This volume examines the synthesizer’s significance for music and culture, with a range of contributors providing historical, musicological, practical and theoretical perspectives. The synthesizer as an instrument has evolved rapidly over the last 50 years, conveying different meanings in musical culture at various times in its history. For example, post-punk and new wave acts used synths to signify their embrace of futurism and modernity. Earlier psychedelic bands used the instrument to sonically represent mind expansion while prog acts signposted their lineage to the classical avant-garde. Techno artists used synths to escape the strictures of acoustic music in parallel with rave culture’s desire for escapism from the mundanity of daily existence. It is now seemingly ubiquitous in modern pop music production.

This volume examines the synthesizerâ (TM)s significance for music and culture, with a range of contributors providing historical, musicological, practical and theoretical perspectives. The synthesizer as an instrument has evolved rapidly over the last 50 years, conveying different meanings in musical culture at various times in its history. For example, post-punk and new wave acts used synths to signify their embrace of futurism and modernity. Earlier psychedelic bands used the instrument to sonically represent mind expansion while prog acts signposted their lineage to the classical avant-garde. Techno artists used synths to escape the strictures of acoustic music in parallel with rave cultureâ (TM)s desire for escapism from the mundanity of daily existence. It is now seemingly ubiquitous in modern pop music production.

Qualitative synthesis within the family of systematic reviews meets an urgent need to use knowledge derived from qualitative studies to inform practice, research, and policy. Despite the contingent nature of evidence gleaned from synthesis of qualitative studies, systematic synthesis is an important technique and, used judiciously, can deepen understanding of the contextual dimensions that emerge from qualitative research. This pocket guide presents an overview for planning, developing, and implementing qualitative synthesis within existing protocols and guidelines for conducting systematic reviews. The authors also explore methodological challenges, including: the philosophical tensions of integrating qualitative synthesis within the family of systematic reviews; the balance of comprehensive and iterative information retrieval strategies to locate and screen qualitative research; the use of appraisal tools to assess quality of qualitative studies; the various approaches to synthesize qualitative studies, including interpretive, integrated, and aggregative; and the tensions between the generalizability and transferability of findings that emerge from qualitative synthesis. Social work researchers, educators, and doctoral students who are interested in systematic reviews will find the step-by-step format of this book invaluable for conducting their reviews, both in the form of rapid evidence assessments and in high-quality critical reviews.

This volume brings together scholars and artist-researchers to explore the nature and function of musical instruments in creative practices, and their role in musical culture. Through historical, theoretical, critical, practical-artistic perspectives and case studies, the contributors here examine identities and affordances of acoustical, electronic and digital musical instruments, the kinds of relationships that composers and performers establish with them, and the crucial role they play in the emergence of musical experiences and meanings.

MOS technology has rapidly become the de facto standard for mixed-signal integrated circuit design due to the high levels of integration possible as device geometries shrink to nanometer scales. The reduction in feature size means that the number of transistor and clock speeds have increased significantly. In fact, current day microprocessors contain hundreds of millions of transistors operating at multiple gigahertz. Furthermore, this reduction in feature size also has a significant impact on mixed-signal circuits. Due to the higher levels of integration, the majority of ASICs possesses some analog components. It has now become nearly mandatory to integrate both analog and digital circuits on the same substrate due to cost and power constraints. This book presents some of the newer problems and opportunities offered by the small device geometries and the high levels of integration that is now possible.The aim of this book is to summarize some of the most critical aspects of high-speed analog/RF communications circuits. Attention is focused on the impact of scaling, substrate noise, data converters, RF and wireless communication circuits and wireline communication circuits, including high-speed I/O.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Verification, Model Checking, and Abstract Interpretation, VMCAI 2018, held in Los Angeles, CA, USA, in January 2018.The 24 full papers presented together with the abstracts of 3 invited keynotes and 1 invited tutorial were carefully reviewed and selected from 43 submissions. VMCAI provides topics including: program verification, model checking, abstract interpretation, program synthesis, static analysis, type systems, deductive methods, program certification, decision procedures, theorem proving, program certification, debugging techniques, program transformation, optimization, and hybrid and cyber-physical systems.