Audience

An audience is a group of people who participate in a show or encounter a work of art, literature (in which they are called "readers"), theatre, music (in which they are called "listeners"), video games (in which they are called "players"), or academics in any medium. Audience members participate in different ways in different kinds of art; some events invite overt audience participation and others allowing only modest clapping and criticism and reception.

Media audience studies have become a recognized part of the curriculum. Audience theory offers scholarly insight into audiences in general. These insights shape our knowledge of just how audiences affect and are affected by different forms of art. The biggest art form is the mass media. Films, video games, radio shows, software (and hardware), and other formats are affected by the audience and its reviews and recommendations.

In the age of easy Internet participation and citizen journalism, professional creators share space, and sometimes attention, with the public. American journalist Jeff Jarvis said, "Give the people control of media, they will use it. The corollary: Don't give the people control of media, and you will lose. Whenever citizens can exercise control, they will."Tom Curley, President of the Associated Press, similarly said, "The users are deciding what the point of their engagement will be — what application, what device, what time, what place."

Audience (disambiguation)

An audience is:

Audience or The Audience may also refer to:

Media and communications

Music

Plays

Audience (company)

Audience is an American mobile voice and audio-processing company based in Mountain View, California, and is one of the 34 founding members of The Open Handset Alliance. They specialize in improving voice clarity and noise suppression for a broad range of consumer products, including cellular phones, mobile devices and PC's.

Audience is the first company to have reverse-engineered the human hearing system and model its processes onto a chip, enabling computers and mobile devices to use the same kind of “auditory intelligence” that humans employ. By using this technology in conjunction with two or more microphones, background noise is suppressed, improving the quality of the remaining voice and reducing distraction for the listener. This technology mimics the “cocktail party effect”.

In 2010, Audience partnered with HTC to integrate their noise suppression technology into the Google Nexus One smartphone. The next year AT&T introduced eight different handsets powered by Audience's earSmart technology including the Samsung Galaxy S III Skyrocket and the HTC Vivid.

Harlequin

Harlequin (/ˈhɑːrləkwɪn/; Italian: Arlecchino [arlekˈkiːno], French: Arlequin [aʁləkɛ̃], Old French Harlequin) is the best-known of the zanni or comic servant characters from the Italian Commedia dell'arte. Traditionally believed to have been introduced by Zan Ganassa in the late 16th century, the role was definitively popularized by the Italian actor Tristano Martinelli in Paris in 1584–1585 and became a stock character after Martinelli's death in 1630.

The Harlequin is characterized by his chequered costume. His role is that of a light-hearted, nimble and astute servant, often acting to thwart the plans of his master, and pursuing his own love interest, Colombina, with wit and resourcefulness, often competing with the sterner and melancholic Pierrot. He later develops into a prototype of the romantic hero. Harlequin inherits his physical agility and his trickster qualities, as well as his name, from a mischievous "devil" character in medieval passion plays.

The Harlequin character came to England early in the 17th century and took center stage in the derived genre of the Harlequinade, developed in the early 18th century by John Rich. As the Harlequinade portion of English dramatic genre pantomime developed, Harlequin was routinely paired with the character Clown. As developed by Joseph Grimaldi around 1800, Clown became the mischievous and brutish foil for the more sophisticated Harlequin, who became more of a romantic character. The most influential such pair in Victorian England were the Payne Brothers, active during the 1860s and 1870s.

Harlequin (film)

Harlequin, also known as Dark Forces in United States, is a 1980 Australian thriller film directed by Simon Wincer and starring Robert Powell, Carmen Duncan, David Hemmings and Broderick Crawford. The film is a modern-day version of Rasputin's story: the major characters have the same first names as Rasputin and the Romanov royal family; and their family name, 'Rast', is simply the word 'Tsar' backwards.

Synopsis

An up-and-coming senator, Nick Rast, has a young son who is terminally ill with leukaemia. A mysterious faith healer, Gregory Wolfe, appears and seems to cure the boy. Rast's wife Sandy falls in love with Wolfe, but the powerful interests behind Rast's career, represented by geriatric monster, Doc Wheelan are less happy with events.

Cast

Production

Development

Simon Wincer and Everett De Roche had previously collaborated on Snapshot but were not happy with the film since it was made so hurriedly. They decided to make another film, came up with six ideas and eventually chose The Minister's Musician, a modern-day version of the Rasputin story. They did a treatment and Antony I. Ginnane became involved as producer.

Harlequin (video game)

Harlequin is a strategy-based platform game for the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST released in 1992 by Gremlin Graphics.

The game was written by Andy Finlay, with graphics by Ed Campbell. It was produced by Pete Cook. The sound is credited to Imagitec, and was composed and arranged by Barry Leitch.

Gameplay

Harlequin takes place across multiple eight-way scrolling levels, each one of which is completely unique, featuring different scenery and enemies. Your character, a harlequin, has returned to his homeworld, Chimerica, to mend its broken heart. To do this, he must find the four pieces that the heart has broken into and take them to the central clock tower.

Finding the pieces of the heart involves a fair deal of strategy and puzzle-solving. Almost every location contains switches that, if flicked, can open up new areas of the current level or change things in different levels, creating new pathways through the game and closing others. Completing the game is thus made more difficult, because the game world evolves as the player interacts with it. You don't have to play through the levels in any particular order to complete the game, but you may often come to a dead end and have to retrace your steps in order to flick a switch you missed, thereby opening up a new route. Some levels need to be revisited several times if you want to make progress, and particularly important changes to the game world actually show up on the map that appears between levels, offering clues as to where you should go next.