Search Results (135)

Recent advancements in generative artificial intelligence have significantly progressed the field of text-to-music generation, enabling users to create music from natural language descriptions. Despite the success of various models, such as MusicLM, MusicGen, and AudioLDM, the current approaches struggle to capture fine-grained genre-specific characteristics, precisely control musical attributes, and handle underrepresented cultural data. This paper introduces a novel, lightweight fine-tuning method for the AudioLDM framework using low-rank adaptation (LoRA). By updating only selected attention and projection layers, the proposed method enables efficient adaptation to musical genres with limited data and computational cost. The proposed method enhances controllability over key musical parameters such as rhythm, emotion, and timbre. At the same time, it maintains the overall quality of music generation. This paper represents the first application of LoRA in AudioLDM, offering a scalable solution for fine-grained, genre-aware music generation and customization. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method improves the semantic alignment and statistical similarity compared with the baseline. The contrastive language–audio pretraining score increased by 0.0498, indicating enhanced text-music consistency. The kernel audio distance score decreased by 0.8349, reflecting improved similarity to real music distributions. The mean opinion score ranged from 3.5 to 3.8, confirming the perceptual quality of the generated music. Full article

Generative AI has been gaining attention across various creative domains. In particular, MusicGen stands out as a representative approach capable of generating music based on text or audio inputs. However, it has limitations in producing high-quality outputs for specific genres and fully reflecting user intentions. This paper proposes a prompt tuning technique that effectively adjusts the output quality of MusicGen without modifying its original parameters and optimizes its ability to generate music tailored to specific genres and styles. Experiments were conducted to compare the performance of the traditional MusicGen with the proposed method and evaluate the quality of generated music using the Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining (CLAP) and Kullback–Leibler Divergence (KLD) scoring approaches. The results demonstrated that the proposed method significantly improved the output quality and musical coherence, particularly for specific genres and styles. Compared with the traditional model, the CLAP score was increased by 0.1270, and the KLD score was increased by 0.00403 on average. The effectiveness of prompt tuning in optimizing the performance of MusicGen validated the proposed method and highlighted its potential for advancing generative AI-based music generation tools. Full article

“Coexpressivity” is the property of utterances that marshal multiple linguistic elements and modalities simultaneously to perform the distinct linguistic functions of Jakobson’s classic analysis (1960). This study draws on a longitudinal corpus of natural conversation recorded over six decades with an accomplished “master speaker” of Tsotsil (Mayan), adept at using his language to manage different aspects of social life. The research aims to elaborate the notion of coexpressivity through detailed examples drawn from a range of circumstances. It begins with codified emic speech genres linked to prayer and formal declamation and then ranges through conversational narratives to gossip-laden multiparty interaction, to emphasize coexpressive connections between speech as text and concurrent gesture, gaze, and posture among interlocutors; audible modalities such as sound symbolism, pitch, and speech rate; and finally, specific morphological characteristics and the multifunctional effects of lexical choices themselves. The study thus explores how multiple functions may, in principle, be coexpressed simultaneously or contemporaneously in individual utterances if one takes this range of modalities and expressive resources into account. The notion of “master speaker” relates to coexpressive virtuosity by linking the resources available in speech, body, and interactive environments to accomplishing a wide range of social ends, perhaps with a special flourish although not excluded from humbler, plainer talk. Full article

This article demonstrates the enabling influence of mixed-genre (or hybrid) poetries by North American women on recent poetry by Irish women poets, specifically in the past decade. Using a compositional/practice-based framework of interruption, the article provides an overview and analysis of interruptive strategies in a number of exemplary texts, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine, Jane: A Murder by Maggie Nelson, and Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip in the North American context and ISDAL by Susannah Dickey, The Sun is Open by Gail McConnell, and MOTHERBABYHOME by Kimberly Campanello, among others. This comparative approach encompasses close readings and analysis of particular compositional approaches evident in both national contexts, in addition to the use of archival sources, news-reporting, and aesthetic strategies of interruption. The article suggests that “a poetics of material interruption” is at play in poetries on both sides of the Atlantic, gesturing towards marginalising forces of gender and colonisation, thus linking to themes prevalent in the above poetries in both Irish and North American contexts. The author poses a “poetics of material interruption” in the aesthetics and composition of the above mixed-genre poetries, perhaps arising from their interactions with the material conditions to which they respond. Full article

In recent years, many academics have addressed the issue of the intersection of the fields of Biblical studies and Cultural studies. Many academic works have emphasized the importance of the Bible in the building of cultural narratives and the need to reflect on those narratives through interpretation, placing biblical texts within originating cultural contexts. This article attempts to situate itself in that stream of work, exploring the graphic interpretation of the story of Ruth and Naomi in the graphic novel The Book of Ruth by Meredith Finch and Colin Dyer. It begins with an introduction to the characteristics of the graphic novel genre, highlighting how this medium has addressed religion and the Bible, including characters, narratives, and traditions. Subsequently, a comparative methodology is applied to examine the treatment of the biblical text in the graphic novel, contrasting the textual and graphic study conducted by Finch and Dyer. The aim is to demonstrate how the graphic novel serves as a contemporary mode of biblical text reception, creating a dialogue between the Bible and the current culture in which its texts are read. Full article

In American Hybrid (2009), Cole Swenson describes hybrid poetics as a reconciliation between the two dominant poetic traditions of the 20th century, which might be called lyric and experimental (xx–xxi). More recently, however, “hybrid” refers to any work blurring boundaries between poetry and other genres. This is most notable in the ever-increasing interest in the lyric essay but also in the constant revision of contemporary elegy as anti-elegy. In Poetry of Mourning, Jahan Ramazani defines anti-elegy in terms of its refusal of consolation and instead its seeking of more melancholic mourning. Subsequently, as noted by Bardazzi, Binetti, and Culler, “Elegy remains a poetic genre and yet, it has also developed a ‘mode of discourse’ that moves beyond its literary borders and finds its expressions in entangled intra-actions between the most diverse range of elegiac objects”. In the early 21st century, hybrid elegy represents the collision of two major changes in American culture: the changing nature of American death rituals and the increasingly intermedial literary landscape. Drawing on examples from Nox by Anne Carson and Ghost Of by Diane Khoi Nguyen, an elegiac version of the hyper-personalized American death ritual is inscribed in assemblages of images and text on the page. When read as a personalized American death ritual, the hybrid elegy materializes its own tradition and poetics, which are expressed in the poetic constraints of assemblage and recognizable in their reliance on elegiac repetition. Full article

This study investigates translation quality between Arabic and English, comparing traditional rule-based machine translation systems, modern neural machine translation tools such as Google Translate, and large language models like ChatGPT. The research adopts both qualitative and quantitative approaches to assess the efficacy, accuracy, and contextual fidelity of translations. It particularly focuses on the translation of idiomatic and colloquial expressions as well as technical texts and genres. Using well-established evaluation metrics such as bilingual evaluation understudy (BLEU), translation error rate (TER), and character n-gram F-score (chrF), alongside the qualitative translation quality assessment model proposed by Juliane House, this study investigates the linguistic and semantic nuances of translations generated by different systems. This study concludes that although metric-based evaluations like BLEU and TER are useful, they often fail to fully capture the semantic and contextual accuracy of idiomatic and expressive translations. Large language models, particularly ChatGPT, show promise in addressing this gap by offering more coherent and culturally aligned translations. However, both systems demonstrate limitations that necessitate human post-editing for high-stakes content. The findings support a hybrid approach, combining machine translation tools with human oversight for optimal translation quality, especially in languages with complex morphology and culturally embedded expressions like Arabic. Full article

Background: This project focuses on the relevance of using a health literacy approach to educating children about obesity prevention. The Habits of Health and Habits of Mind© model was used to write Electronic Texts for Health Literacy© to encourage actions that support obesity prevention. Guided by the Integrative Theory of Behavioral Prediction, the design template for a new genre of digital texts called Electronic Texts for Health Literacy© emerges for exploring children’s frame of mind, health literacy skills, and behavioral intentions toward obesity prevention. Methods: Online materials from selected websites were strategically reviewed for improving obesity prevention and child health literacy. The digital resources were juxtaposed with the Electronic Texts for Health Literacy©, with the latter written by and for children. Discussion: Health educators who use a constructivist pedagogy can help students to write health literacy narratives about obesity prevention, then read and talk about their multimodal compositions to further the practice and development of their health literacy skills. Children with obesogenic body frames can also gain from cowriting visual–textual–gestural health narratives with their peers or health professionals. Co-constructed narratives can help children make deeper connections about their identity, frame of mind, and social agency. Summary: Although this untested resource is available as a new genre of digital text, health educators could nudge children toward developing a stronger frame of mind and behavioral intentions toward obesity prevention when they write health literacy narratives that focus on decision making, goal setting, and communication in the context of eating nutritious foods and participating in physical activities. Full article

Writing proficiency is important for academic and professional success, yet only one-third of US students write at proficient levels. While Self-Regulated Strategy Development (SRSD) has shown effectiveness across different populations, few studies have examined its application in elementary social studies contexts. This study investigated the implementation of STOP DARE+, an SRSD-based writing intervention incorporating reading from social studies source texts and perspective-taking, in a fourth-grade social studies classroom studying the Underground Railroad. The intervention was delivered across 11 sessions to 12 students with diverse learning needs. Writing quality was assessed using the newly developed Multidimensional Spectrum of Holistic Writing Quality scoring tool, alongside genre elements and text production measures. Social validity was evaluated through the Teacher-Informed Perspectives Snapshot (TIPS), a new repeated-measures tool, combined with interviews and student focus groups. Results showed significant improvements in all writing measures with large effect sizes. Students and teachers reported strong positive perceptions of the intervention’s effectiveness and meaningfulness, with students particularly emphasizing the importance of perspective-taking for both academic and social development. The findings suggest that integrating SRSD-based writing instruction with social studies content can enhance both writing skills and critical thinking while fostering deeper engagement with historical events and social justice themes. Full article

This article compares the similar texts in historiography, legend, poetry, and law between the Hebrew Bible and Chinese classic works, emphasizing the mutual reflection and illumination of the two in terms of culture. This article holds that a literary work, just like an object, will release a certain form of energy, which will have an impact on other works and, at the same time, be influenced by other works. This article examines Chinese classic works from the perspective of the Hebrew Bible to gain new insights. By discussing the traditional comparative methods in biblical studies, the article emphasizes the possibility of comparison between different cultures. It is believed that, for similar stories and texts, it is important to analyze their specific cultural backgrounds and writing environments and to reveal the deep-seated reasons in terms of philosophy, history, society, culture, personal life experiences, etc., behind the phenomena of similarities and differences. Using this method, the article deeply analyzes the similarities and differences between the two kinds of texts in specific literary genres such as historiography, poetry, and law and gives examples to illustrate the similarities and differences between these two types of literary works. The study of these narratives within a comparative framework enables people to have a deeper understanding of these texts and the societies that produced them, while also respecting the unique backgrounds and meanings of each work. The article underlines the significance of cross-cultural comparison in the studies of the Bible and Chinese classic works. This research approach, as proposed, enriches the comprehension of these two literary traditions and their profound influence on the shaping of human history and culture. Full article

This study explores how contemporary text-to-image models interpret and generate Classical and Baroque styles under Wölfflin’s framework—two categories that are atemporal and transversal across media. Our goal is to see whether generative AI can replicate the nuanced stylistic cues that art historians attribute to them. We prompted two popular models (DALL•E and Midjourney) using explicit style labels (e.g., “baroque” and “classical”) as well as more implicit cues (e.g., “dynamic”, “static”, or reworked Wölfflin descriptors). We then collected expert ratings and conducted broader qualitative reviews to assess how each output aligned with Wölfflin’s characteristics. Our findings suggest that the term “baroque” usually evokes features recognizable in typically historical Baroque artworks, while “classical” often yields less distinct results, particularly when a specified genre (portrait, still life) imposes a centered, closed-form composition. Removing explicit style labels may produce highly abstract images, revealing that Wölfflin’s descriptors alone may be insufficient to convey Classical or Baroque styles efficiently. Interestingly, the term “dynamic” gives rather chaotic images, yet this chaos is somehow ordered, centered, and has an almost Classical feel. Altogether, these observations highlight the complexity of bridging canonical stylistic frameworks and contemporary AI training biases, underscoring the need to update or refine Wölfflin’s atemporal categories to accommodate how generative models—and modern visual culture—reinterpret Classical and Baroque. Full article

This paper examines how Daoxuan 道宣, the Tang Dynasty Buddhist historian and founder of the Nanshan Vinaya School, meticulously constructed the saintly image of Sengya 僧崖—a monk renowned for his auto-cremation—in his Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks (Xu gaoseng zhuan 續高僧傳). Drawing on a range of sources—including the now-lost Biography of the Bodhisattva Sengya and regional texts such as the Collection of Miscellaneous Records from the Shu Region—Daoxuan reconfigured Sengya’s narrative, presenting his auto-cremation as a profound religious sacrifice emblematic of transformative spiritual commitment. The analysis explores how Daoxuan navigated the doctrinal tensions between this extreme practice and the Vinaya precept of non-killing by emphasizing the practitioner’s mental state over the physical act. In doing so, he reframed self-immolation not as an aberration but as a legitimate, even exalted, path to liberation. This reinterpretation is situated within the broader context of Chinese Buddhist thought—particularly the ideas of the indestructibility of the spirit and the cosmological framework of “Heaven–Man Correspondence”—highlighting the interplay between religious symbolism, doctrinal adaptation, and lived practice. Crucially, this paper treats Daoxuan’s narrative not merely as biography, but as hagiography—a literary mode in which historical memory and religious narrative are inextricably entwined. By examining the rhetorical and ideological dimensions of this genre, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how religious hagiography functioned as a tool for shaping sainthood, authorizing extreme religious practices, and negotiating the spiritual and social landscapes of medieval China. Full article

The aim of the present study was to examine the effect of background music on text comprehension using eye-tracking technology. Ten Greek undergraduate students read four texts under the following four reading conditions: preferred music, non-preferred music, café noise, and in silence. Eye movements were tracked to assess visual patterns, while reading performance and attitudes were also evaluated. The results showed that fixation measures remained stable across conditions, suggesting that early visual processing is not significantly influenced by auditory distractions. However, reading performance significantly declined under non-preferred music, highlighting its disruptive impact on cognitive processing. Participants also reported greater difficulty and fatigue in this condition, consistent with an increased cognitive load. In contrast, preferred music and silence were associated with enhanced understanding, confidence, and immersion, café noise also had a moderate but manageable effect on reading outcomes. These findings underscore the importance of tailoring reading environments to individual preferences in order to optimize reading performance and engagement. Future research studies should focus on the effects of different musical attributes, such as tempo and genre, and use more complex reading tasks, in order to better understand how auditory stimuli interact with cognitive load and visual processing. Full article

Australian author Garth Nix has set six critically acclaimed and internationally bestselling novels and several shorter works in and around the fictional world of the Old Kingdom, beginning with Sabriel (1995) and continuing most recently with Terciel & Elinor (2021). This loose series of texts, with its bellringing protagonists, is the prime contributor to his reputation as an author of high fantasy fiction, although he is also marketed as and known for writing science fiction and other related subgenres. Most notably, his work prominently features elements of the Gothic. This aspect of his work and the ways in which it creates tension within the “high” fantasy genre becomes increasingly apparent when examined through the lens of sound—a critical method that has potential for charting the entanglements of this genre with other popular genres of fiction. Full article

This text explores the life and legacy of Sergei Kuriokhin, a multifaceted artist who profoundly impacted Soviet and post-Soviet culture. Known for his radical experimentation in music, theater, and film, Kuriokhin defied conventional genres through his groundbreaking project, ‘Pop Mechanics’, which blended jazz, classical music, rock, circus acts, and more. His provocative performances often included surreal elements and bizarre satire, challenging cultural norms and the boundaries of Soviet censorship. Kuriokhin’s influence extended into politics, where his satirical “Lenin was a Mushroom” program questioned historical and ideological narratives, stirring public debate. His charisma, intellectual depth, and penchant for the absurd made him a central figure in Leningrad’s avant-garde scene. Kuriokhin collaborated with prominent artists and philosophers, leaving an indelible mark on Russian art and political discourse. This work, presented through the reflections of his close associates, offers insights into his lasting impact on Russian culture, blending history with personal mythologies. Full article