A heartfelt family drama of loss and reconciliation with the unthinkable, from the author of Emily, Alone and Henry, Himself Returning again to the theme of working-class people and their wrenching concerns, Songs for the Missing begins with the suspenseful pace of a thriller, following an Ohio community's efforts to locate a young woman who has gone missing. It soon deepens into an affecting portrait of a family trying desperately to hold onto itself and the memory of a daughter whose return becomes increasingly unlikely. Stark and honest, this is an intimate account of what happens behind the headlines of a very American tragedy.

When a popular high-school student goes missing from her small Midwestern community, her loving parents, introverted sister, friends, and boyfriend devote themselves to finding her, an effort that gives way to pleading television appearances, private investigations, and intimate struggles to cling to hope. 60,000 first printing.

The songs of the Royal Zhōu (“Zhōu Nán” 周南) and of the Royal Shào (“Shào Nán” 召南) have formed a conceptual unit since at least the late Spring and Autumn period (771–453 BC). With this book Meyer and Schwartz provide a first complete reading of their earliest, Warring States (453–221 BC), iteration as witnessed by the Ānhuī University manuscripts. As a thought experiment, the authors seek to establish an emic reading of these songs, which they contextualise in the larger framework of studies of the Shī (Songs) and of meaning production during the Warring States period more broadly. The analysis casts light on how the Songs were used by different groups during the Warring States period.

I truly love God and all that He is, with every part of me. I hope that these Songs of my Heart touch and bless every heart who reads this book.

The research area of music information retrieval has gradually evolved to address the challenges of effectively accessing and interacting large collections of music and associated data, such as styles, artists, lyrics, and reviews. Bringing together an interdisciplinary array of top researchers, Music Data Mining presents a variety of approaches to successfully employ data mining techniques for the purpose of music processing. The book first covers music data mining tasks and algorithms and audio feature extraction, providing a framework for subsequent chapters. With a focus on data classification, it then describes a computational approach inspired by human auditory perception and examines instrument recognition, the effects of music on moods and emotions, and the connections between power laws and music aesthetics. Given the importance of social aspects in understanding music, the text addresses the use of the Web and peer-to-peer networks for both music data mining and evaluating music mining tasks and algorithms. It also discusses indexing with tags and explains how data can be collected using online human computation games. The final chapters offer a balanced exploration of hit song science as well as a look at symbolic musicology and data mining. The multifaceted nature of music information often requires algorithms and systems using sophisticated signal processing and machine learning techniques to better extract useful information. An excellent introduction to the field, this volume presents state-of-the-art techniques in music data mining and information retrieval to create novel ways of interacting with large music collections.

First published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.