Decomposed

The hidden material histories of music. Music is seen as the most immaterial of the arts, and recorded music as a progress of dematerialization—an evolution from physical discs to invisible digits. In Decomposed, Kyle Devine offers another perspective. He shows that recorded music has always been a significant exploiter of both natural and human resources, and that its reliance on these resources is more problematic today than ever before. Devine uncovers the hidden history of recorded music—what recordings are made of and what happens to them when they are disposed of. Devine's story focuses on three forms of materiality. Before 1950, 78 rpm records were made of shellac, a bug-based resin. Between 1950 and 2000, formats such as LPs, cassettes, and CDs were all made of petroleum-based plastic. Today, recordings exist as data-based audio files. Devine describes the people who harvest and process these materials, from women and children in the Global South to scientists and industrialists in the Global North. He reminds us that vinyl records are oil products, and that the so-called vinyl revival is part of petrocapitalism. The supposed immateriality of music as data is belied by the energy required to power the internet and the devices required to access music online. We tend to think of the recordings we buy as finished products. Devine offers an essential backstory. He reveals how a range of apparently peripheral people and processes are actually central to what music is, how it works, and why it matters.

Biology of Plant Litter Decomposition, Volume II is organized into two parts. The first part focuses on the organisms involved in plant litter decomposition, particularly, their structure and function. The second part deals with the environmental conditions under which breakdown occurs over the whole global surface. This volume separately considers terrestrial, freshwater, and marine environments. Furthermore, it describes two anthropocentric aspects: agriculture, with an emphasis on the importance of the saprophytic activity of plant pathogenic fungi, and the increasingly important composting of urban waste. This book will be invaluable to science students and instructors, as well as to biologists, botanists, marine ecologists.

This book deals with the problem of detecting and localizing multiple simultaneously active wideband acoustic sources by applying the notion of wavefield decomposition using circular and spherical microphone arrays. A rigorous derivation of modal array signal processing algorithms for unambiguous source detection and localization, as well as performance evaluations by means of measurements using an actual real-time capable implementation, are discussed.

This book covers the results of investigations into the mechanisms and kinetics of thermal decompositions of solid and liquid substances on the basis of thermochemical analyses. The main features of these reactions are explained and many problems and unusual phenomena, which have accumulated in this field are interpreted. New methods of TA measurement and calculation have been developed, which permit the precision and accuracy of determination of kinetic parameters to be increased substantially.

These are the proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Domain Decomposition Methods, which was held in Lugano, Switzerland. With 172 participants from over 24 countries, this conference continued a long-standing tradition of internationally oriented meetings on Domain Decomposition Methods. The book features a well-balanced mix of established and new topics, such as the manifold theory of Schwarz Methods, Isogeometric Analysis, Discontinuous Galerkin Methods, exploitation of modern HPC architectures and industrial applications. As the conference program reflects, the growing capabilities in terms of theory and available hardware allow increasingly complex non-linear and multi-physics simulations, confirming the tremendous potential and flexibility of the domain decomposition concept.