Landscape Biographies explores the long, complex histories of landscapes from personal and social perspectives. Twenty geographers, archaeologists, historians, and anthropologists investigate the diverse ways in which landscapes and monuments have been constructed, transmitted, and transformed from prehistory to the present, from Manhattan to Shanghai, Iceland to Portugal, England to Estonia.
Architecture and Modern Literature explores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the…
In Performing Deception, Brian Rappert reconstructs the practice of entertainment magic by analysing it through the lens of perception, deception and learning, as he goes about studying conjuring himself. Through this novel meditation on reasoning and skill, Rappert elevates magic from the undertaking of mere trickery to an art that offers the basis for rethinking our possibilities for acting i…
‘Love is harder to explain than hunger, for a piece of fruit does not feel the desire to be eaten’: Denis Diderot’s Éléments de physiologie presents a world in flux, turning on the relationship between man, matter and mind. In this late work, Diderot delves playfully into the relationship between bodily sensation, emotion and perception, and asks his readers what it means to be human in…
In Book IV of his Physics, Aristotle asked whether time could exist without a soul that counts it. As a result, philosophers throughout antiquity tackled the problem of subjective time and its relation to the physical time of the cosmos. The present book gives an account of this debate. It analyses the contributions made by Aristotle and his Peripatetic followers but also discusses Neoplatonist…
It covers aspects of unsupervised machine learning used for knowledge discovery in data science and introduces a data-driven approach to cluster analysis, the Databionic swarm(DBS). DBS consists of the 3D landscape visualization and clustering of data. The 3D landscape enables 3D printing of high-dimensional data structures.The clustering and number of clusters or an absence of cluster structur…
This Open Access book offers an original interdisciplinary overview of the role of haptic feedback in musical interaction. Divided into two parts, part I examines the tactile aspects of music performance and perception, discussing how they affect user experience and performance in terms of usability, functionality and perceived quality of musical instruments. Part II presents engineering, compu…
We have known for some time that babies possess a keen perceptual sensitivity for the melodic, rhythmic and dynamic aspects of speech and music: aspects that linguists are inclined to categorize under the term ‘prosody’, but which are in fact the building blocks of music. Only much later in a child’s development does he make use of this ‘musical prosody’, for instance in delineating a…
We have known for some time that babies possess a keen perceptual sensitivity for the melodic, rhythmic and dynamic aspects of speech and music: aspects that linguists are inclined to categorize under the term ‘prosody’, but which are in fact the building blocks of music. Only much later in a child’s development does he make use of this ‘musical prosody’, for instance in delineating a…