Managing Stages of Film Sound Production

The purpose of this article is to analyse the main stages of sound production in film. The study aims to establish the main principles of film sound design, prove the importance of a rational approach to each stage in the context of their impact on the results of the study, and determine the role of sound in film dramaturgy. The research methodology is based on theoretical methods, namely an analysis of information sources, comparison of Ukrainian and foreign approaches to filmmaking, generalisation and systematisation of practical knowledge and experience of sound production in film from the first sound film to the present day. Scientific novelty. The management structure of sound production’s modern stages and their impact on creative and technical components of film soundtracks is analysed in detail for the first time. Conclusions. The article analyses the stages of sound production in film and establishes the main principles of sound design by studying Ukrainian and foreign approaches to creating sound in the film. The author summarises the rational approach to each stage in the context of their impact on the results of the study and examines the role of sound in film dramaturgy.

Topic: A Linguistic Study of the English Allomorphs il, ir, im, in and their Albanian equivalence

Although the Albanian and English languages both belong to the Indo-European family of languages, they are obviously different in terms of their morphological structure, word-formation system, especially in the type of prefixation, which is the focus of our study. Allomorphs, which can be found in both languages, are widely known as specific types of morphemes which are either morphologically or phonologically conditioned. Thus, the English prefix in- has allomorphs such as im-, ir-, il depending on the first sound of the base to which the prefix is added. If the first sound is p, b, m, the realization is im as in words like improper, imperfect, imbalance etc., but ir- with the sound /r/ as in irregular, and il- with the sound /l/ as in illegible. This paper aims at comparing the paradigmatic group of formations with prefixes il, ir, im, in in both English and Albanian. The study analyses the linguistic, morphological and semantic features they share and those that make them different by comparing and illustrating. The study is based on a practical lexical glossary. Aunque las lenguas albanesa e inglesa pertenecen a la familia de lenguas indoeuropeas, son obviamente diferentes en cuanto a su estructura morfológica, sistema de formación de palabras, especialmente en el tipo de prefijación, que es el foco de nuestro estudio. Los alomorfos, que se encuentran en ambas lenguas, son ampliamente conocidos como tipos específicos de morfemas que están condicionados morfológica o fonológicamente. Así, el prefijo inglés in- tiene alomorfos como im-, ir-, il dependiendo del primer sonido de la base a la que se añade el prefijo. Si el primer sonido es p, b, m, la realización es im como en palabras como impropio, imperfecto, desequilibrio, etc., pero ir- con el sonido /r/ como en irregular, e il- con el sonido /l/ como en ilegible. El objetivo de este trabajo es comparar el grupo paradigmático de formaciones con prefijos il, ir, im, tanto en inglés como en albanés. El estudio analiza los rasgos lingüísticos, morfológicos y semánticos que comparten y los que los diferencian comparándolos e ilustrándolos. El estudio se basa en un glosario léxico práctico.

Biscriptal bilingualism differentially affects segmentation of cross-language homophones: Evidence from Hindi and English users

Aims and objectives: Few previous studies of bilingual cognition have theorized the impact of being literate in distinct orthographies. This study examined: (1) How do differences in the way writing systems represent sound affect biscriptal bilinguals’ segmentation of spoken words in each language? and (2) What is the impact of the first learned orthography? These questions were addressed in native and non-native readers of Hindi and English. The primary unit of writing in Hindi is the akshara, which corresponds to a syllable in most cases, whereas for English the unit of writing corresponds to a phoneme. Method: Hindi-English users listened to cross-language homophones in Hindi and English. Participants were instructed to take away “the first sound” of each word and say aloud what remained. Data analysis: Percent deletion of the initial phoneme was examined. Exp. 1 included 44 bilinguals. Exp. 2 tested 13 bilinguals. Findings/conclusions: For native English readers the first phoneme was deleted regardless of language. For native readers of Hindi, performance differed by language: the “first sound” was a phoneme for English words but a syllable for Hindi words (except for vowel-initial words). Originality: Using a novel paradigm, this study demonstrates that biscriptal bilinguals’ conceptions of speech sounds are differentially shaped by their knowledge of the written forms of those sounds: deleting “the first sound” in /sʌfʌr/ resulted in /fʌr/ when it was presented as a Hindi word but as /ʌfʌr/ when presented as English. Thus, the very same spoken word can yield different conceptions depending on whether it is heard as a word belonging to one language or another. Significance/implications: The findings indicate that language-specific orthographic knowledge influences biscriptal bilinguals’ conceptualization of speech sounds in their respective languages. More generally, our study argues for more research on biscriptal bilinguals in the study of bilingual cognition.

Fritz Lang

A visual artist who studied architecture, Viennese-born Fritz Lang (b. 1890–d. 1976) began his career as a scenarist for UFA before moving into directing scripts cowritten with his eventual wife, Thea von Harbou. During this period, Lang made several masterpieces of Weimar cinema, including Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), The Nibelungen (1924), Metropolis (1927), and his first sound film, M (1931). The second major period of Lang’s career was during the golden age of Hollywood. Lang had a tendency to self-mythologize and told many versions of a story in which Joseph Goebbels invited him to be the head filmmaker for the Nazi regime. Lang claimed he fled Germany the same night. While this narrative is largely disproven, Lang (whose mother was Jewish) did leave Germany in 1933, a departure that severed both his marriage and professional relationship with Harbou. Lang journeyed to Hollywood, where he would spend the next twenty years working studio to studio, directing twenty-two films with intermittent critical and commercial success. His first film there, Fury (1936), dealt with themes of law and justice, which carried through to his final film in Hollywood, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). Perhaps his greatest contributions in Hollywood are his films noir, such as The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Big Heat (1953). Lang’s Hollywood period has been the subject of major critical debate. In the 1950s and after, French critics (both in Cahiers du Cinéma and elsewhere) argued for his status as an unappreciated auteur working in the Hollywood system, whereas other critics had argued that the quality of Lang’s output dramatically dropped after he left Germany. The New Wave filmmakers’ love of Lang perhaps reached its apogee in his being cast as a character called Fritz Lang in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (1963). These critical reappraisals resulted in attempts to link Lang’s Weimar and Hollywood periods. He would return to Germany in the late 1950s to direct his final three films, all of which were related to his earlier Weimar-era work. Although Lang is now regarded by many as an auteur in the same vein as Alfred Hitchcock, until more recently he received considerably less (in quality) scholarly analysis than the British director. Lang continued granting interviews and sharing his own thoughts on his work and career until his death in 1976.

Sound reasoning in tock-CSP

Specifying budgets and deadlines using a process algebra like CSP requires an explicit notion of time. The tock-CSP encoding embeds a rich and flexible approach for modelling discrete-time behaviours with powerful tool support. It uses an event tock, interpreted to mark passage of time. Analysis, however, has traditionally used the standard semantics of CSP, which is inadequate for reasoning about timed refinement. The most recent version of the model checker FDR provides tailored support for tock-CSP, including specific operators, but the standard semantics remains inadequate. In this paper, we characterise tock-CSP as a language in its own right, rich enough to model budgets and deadlines, and reason about Zeno behaviour. We present the first sound tailored semantic model for tock-CSP that captures timewise refinement. It is fully mechanised in Isabelle/HOL and, to enable use of FDR4 to check refinement in this novel model, we use model shifting, which is a technique that explicitly encodes refusals in traces.

The 1930s Horror Adventure Film on Location in Jamaica: ‘Jungle Gods’, ‘Voodoo Drums’ and ‘Mumbo Jumbo’ in the ‘Secret Places of Paradise Island’

In this article, I consider the representation of African-Caribbean religions in the early horror adventure film from a postcolonial perspective. I do so by zooming in on Ouanga (1935), Obeah (1935), and Devil’s Daughter (1939), three low-budget horror productions filmed on location in Jamaica during the 1930s (and the only films shot on the island throughout that decade). First, I discuss the emergence of depictions of African-Caribbean religious practices of voodoo and obeah in popular Euro-American literature, and show how the zombie figure entered Euro-American empire cinema in the 1930s as a colonial expression of tropical savagery and jungle terror. Then, combining historical newspaper research with content analyses of these films, I present my exploration into the three low-budget horror films in two parts. The first part contains a discussion of Ouanga, the first sound film ever made in Jamaica and allegedly the first zombie film ever shot on location in the Caribbean. In this early horror adventure, which was made in the final year of the U.S. occupation of Haiti, zombies were portrayed as products of evil supernatural powers to be oppressed by colonial rule. In the second part, I review Obeah and The Devil’s Daughter, two horror adventure movies that merely portrayed African-Caribbean religion as primitive superstition. While Obeah was disturbingly set on a tropical island in the South Seas infested by voodoo practices and native cannibals, The Devil’s Daughter was authorized by the British Board of Censors to show black populations in Jamaica and elsewhere in the colonial world that African-Caribbean religions were both fraudulent and dangerous. Taking into account both the production and content of these movies, I show that these 1930s horror adventure films shot on location in Jamaica were rooted in a long colonial tradition of demonizing and terrorizing African-Caribbean religions—a tradition that lasts until today.

France Marolt’s Endeavours to Sound Document Folk Music

The paper presents France Marolt’s endeavours spanning many years to acquire the recording devices that he planned to use for documenting folk music in the field, as well as for his research work and various forms of educational and cultural activities. The main focus is on researching the circumstances in which sound recordings on gramophone records were made in collaboration with Radio Ljubljana, and on the first sound collection of the Institute of Ethnomusicology ZRC SAZU, which consisted of these records. The records have a special documentary value and, combined with archival documents, convey Marolt’s view of folk music.

Nuclear saturation energy in effective chiral model within Fermi liquid theory approach

We calculate the relativistic Fermi liquid parameters (RFLPs) for the description of the nuclear saturation energy using a chiral effective Lagrangian. Analytical expressions of Fermi liquid parameters (FLPs) are presented both for the direct and exchange contributions by retaining the meson masses. We present a comparative study of perturbative calculation with mean field results. The FLPs, so determined, are then used to calculate the chemical potential, energy densities, and binding energy for dense nuclear matter interacting via the exchange of σ, ω, and π mesons. In addition, we also estimate bulk quantities like incompressibility and first sound velocity in terms of RFLPs for dense nuclear matter.