A zero-waste lifestyle means you opt for sustainable and reusable alternatives and strive to send as little as possible to landfills. This implies replacing as much as possible with reusable products, including clothing, food and drink packaging, and hygiene products, composting what you can, and then only sending a small part of waste to landfills. Zero-waste is impossible, but the visionary term is not about perfection. It's about making a conscious effort to make better choices.

Living a zero-waste lifestyle

The goal of zero waste is to move to a circular economy, which is where rubbish has no existence. Instead of discarding valuable resources, creating a circular economy proposes reusing items or sending them to be recycled so they can be used fully in the system. <ul><li>Designing and managing products and processes can reduce the volume and toxicity of waste and materials and conserve and recover all resources.</li><li>Many manufacturing companies are looking at designing long-lasting, easily maintainable and repairable products.</li></ul>

Circular economy

A landfill site or rubbish dump is a site for dumping waste materials. <ul><li>The decaying rubbish produces weak acidic chemicals, which combine with liquids in the waste to form leachate and landfill gas, which can be toxic. About 42% of all greenhouse gas emissions are caused by the production and use of goods, including food, products and packaging.</li><li>Landfills are changing and destroying animals' natural habitats. Landfill waste is often overloaded with chemicals that can disturb plant growth in nearby areas if it leaches into the ground. The chemicals contaminate plants and waters.</li></ul>

The problem with landfills

The success of any zero waste goal relies on the education and participation of communities and business organisations. <ul><li>Encouraging people to use waste-free practices and taking active participation in designing resource management systems to reduce waste would be invaluable.</li><li>Public education campaigns can inspire participation.</li></ul>

Engaging the community

Start by looking through your trash and recycling bins to see what you're throwing out the most. <ul><li>If your garbage is filled with food scraps, start composting.</li><li>Use eco-friendly versions of paper products like napkins, paper towels, and tissues.</li><li>If you have a lot of food packaging, start buying food from bulk sections where you can bring your own reusable container or packaging.</li></ul>

How to start a zero-waste lifestyle at home

Paper produces about 60-80% of waste. Think before you print. Consider pull-printing as 30% of printing is never collected from the printer. Reduce plastic waste<ul><li>Remove plastic straws from your office</li><li>Ban disposable cutlery and plates</li><li>Cut down on single-use food packaging</li><li>Switch to reusable drinks bottles and coffee cups</li><li>Decrease product packaging</li><li>Then recycle what's left</li></ul> Set up an effective bin system with clear labelling to ensure your staff correctly recycle waste. Educate your staff. Recycling is complicated. Each waste management company uses its own system and has different recycling rules.

How to start a zero waste lifestyle at work

Find out just what the term zero waste means here, and how you can make changes in your lifestyle or business with the goal of sending less waste to landfill

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Science & Nature

What is Zero Waste? What is the Zero Waste Movement?

Moral injury is a trauma response to witnessing or participating in workplace behaviours that contradict one’s moral beliefs in high-stakes situations. Organisational decision makers are ultimately responsible for preventing moral injury, yet individual employees are often forced to deal with the consequences on their own.

Moral injury in the workplace

Terms used to describe responses to moral events.<ul><li>Moral challenges are single incidents or low-stakes transgressions, such as using lower-quality materials or requiring an employee to stay late as an exception.</li><li>Moral stressors involve more substantial or regular moral transgressions, for example, a dental practice that upsell patients on unnecessary treatments.</li><li>Injurious events, such as a health care worker that is required to provide a medical treatment that will lead to more unnecessary treatments.</li></ul>

A Continuum of harm

Denial of moral injury can be a coping mechanism. But that instinct to survive can lead to organisational Stockholm syndrome, where you form a bond with your abusive environment while ignoring its harmful effects. If you find yourself saying, “She probably didn’t mean it that way”, or “He’s just having a rough week again,” take note. It is fine to give someone the benefit of the doubt once or twice. But if it is a pattern that causes destructive outcomes for others, you have to face the harm.

Confront denial and listen to your pain

Moral injury is often described as the wounding of the soul and needs a particular kind of attention to heal. An honest conversation with a trusted professional is a good way to release the emotional pain. Restoration isn’t a quick process, but if you want to leave behind the remnants of moral injury, you’ll need to commit to the process.

Engage in “soul care” as self-care

The bitterness of moral injury can lead to craving revenge. However, any momentary satisfaction will be short-lived as you'll be compromising the very values that were injured. Learning to self-regulate is critical to steering clear of acting impulsively. A close confidant, mentor, or coach that you can call on short notice can be helpful.

Avoid vengeful and entitled reactions

When your conscience has been wounded, choosing forgiveness requires you to step back and explore your relationship to this often misunderstood value. <ul><li>Forgiveness is not the restoration of trust. Forgiveness means letting go of your bitterness and desire to pay back for the harm incurred. It's letting go of your anger as a source of motivation.</li><li>Forgiveness is a process. It's a daily choice to engage and release the emotions that flood your mind.</li></ul>

Determine what role forgiveness can play

Grappling with the harm we've caused is one of the most painful discoveries when dealing with moral injury. Guilt and shame can cause health issues. One way to shed regret and shame is to accept the things you did and didn't do. This will reignite your convictions.

Shed shame to restore your moral center

We cannot restore our conscience while continuing to violate our values. It also cannot heal in the same situation where the injury continues to take place. Sometimes it is possible to do good work or help change our organisation, such as helping to create new regulations. But if that's not possible, leaving the situation is a necessary step.

Change your situation

Moral injury occurs across occupations and is a trauma response to witnessing or participating in workplace behaviors that contradict one’s moral beliefs in high-stakes situations. While the ultimate responsibility for preventing moral injury rests on organizational decision makers, individual employees are often forced to deal with the consequences on their own. The authors’ advice, prompted by readers’ responses to their recent article, is directed to those who must take care of themselves while their employers put them into situations of moral harm. If your conscience has been wounded, even by your own hand, they offer six ways for you to begin your process of restoration.

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Philosophy

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Career

What to Do If Your Job Compromises Your Morals

<ul><li class="ql-align-justify">Whether it's driverless cars to personal robots, AI will have to make decisions that could significantly affect our lives. </li><li class="ql-align-justify">One way to instill ethics in AI is to have everyone vote on what robots should do in particular situations. But are values and morals really about what the majority want? </li><li class="ql-align-justify">When we make moral decisions, we each weigh up principles and certain values. It's unlikely that we can recreate that in AI.</li></ul>

Robot Ethics: Key Takeaways

<ul><li>An international team of philosophers, scientists, and data analysts held The Moral Machine Experiment.</li><li>40 million responses across 233 countries and territories about what people would do in this or that moral situation.</li><li> The problems were modifications to the famous “<a href="https://bigthink.com/thinking/trolley-problem-solution/">trolley problem</a>” — the thought experiment which asks whether it’s better to actively kill one person or passively let more than one person die. </li><li>Most people favour humans over animals, many humans over fewer, and younger over older.</li><li>Respondents prefered saving women over men, doctors over athletes, and the fit over the unfit.</li></ul>

Human Bias In Choices: The Moral Machine Experiment

In many cases, our intentions and actions are jarringly different; the millions of dollars wasted on unused gym memberships and the scattered ground of broken marriages are testament to that. In other situations, we simply don’t know what we would do. Also, it’s not clear that values and ethics are something that should be democratized. The lone and brave good person is just as good in a mass of bad.

The Democratization of Values for Ethical AI

<ul><li>Moral thought experiments serve to perturb the initial conditions of a moral situation until one's intuitions vary.</li><li>This can be philosophically useful insofar as we may be able to analyze which salient feature of the dilemma caused that variance.</li><li>Thought experiments are evidence that either corroborates or falsifies a certain hypothesis. They are not the hypothesis itself.</li></ul>

The Purpose of Thought Experiments

There are a <a href="https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/can-ai-think-understand/">great</a> <a href="https://bigthink.com/the-present/mcdonalds-replacing-human-drivethru-ai/">many</a> <a href="https://bigthink.com/the-future/artificial-general-intelligence-impossible/">philosophical</a> <a href="https://bigthink.com/the-present/ai-trustworthiness/">problems</a> raised by emerging technology and AI. As machines start to integrate more and more into our lives, they will inevitably face more and more ethical decisions. On any given day, you will make a great many ethical decisions, and a significant number of these will be your choice based on your values. There is no “perfect moral citizen” and there is no black and white when it comes to right and wrong. If there were, ethics would be a much less interesting area of study.

Building An Ethical AI

We each make decisions based on certain values and principles. But whose do we choose as the template for ethical AI?

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Technology & The Future

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Artificial Intelligence

Whose ethics should be programmed into the robots of tomorrow?

While concerns about AI and ethical violations have become common in companies, turning these anxieties into actionable conversations can be tough. With the complexities of machine learning, ethics, and of their points of intersection, there are no quick fixes, and conversations around these issues can feel nebulous and abstract. Getting to the desired outcomes requires learning to talk about these issues differently.

The Premise

Over the past several years, concerns around AI ethics have gone mainstream. The concerns, and the outcomes everyone wants to avoid, are largely agreed upon and well documented. No one wants to push out discriminatory or biased AI. No one wants to be the object of a lawsuit or regulatory investigation for violations of privacy. But once we’ve all agreed that biased, black box, privacy-violating AI is bad, where do we go from here? The question most every senior leader asks is: How do we take action to mitigate those ethical risks?

AI Ethics

Acting quickly to address concerns is admirable, but with the complexities of machine learning, ethics, and of their points of intersection, there are no quick fixes. To implement, scale, and maintain effective AI ethical risk mitigation strategies, companies should begin with a deep understanding of the problems they’re trying to solve. A challenge, however, is that conversations about AI ethics can feel nebulous. The first step, then, should consist of learning how to talk about it in concrete, actionable ways.

Understanding The Problems That Need To Be Solved

Summon a senior-level working group that is responsible for driving AI ethics in your organization. They should have the right skills, experience, and knowledge such that the conversations are well-informed about the business needs, technical capacities, and operational know-how. Involve four kinds of people: technologists, legal/compliance experts, ethicists, and business leaders. Their collective goal is to understand the sources of ethical risks generally, for the industry of which they are members, and for their particular company.

The People Who Need To Be Involved

You need the technologist to assess what is technologically feasible, not only at a per product level but also at an organizational level. That is because, in part, various ethical risk mitigation plans require different tech tools and skills. Knowing where your organization is from a technological perspective can be essential to mapping out how to identify and close the biggest gaps.

The Tech Guys

Legal and compliance experts are there to help ensure that any new risk mitigation plan is compatible and not redundant with existing risk mitigation practices. Legal issues loom particularly large in light of the fact that it’s neither clear how existing laws and regulations bear on new technologies, nor what new regulations or laws are coming down the pipeline.

The Legal Eagles

Ethicists are there to help ensure a systematic and thorough investigation into the ethical and reputational risks you should attend to, not only by virtue of developing and procuring AI, but also those risks that are particular to your industry and/or your organization. Their importance is particularly relevant because compliance with outdated regulations does not ensure the ethical and reputational safety of your organization.

The Path Correctors

Business leaders should help ensure that all risk is mitigated in a way that is compatible with business necessities and goals. Zero risk is an impossibility so long as anyone does anything. But unnecessary risk is a threat to the bottom line, and risk mitigation strategies also should be chosen with an eye towards what is economically feasible.

The Business Leaders

Once the team is in place, here are three crucial conversations to have. <ul><li>One conversation concerns coming to a shared understanding of what goals an AI ethical risk program should be striving for. </li><li>The second conversation concerns identifying gaps between where the organization is now and where it wants to be. </li><li>The third conversation is aimed at understanding the sources of those gaps so that they are comprehensively and effectively addressed.</li></ul>

Three Conversations to Push Things Forward

Any conversation should recognize that legal compliance (like the anti-discrimination law) and regulatory compliance are table stakes. The question to address is: Given that the set of ethical risks is not identical to the set of legal/regulatory risks, what do we identify as the ethical risks for our industry/organization and where do we stand on them?

Define Your Organization’s Ethical Standard for AI

There are various technical “solutions” or “fixes” to AI ethics problems. A number of software products from big tech to startups to non-profits help data scientists apply quantitative metrics of fairness to their model outputs. Tools like LIME and SHAP aid data scientists in explaining how outputs are arrived at in the first place. But virtually no one thinks these technical solutions, or any technological solution for that matter, will sufficiently mitigate the ethical risk and transform your organization into one that meets its AI ethics standards.

Identify the Gaps Between Where You Are Now and What Your Standards Call For

Your AI ethics team should determine where their respective limits are and how their skills and knowledge can complement each other. This means asking:<ul><li>What, exactly, is the risk we’re trying to mitigate?</li><li>How does software/quantitative analysis help us mitigate that risk?</li><li>What gaps do the software/quantitative analyses leave?</li><li>What kinds of qualitative assessments do we need to make, when do we need to make them, on what basis do we make them, and who should make them, so that those gaps are appropriately filled?</li></ul>

Know The Limits

Many conversations around bias in AI start with giving examples and immediately talking about “biased data sets.” Sometimes this will slide into talk about “implicit bias” or “unconscious bias,” which are terms borrowed from psychology that lack a clear and direct application to “biased data sets.” But it’s not enough to say, “the models are trained on biased data sets” or “the AI reflects our historical societal discriminatory actions and policies.”

Understand the Complex Sources of The Problems and Operationalize Solutions

Productive conversations on ethics should go deeper than broad stroke examples descried by specialists and non-specialists alike. Your organization needs the right people at the table so that its standards can be defined and deepened. Your organization should fruitfully marry its quantitative and qualitative approaches to ethical risk mitigation so it can close the gaps between where it is now and where it wants it to be. And it should appreciate the complexity of the sources of its AI ethical risks.

The Bottom Line

Move from abstract concerns to actionable plans.

Discover the world of business and economics.

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Economics

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Business

Ethics and AI: 3 Conversations Companies Need to Have

Why is the Sky Blue?Some say it's due to the blue oceans.Some think it's what's in the atmosphere(mostly nitrogen and oxygen).Some believe it's because outer space is blue.But truthfully, it has to do with the size of the particles in the Earth's atmosphere. They are considered "small" particles (much less than 1 nanometer across).These small particles scatter sunlight as it passes through.

The Colour Of The Sky

Sunlight contains all visible colours of light and more.In the 1870s, a man named Rayleigh found that each colour (or wavelength) of light is scattered to a different degree.More blue light than other colours is scattered out of the sunlight travelling through the atmosphere.This creates a diffuse blue glow and makes the sun appear yellow in colour.

The Light Of The Sun

When the sun is lower in the sky, sunlight travels a longer distance through the atmosphere to reach an observer.This means it encounters more particles that scatter out most of the blue light, as well as some green and yellow light. This leaves mostly red light when the sunlight reaches the observer.

Evening Time: Yellow And Red

Why Is the Sky Blue? A tiny explanatory illustration brought to you by Halftone.

Why is the Sky Blue? | Halftone

The development of AI is creating new opportunities to improve the lives of people around the world, from business to healthcare to education. 
It is also raising new questions about the best way to build fairness, interpretability, privacy, and security into these systems.

Responsible AI practices

Reliable, effective user-centered AI systems should be designed following <a href="https://techdevguide.withgoogle.com/">general best practices for software systems</a>, together with practices that address considerations unique to machine learning.

General recommended practices for AI

The way actual users experience your system is essential to assessing the true impact of its predictions, recommendations, and decisions.<ul><li>Design features with appropriate disclosures built-in: clarity and control are crucial to a good user experience.</li><li>Consider augmentation and assistance.</li><li>Model potential adverse feedback early in the design process, followed by specific live testing and iteration for a small fraction of traffic before full deployment.</li><li>Engage with a diverse set of users and use-case scenarios, and incorporate feedback before and throughout project development. </li></ul>

Use a human-centred design approach

The use of several metrics rather than a single one will help you to understand the tradeoffs between different kinds of errors and experiences.Consider metrics including feedback from user surveys, quantities that track overall system performance and short- and long-term product health (e.g., click-through rate and customer lifetime value, respectively), and false positive and false negative rates sliced across different subgroups.Ensure that your metrics are appropriate for the context and goals of your system.

Identify multiple metrics to assess training and monitoring

ML models will reflect the data they are trained on, so analyze your raw data carefully to ensure you understand it. <ul><li>Does your data contain any mistakes (e.g., missing values, incorrect labels)?</li><li>Is your data sampled in a way that represents your users and real-world settings?</li><li>Are any features in your model redundant or unnecessary? </li><li>If you are using a data label X as a proxy to predict a label Y, in which cases is the gap between X and Y problematic?</li></ul>

Directly examine your raw data

The difference between performance during training and performance during serving—is a persistent challenge. 
During training, try to identify potential skews and work to address them, including by adjusting your training data or objective function. During the evaluation, continue to try to get evaluation data that is as representative as possible of the deployed setting.

Training-serving skew

<ul><li>A model trained to detect correlations should not be used to make causal inferences, or imply that it can. </li><li>Machine learning models today are largely a reflection of the patterns of their training data.</li><li>Communicate limitations to users where possible.</li></ul>

Understand the limitations of your dataset and model

<ul>
<li>Conduct rigorous unit tests to test each component of the system in isolation.</li>
<li>Conduct integration tests to understand how individual ML components interact with other parts of the overall system.</li>
<li>Proactively detect input drift by testing the statistics of the inputs to the AI system to make sure they are not changing in unexpected ways.</li>
<li>Use a gold standard dataset to test the system and ensure that it continues to behave as expected.</li>
<li>Conduct iterative user testing to incorporate a diverse set of users’ needs in the development cycles.</li>
<li>Build quality checks into a system.</li>
</ul>

Test, test, test

<ul><li>Issues will occur: any model of the world is imperfect almost by definition. Build time into your product roadmap to allow you to address issues.</li><li>Consider both short- and long-term solutions to issues. A simple fix (e.g., blocklisting) may help to solve a problem quickly, but may not be the optimal solution in the long run. Balance short-term simple fixes with longer-term learned solutions.</li><li>Before updating a deployed model, analyze how the candidate and deployed models differ, and how the update will affect the overall system quality and user experience.</li></ul>

Monitor and update the system after deployment

We're committed to progress in the responsible development of AI and to sharing knowledge, research, tools, datasets, and other resources. Learn more about recommended practices and our current work.

Responsible AI practices – Google AI

Some studies show that people want to believe that the products they buy support their values. Other studies found the opposite and even dismissed the idea of the ethical consumer. However, a review of existing research on consumer morality identified weaknesses in how previous studies assessed morality. As a result, a recent study tested a new way of consumer morality and found that morality does matter but that consumers interpret morality differently from researchers.

Research on Consumer Morality

An attitude-based approach makes it possible to identify what consumers view as a moral decision or not. Research found that getting people to self-perceive their own attitudes about a product based on morality makes them more likely to purchase it. Furthermore, the more moral a person perceived a product to be, the more likely they were to consider buying it, regardless of how well the product was reviewed.

Disentangling Morality From Dislike

Consumers care about morality and reliably act on it. Positioning products in ways that support a consumer's sense of morality may potentially be an effective form of motivating consumer behaviour. Research shows that people hold morally based attitudes towards many unlikely products, such as refrigerators. Therefore, it is important to learn how different consumer segments differentially moralise the same products or attributes.

Marketing on Morality

New research shows that morality matters—but it’s in the eye of the beholder.

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Marketing & Sales

startup

Startups

Yes, Consumers Care if Your Product Is Ethical

This is the branch of philosophy that deals with the ethical questions around sports competitions. Sports have rules that should be enforced. This means that every player needs to respect the game's rules and has the right to see the rules applied equally to every other contestant. Sport is then a critical tool to teach justice, respect, and honesty.

Sports ethics

Considering how widely drug and medical techniques are used in professional sport, it has become increasingly difficult to establish a boundary between acceptable performance enhancers and those that are problematic. Professional athletes of well-off teams often get medical aids to increase their performances. But the question remains whether setting the tolerability threshold of enhancers as low as possible is more respectful of athletes’ health and safety.

Enhancement and doping

The high salaries of certain athletes and the difference in pay between players have also allowed the rethinking of compensation. What should be a just compensation, and should salaries be capped? The entertainment industry around sport also offers us the opportunity to question to what extent income can contribute to a good life.

Compensation in sports

Sports ethics has come to be a foremost point of contact between philosophy, civil institutions, and society at large.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

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Health

problemsolving

Problem Solving

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Sports

How Sports Can Test Philosophical Theories

The movie is first made in the head. 
<ul>
<li>The story that is inside the brain, in the beginning, serves as a foundation to the project, which will eventually see lots of changes, twists and turns. </li>
<li>Important story elements like plot, characters, narrative, conflict etc. are decided at this stage.</li>
<li>It is good to carry a notepad or install a note-taking app to jot down fresh ideas that come up in this initial stage. </li>
<li>Keep a note of newspaper articles, real-life observations and even dreams!</li>
</ul>

The Filmmaking Process: The Idea

The script makes the story, dialogue, and plot points in a systematic, linear format. The team relies on this tool to know what to do and uses this as a reference point for the action and dialogue lines.It is a good idea to improvise on your ‘bound’ script and let the actors improvise their performance, enhancing the story and visual impact.

The Filmmaking Process: The Script

Acting as a rough visual scene sequence for the filmmaker, the Storyboard represents what shots are planned to be filmed. Many details can be planned over here, based on the ideas in the filmmaker's head that need to be brought to screen.For those who cannot draw, it is a good idea to click pictures on the smartphone of props representing how you want the scene to be shot later.

The Filmmaking Process: The Storyboards

It pays to take as much time as possible to get the right people to work with, considering their work experience, discipline and talent stack. One can hold auditions to select the best talent, and not just take someone you know from the past, as an obligation or courtesy.

The Filmmaking Process: Cast And Crew

The filmmaker needs to scout for the best shooting locations. This is a fun part where there is lots of travel, clicking pictures and shooting small videos. Choose places that can accommodate the actors and the cameras, lights, crew as well.

The Filmmaking Process: The Locations

One can prepare for the filming process by having a shoot script and a schedule ready and shared with all the stakeholders. Don’t rush and try to accommodate changes and eventual problems/challenges.Shoot the same scene from multiple angles, giving you more footage to work with.

The Filmmaking Process: The Filming

This lengthy process is where all the footage is edited and placed together to create the first rough cut of the movie. The next step is adding sound effects, dialogues, music and visual effects.One can show the rough cut to take opinion from trusted individuals, removing segments that won’t work with the audience.

The Filmmaking Process: Post-Production

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Movies & Shows

The Beginner's Guide to the Filmmaking Process

Cantata comes from the Italian word cantare, which means "to sing." It originated in the early 17th-century, but, as with any musical form, it has evolved through the years.At the very beginning, cantatas referred to a music piece that is meant to be sung. Loosely defined today, a cantata is a vocal work with multiple movements and instrumental accompaniment; it can be based on either a secular or sacred subject.

Cantata

Originally, chamber music referred to a type of classical music that was performed in a small space such as a house or a palace room. The number of instruments used was few and without a <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-a-conductor-2456662">conductor</a> to guide the musicians.Today, chamber music is performed very similarly in terms of the size of the venue and the number of instruments used.

Chamber Music

Choral music refers to music which is sung by a choir. Each musical part is sung by two or more voices. The size of a choir varies; it can be as few as a dozen singers or as large as to be able to sing <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/gustav-mahler-biography-723887">Gustav Mahler's</a> Symphony No. 8 in E Flat Major, also known as Symphony of a Thousand.

Choral Music

The suite is a type of instrumental dance music that emerged during the <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/renaissance-music-timeline-2456181">Renaissance</a> and was further developed during the <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/baroque-music-timeline-2457147">Baroque Period</a>. It consists of several movements or short pieces in the same key and functions as dance music or dinner music during social gatherings.

Dance Suite

The fugue is a type of polyphonic composition or compositional technique based on a principal theme (subject) and melodic lines (<a href="https://www.liveabout.com/bright-and-warm-singing-2994193">counterpoint</a>) that imitate the principal theme. The fugue is believed to have developed from the canon which appeared during the 13th century.

Fugue

Also known as church music, it is music performed during worship or a religious rite. It evolved from the music performed in Jewish synagogues. In its early form, singers were accompanied by an organ, then by the 12th-century liturgical music adapted a polyphonic style.

Liturgical Music

Motet emerged in Paris around the year 1200. It is a type of polyphonic vocal music which uses <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/rhythm-definition-2701751">rhythm patterns</a>. <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-choral-music-2456543">Early motets</a> were both sacred and secular; touching on subjects like love, politics and religion. It flourished until the 1700s and today is still being used by the Catholic Church.

Motet

An opera is generally referred to as a stage presentation or work that combines music, costumes, and scenery to tell a story. Most operas are sung, with few or no spoken lines. The word "opera" is actually a shortened word for the term "opera in musica".

Opera

An oratorio is an extended composition for vocal soloists, <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-a-chorus-2456545">chorus</a> and <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-an-orchestra-2456541">orchestra</a>; the narrative text is usually based on scripture or biblical stories but is non-liturgical.Although the oratorio is often about sacred subjects, it may also deal with semi-sacred subjects.

Oratorio

It is a form of medieval church music that involves chanting; it emerged around 100 C.E. Plainchant does not use any instrumental accompaniment. Instead, it uses words that are sung. It was the only type of music allowed in Christian churches early on.

Plainchant (Plainsong)

Polyphony is a characteristic of Western music.It began when singers started improvising with parallel melodies, with emphasis on fourth (ex. C to F) and fifth (ex. C to G) <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/what-are-intervals-2456549">intervals</a>. This marked the start of polyphony wherein several musical lines were combined.As singers continued experimenting with melodies, polyphony became more elaborate and complex.

Polyphony

A <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/melody-definition-2701673">round</a> is a vocal piece wherein different voices sing the same melody, at the same pitch, but the lines are successively sung.An early example of a round is Sumer is icumen in, a piece that is also an example of a six-voice polyphony. The children's song Row, Row, Row Your Boat is another example of a round.

Round

A symphony often has 3 to 4 <a href="https://www.liveabout.com/what-is-a-symphony-724425">movements</a>. The beginning is moderately fast, the next section is slow followed by a minuet, and then a very fast conclusion.Symphonies had its roots from Baroque sinfonias, but composers like Haydn (known as "The Father of the Symphony") and Beethoven (whose popular work includes the "Ninth Symphony") further developed and influenced this music form.

Symphony

Learn to tell the difference between music styles of the early music and common-practice period, including cantata, motet, opera, symphony and more.

What is Zero Waste? What is the Zero Waste Movement?

What to Do If Your Job Compromises Your Morals

Whose ethics should be programmed into the robots of tomorrow?

Ethics and AI: 3 Conversations Companies Need to Have

Why is the Sky Blue? | Halftone

Anika Dhar