Free jazz

The Spiritual Imagination of the BeatsWomen Writers of the Beat Era: Autobiography and IntertextualityWorld Beats: Beat Generation Writing and the Worlding of U.S. LiteratureKerouac: Language, Poetics, and Territory

Readers and acolytes of the vital early 1950s-mid 1960s writers known as the Beat Generation tend to be familiar with the prose and poetry by the seminal authors of this period: Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Diane Di Prima, and many others. Yet all of these authors, as well as other less well-known Beat figures, also wrote plays—and these, together with their countercultural approaches to what could or should happen in the theatre—shaped the dramatic experiments of the playwrights who came after them, from Sam Shepard to Maria Irene Fornes, to the many vanguard performance artists of the seventies. This volume, the first of its kind, gathers essays about the exciting work in drama and performance by and about the Beat Generation, ranging from the well-known Beat figures such as Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs, to the “Afro-Beats” - LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Bob Kaufman, and others. It offers original studies of the women Beats - Di Prima, Bunny Lang - as well as groups like the Living Theater who in this era first challenged the literal and physical boundaries of the performance space itself.

This paper considers detection and error control coding for the two-dimensional magnetic recording (TDMR) channel modeled by the two-dimensional (2D) four-rectangular-grain model proposed by Kavcic, Huang et. al. in 2010. This simple model captures the effects of different 2D grain sizes and shapes, as well as the TDMR grain overwrite effect: grains large enough to be written by successive bits retain the polarity of only the last bit written. We construct a row-by-row BCJR detection algorithm that considers outputs from two rows at a time over two adjacent columns, thereby enabling consideration of more grain and data states than previously proposed algorithms that scan only one row at a time. The proposed algorithm employs soft-decision feedback of grain states from previous rows to aid the estimation of current data bits and grain states. Simulation results using the same average coded bit density and serially concatenated convolutional code (SCCC) as a previous paper by Pan, Ryan, et. al. show gains in user bits/grain of up to 6.7% over the previous work when no iteration is performed between the TDMR BCJR and the SCCC, and gains of up to 13.4% when the detector and the decoder iteratively exchange soft information.

In this chapter, we describe an intelligent music system approach that utilizes a joint bottom-up/top-down structure. The bottom-up structure is purely signal driven and calculates pitch, loudness, and information rate among other parameters using auditory models that simulate the functions of different parts of the brain. The top-down structure builds on a logic-based reasoning system and an ontology that was developed to reflect rules in jazz practice. Two instances of the agent have been developed to perform traditional and free jazz, and it is shown that the same general structure can be used to improvise different styles of jazz.