This article probes the classic definition of religious aesthetics as related to the notions of beauty, goodness and truth. The phenomenon of kitsch, understood as simulation (or inversion) of beauty, goodness and truth, is taken cognisance of, especially in the light of contributions by Milan Kundera, Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard. The article briefly reflects on the liturgical consequences...

PURPOSE The current study provides a comprehensive analysis of the content of advertisements on Web sites targeted at adolescents, with a particular focus on the female beauty ideal. METHODS Advertisements (N = 631) from 14 Web sites popular with adolescents were analyzed with respect to product advertised, characteristics of people presented, and emphasis on appearance and the thin beauty id...

Concern with body image and medical interventions related to physical beauty has greatly increased in the past few years. The purpose of this study is to investigate how medicine is dealing with the theme of beauty. The 2003/2004 editions of the periodicals Aesthetic Surgery Journal and Aesthetic Plastic Surgery were analyzed, in order to investigate the rationality buttressing their discourse....

From art portraits, the observer may derive at least two different hedonic values: The attractiveness of the depicted person and the artistic beauty of the image that relates to the way of presentation. We argue that attractiveness is a property that is predominantly driven by perceptual processes, while the perception of artistic beauty is based predominantly on cognitive processing. To test t...

The beauty parlor industry is one of the fastest growing industries of Bangladesh. The lifestyle of people of our country has changed rapidly over the past few years. Realizing the importance of sound health and presentation, people are becoming more concerned about their health and beauty. Thousands of beauty-care service providers or beauty parlors have sprung up all over the country in the l...

Is there a distinction between New Interfaces for Musical Expression and New Interfaces for Controlling Sound? This article begins with a brief overview of expression in musical performance, and examines some of the characteristics of effective “expressive” computer music instruments. It becomes apparent that sophisticated musical expression requires not only a good control interface but also v...

Two modest-sized symbolic corpora of post-tonal and post-metric keyboard music have been constructed, one algorithmic, the other improvised. Deep learning models of each have been trained and largely optimised. Our purpose is to obtain a model with sufficient generalisation capacity that in response to a small quantity of separate fresh input seed material, it can generate outputs that are dist...

SkipStep is a novel touchscreen application that allows users to write, perform, and improvise music on multiple virtual instruments via MIDI. It is a looping-based instrument that incorporates step sequencer and keyboard inspired interfaces with generative music capabilities. Additionally, SkipStep allows for collaborative performance over Wi-Fi, allowing users to either send musical material ...