Response to Kenneth Ring's “Religious Wars in the NDE Movement: Some Personal Reflections on Michael Sabom's Light & Death”

This article responds to 15 excerpts from Kenneth Ring's paper that question the accuracy and integrity of Light & Death (Sabom, 1998).     

五月颂歌

五月是一首绿油油的歌,从春天的枝头飘来,写进泥土的芳香,怀揣秋天金灿灿的梦,带着柳叶的滴翠,带着桃花的嫣红,引来欢唱的喜鹊,向人们叙述,叙述这火红五月的来历……     

Race – Kenneth Leech

Book reviewed:
Race , Kenneth Leech, Church Publishing Inc 2005 (0-89869-495-7), xi + 160 pp., pb $20.00     

Behavioral consequences of song learning: Discrimination of song types by male white-crowned sparrows

The functional significance of learned population differences in male song in the white-crowned sparrow was explored in natural populations using playback tests. Laboratory results have shown that learning of the population-specific song seems to take place in early life and is strongly dependent upon the nature of the auditory experience at that time. However, the varied results of recent studies make it difficult to reach a confident conclusion about the ecological functions of song learning. The present research took advantage of naturally occurring variation in the differences between songs of adjacent populations to determine a function relating degree of difference in song to intensity of territorial singing elicited. Applying a typological evaluation of syllable structure to the four segments of the song allowed a crude quantitative ranking of the differences between local songs and playback stimuli. These results, together with those of other studies, suggest a unimodal aggressive response function of males to songs of other males. A maximum response to songs slightly different from the local song environment suggests that male exclusion based upon acquired song components may contribute to the maintenance of discrete and stable song dialects.     

Social metrics of song learning

Five metrics of song learning are described for brown-headed cowbirds (Molothrus ater). The intent of these metrics is to capture not only the behavior of the song learner but the social context in which song learning occurs. Playback procedures, observations of mating, and acoustic and functional assessment of song content are combined to yield measures of song potency, functional validity, social dynamics, vocal flexibility, and social reactivity. Taken as a whole, the results revealed by these metrics indicate that males learn to be effective singers by attending to the social consequences of their behavior.     

Cross-series adaptation using song and string

The acoustic-auditory feature “risetime” has been claimed to underlie both the phoneticaffricate-fricative distinction and the nonphoneticplucked-string/bowed-string distinction. We used the perceptual adaptation technique to determine whether the risetime differences of the [d3a]-[3a] distinction would therefore be registered by the same mechanism that mediates risetime differences for the plucked-bowed distinction. Two continua were used, one of digitally modified natural speech and one of synthetic violin sounds, in which the risetime was varied across each set of tokens from 0 msec to 80 msec in steps of 10 msec. The speech was sung and the violin notes were synthesized with the same fundamental frequency, 294 Hz. Adaptation of the category boundaries was observed only when speech adaptors were tested with the speech continuum and when violin adaptors were tested with the violin continuum. When crossseries tests were performed (violin adaptors tested with the speech series, and speech adaptors tested with the violin series), no effect of adaptation was observed. This finding indicates that these speech and violin sounds, despite obvious acoustic similarities, do not share the same feature detectors.     

Culture: The song beyond words

The paperarises from Pakeha attem pts to dealwith bicultural responsiveness in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and represents the application of a social constructionist conceptual framework to practical issues faced by counsel brsworking around cultural difference. It seeks to de‐construct some of the assumptions made in discourses around difference through expbration of the language through, and by which, we make cross‐cultural connections. Readers are invited to consider the relationship of text to ethos, and the relationship of the words we use to the space between the words. It is suggested that the power of this in‐between space, this chora (Kristeva, 1980), is related to the expression of culture. The paper aims to present a challenge to those who at times wonder about the ethics and efficacy of their counselling profession in relation to their desire to create a betterworld — in particular in redressing the inequities which invariably exist between different cultures. It is proposed that counselling as a discourse technology is a powerful tool for change. However, as a marketable technology, forms of discourse need constant monitoring since certain forms of language can be both colonised and colonising. Colonisation, with its implications of dominance and exploitation, is seen as incompatible with counselling values. Consideration is given to three aspects of discourse worthy of consideration for those working for change: ethos, individual ownership and nominalisation.     

Multiple levels of representation of song by European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris): open-ended categorization of starling song types and differential forgetting of song categories and exemplars

Four European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) were trained to discriminate among conspecific and heterospecific song segments in a go/no-go operant task. In Experiment 1, the starlings discriminated among novel starling and heterospecific songs, indicating an open-ended category of conspecific song types. The starlings also showed excellent memory for reinforced conspecific songs and discriminated among subordinate categories of conspecific song. In Experiment 2, the starlings were presented with the song segments from Experiment 1 after an 8-month delay period. The starlings retained the discrimination between conspecific and heterospecific songs but not among conspecific songs. The starlings also retained memory for individual singers over the 8-month delay. Starlings categorize song at the level of species, and at subordinate categories of song types, and may have superior long-term retention of song categories relative to song exemplars.