Gabriel Tarde

Gabriel Tarde (French: [taʁd]; in full Jean-Gabriel De Tarde; 12 March 1843 – 13 May 1904) was a French sociologist, criminologist and social psychologist who conceived sociology as based on small psychological interactions among individuals (much as if it were chemistry), the fundamental forces being imitation and innovation.

Life

Tarde was born in Sarlat in the province of Dordogne, and he studied law at Toulouse and Paris. From 1869 to 1894 he worked as a magistrate and investigating judge in the province. In the 1880s he corresponded with representatives of the newly formed criminal anthropology, most notably the Italians Enrico Ferri and Cesare Lombroso and the French psychiatrist Alexandre Lacassagne. With the latter, Tarde came to be the leading representative for a "French school" in criminology. In 1900 he was appointed professor in modern philosophy at the Collège de France. As such he was the most prominent contemporary critic of Durkheim's sociology.

Work

Among the concepts that Tarde initiated were the group mind (taken up and developed by Gustave Le Bon, and sometimes advanced to explain so-called herd behaviour or crowd psychology), and economic psychology, where he anticipated a number of modern developments.Tarde was very critical of Émile Durkheim’s work at the level of both methodology and theory. However, Durkheim's sociology overshadowed Tarde's insights, and it was not until U.S. scholars, such as the Chicago school, took up his theories that they became famous.

Resource Interchange File Format

The Resource Interchange File Format (RIFF) is a generic file container format for storing data in tagged chunks. It is primarily used to store multimedia such as sound and video, though it may also be used to store any arbitrary data.

The Microsoft implementation is mostly known through container formats like AVI, ANI and WAV, which use RIFF as their basis.

History

RIFF was introduced in 1991 by Microsoft and IBM, and was presented by Microsoft as the default format for Windows 3.1 multimedia files. It is based on Electronic Arts' Interchange File Format, introduced in 1985 on the Commodore Amiga, the only difference being that multi-byte integers are in little-endian format, native to the 80x86 processor series used in IBM PCs, rather than the big-endian format native to the 68k processor series used in Amiga and Apple Macintosh computers, where IFF files were heavily used.

In 2010 Google introduced the WebP picture format, which uses RIFF as a container.

Ostinato

In music, an ostinato [ostiˈnaːto] (derived from Italian: stubborn, compare English: 'obstinate') is a motif or phrase that persistently repeats in the same musical voice, usually at the same pitch. Well-known ostinato-based pieces include both classical compositions such as Ravel's Boléro and popular songs such as Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder's "I Feel Love" (1977) and The Verve's "Bitter Sweet Symphony" (1997).

The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody in itself. Both ostinatos and ostinati are accepted English plural forms, the latter reflecting the word's Italian etymology. Strictly speaking, ostinati should have exact repetition, but in common usage, the term covers repetition with variation and development, such as the alteration of an ostinato line to fit changing harmonies or keys.

Within the context of film music, Claudia Gorbman defines an obstinate as a repeated melodic or rhythmic figure that propel scenes that lack dynamic visual action.

Riff (disambiguation)

Riff, RIFF, The 'Riff, or Riffs may refer to:

Acronyms