Suchergebnisse

TWO ISRAELI ARCHITECTS CREATED AN EXHIBITION OF MAPS AND PHOTOS SHOWING THE LINK BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL DESIGN OF JEWISH SETTLEMENTS AND THE POLITICAL MOTIVES BEHIND THEIR CONSTRUCTION. ITS SPONSORS SHUT IT DOWN

In Indonesia, polymusic – juxtaposed music – is performed during major ceremonies. Several groups play simultaneously, in the same space, but different tunes. If many tunes are performed at the same time in the same space, who can listen to them ? Seven cases of Indonesian polymusic, from South Sulawesi, West Kalimantan, and Bali, recorded between 1991 and 2001 are described : a Sa'dan Toraja funeral (pasonglo), house ceremony (bua' sangrapu), and trance ritual (maro pabalikan), a Dayak Taman ritual for the ancestors (gawai mamandung), a Balinese temple ceremony (odalan). The seven examples are compared through an analysis of space and time, in order to disclose their common aspects and relevant meanings. Polymusic presents the musicologist with a paradox of temporal and spatial perception. While assembling groups of singers at the same time and in the same space, these rituals prescribe their separation and individualization. The analysis of space and time points to a double perception : that of a differentiated and an undifferentiated world. This is translated on the acoustic level by the simultaneous juxtaposition and synthesis of different repertoires and different groups, which reveals – both sensorily and intellectually – either the groups' differences or the achievement of a macro-unity expressing the ritual expenditure.

As a test of the idea of a common brain system responsible for representing all prothetic dimensions, schizophrenic patients and healthy participants took part in a line bisection task and two visual temporal bisection tasks, one using durations from 1 to 4 s and another using 30 s long specially designed stimuli (aging faces). Against expectations, schizophrenics showed better precision (smaller variable error) both in line bisection and the aging faces temporal task than healthy controls. Moreover, patients also showed less bias (smaller constant error) than controls in the aging faces task. This increased precision correlated with degree of severity of schizophrenia. Although no group differences were found in the temporal task with shorter intervals, both variable and constant error measures correlated marginally with severity of schizophrenia, also in the direction of smaller error in more severe cases. Thus, overall, spatial and temporal tasks behaved similarly across groups. However, bias and precision indexes did not covary across the three tasks when correlations where computed over the whole set of participants in the present study. The results thus provide mixed support for a common system behind spatial and temporal processing and point toward the need of developing a more nuanced view of magnitude representation in the mind/brain. ; This research has been funded by grants P09-SEJ-4772 (Consejería de Innovación, Ciencia y Empresa, Andalusian Government), PSI2012-32464 (Spanish Ministery of Economy and Competitivity), to Julio Santiago (PI), and by a FPU scholarship from the Spanish Ministery of Education to Isidro Martínez-Cascales.