Smile

A smile is a facial expression formed primarily by flexing the muscles at the sides of the mouth. Some smiles include a contraction of the muscles at the corner of the eyes, an action known as a "Duchenne smile". Smiles performed without the eye contraction can be perceived as "fake".

Among humans, smiling is an expression denoting pleasure, sociability, happiness, or amusement. It is distinct from a similar but usually involuntary expression of anxiety known as a grimace. Although cross-cultural studies have shown that smiling is a means of communication throughout the world, there are large differences between different cultures, with some using smiles to convey confusion or embarrassment.

Historical background

Primatologist Signe Preuschoft traces the smile back over 30 million years of evolution to a "fear grin" stemming from monkeys and apes who often used barely clenched teeth to portray to predators that they were harmless. The smile may have evolved differently among species and especially among humans. Apart from Biology as an academic discipline that interprets the smile, those who study kinesics and psychology such as Freitas-Magalhaes view the smile as an affect display that can communicate feelings such as love, happiness, pride, contempt, and embarrassment.

Smile! (novel)

Smile! is a children's book by Geraldine McCaughrean. In 2004 it won the Nestlé Smarties Book Prize Bronze Award.

References

Smile (The Beach Boys album)

Smile (occasionally typeset as SMiLE) was a projected album by American rock band the Beach Boys intended to follow their 11th studio album Pet Sounds. After the group's songwriting leader Brian Wilson abandoned large portions of music recorded between 1966 and 1967, the band recorded and released the dramatically scaled-down Smiley Smile album in its place. Some of the original Smile tracks eventually found their way onto subsequent Beach Boys studio and compilation albums. As more fans learned of the project's origins, details of its recordings acquired considerable mystique, and it was later acknowledged as the most legendary unreleased album in the history of popular music.

Working with lyricist Van Dyke Parks, Smile was composed as a multi-thematic concept album, existing today in its unfinished and fragmented state as an unordered series of abstract musical vignettes. Its genesis came during the recording of Pet Sounds, when Wilson began recording a new single: "Good Vibrations". The track was created by an unprecedented recording technique: over 90 hours of tape was recorded, spliced, and reduced into a three-minute pop song. It quickly became the band's biggest international hit yet; Smile was to be produced in a similar fashion. Wilson touted the album "a teenage symphony to God," incorporating a diverse range of music styles including psychedelic, doo-wop, barbershop singing, ragtime, yodeling, early American folk, classical music, and avant-garde explorations into noise and musical acoustics. Its projected singles were "Heroes and Villains", a Western musical comedy, and "Vega-Tables", a satire of physical fitness.

+/- (band)

+/-, or Plus/Minus, is an American indietronic band formed in 2001. The band makes use of both electronic and traditional instruments, and has sought to use electronics to recreate traditional indie rock song forms and instrumental structures. The group has released two albums on each of the American indie labels Teenbeat Records and Absolutely Kosher, and their track "All I do" was prominently featured in the soundtrack for the major film Wicker Park. The group has developed a devoted following in Japan and Taiwan, and has toured there frequently. Although many artists append bonus tracks onto the end of Japanese album releases to discourage purchasers from buying cheaper US import versions, the overseas versions of +/- albums are usually quite different from the US versions - tracklists can be rearranged, artwork with noticeable changes is used, and tracks from the US version can be replaced as well as augmented by bonus tracks.

History

Bandō

Bandō may refer to:

People

Other

See also

Bando (disambiguation)

Band society

A band society is the simplest form of human society. A band generally consists of a small kin group, no larger than an extended family or clan; one definition sees a band as consisting of no more than 100 individuals.

Characteristics

Bands have a loose organization. Their power structure is often egalitarian and has informal leadership; the older members of the band generally are looked to for guidance and advice, and decisions are often made on a consensus basis, but there are no written laws and none of the specialised coercive roles (e.g., police) typically seen in more complex societies. Bands' customs are almost always transmitted orally. Formal social institutions are few or non-existent. Religion is generally based on family tradition, individual experience, or counsel from a shaman. All known band societies hunt and gather to obtain their subsistence.

Definitions and distinctions

In his 1972 study, The Notion of the Tribe, Morton Fried defined bands as small, mobile, and fluid social formations with weak leadership that do not generate surpluses, pay taxes nor support a standing army.