a School and the Ways in Which We Give Access to Meaningful Music Education. Unpublished PhD, La Trobe, Melbourne, 2001. Xenakis, I. Formalized Music. New York: Pendragon Press, 1991. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dillon, Steve. "Jam2jam: Networked Jamming." M/C Journal 9.6 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/04-dillon.php>. APA Style Dillon, S. (Dec. 2006) "Jam2jam: Networked Jamming," M/C Journal, 9(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0612/04-dillon.php>.

'He did what the cipher could not, he rescued himself.' -- Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination (23) On many levels, the new Nine Inch Nails album The Fragile is a gritty meditation about different types of End: the eternal relationship cycle of 'fragility, tension, ordeal, fragmentation' (adapted, with apologies to Wilhelm Reich); fin-de-siècle anxiety; post-millennium foreboding; a spectre of the alien discontinuity that heralds an on-rushing future vastly different from the one envisaged by Enlightenment Project architects. In retrospect, it's easy for this perspective to be dismissed as jargon-filled cyber-crit hyperbole. Cyber-crit has always been at its best too when it invents pre-histories and finds hidden connections between different phenomena (like the work of Greil Marcus and early Mark Dery), and not when it is closer to Chinese Water Torture, name-checking the canon's icons (the 'Deleuze/Guattari' tag-team), texts and key terms. "The organization of sound is interpreted historically, politically, socially ... . It subdues music's ambition, reins it in, restores it to its proper place, reconciles it to its naturally belated fate", comments imagineer Kodwo Eshun (4) on how cyber-crit destroys albums and the innocence of the listening experience. This is how official histories are constructed a priori and freeze-dried according to personal tastes and prior memes: sometimes the most interesting experiments are Darwinian dead-ends that fail to make the canon, or don't register on the radar. Anyone approaching The Fragile must also contend with the music industry's harsh realities. For every 10 000 Goth fans who moshed to the primal 'kill-fuck-dance' rhythms of the hit single "Closer" (heeding its siren-call to fulfil basic physiological needs and build niche-space), maybe 20 noted that the same riff returned with a darker edge in the title track to The Downward Spiral, undermining the glorification of Indulgent hedonism. "The problem with such alternative audiences," notes Disinformation Creative Director Richard Metzger, "is that they are trying to be different -- just like everyone else." According to author Don Webb, "some mature Chaos and Black Magicians reject their earlier Nine Inch Nails-inspired Goth beginnings and are extremely critical towards new adopters because they are uncomfortable with the subculture's growing popularity, which threatens to taint their meticulously constructed 'mysterious' worlds. But by doing so, they are also rejecting their symbolic imprinting and some powerful Keys to unlocking their personal history." It is also difficult to separate Nine Inch Nails from the commercialisation and colossal money-making machine that inevitably ensued on the MTV tour circuit: do we blame Michael Trent Reznor because most of his audience are unlikely to be familiar with 'first-wave' industrial bands including Cabaret Voltaire and the experiments of Genesis P. Orridge in Throbbing Gristle? Do we accuse Reznor of being a plagiarist just because he wears some of his influences -- Dr. Dre, Daft Punk, Atari Teenage Riot, Pink Floyd's The Wall (1979), Tom Waits's Bone Machine (1992), David Bowie's Low (1977) -- on his sleeve? And do we accept no-brain rock critic album reviews who quote lines like 'All the pieces didn't fit/Though I really didn't give a shit' ("Where Is Everybody?") or 'And when I suck you off/Not a drop will go to waste' ("Starfuckers Inc") as representative of his true personality? Reznor evidently has his own thoughts on this subject, but we should let the music speak for itself. The album's epic production and technical complexity turned into a post-modern studio Vision Quest, assisted by producer Alan Moulder, eleventh-hour saviour Bob Ezrin (brought in by Reznor to 'block-out' conceptual and sonic continuity), and a group of assault-technicians. The fruit of these collaborations is an album where Reznor is playing with our organism's time-binding sense, modulating strange emotions through deeply embedded tonal angularities. During his five-year absence, Trent Reznor fought diverse forms of repetitious trauma, from endogenous depression caused by endless touring to the death of his beloved grandmother (who raised him throughout childhood). An end signals a new beginning, a spiral is an open-ended and ever-shifting structure, and so Reznor sought to re-discover the Elder Gods within, a shamanic approach to renewal and secular salvation utilised most effectively by music PR luminary and scientist Howard Bloom. Concerned with healing the human animal through Ordeals that hard-wire the physiological baselines of Love, Hate and Fear, Reznor also focusses on what happens when 'meaning-making' collapses and hope for the future cannot easily be found. He accurately captures the confusion that such dissolution of meaning and decline of social institutions brings to the world -- Francis Fukuyama calls this bifurcation 'The Great Disruption'. For a generation who experienced their late childhood and early adolescence in Reagan's America, Reznor and his influences (Marilyn Manson and Filter) capture the Dark Side of recent history, unleashed at Altamont and mutating into the Apocalyptic style of American politics (evident in the 'Star Wars'/SDI fascination). The personal 'psychotic core' that was crystallised by the collapse of the nuclear family unit and supportive social institutions has returned to haunt us with dystopian fantasies that are played out across Internet streaming media and visceral MTV film-clips. That such cathartic releases are useful -- and even necessary (to those whose lives have been formed by socio-economic 'life conditions') is a point that escapes critics like Roger Scruton, some Christian Evangelists and the New Right. The 'escapist' quality of early 1980s 'Rapture' and 'Cosmocide' (Hal Lindsey) prophecies has yielded strange fruit for the Children of Ezekiel, whom Reznor and Marilyn Manson are unofficial spokes-persons for. From a macro perspective, Reznor's post-human evolutionary nexus lies, like J.G. Ballard's tales, in a mythical near-future built upon past memory-shards. It is the kind of worldview that fuses organic and morphogenetic structures with industrial machines run amok, thus The Fragile is an artefact that captures the subjective contents of the different mind produced by different times. Sonic events are in-synch but out of phase. Samples subtly trigger and then scramble kinaesthetic-visceral and kinaesthetic-tactile memories, suggestive of dissociated affective states or body memories that are incapable of being retrieved (van der Kolk 294). Perhaps this is why after a Century of Identity Confusion some fans find it impossible to listen to a 102-minute album in one sitting. No wonder then that the double album is divided into 'left' and 'right' discs (a reference to split-brain research?). The real-time track-by-track interpretation below is necessarily subjective, and is intended to serve as a provisional listener's guide to the aural ur-text of 1999. The Fragile is full of encrypted tones and garbled frequencies that capture a world where the future is always bleeding into a non-recoverable past. Turbulent wave-forms fight for the listener's attention with prolonged static lulls. This does not make for comfortable or even 'nice' listening. The music's mind is a snapshot, a critical indicator, of the deep structures brewing within the Weltanschauung that could erupt at any moment. "Somewhat Damaged" opens the album's 'Left' disc with an oscillating acoustic strum that anchor's the listener's attention. Offset by pulsing beats and mallet percussion, Reznor builds up sound layers that contrast with lyrical epitaphs like 'Everything that swore it wouldn't change is different now'. Icarus iconography is invoked, but perhaps a more fitting mythopoeic symbol of the journey that lies ahead would be Nietzsche's pursuit of his Ariadne through the labyrinth of life, during which the hero is steadily consumed by his numbing psychosis. Reznor fittingly comments: 'Didn't quite/Fell Apart/Where were you?' If we consider that Reznor has been repeating the same cycle with different variations throughout all of his music to date, retro-fitting each new album into a seamless tapestry, then this track signals that he has begun to finally climb out of self-imposed exile in the Underworld. "The Day the World Went Away" has a tremendously eerie opening, with plucked mandolin effects entering at 0:40. The main slashing guitar riff was interpreted by some critics as Reznor's attempt to parody himself. For some reason, the eerie backdrop and fragmented acoustic guitar strums recalls to my mind civil defence nuclear war films. Reznor, like William S. Burroughs, has some powerful obsessions. The track builds up in intensity, with a 'Chorus of the Damned' singing 'na na nah' over apocalyptic end-times imagery. At 4:22 the track ends with an echo that loops and repeats. "The Frail" signals a shift to mournful introspectiveness with piano: a soundtrack to faded 8 mm films and dying memories. The piano builds up slowly with background echo, holds and segues into ... "The Wretched", beginning with a savage downbeat that recalls earlier material from Pretty Hate Machine. 'The Far Aways/Forget It' intones Reznor -- it's becoming clear that despite some claims to the contrary, there is redemption in this album, but it is one borne out of a relentless move forward, a strive-drive. 'You're finally free/You could be' suggest Reznor studied Existentialism during his psychotherapy visits. This song contains perhaps the ultimate post-relationship line: 'It didn't turn out the way you wanted it to, did it?' It's over, just not the way you wanted; you can always leave the partner you're with, but the ones you have already left will always stain your memories. The lines 'Back at the beginning/Sinking/Spinning' recall the claustrophobic trapped world and 'eternal Now' dislocation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder victims. At 3:44 a plucked cello riff, filtered, segues into a sludge buzz-saw guitar solo. At 5:18 the cello riff loops and repeats. "We're in This Together Now" uses static as percussion, highlighting the influence of electricity flows instead of traditional rock instrument configurations. At 0:34 vocals enter, at 1:15 Reznor wails 'I'm impossible', showing he is the heir to Roger Waters's self-reflective rock-star angst. 'Until the very end of me, until the very end of you' reverts the traditional marriage vow, whilst 'You're the Queen and I'm the King' quotes David Bowie's "Heroes". Unlike earlier tracks like "Reptile", this track is far more positive about relationships, which have previously resembled toxic-dyads. Reznor signals a delta surge (breaking through barriers at any cost), despite a time-line morphing between present-past-future. At 5:30 synths and piano signal a shift, at 5:49 the outgoing piano riff begins. The film-clip is filled with redemptive water imagery. The soundtrack gradually gets more murky and at 7:05 a subterranean note signals closure. "The Fragile" is even more hopeful and life-affirming (some may even interpret it as devotional), but this love -- representative of the End-Times, alludes to the 'Glamour of Evil' (Nico) in the line 'Fragile/She doesn't see her beauty'. The fusion of synths and atonal guitars beginning at 2:13 summons forth film-clip imagery -- mazes, pageants, bald eagles, found sounds, cloaked figures, ruined statues, enveloping darkness. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Just like You Imagined" opens with Soundscapes worthy of Robert Fripp, doubled by piano and guitar at 0:39. Drums and muffled voices enter at 0:54 -- are we seeing a pattern to Reznor's writing here? Sonic debris guitar enters at 1:08, bringing forth intensities from white noise. This track is full of subtle joys like the 1:23-1:36 solo by David Bowie pianist Mike Garson and guitarist Adrian Belew's outgoing guitar solo at 2:43, shifting back to the underlying soundscapes at 3:07. The sounds are always on the dissipative edge of chaos. "Pilgrimage" utilises a persistent ostinato and beat, with a driving guitar overlay at 0:18. This is perhaps the most familiar track, using Reznor motifs like the doubling of the riff with acoustic guitars between 1:12-1:20, march cries, and pitch-shift effects on a 3:18 drumbeat/cymbal. Or at least I could claim it was familiar, if it were not that legendary hip-hop producer and 'edge-of-panic' tactilist Dr. Dre helped assemble the final track mix. "No, You Don't" has been interpreted as an attack on Marilyn Manson and Hole's Courntey Love, particularly the 0:47 line 'Got to keep it all on the outside/Because everything is dead on the inside' and the 2:33 final verse 'Just so you know, I did not believe you could sink so low'. The song's structure is familiar: a basic beat at 0:16, guitars building from 0:31 to sneering vocals, a 2:03 counter-riff that merges at 2:19 with vocals and ascending to the final verse and 3:26 final distortion... "La Mer" is the first major surprise, a beautiful and sweeping fusion of piano, keyboard and cello, reminiscent of Symbolist composer Debussy. At 1:07 Denise Milfort whispers, setting the stage for sometime Ministry drummer Bill Reiflin's jazz drumming at 1:22, and a funky 1:32 guitar/bass line. The pulsing synth guitar at 2:04 serves as anchoring percussion for a cinematic electronica mindscape, filtered through new layers of sonic chiaroscuro at 2:51. 3:06 phase shifting, 3:22 layer doubling, 3:37 outgoing solo, 3:50-3:54 more swirling vocal fragments, seguing into a fading cello quartet as shadows creep. David Carson's moody film-clip captures the end more ominously, depicting the beauty of drowning. This track contains the line 'Nothing can stop me now', which appears to be Reznor's personal mantra. This track rivals 'Hurt' and 'A Warm Place' from The Downward Spiral and 'Something I Can Never Have' from Pretty Hate Machine as perhaps the most emotionally revealing and delicate material that Reznor has written. "The Great Below" ends the first disc with more multi-layered textures fusing nostalgia and reverie: a twelve-second cello riff is counter-pointed by a plucked overlay, which builds to a 0:43 washed pulse effect, transformed by six second pulses between 1:04-1:19 and a further effects layer at 1:24. E-bow effects underscore lyrics like 'Currents have their say' (2:33) and 'Washes me away' (2:44), which a 3:33 sitar riff answers. These complexities are further transmuted by seemingly random events -- a 4:06 doubling of the sitar riff which 'glitches' and a 4:32 backbeat echo that drifts for four bars. While Reznor's lyrics suggest that he is unable to control subjective time-states (like The Joker in the Batman: Dark Knight series of Kali-yuga comic-books), the track constructions show that the Key to his hold over the listener is very carefully constructed songs whose spaces resemble Pythagorean mathematical formulas. Misdirecting the audience is the secret of many magicians. "The Way Out Is Through" opens the 'Right' disc with an industrial riff that builds at 0:19 to click-track and rhythm, the equivalent of a weaving spiral. Whispering 'All I've undergone/I will keep on' at 1:24, Reznor is backed at 1:38 by synths and drums coalescing into guitars, which take shape at 1:46 and turn into a torrential electrical current. The models are clearly natural morphogenetic structures. The track twists through inner storms and torments from 2:42 to 2:48, mirrored by vocal shards at 2:59 and soundscapes at 3:45, before piano fades in and out at 4:12. The title references peri-natal theories of development (particularly those of Stanislav Grof), which is the source of much of the album's imagery. "Into the Void" is not the Black Sabbath song of the same name, but a catchy track that uses the same unfolding formula (opening static, cello at 0:18, guitars at 0:31, drums and backbeat at 1:02, trademark industrial vocals and synth at 1:02, verse at 1:23), and would not appear out of place in a Survival Research Laboratories exhibition. At 3:42 Reznor plays with the edge of synth soundscapes, merging vocals at 4:02 and ending the track nicely at 4:44 alone. "Where Is Everybody?" emulates earlier structures, but relies from 2:01 on whirring effects and organic rhythms, including a flurry of eight beat pulses between 2:40-2:46 and a 3:33 spiralling guitar solo. The 4:26 guitar solo is pure Adrian Belew, and is suddenly ended by spluttering static and white noise at 5:13. "The Mark Has Been Made" signals another downshift into introspectiveness with 0:32 ghostly synth shimmers, echoed by cello at 1:04 which is the doubled at 1:55 by guitar. At 2:08 industrial riffs suddenly build up, weaving between 3:28 distorted guitars and the return of the repressed original layer at 4:16. The surprise is a mystery 32 second soundscape at the end with Reznor crooning 'I'm getting closer, all the time' like a zombie devil Elvis. "Please" highlights spacious noise at 0:48, and signals a central album motif at 1:04 with the line 'Time starts slowing down/Sink until I drown'. The psychic mood of the album shifts with the discovery of Imagination as a liberating force against oppression. The synth sound again is remarkably organic for an industrial album. "Starfuckers Inc" is the now infamous sneering attack on rock-stardom, perhaps at Marilyn Manson (at 3:08 Reznor quotes Carly Simon's 'You're So Vain'). Jungle beats and pulsing synths open the track, which features the sound-sculpting talent of Pop Will Eat Itself member Clint Mansell. Beginning at 0:26, Reznor's vocals appear to have been sampled, looped and cut up (apologies to Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs). The lines 'I have arrived and this time you should believe the hype/I listened to everyone now I know everyone was right' is a very savage and funny exposure of Manson's constant references to Friedrich Nietzsche's Herd-mentality: the Herd needs a bogey-man to whip it into submission, and Manson comes dangerous close to fulfilling this potential, thus becoming trapped by a 'Stacked Deck' paradox. The 4:08 lyric line 'Now I belong I'm one of the Chosen Ones/Now I belong I'm one of the Beautiful Ones' highlights the problem of being Elect and becoming intertwined with institutionalised group-think. The album version ditches the closing sample of Gene Simmons screaming "Thankyou and goodnight!" to an enraptured audience on the single from KISS Alive (1975), which was appropriately over-the-top (the alternate quiet version is worth hearing also). "The danger Marilyn Manson faces", notes Don Webb (current High Priest of the Temple of Set), "is that he may end up in twenty years time on the 'Tonight Show' safely singing our favourite songs like a Goth Frank Sinatra, and will have gradually lost his antinomian power. It's much harder to maintain the enigmatic aura of an Evil villain than it is to play the clown with society". Reznor's superior musicianship and sense of irony should keep him from falling into the same trap. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "Complication" juggernauts in at 0:57 with screaming vocals and a barrage of white noise at 1:56. It's clear by now that Reznor has read his psychological operations (PSYOP) manuals pertaining to blasting the hell out of his audiences' psyche by any means necessary. Computer blip noise and black light flotation tank memories. Dislocating pauses and time-bends. The aural equivalent of Klein bottles. "The Big Come Down" begins with a four-second synth/static intro that is smashed apart by a hard beat at 0:05 and kaleidoscope guitars at 0:16. Critics refer to the song's lyrics in an attempt to project a narcissistic Reznor personality, but don't comment on stylistic tweaks like the AM radio influenced backing vocals at 1:02 and 1:19, or the use of guitars as a percussion layer at 1:51. A further intriguing element is the return of the fly samples at 2:38, an effect heard on previous releases and a possible post-human sub-text. The alien mythos will eventually reign over the banal and empty human. At 3:07 the synths return with static, a further overlay adds more synths at 3:45 as the track spirals to its peak, before dissipating at 3:1 in a mesh of percussion and guitars. "Underneath It All" opens with a riff that signals we have reached the album's climatic turning point, with the recurring theme of fragmenting body-memories returning at 0:23 with the line 'All I can do/I can still feel you', and being echoed by pulsing static at 0:42 as electric percussion. A 'Messiah Complex' appears at 1:34 with the line 'Crucify/After all I've died/After all I've tried/You are still inside', or at least it appears to be that on the surface. This is the kind of line that typical rock critics will quote, but a careful re-reading suggests that Reznor is pointing to the painful nature of remanifesting. Our past shapes us more than we would like to admit particularly our first relationships. "Ripe (With Decay)" is the album's final statement, a complex weaving of passages over a repetitive mesh of guitars, pulsing echoes, back-beats, soundscapes, and a powerful Mike Garson piano solo (2:26). Earlier motifs including fly samples (3:00), mournful funeral violas (3:36) and slowing time effects (4:28) recur throughout the track. Having finally reached the psychotic core, Reznor is not content to let us rest, mixing funk bass riffs (4:46), vocal snatches (5:23) and oscillating guitars (5:39) that drag the listener forever onwards towards the edge of the abyss (5:58). The final sequence begins at 6:22, loses fidelity at 6:28, and ends abruptly at 6:35. At millennium's end there is a common-held perception that the world is in an irreversible state of decay, and that Culture is just a wafer-thin veneer over anarchy. Music like The Fragile suggests that we are still trying to assimilate into popular culture the 'war-on-Self' worldviews unleashed by the nineteenth-century 'Masters of Suspicion' (Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche). This 'assimilation gap' is evident in industrial music, which in the late 1970s was struggling to capture the mood of the Industrial Revolution and Charles Dickens, so the genre is ripe for further exploration of the scarred psyche. What the self-appointed moral guardians of the Herd fail to appreciate is that as the imprint baseline rises (reflective of socio-political realities), the kind of imagery prevalent throughout The Fragile and in films like Strange Days (1995), The Matrix (1999) and eXistenZ (1999) is going to get even darker. The solution is not censorship or repression in the name of pleasing an all-saving surrogate god-figure. No, these things have to be faced and embraced somehow. Such a process can only occur if there is space within for the Sadeian aesthetic that Nine Inch Nails embodies, and not a denial of Dark Eros. "We need a second Renaissance", notes Don Webb, "a rejuvenation of Culture on a significant scale". In other words, a global culture-shift of quantum (aeon or epoch-changing) proportions. The tools required will probably not come just from the over-wordy criticism of Cyber-culture and Cultural Studies or the logical-negative feeding frenzy of most Music Journalism. They will come from a dynamic synthesis of disciplines striving toward a unity of knowledge -- what socio-biologist Edward O. Wilson has described as 'Consilience'. Liberating tools and ideas will be conveyed to a wider public audience unfamiliar with such principles through predominantly science fiction visual imagery and industrial/electronica music. The Fragile serves as an invaluable model for how such artefacts could transmit their dreams and propagate their messages. For the hyper-alert listener, it will be the first step on a new journey. But sadly for the majority, it will be just another hysterical industrial album promoted as selection of the month. References Bester, Alfred. The Stars My Destination. London: Millennium Books, 1999. Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998. Van der Kolk, Bessel A. "Trauma and Memory." Traumatic Stress: The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society. Eds. Bessel A. van der Kolk et al. New York: Guilford Press, 1996. Nine Inch Nails. Downward Spiral. Nothing/Interscope, 1994. ---. The Fragile. Nothing, 1999. ---. Pretty Hate Machine. TVT, 1989. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Alex Burns. "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.8 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php>. Chicago style: Alex Burns, "'This Machine Is Obsolete': A Listeners' Guide to Nine Inch Nails' The Fragile," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 8 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Alex Burns. (1999) 'This machine is obsolete': a listeners' guide to Nine Inch Nails' The fragile. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(8). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9912/nine.php> ([your date of access]).

Photograph by Gonzalo Echeverria (2010)Doubt has been my closest companion for several years as I struggle to make sense of certain hidden events from within my family’s history. The actual nature of such events, although now lost to us, can nevertheless be explored through the distorting lens of memory and academic research. I base such explorations in part on my intuition and sensitivity to emotional experience, which are inevitably riddled with doubt. I write from the position of a psychoanalytic psychologist who is also a creative writer and my doubts increase further when I use the autobiographical impulse as a driving force. I am not alone with such uncertainties. Ross Gibson, an historian and filmmaker, uses his doubts to explore empty spaces in the Australian landscape. He looks to see “what’s gone missing” as he endeavours with a team of colleagues to build up some “systematic comprehension in response to fragments” (Gibson, “Places” 1). How can anyone be certain as to what has transpired with no “facts” to go on? he asks. What can we do with our doubts? To this end, Gibson has collected a series of crime scene photographs, taken in post war Sydney, and created a display – a photographic slide show with a minimalist musical score, mostly of drumming and percussion, coupled with a few tight, poetic words, in the form of haiku, splattered across the screen. The notes accompanying the photographic negatives were lost. The only details “known” include the place, the date and the image. Of some two thousand photos, Gibson selected only fifty for display, by hunch, by nuance, or by whatever it was that stirred in him when he first glimpsed them. He describes each photo as “the imprint of a scream”, a gut reaction riddled with doubt (Gibson and Richards, Wartime). In this type of research, creative imaginative flair is essential, Gibson argues. “We need to propose ‘what if’ scenarios that help us account for what has happened…so that we can better envisage what might happen. We need to apprehend the past” (Gibson, “Places” 2). To do this we need imagination, which involves “a readiness to incorporate the unknown…when one encounters evidence that’s in smithereens”, the evidence of the past that lies rooted in a seedbed of doubt (Gibson, “Places” 2). The sociologist, Avery Gordon, also argues in favour of the imaginative impulse. “Fiction is getting pretty close to sociology,” she suggests as she begins her research into the business of ghosts and haunting (Gordon 38). As we entertain our doubts we tune in with our uncertain imaginations. “The places where our discourse is unauthorised by virtue of its unruliness…take us away from abstract questions of method, from bloodless professionalised questions, toward the materiality of institutionalised storytelling, with all its uncanny repetitions” (Gordon 39). If we are to dig deeper, to understand more about the emotional truth of our “fictional” pasts we must look to “the living traces, the memories of the lost and disappeared” (Gordon ix). According to Janice Radway, Gordon seeks a new way of knowing…a knowing that is more a listening than a seeing, a practice of being attuned to the echoes and murmurs of that which has been lost but which is still present among us in the form of intimations, hints, suggestions and portents … ghostly matters … . To be haunted is to be tied to historical and social effects. (x) And to be tied to such effects is to live constantly in the shadow of doubt. A photograph of my dead baby sister haunts me still. As a child I took this photo to school one day. I had peeled it from its corners in the family album. There were two almost identical pictures, side by side. I hoped no one would notice the space left behind. “She’s dead,” I said. I held the photo out to a group of girls in the playground. My fingers had smeared the photo’s surface. The children peered at the image. They wanted to stare at the picture of a dead baby. Not one had seen a dead body before, and not one had been able to imagine the stillness, a photographic image without life, without breath that I passed around on the asphalt playground one spring morning in 1962 when I was ten years old. I have the photo still—my dead sister who bears the same name as my older sister, still living. The dead one has wispy fine black hair. In the photo there are dark shadows underneath her closed eyes. She looks to be asleep. I do not emphasise grief at the loss of my mother’s first-born daughter. My mother felt it briefly, she told me later. But things like that happened all the time during the war. Babies were born and died regularly. Now, all these years later, these same unmourned babies hover restlessly in the nurseries of generations of survivors. There is no way we can be absolute in our interpretations, Gibson argues, but in the first instance there is some basic knowledge to be generated from viewing the crime scene photographs, as in viewing my death photo (Gibson, "Address"). For example, we can reflect on the décor and how people in those days organised their spaces. We can reflect on the way people stood and walked, got on and off vehicles, as well as examine something of the lives of the investigative police, including those whose job it was to take these photographs. Gibson interviewed some of the now elderly men from the Sydney police force who had photographed the crime scenes he displays. He asked questions to deal with his doubts. He now has a very different appreciation of the life of a “copper”, he says. His detective work probing into these empty spaces, digging into his doubts, has reduced his preconceptions and prejudices (Gibson, "Address"). Preconception and prejudice cannot tolerate doubt. In order to bear witness, Gibson says we need to be speculative, to be loose, but not glib, “narrativising” but not inventive, with an eye to the real world (Gibson, "Address"). Gibson’s interest in an interpretation of life after wartime in Sydney is to gather a sense of the world that led to these pictures. His interpretations derive from his hunches, but hunches, he argues, also need to be tested for plausibility (Gibson, Address). Like Gibson, I hope that the didactic trend from the past—to shut up and listen—has been replaced by one that involves “discovery based learning”, learning that is guided by someone who knows “just a little more”, in a common sense, forensic, investigative mode (Gibson, “Address”). Doubt is central to this heuristic trend. Likewise, my doubts give me permission to explore my family’s past without the paralysis of intentionality and certainty. “What method have you adopted for your research?” Gordon asks, as she considers Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the same question. It is “a delicate question. For isn’t it the method, the path to knowledge, that has always also led us away, led us astray, by fraud and artifice” (Gordon 38). So what is my methodology? I use storytelling meshed with theory and the autobiographical. But what do you think you’re doing? my critics ask. You call this research? I must therefore look to literary theorists on biography and autobiography for support. Nancy Miller writes about the denigration of the autobiographical, particularly in academic circles, where the tendency has been to see the genre as “self indulgent” in its apparent failure to maintain standards of objectivity, of scrutiny and theoretical distance (Miller 421). However, the autobiographical, Miller argues, rather than separating and dividing us through self-interests can “narrow the degree of separation” by operating as an aid to remembering (425). We recognise ourselves in another’s memoir, however fleetingly, and the recognition makes our “own experience feel more meaningful: not ‘merely’ personal but part of the bigger picture of cultural memory” (Miller 426). I speak with some hesitation about my family of origin yet it frames my story and hence my methodology. For many years I have had a horror of what writers and academics call “structure”. I considered myself lacking any ability to create a structure within my writing. I write intuitively. I have some idea of what I wish to explore and then I wait for ideas to enter my mind. They rise to the surface much like air bubbles from a fish. I wait till the fish joggles my bait. Often I write as I wait for a fish to bite. This writing, which is closely informed by my reading, occurs in an intuitive way, as if by instinct. I follow the associations that erupt in my mind, even as I explore another’s theory, and if it is at all possible, if I can get hold of these associations, what I, too, call hunches, then I follow them, much as Gibson and Gordon advocate. Like Gordon, I take my “distractions” seriously (Gordon, 31-60). Gordon follows ghosts. She looks for the things behind the things, the things that haunt her. I, too, look for what lies beneath, what is unconscious, unclear. This writing does not come easily and it takes many drafts before a pattern can emerge, before I, who have always imagined I could not develop a structure, begin to see one—an outline in bold where the central ideas accrue and onto which other thoughts can attach. This structure is not static. It begins with the spark of desire, the intercourse of opposing feelings, for me the desire to untangle family secrets from the past, to unpack one form, namely the history as presented within my family and then to re-assemble it through a written re-construction that attempts to make sense of the empty spaces left out of the family narrative, where no record, verbal or written, has been provided. This operates against pressure from certain members of my family to leave the family past unexplored. My methodology is subjective. Any objectivity I glean in exploring the work and theories of others comes through my own perspective. I read the works of academics in the literary field, and academics from psychoanalysis interested in infant development and personality theory. They consider these issues in different ways from the way in which I, as a psychotherapist, a doubt-filled researcher, and writer, read and experience them. To my clinician self, these ideas evolve in practice. I do not see them as mere abstractions. To me they are living ideas, they pulse and flow, and yet there are some who would seek to tie them down or throw them out. Recently I asked my mother about the photo of her dead baby, her first-born daughter who had died during the Hongerwinter (Hunger winter) of 1945 in Heilo, Holland. I was curious to know how the photo had come about. My curiosity had been flamed by Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America, a transcript on the nature of post-mortem photography, which includes several photos of dead people. The book I found by chance in a second-hand books store. I could not leave these photographs behind. Ruby is concerned to ask questions about why we have become so afraid of death, at least in the western world, that we no longer take photographs of our loved ones after death as mementos, or if we take such photos, they are kept private, not shared with the public, for fear that the owners might be considered ghoulish (Ruby 161). I follow in Gordon’s footsteps. She describes how one day, on her way to a conference to present a paper, she had found herself distracted from her conference topic by thoughts of a woman whose image she had discovered was “missing” from a photo taken in Berlin in 1901. According to Gordon’s research, the woman, Sabina Spielrein, should have been present in this photo, but was not. Spielrein is a little known psychoanalyst, little known despite the fact that she was the first to hypothesise on the nature of the death instinct, an unconscious drive towards death and oblivion (Gordon 40). Gordon’s “search” for this missing woman overtook her initial research. My mother could not remember who took her dead baby’s photograph, but suspected it was a neighbour of her cousin in whose house she had stayed. She told me again the story she has told me many times before, and always at my instigation. When I was little I wondered that my mother could stay dry-eyed in the telling. She seemed so calm, when I had imagined that were I the mother of a dead baby I would find it hard to go on. “It is harder,” my mother said, to lose an older child. “When a child dies so young, you have fewer memories. It takes less time to get over it.” Ruby concludes that after World War Two, postmortem photographs were less likely to be kept in the family album, as they would have been in earlier times. “Those who possess death-related family pictures regard them as very private pictures to be shown only to selected people” (Ruby 161). When I look at the images in Ruby’s book, particularly those of the young, the children and babies, I am struck again at the unspoken. The idea of the dead person, seemingly alive in the photograph, propped up in a chair, on a mother’s lap, or resting on a bed, lifeless. To my contemporary sensibility it seems wrong. To look upon these dead people, their identities often unknown, and to imagine the grief for others in that loss—for grief there must have been such that the people remaining felt it necessary to preserve the memory—becomes almost unbearable. It is tempting to judge the past by present standards. In 1999, while writing her historical novel Year of Wonders, Geraldine Brooks came across a letter Henry James had written ninety eight years earlier to a young Sarah Orne Jewett who had previously sent him a manuscript of her historical novel for comment. In his letter, James condemns the notion of the historical novel as an impossibility: “the invention, the representation of the old consciousness, the soul, the sense of horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world,” are all impossible, he insisted (Brooks 3). Despite Brooks’s initial disquiet at James’s words, she realised later that she had heard similar ideas uttered in different contexts before. Brooks had worked as a journalist in the Middle East and Africa: “They don’t think like us,” white Africans would say of their black neighbours, or Israelis of Arabs or upper class Palestinians about their desperately poor refugee-camp brethren … . “They don’t value life as we do. They don’t care if their kids get killed—they have so many of them”. (Brookes 3) But Brooks argues, “a woman keening for a dead child sounds exactly as raw in an earth-floored hovel as it does in a silk-carpeted drawing room” (3). Brooks is concerned to get beyond the certainties of our pre-conceived ideas: “It is human nature to put yourself in another’s shoes. The past may be another country. But the only passport required is empathy”(3). And empathy again requires the capacity to tolerate doubt. Later I asked my mother yet again about what it was like for her when her baby died, and why she had chosen to have her dead baby photographed. She did not ask for the photograph to be taken, she told me. But she was glad to have it now; otherwise nothing would remain of this baby, buried in an unfamiliar cemetery on the other side of the world. Why am I haunted by this image of my dead baby sister and how does it connect with my family’s secrets? The links are still in doubt. Gibson’s creative flair, Gordon’s ideas on ghostly matters and haunting, the things behind the things, my preoccupation with my mother’s dead baby and a sense that this sister might mean less to me did I not have the image of her photograph planted in my memory from childhood, all come together through parataxis if we can bear our doubts. Certainty is the enemy of introspection of imagination and of creativity. Yet too much doubt can paralyse. Here I write about tolerable levels of doubt tempered with an inquisitive mind that can land on hunches and an imagination that allows the researcher to follow such hunches and then seek evidence that corroborates or disproves them. As Gibson writes elsewhere, I tried to use all these scrappy details to help people think about the absences and silences between all the pinpointed examples that made up the scenarios that I presented in prose that was designed to spur rigorous speculation rather than lock down singular conclusions. (“Extractive” 2) Ours is a positive doubt, one that expects to find something, however “unexpected”, rather than a negative doubt that expects nothing. For doubt in large doses can paralyse a person into inaction. Furthermore, a balanced state of doubt fosters connectivity. As John Patrick Shanley’s character, the parish priest, Father Flynn, in the film Doubt, observes, “there are these times in our life when we feel lost. It happens and it’s a bond” (Shanley). References Brooks, Geraldine. "Timeless Tact Helps Sustain a Literary Time Traveller." New York Times, 2001. 14 Jan. 2011 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/02/arts/writers-on-writing-timeless-tact-helps-sustain-a-literary-time-traveler.html?pagewanted=3&src=pm›. Doubt. Shanley, Dir. J. P. Shanley. Miramax Films, 2008. Gibson, Ross, and Kate Richards. “Life after Wartime.” N.d. 25 Feb. 2011. ‹http://www.lifeafterwartime.com/›. Gibson, Ross. “The Art of the Real Conference.” Keynote address. U Newcastle, 2008. Gibson, Ross. “Places past Disappearance.” Transformations 13-1 (2006). 22 Feb. 2007 ‹http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_13/article_01.shtml›. ———. “Extractive Realism.” Australian Humanities Review 47 (2009). 25 Feb. 2011 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-November-2009/gibson.html›. Gordon, Avery F. Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 2008. Miller, Nancy K. “But Enough about Me, What Do You Think of My Memoir?” The Yale Journal of Criticism 13.2 (2000): 421-536. Ruby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1995.

In this article I discuss a story told by the South Australian Ngarrindjeri Aboriginal elder, Aunty Hilda Wilson (nee Varcoe), about the time when, at not quite sixteen, she was sent from the Point Pearce Aboriginal Station to work in the Adelaide Hills, some 500 kilometres away, as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”. Her secondment was part of a widespread practice in early and mid-twentieth century Australia of placing young Aboriginal women “of marriageable age” from missions and government reserves into domestic service. Consciously deploying Indigenous storytelling practices as pedagogy, Hilda Wilson recounted this episode in a number of distinct ways during the late 1990s and early 2000s. Across these iterations, each building on the other, she exhibited a personal resilience in her subjectivity, embedded in Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality, kin and work, which informed her agency and determination in a challenging situation in which she was both caring for a white socially-privileged family of five, while simultaneously grappling with the injustices of a state system of segregated indentured labour. Kirmayer and colleagues propose that “notions of resilience emerging from developmental psychology and psychiatry in recent years address the distinctive cultures, geographic and social settings, and histories of adversity of indigenous peoples”. Resilience is understood here as an ability to actively engage with traumatic change, involving the capacity to absorb stress and to transform in order to cope with it (Luthar et al.). Further to this, in an Indigenous context, Marion Kickett has found the capacity for resilience to be supported by three key factors: family connections, culture and belonging as well as notions of identity and history. In exploring the layers of this autobiographical story, I employ this extended psychological notion of resilience in both a domestic ambit as well as the broader social context for Indigenous people surviving a system of external domination. Additionally I consider the resilience Aunty Hilda demonstrates at a pivotal interlude between girlhood and womanhood within the trajectory of her overall long and productive life, and within an intergenerational history of resistance and accommodation. What is especially important about her storytelling is its refusal to be contained by the imaginary of the settler nation and its generic Aboriginal-female subject. She refuses victimhood while at the same time illuminating the mechanisms of injustice, hinting also at possibilities for alternative and more equitable relationships of family and work across cultural divides. Considered through this prism, resilience is, I suggest, also a quality firmly connected to ideas of Aboriginal cultural-sovereignty and standpoint and to, what Victoria Grieves has identified as, the Aboriginal knowledge value of sharing (25, 28, 45). Storytelling as Pedagogy The story I discuss was verbally recounted in a manner that Westphalen describes as “a continuation of Dreaming Stories”, functioning to educate and connect people and country (13-14). As MacGill et al. note, “the critical and transformative aspects of decolonising pedagogies emerge from storytelling and involve the gift of narrative and the enactment of reciprocity that occurs between the listener and the storyteller.” Hilda told me that as a child she was taught not to ask questions when listening to the stories of an Elder, and her own children were raised in this manner. Hilda's oldest daughter described this as a process involving patience, intrigue and surprise (Elva Wanganeen). Narratives unfold through nuance and repetition in a complexity of layers that can generate multiple levels of meaning over time. Circularity and recursivity underlie this pedagogy through which mnemonic devices are built so that stories become re-membered and inscribed on the body of the listener. When a perceived level of knowledge-transference has occurred, a narrator may elect to elaborate further, adding another detail that will often transform the story’s social, cultural, moral or political context. Such carefully chosen additional detail, however, might re-contextualise all that has gone before. As well as being embodied, stories are also emplaced, and thus most appropriately told in the Country where events occurred. (Here I use the Aboriginal English term “Country” which encompasses home, clan estate, and the powerful complex of spiritual, animate and inanimate forces that bind people and place.) Hilda Wilson’s following account of her first job as a housekeeper for “one of Adelaide’s leading doctors”, Dr Frank Swann, provides an illustration of how she expertly uses traditional narrative forms of incrementally structured knowledge transmission within a cross-cultural setting to tell a story that expresses practices of resilience as resistance and transformation at its core. A “White Doctor” Story: The First Layer Aunty Hilda first told me this story when we were winding along the South Eastern Freeway through the Adelaide hills between Murray Bridge and Mount Barker, in 1997, on our way home to Adelaide from a trip to Camp Coorong, the Ngarrindjeri cultural education centre co-founded by her granddaughter. She was then 86 years old. Ahead of us, the profile of Mt Lofty rose out of the plains and into view. The highest peak in the Mount Lofty ranges, Yurrebilla, as it is known to Kaurna Aboriginal people, or Mt Lofty, has been an affluent enclave of white settlement for Adelaide’s moneyed elite since early colonial times. Being in place, or in view of place, provided the appropriate opportunity for her to tell me the story. It belongs to a group of stories that during our initial period of working together changed little over time until one day two years later she an added contextual detail which turned it inside out. Hilda described the doctor’s spacious hill-top residence, and her responsibilities of caring for Dr Swann’s invalid wife (“an hysteric who couldn't do anything for herself”), their twin teenage boys (who attended private college in the city) along with another son and younger daughter living at home (pers. com. Hilda Wilson). Recalling the exhilaration of looking down over the sparkling lights of Adelaide at night from this position of apparent “privilege” on the summit, she related this undeniably as a success story, justifiably taking great pride in her achievements as a teenager, capable of stepping into the place of the non-Indigenous doctor's wife in running the large and demanding household. Successfully undertaking a wide range of duties employed in the care of a family, including the disabled mother, she is an active participant crucial to the lives of all in the household, including to the work of the doctor and the twin boys in private education. Hilda recalled that Mrs Swann was unable to eat without her assistance. As the oldest daughter of a large family Hilda had previously assisted in caring for her younger siblings. Told in this way, her account collapses social distinctions, delineating a shared social and physical space, drawing its analytic frame from an Indigenous ethos of subjectivity, relationality, reciprocity and care. Moreover Hilda’s narrative of domestic service demonstrates an assertion of agency that resists colonial and patriarchal hegemony and inverts the master/mistress-servant relationship, one she firmly eschews in favour of the self-affirming role of the lady of the house. (It stands in contrast to the abuse found in other accounts for example Read, Tucker, Kartinyeri. Often the key difference was a continuity of family connections and ongoing family support.) Indeed the home transformed into a largely feminised and cross-culturalised space in which she had considerable agency and responsibility when the doctor was absent. Hilda told me this story several times in much the same way during our frequent encounters over the next two years. Each telling revealed further details that fleshed a perspective gained from what Patricia Hill Collins terms an “epistemic privilege” via her “outsider-within status” of working within a white household, lending an understanding of its social mechanisms (12-15). She also stressed the extent of her duty of care in upholding the family’s well-being, despite the work at times being too burdensome. The Second Version: Coming to Terms with Intersecting Oppressions Later, as our relationship developed and deepened, when I began to record her life-narrative as part of my doctoral work, she added an unexpected detail that altered its context completely: It was all right except I slept outside in a tin shed and it was very cold at night. Mount Lofty, by far the coldest part of Adelaide, frequently experiences winter maximum temperatures of two or three degrees and often light snowfalls. This skilful reframing draws on Indigenous storytelling pedagogy and is expressly used to invite reflexivity, opening questions that move the listener from the personal to the public realm in which domestic service and the hegemony of the home are pivotal in coming to terms with the overlapping historical oppressions of class, gender, race and nation. Suddenly we witness her subjectivity starkly shift from one self-defined and allied with an equal power relationship – or even of dependency reversal cast as “de-facto doctor's wife” – to one diminished by inequity and power imbalance in the outsider-defined role of “mistreated servant”. The latter was signalled by the dramatic addition of a single signifying detail as a decoding device to a deeper layer of meaning. In this parallel stratum of the story, Hilda purposefully brings into relief the politics in which “the private domain of women's housework intersected with the public domain of governmental social engineering policies” (Haskins 4). As Aileen Moreton-Robinson points out, what for White Australia was cheap labour and a civilising mission, for Indigenous women constituted stolen children and slavery. Protection and then assimilation were government policies under which Indigenous women grew up. (96) Hilda was sent away from her family to work in 1927 by the universally-feared Sister Pearl McKenzie, a nurse who too-zealously (Katinyeri, Ngarrindjeri Calling, 23) oversaw the Chief Protector’s policies of “training” Aboriginal children from the South Australian missions in white homes once they reached fourteen (Haebich, 316—20). Indeed many prominent Adelaide hills’ families benefited from Aboriginal labour under this arrangement. Hilda explained her struggle with the immense cultural dislocation that removal into domestic service entailed, a removal her grandfather William Rankine had travelled from Raukkan to Government House to protest against less than a decade earlier (The Register December 21, 1923). This additional layer of story also illuminates Hilda’s capacity for resilience and persistence in finding a way forward through the challenge of her circumstances (Luthar et al.), drawing on her family networks and sense of personhood (Kickett). Hilda related that her father visited her at Mount Lofty twice, though briefly, on his way to shearing jobs in the south-east of the state. “He said it was no good me living like this,” she stated. Through his active intervention, reinforcement was requested and another teenager from Point Pearce, Hilda’s future husband’s cousin, Annie Sansbury, soon arrived to share the workload. But, Hilda explained, the onerous expectations coupled with the cultural segregation of retiring to the tin shed quickly became too much for Annie, who stayed only three months, leaving Hilda coping again alone, until her father applied additional pressure for a more suitable placement to be found for his daughter. In her next position, working for the family of a racehorse trainer, Hilda contentedly shared the bedroom with the small boy for whom she cared, and not long after returned to Point Pearce where she married Robert Wilson and began a family of her own. Gendered Resilience across Cultural Divides Hilda explicitly speaks into these spaces to educate me, because all but a few white women involved have remained silent about their complicity with state sanctioned practices which exploited Indigenous labour and removed children from their families through the policies of protection and assimilation. For Indigenous women, speaking out was often fraught with the danger of a deeper removal from family and Country, even of disappearance. Victoria Haskins writes extensively of two cases in New South Wales where young Aboriginal women whose protests concerning their brutal treatment at the hands of white employers, resulted in their wrongful and prolonged committal to mental health and other institutions (147-52, 228-39). In the indentured service of Indigenous women it is possible to see oppression operating through Eurocentric ideologies of race, class and gender, in which Indigenous women were assumed to take on, through displacement, the more oppressed role of white women in pre-second world war non-Aboriginal Australian society. The troubling silent shadow-figure of the “doctor’s wife” indeed provides a haunting symbol of - and also a forceful rebellion against – the docile upper middle-class white femininity of the inter-war era. Susan Bordo has argued that that “the hysteric” is archetypal of a discourse of ‘pathology as embodied protest’ in which the body may […] be viewed as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view in extreme or hyperliteral form. (20) Mrs Swann’s vulnerability contrasts markedly with the strength Hilda expresses in coping with a large family, emanating from a history of equitable gender relations characteristic of Ngarrindjeri society (Bell). The intersection of race and gender, as Marcia Langton contends “continues to require deconstruction to allow us to decolonise our consciousness” (54). From Hilda’s brief description one grasps a relationship resonant with that between the protagonists in Tracy Moffat's Night Cries, (a response to the overt maternalism in the film Jedda) in which the white mother finds herself utterly reliant on her “adopted” Aboriginal daughter at the end of her life (46-7). Resilience and Survival The different versions of story Hilda deploys, provide a pedagogical basis to understanding the broader socio-political framework of her overall life narrative in which an ability to draw on the cultural continuity of the past to transform the future forms an underlying dynamic. This demonstrated capacity to meet the challenging conditions thrown up by the settler-colonial state has its foundations in the connectivity and cultural strength sustained generationally in her family. Resilience moves from being individually to socially determined, as in Kickett’s model. During the onslaught of dispossession, following South Australia’s 1836 colonial invasion, Ngarrindjeri were left near-starving and decimated from introduced diseases. Pullume (c1808-1888), the rupuli (elected leader of the Ngarrindjeri Tendi, or parliament), Hilda’s third generation great-grandfather, decisively steered his people through the traumatic changes, eventually negotiating a middle-path after the Point McLeay Mission was established on Ngarrindjeri country in 1859 (Jenkin, 59). Pullume’s granddaughter, the accomplished, independent-thinking Ellen Sumner (1842—1925), played an influential educative role during Hilda’s youth. Like other Ngarrindjeri women in her lineage, Ellen Sumner was skilled in putari practice (female doctor) and midwifery culture that extended to a duty of care concerning women and children (teaching her “what to do and what not to do”), which I suggest is something Hilda herself drew from when working with the Swann family. Hilda’s mother and aunties continued aspects of the putari tradition, attending births and giving instruction to women in the community (Bell, 171, Hughes Grandmother, 52-4). As mentioned earlier, when the South Australian government moved to introduce The Training of Children Act (SA) Hilda’s maternal grandfather William Rankine campaigned vigorously against this, taking a petition to the SA Governor in December 1923 (Haebich, 315-19). As with Aunty Hilda, William Rankine used storytelling as a method to draw public attention to the inequities of his times in an interview with The Register which drew on his life-narrative (Hughes, My Grandmother, 61). Hilda’s father Wilfred Varcoe, a Barngarrla-Wirrungu man, almost a thousand kilometres away from his Poonindie birthplace, resisted assimilation by actively pursuing traditional knowledge networks using his mobility as a highly sought after shearer to link up with related Elders in the shearing camps, (and as we saw to inspect the conditions his daughter was working under at Mt Lofty). The period Hilda spent as a servant to white families to be trained in white ways was in fact only a brief interlude in a long life in which family connections, culture and belonging (Kickett) served as the backbone of her resilience and resistance. On returning to the Point Pearce Mission, Hilda successfully raised a large family and activated a range of community initiatives that fostered well-being. In the 1960s she moved to Adelaide, initially as the sole provider of her family (her husband later followed), to give her younger children better educational opportunities. Working with Aunty Gladys Elphick OBE through the Council of Aboriginal Women, she played a foundational role in assisting other Aboriginal women establish their families in the city (Mattingly et al., 154, Fisher). In Adelaide, Aunty Hilda became an influential, much loved Elder, living in good health to the age of ninety-six years. The ability to survive changing circumstances, to extend care over and over to her children and Elders along with qualities of leadership, determination, agency and resilience have passed down through her family, several of whom have become successful in public life. These include her great-grandson and former AFL football player, Michael O’Loughlin, her great-nephew Adam Goodes and her-grand-daughter, the cultural weaver Aunty Ellen Trevorrow. Arguably, resilience contributes to physical as well as cultural longevity, through caring for the self and others. Conclusion This story demonstrates how sociocultural dimensions of resilience are contextualised in practices of everyday lives. We see this in the way that Aunty Hilda Wilson’s self-narrated story resolutely defies attempts to know, subjugate and categorise, operating instead in accord with distinctively Aboriginal expressions of gender and kinship relations that constitute an Aboriginal sovereignty. Her storytelling activates a revision of collective history in ways that valorise Indigenous identity (Kirmayer et al.). Her narrative of agency and personal achievement, one that has sustained her through life, interacts with the larger narrative of state-endorsed exploitation, diffusing its power and exposing it to wider moral scrutiny. Resilience in this context is inextricably entwined with practices of cultural survival and resistance developed in response to the introduction of government policies and the encroachment of settlers and their world. We see resilience too operating across Hilda Wilson’s family history, and throughout her long life. The agency and strategies displayed suggest alternative realities and imagine other, usually more equitable, possible worlds. References Bell, Diane. Ngarrindjeri Wurruwarrin: A World That Is, Was and Will Be. Melbourne: Spinifex, 1998. Bordo, Susan. “The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Eds. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. 90-110. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought. New York: Routledge, 2000. Fisher, Elizabeth M. "Elphick, Gladys (1904–1988)." Australian Dictionary of Biography. National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 29 Sep. 2013. ‹http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/elphick-gladys-12460/text22411>. Grieves, Victoria. Aboriginal Spirituality: Aboriginal Philosophy, The Basis of Aboriginal Social and Emotional Wellbeing, Melbourne University: Cooperative Research Centre for Aboriginal Health, 2009. Haebich, Anna. Broken Circles: The Fragmenting of Indigenous Families. Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Press, 2000. Haskins, Victoria. My One Bright Spot. London: Palgrave, 2005. Hughes, Karen. "My Grandmother on the Other Side of the Lake." PhD thesis, Department of Australian Studies and Department of History, Flinders University. Adelaide, 2009. ———. “Microhistories and Things That Matter.” Australian Feminist Studies 27.73 (2012): 269-278. ———. “I’d Grown Up as a Child amongst Natives.” Outskirts: Feminisms along the Edge 28 (2013). 29 Sep. 2013 ‹http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu.au/volumes/volume-28/karen-hughes>. Jenkin, Graham. Conquest of the Ngarrindjeri. Adelaide: Rigby, 1979. Kartinyeri, Doris. Kick the Tin. Melbourne: Spinifex, 2000. Kartinyeri, Doreen. My Ngarrindjeri Calling, Adelaide: Wakefield, 2007. Kickett, Marion. “Examination of How a Culturally Appropriate Definition of Resilience Affects the Physical and Mental Health of Aboriginal People.” PhD thesis, Curtin University, 2012. Kirmayer, L.J., S. Dandeneau, E. Marshall, M.K. Phillips, K. Jenssen Williamson. “Rethinking Resilience from Indigenous Perspectives.” Canadian Journal of Psychiatry 56.2 (2011): 84-91. Luthar, S., D. Cicchetti, and B. Becker. “The Construct of Resilience: A Critical Evaluation and Guidelines for Future Work.” Child Development 71.3 (2000): 543-62. MacGill, Bindi, Julie Mathews, Ellen Trevorrow, Alice Abdulla, and Deb Rankine. “Ecology, Ontology, and Pedagogy at Camp Coorong,” M/C Journal 15.3 (2012). Mattingly, Christobel, and Ken Hampton. Survival in Our Own Land, Adelaide: Wakefield, 1988. Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. Talkin’ Up to the White Woman. St Lucia: UQP, 2000. Night Cries, A Rural Tragedy. Dir. Tracy Moffatt. Chili Films, 1990. Read, Peter. A Rape of the Soul So Profound. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Tucker, Margaret. If Everyone Cared. Sydney: Ure Smith, 1977. Wanganeen, Elva. Personal Communication, 2000. Westphalen, Linda. An Anthropological and Literary Study of Two Aboriginal Women's Life Histories: The Impacts of Enforced Child Removal and Policies of Assimilation. New York: Mellen Press, 2011.