Search Results (179)

The first half of the 19th century witnessed the rise of Romantic poetry, which focused in depth on individual consciousness, inner worlds, and metaphysical inquiries. This poetic orientation became particularly evident in works centred on themes such as solitude, alienation, and existential quests. Within this context, the present study aims to examine the archetypal and poetic resonances of the poetic voice in Mihail Lermontov’s poem The Demon, based on its sixth and final version dated 1841, in relation to Nikoloz Baratashvili’s poem Secret Voice. Lermontov’s poem is analyzed through the English translation by Charles Johnston, published in 1983, while Baratashvili’s poem is discussed based on the 24-line version included in the fifth edition (1895) of the anthology Poems and Letters (Leksebi da Tserilebi). This study explores the thematic and structural similarities between the two poems within the framework of comparative literature and psychoanalytic criticism, focusing on Romantic archetypes, the uncanny, the shadow figure, and ontological solitude. Furthermore, the dialogue established between Lermontov’s demonic narrator and Baratashvili’s introspective poetic voice reopens discussions on the boundaries of cultural memory, oral narrative patterns, and poetic identity. Ultimately, this comparative analysis reveals the implicit influences of The Demon on Georgian poetry and discusses the intercultural resonances of themes such as voice, self, and archetype in Romantic poetry. Full article

This paper presents the development, implementation, and outcomes of the ELEVATE-US-UP (Engaging Learners through Exploration of Visionary Academic Thought and Empowerment in UnderServed and UnderPrivileged communities) teaching methodology, an equity-centered, culturally responsive pedagogical framework designed to enhance student engagement, academic performance, and science identity among underrepresented learners. This framework was piloted at Northern New Mexico College (NNMC), a Hispanic- and minority-serving rural institution. ELEVATE-US-UP reimagines science education as a dynamic, inquiry-driven, and contextually grounded process that embeds visionary scientific themes, community relevance, trauma-informed mentoring, and authentic assessment into everyday instruction. Drawing from culturally sustaining pedagogy, experiential learning, and action teaching, the methodology positions students not as passive recipients of content but as knowledge-holders and civic actors. Implemented across upper-level environmental science courses, the method produced measurable gains: class attendance rose from 67% to 93%, average final grades improved significantly, and over two-thirds of students reported a stronger science identity and a newfound confidence in their academic potential. Qualitative feedback highlighted increased perceptions of classroom inclusivity, community relevance, and instructor support. By centering on cultural context, student voice, and place-based application, the ELEVATE-US-UP framework offers a replicable and scalable model for educational transformation in underserved regions. Full article

This perspective paper presents a first-person account of life with motor neurone disease (MND). Through the lens of lived experience, it explores the complex and often prolonged diagnostic journey, shaped in part by the protective grip of denial. This paper then delves into the emotional impact of MND on the individual and their close relationships, capturing the strain on identity and family dynamics. It also highlights the vital role of the multidisciplinary team in providing support throughout the journey. A central focus of the paper is the personal journey of voice banking. It reflects on the restorative experience of reclaiming a pre-disease voice through tools such as ElevenLabs^TM. This narrative underscores the critical importance of early intervention and timely access to voice banking, positioning voice not only as a tool for communication but also as a powerful anchor of identity, dignity, and agency. The paper concludes by highlighting key systemic gaps in MND care. It calls for earlier referral to speech pathology, earlier access to voice banking, access to psychological support from the time of diagnosis, and better integration between research and clinical care. Full article

Proclaiming Our Roots (POR) began as an academic community-based research initiative documenting Afro-Indigenous identities and lived experiences through digital oral storytelling. Since its inception, Proclaiming Our Roots has grown into a grassroots social movement focused on self-determination, cultural reclamation, and resistance to colonial erasure. This paper explores Proclaiming Our Root’s evolution, from a research project to a grassroots social movement, analyzing how storytelling, relational accountability, and Indigenous, Black, and Afro-Indigenous governance have shaped its development. Drawing on Indigenous methodologies and grounded in Afro-Indigenous worldviews, we examine how POR mobilizes digital storytelling, community gatherings, and intergenerational dialog to give voice to Afro-Indigenous identity, build collective consciousness, and challenge dominant narratives that erase or marginalize Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous presence. Through a sharing circle involving Proclaiming Our Roots community members, advisory council members, and the research team, in this paper we identify key themes that reflect the movement’s transformative impact: Identity and Belonging, Storytelling as Decolonial Praxis, Healing, Spirituality and Collective Consciousness, and Resistance and Social Movement Building. We discuss how these themes illustrate Proclaiming Our Roots’ dual role as a site of knowledge production and political action, navigating tensions between institutional affiliation and community autonomy. By prioritizing Afro-Indigenous epistemologies and centering lived experience, POR demonstrates how academic research can be a foundation for long-term, relational, and community-led movement-building. In this paper, we want to contribute to broader discussions around the sustainability of grassroots movements, the role of storytelling in social change for Indigenous and Black Peoples, and the possibilities of decolonial knowledge production as epistemic justice. We offer a model for how academic research-initiated projects can remain accountable to the communities with whom we work, while actively participating in liberatory re-imaginings. Full article

This article presents an in-depth examination of the technical and cultural dimensions of singing practices within the traditional music of sub-Saharan Africa. Utilizing an extensive body of theoretical and ethnomusicological research, comparative transcription, and culturally situated observation, it presents a comprehensive framework for understanding the significance of the human voice in various performance contexts. The study revolves around a tripartite model—auditory clarity, ambiguous auditory clarity, and occlusion—that delineates the varying levels of audibility of vocal lines amidst intricate instrumental arrangements. The article examines case studies from West, East, and Southern Africa, highlighting essential vocal techniques such as straight tone, nasal resonance, ululation, and controlled (or delayed) vibrato. It underscores the complex interplay between language, melody, and rhythm in tonal languages. The analysis delves into the influence of sound reinforcement technologies on vocal presence and cultural authenticity, positing that PA systems have the capacity to either enhance or disrupt the equilibrium between traditional aesthetics and modern requirements. This research is firmly rooted in a blend of African and Western theoretical frameworks, drawing upon the contributions of Nketia, Agawu, Chernoff, and Kubik. It proposes a nuanced methodology that integrates technical analysis with cultural significance. It posits that singing in African traditional music transcends mere expression, serving as a vessel for collective memory, identity, and the socio-musical framework. The article concludes by emphasizing the enduring strength and flexibility of African vocal traditions, illustrating their capacity for evolution while preserving fundamental communicative and artistic values. Full article

This paper explores how sound design in the Harry Potter film series shapes the symbolic significance of written words within the magical world. Sound mediates between language and meaning; while characters gain knowledge by reading and seeing, viewers are guided emotionally and thematically by how these written texts are framed through sound. For example, Harry’s magical identity is signalled to viewers through the score long before he fully understands himself—first through music when he speaks to a snake, then more explicitly when he receives his letter from Hogwarts. Throughout the series, characters engage with a wide array of written media—textbooks, letters, newspapers, diaries, maps, and inscriptions—that gradually shift in narrative function, from static props to dynamic, multi-sensory agents of transformation. Using a close analysis of selected scenes to examine layers of utterances, diegetic sounds, underscore, and sound design, this study draws on metaphor theory and adaptation theory to examine how sound design gives writing a metaphorical voice, sometimes framing it as character, landscape, or moral authority. As the series progresses, becoming more autonomous from the literary source, written words take on greater symbolic significance, and sound increasingly determines which texts are granted narrative power, whose voices are trusted, and how viewers interpret truth and agency across media. Ultimately, written words in the films are animated through sound into agents of growth, memory, resistance, and transformation. Thus, the audio-visual treatment of written magic reveals not just what is written, but what matters. Full article

This paper presents an intelligent navigation wearable device for visually impaired individuals. The system aims to improve their independent travel capabilities and reduce the negative emotional impacts associated with visible disability indicators in travel tools. It employs an RGB-D camera and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor to facilitate real-time obstacle detection and recognition via advanced point cloud processing and YOLO-based target recognition techniques. An integrated intelligent interaction module identifies the core obstacle from the detected obstacles and translates this information into multidimensional auxiliary guidance. Users receive haptic feedback to navigate obstacles, indicating directional turns and distances, while auditory prompts convey the identity and distance of obstacles, enhancing spatial awareness. The intuitive vibrational guidance significantly enhances safety during obstacle avoidance, and the voice instructions promote a better understanding of the surrounding environment. The device adopts an arm-mounted design, departing from the traditional cane structure that reinforces disability labeling and social stigma. This lightweight mechanical design prioritizes user comfort and mobility, making it more user-friendly than traditional stick-type aids. Experimental results demonstrate that this system outperforms traditional white canes and ultrasonic devices in reducing collision rates, particularly for mid-air obstacles, thereby significantly improving safety in dynamic environments. Furthermore, the system’s ability to vocalize obstacle identities and distances in advance enhances spatial perception and interaction with the environment. By eliminating the cane structure, this innovative wearable design effectively minimizes social stigma, empowering visually impaired individuals to travel independently with increased confidence, ultimately contributing to an improved quality of life. Full article

In pursuit of sustainable management, organizations must not only balance economic, environmental, and social goals but also cultivate human-centered strategies that support long-term viability. Drawing on identity theory, this study introduces civic identity—an individual’s self-concept as a responsible member of society—into the workplace and examines how its relationship with employee identity (i.e., enhancement and conflict) influences sustainability mechanisms: work engagement, role expansion, and voice behavior. Two field studies were conducted using multi-source data from 339 employees at large conglomerates (study 1) and three-wave data from 121 employees at entrepreneurial firms (study 2). Multiple regression analyses revealed that identity enhancement positively predicted both work engagement and role expansion, which in turn strengthened voice behavior. In contrast, identity conflict showed relatively weaker negative effects, while supplementary analyses indicated that identity separation exerted more pronounced negative influences. Although identity conflict and separation did not significantly affect role expansion in study 2, the results across both studies were largely consistent. By incorporating a neglected nonwork identity that fosters sustainable employee behavior, this research expands the scope of organizational studies and sustainability science. Implications for integrating civic identity into sustainable management strategies are discussed. Full article

In recent decades, various communities and organizations have been working to promote LGBTQ+ inclusion and justify their equal rights. This task becomes more complex within religious communities that are based on traditional values that reject homosexuality. This historical-anthropological study presents “K’Afikim BaNegev”—a special manual that includes more than 347 pages and incorporates 73 diverse sources distributed in early 1994 in American Conservative Jewish congregations aimed at combating homophobia. I clarify how the documents reveal progressive qualitative methodologies for identifying and understanding barriers and mechanisms of community change. Textual analysis of personal letters, educational programs, workshops, and rabbinical sermons revealed two methods for creating this egalitarian change and constructing the Jewish community as a safe space for gay men and lesbian women and their family members: (1) using and promoting personal narrative (storytelling) as a channel to voice LGBTQ+ people’s stories and (2) adapting a text-centered approach that considers biblical sources as authoritative in recognizing LGBTQ+ identity. Thus, the acceptance of homosexuality was not conceptualized in terms of liberal human rights rhetoric but rather as a religious commandment. Thus, I define this novel initiative as an act of ‘queer Jewish activism,’ offering a new typology for community development and practice that advocates for LGBTQ+ individuals within contemporary religious communities. Full article

Deepfake technology uses artificial intelligence to create highly realistic but fake audio, video, or images, often making it difficult to distinguish from real content. Due to its potential use for misinformation, fraud, and identity theft, deepfake technology has gained a bad reputation in the digital world. Recently, many works have reported on the detection of deepfake videos/images. However, few studies have concentrated on developing robust deepfake voice detection systems. Among most existing studies in this field, a deepfake voice detection system commonly requires a large amount of training data and a robust backbone to detect real and logistic attack audio. For acoustic feature extractions, Mel-frequency Filter Bank (MFB)-based approaches are more suitable for extracting speech signals than applying the raw spectrum as input. Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) have been successfully applied to Natural Language Processing (NLP), but these backbones suffer from gradient vanishing or explosion while processing long-term sequences. In addition, the cross-dataset evaluation of most deepfake voice recognition systems has weak performance, leading to a system robustness issue. To address these issues, we propose an acoustic feature-fusion method to combine Mel-spectrum and pitch representation based on cross-attention mechanisms. Then, we combine a Transformer encoder with a convolutional neural network block to extract global and local features as a front end. Finally, we connect the back end with one linear layer for classification. We summarized several deepfake voice detectors’ performances on the silence-segment processed ASVspoof 2019 dataset. Our proposed method can achieve an Equal Error Rate (EER) of 26.41%, while most of the existing methods result in EER higher than 30%. We also tested our proposed method on the ASVspoof 2021 dataset, and found that it can achieve an EER as low as 28.52%, while the EER values for existing methods are all higher than 28.9%. Full article

Voice conversion (VC) is an advanced technology that enables the transformation of raw speech into high-quality audio resembling the target speaker’s voice while preserving the original linguistic content and prosodic patterns. In this study, we propose a voice conversion algorithm, Multi-Dimensional Perception Flow Matching (MPFM-VC). Unlike traditional approaches that directly generate waveform outputs, MPFM-VC models the evolutionary trajectory of mel spectrograms with a flow-matching framework and incorporates a multi-dimensional feature perception network to enhance the stability and quality of speech synthesis. Additionally, we introduce a content perturbation method during training to improve the model’s generalization ability and reduce inference-time artifacts. To further increase speaker similarity, an adversarial training mechanism on speaker embeddings is employed to achieve effective disentanglement between content and speaker identity representations, thereby enhancing the timbre consistency of the converted speech. Experimental results for both speech and singing voice conversion tasks show that MPFM-VC achieves competitive performance compared to existing state-of-the-art VC models in both subjective and objective evaluation metrics. The synthesized speech shows improved naturalness, clarity, and timbre fidelity in both objective and subjective evaluations, suggesting the potential effectiveness of the proposed approach. Full article

The green behaviors of engineering project designers can improve the green performance of engineering projects. Moral factors are likely to influence designers’ behavior related to green design. Therefore, this study takes mindfulness leadership as a new antecedent of green behavior and explores how mindfulness leadership influences the green behaviors of designers. Based on social cognitive theory, this study proposes that mindfulness leadership stimulates the designers to exhibit green behaviors. Then, this study used a survey design and adopted partial least squares structural equation modeling to examine the hypotheses. The results indicate that mindfulness leadership is positively associated with green voice behavior (β = 0.313), green knowledge-sharing behavior (β = 0.281), and green helping behavior (β = 0.353). Moreover, moral identity mediates the main effect (β_a = 0.131, β_b = 0.147, β_c = 0.169). These quantitative findings substantiate that mindfulness leadership can effectively motivate designers to provide eco-conscious solutions, share sustainability knowledge, and collaborate on green improvements. The study equips project managers with evidence-based strategies to cultivate moral identity and leadership practices that systematically enhance environmental performance in engineering design contexts. Full article

The 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and Israel’s ensuing assault in Gaza caused immense public upheaval in Berlin, home of Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora. This article shows how Palestinian families intergenerationally navigate the ensuing losses, protests and school unrests, which took place not just in response to the devastation in Gaza and the West Bank, but also to Germany’s unwavering support for Israel, while suppressing pro-Palestinian voices. For the families, this intensification of the protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict deepened a state of chronic crises based on traumas, longstanding insecurity and increasing xenophobia in Germany. Drawing from 11 years of ethnographic research in Berlin–Neukölln, I show how events since 7 October drastically changed the neighborhood’s ethos, forcing a communal front of silence. The silence was a reaction to fears of being misrepresented in the media and threats of deportation and school expulsions. Examining prevailing sociopolitical influences, and what happens within families and between generations, I illustrate how families became more insular in their mourning and grief yet found ways to navigate their political views intergenerationally. My argument scrutinizes sociopolitical processes leading to increased polarization and highlights the importance of schools as safe spaces for identity formation and contemplation. Full article

International students beginning university face challenges, including loneliness and isolation. Research shows that choir singing can enhance social bonds and emotional wellbeing. However, its effect on international students remains underexplored. This study applied a social identity perspective to evaluate the impact of participation in a university community choir on international students’ university identification (i.e., sense of belonging), loneliness, and wellbeing. A non-randomised controlled study was conducted with 53 international students at UQ, including 31 UQ Voices choir members (M_age = 24.90, 71.0% female) and 22 non-choir students (M_age = 24.18, 72.7% female). Participants completed measures of university identification, loneliness, and wellbeing at baseline (pre) and after 6–8 weeks (post), along with group-based psychosocial resources measures. Data were analysed using 2 (choir, control) × 2 (pre, post) ANOVAs. A significant interaction effect emerged for university identification (sense of belonging), with choir participants improving more than controls. A main effect of group emerged for wellbeing, with choir members reporting higher wellbeing. No significant effects for loneliness, which was not elevated at baseline. Choir identification was significantly related to psychosocial resources (self-esteem, control, meaning and purpose, and mood improvement). Choir singing may serve as a preventative intervention to support international students’ wellbeing by fostering a stronger sense of belonging in the new university and country. Full article

In the field of voice cryptography, detecting forged speech is crucial for secure communication and identity authentication. While most existing spoof detection methods rely on monaural audio, the characteristics of dual-channel signals remain underexplored. To address this, we propose a symmetrical dual-branch detection framework that integrates Res2Net with coordinate attention (Res2NetCA) and a dual-channel heterogeneous graph fusion module (DHGFM). The proposed architecture encodes left and right vocal tract signals into spectrogram and time-domain graphs, and it models both intra- and inter-channel time–frequency dependencies through graph attention mechanisms and fusion strategies. Experimental results on the ASVspoof2019 and ASVspoof2021 LA datasets demonstrate the superior detection performance of our method. Specifically, it achieved an EER of 1.64% and a Min-tDCF of 0.051 on ASVspoof2019, and an EER of 6.76% with a Min-tDCF of 0.3638 on ASVspoof2021, validating the effectiveness and potential of dual-channel modeling in spoofed speech detection. Full article