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The costumes were influenced by 1950s couture, Victorian clothing, black and white television shows like Leave It to Beaver, and the stretched bodies in Salvador Dali's The Enigma of William Tell (1933) and Soft Boiled Construction (1936), which I saw on my first trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art as a child. The video contains film and audio samples from Snow White, Rebecca, West Side Story, Misery, Tarzan, Cinderella, A Streetcar Named Desire, Paris Is Burning, Toni Braxton's Breathe Again, Leave It to Beaver, and 1950s commercials.1 A year after finishing the video, I decided to adapt TAKEABITE into an opera, which premiered in 2013. \"theOpera\" was my first large commission by El Museo del Barrio. Snow White (Disney, USA, 1937), Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, USA, 1940), West Side Story (Jerome Robbins and Robert Wise, 1961), Misery (Rob Reiner, USA, 1990), Tarzan (W. S. Van Dyke, USA, 1932), Cinderella (Disney, USA, 1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (Elia Kazan, USA, 1951), Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, USA, 1990), Toni Braxton's Breathe Again (1993), and Leave It to Beaver (USA, 1957–63).

\"Moving to the beat\" is both one of the most basic and one of the most profound means by which humans (and a few other species) interact with music. Computer algorithms that detect the precise temporal location of beats (i.e., pulses of musical \"energy\") in recorded music have important practical applications, such as the creation of playlists with a particular tempo for rehabilitation (e.g., rhythmic gait training), exercise (e.g., jogging), or entertainment (e.g., continuous dance mixes). Although several such algorithms return simple point estimates of an audio file's temporal structure (e.g., \"average tempo\", \"time signature\"), none has sought to quantify the temporal stability of a series of detected beats. Such a method--a \"Balanced Evaluation of Auditory Temporal Stability\" (BEATS)--is proposed here, and is illustrated using the Million Song Dataset (a collection of audio features and music metadata for nearly one million audio files). A publically accessible web interface is also presented, which combines the thresholdable statistics of BEATS with queryable metadata terms, fostering potential avenues of research and facilitating the creation of highly personalized music playlists for clinical or recreational applications.

Despite rhythm and blues culture’s undeniable role in molding, reflecting, and reshaping black cultural production, consciousness, and politics, it has yet to receive the serious scholarly examination it deserves. Destructive Desires corrects this omission by analyzing how post-Civil Rights era rhythm and blues culture articulates competing and conflicting political, social, familial, and economic desires within and for African American communities. As an important form of black cultural production, rhythm and blues music helps us to understand black political and cultural desires and longings in light of neo-liberalism’s increased codification in America’s racial politics and policies since the 1970s. Robert J. Patterson provides a thorough analysis of four artists—Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds, Adina Howard, Whitney Houston, and Toni Braxton—to examine black cultural longings by demonstrating how our reading of specific moments in their lives, careers, and performances serve as metacommentaries for broader issues in black culture and politics.