Spaces of Polyphony covers a lot of ground. It echoes the voices of researchers and their informants from many different places and backgrounds. Among the variety of languages under study and methodological approaches there is also a common ground and narrative thread underpinning the polyphonic chorus of the contributors. From a shared starting point of discourse analysis and inspiration from Bakhtin, the various authors span from East to West, from Moscow to Texas, from Romania and Czech Republic to Mexico. They look into all ages, starting from early childhood, and many walks of life, ranging from casual chatting among relatives to parliamentary speeches and TV shows, including formal education, literary inner monologue and translation. Irony, humour and self-awareness are recurrent themes. The array of voices and dialogism studied in this book is such that it even includes the silent (silenced) voices of people forced to express their heritage by weaving their discourse.

An exploration of polyphony and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. Polyphony—the interweaving of simultaneous sounds—is a crucial aspect of music that has deep implications for how we understand the mind. In Polyphonic Minds, Peter Pesic examines the history and significance of “polyphonicity”—of “many-voicedness”—in human experience. Pesic presents the emergence of Western polyphony, its flowering, its horizons, and the perspective it offers on our own polyphonic brains. When we listen to polyphonic music, how is it that we can hear several different things at once? How does a single mind experience those things as a unity (a motet, a fugue) rather than an incoherent jumble? Pesic argues that polyphony raises fundamental issues for philosophy, theology, literature, psychology, and neuroscience—all searching for the apparent unity of consciousness in the midst of multiple simultaneous experiences. After tracing the development of polyphony in Western music from ninth-century church music through the experimental compositions of Glenn Gould and John Cage, Pesic considers the analogous activity within the brain, the polyphonic “music of the hemispheres” that shapes brain states from sleep to awakening. He discusses how neuroscientists draw on concepts from polyphony to describe the “neural orchestra” of the brain. Pesic’s story begins with ancient conceptions of God’s mind and ends with the polyphonic personhood of the human brain and body. An enhanced e-book edition allows the sound examples to be played by a touch.

With the advent and increasing popularity of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) and e-learning technologies, the need of automatic assessment and of teacher/tutor support for the two tightly intertwined activities of comprehension of reading materials and of collaboration among peers has grown significantly. In this context, a polyphonic model of discourse derived from Bakhtin’s work as a paradigm is used for analyzing both general texts and CSCL conversations in a unique framework focused on different facets of textual cohesion. As specificity of our analysis, the individual learning perspective is focused on the identification of reading strategies and on providing a multi-dimensional textual complexity model, whereas the collaborative learning dimension is centered on the evaluation of participants’ involvement, as well as on collaboration assessment. Our approach based on advanced Natural Language Processing techniques provides a qualitative estimation of the learning process and enhances understanding as a “mediator of learning” by providing automated feedback to both learners and teachers or tutors. The main benefits are its flexibility, extensibility and nevertheless specificity for covering multiple stages, starting from reading classroom materials, to discussing on specific topics in a collaborative manner and finishing the feedback loop by verbalizing metacognitive thoughts.

Linguistic polyphony is an utterance act theory (la linguistique de l’énonciation) and is a French specialty. It deals with the numerous points of view that are likely to be communicated through an utterance. The book introduces utterance act theory and polyphony as such, but most especially focuses on the Scandinavian variant of polyphony, ScaPoLine. ScaPoLine is a formal linguistic theory whose main purpose is to specify the instructions conveyed through linguistic form for the creation of polyphonic meaning. The theoretical introduction is followed by polyphonic analyses of linguistic phenomena such as negation, mood, modality and connectors, and of textual phenomena such as represented discourse and irony. The book suggests how ScaPoLine could offer new insights within cross-linguistic and interdisciplinary studies.

The noted music theorist presents a brilliant and sweeping study of Schoenberg’s compositions and his influence on the generations that followed. A pioneering composer and leader of the Second Viennese School, Arthur Schoenberg was one of the most important figures in twentieth-century classical music. In Schoenberg and His School, composer, conductor, and music theorist René Leibowitz offers an authoritative analysis of Schoenberg’s groundbreaking contributions to composition theory and Western polyphony. In addition to detailing his subject’s major works, Leibowitz also explores Schoenberg’s influence on the works of his two great disciples, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Leibowitz considers how the influences of all three men have, in turn, created new movements within contemporary music today.