Everyday we find ourselves making hundreds of decisions, often without noticing the relevance of even the most miniscule choice that can grow and form into a life altering state of mind. The human brain is the most elaborately complex structure in existence, enabling us to be able to function and comprehend our surroundings. With complexity, also comes malfunctions, which will inevitably occur occasionally ranging in a wide variety of defects from mental illnesses, to super genius abilities. What a certain individual may see as reality, may be completely opposite of the reality you or I see. This poses the question, who decides which reality is true? This paper contains documentation of my research and process through writing and performing an original short film confronting observations that we all experience in our daily lives in the form of a very extreme circumstance that will attempt to force a new way of thinking about what ties us all together as a species, despite our many unique and diverse perceptions. "Metamorphosis" was shown November 30th, 2012 as a short film. To coincide with the film, a promotional website was made to accompany the piece, as well as graphics.

Empathy, defined as the capacity to observe the feelings of another person and to respond with care and concern for that other person, is a very important quality of successful people (Cotton, 2000). However, there is very little research on the development of empathy in children, with a definite gap in research on the development of empathy in children from 24 to 48 months of age. The characteristic of empathy can be very difficult for young children to portray because of their tendency to be egocentric and their difficulty in recognizing the feelings of others. This study attempts to close the research gap. It is based on prior research indicating that movement in synchrony with music could encourage children, 24 to 36 months, to demonstrate empathetic behavior. The study included seven participants between the ages of 24-36 months. Field notes, as well as videotapes, captured the data. Before the study took place, teachers rated each child’s level of empathy in the classroom. In the first part of the study the children were bounced to the beat of the music and divided into two groups. In the synchronous group the principal investigator would stand in front of the child and bounce synchronously with the child. In the Asynchronous group the principal investigator would bounce asynchronously to the child in random unpredictable beats. The principal investigator would then complete a task of drawing a picture with each child. The principal investigator would then drop the crayon and act as if she were unable to reach it to see if the child would take action to help retrieve the crayon. The second part of the study involved a group activity, led by the principal investigator, in which children moved synchronously to music, using child safe rhythm sticks. The principal investigator would then drop her stick and act as if she was unable to reach it. In both parts of the study children were observed to see if they demonstrated any type of empathetic behavior towards the other children participating or towards the researcher. Results indicate that children who demonstrated empathetic or helping behaviors were originally part of the synchronous group. These results suggest that moving synchronously to music can encourage children to demonstrate empathetic behavior as well as create a connection between the participants. With this knowledge teachers will be able to create more effective classrooms where development of empathy is fostered.

A documentation of the rehearsal process of Edward Albee's The Zoo Story, written by the actor playing Jerry and attempting to use the Stella Adler technique of acting.

The Beauty of Stage Managing: Being a Catalyst for the Theatrical Arts analyzes the art and craft of stage management. My experiences as a theatre student at East Tennessee State University from 2009-2012, culminated in my final senior capstone as the stage manager for the ETSU Division of Theatre and Dance production of Beautiful Bodies by Laura Shaine Cunningham (performed October 18-21 2012 at the Bud Frank Theatre). In addition, the following research of the history and development of stage management and its modern practices created a better understanding of the artistic field. Both in theory and in practice, I explored the multitude of organizational and artistic responsibilities that are in the custody of the stage manager.

In the Altai Mountains of far-western Mongolia near the convergence of China, Kazakhstan, and Russia, the Biluut Rock Art Complex contains over 9,000 petroglyphs. Hundreds of associated archaeological features including stone mounds and different types of standing stones are also present. Perhaps most crucial to connecting Biluut rock art with these features are deer stones, found not only here, but also throughout northern and central Mongolia, the larger Altai region, and Central Asia. These monuments bear important connections to khirigsuurs, Bronze Age burial mounds of stone encircled by ringed “fences”. Stylized “Mongolian deer” engraved on the classical type of deer stone have also been found on natural rock panels on the three Biluut hills. Combined rock art and archaeological research as part of a larger project aims to clarify cultural developments in the Bronze and early Iron Ages, especially. My thesis contributes to these efforts by aiding in the documentation, cataloguing, analysis, and interpretation of Mongolian deer and other deer imagery at Biluut, in the context of rock art and archaeology in the general region. Systematic stylistic analysis of Mongolian deer forms is discussed in light of new data collected from Biluut 3 in the summer of 2011, then extended to a mixed body of deer imagery as a whole. This refines perspectives on the language of Mongolian deer imagery at Biluut and nearby sites (which I initiated as the focus of my McNair project in 2010-2011), and extends to the wider body of deer imagery. Considering the cosmology and gender significance of deer imagery, I critically engage with Jacobson-Tepfer’s “Deer Goddess” interpretation of the classical Mongolian deer figure-type. A core component of this research is an investigation of Mongolian shamanism and related Siberian forms of shamanism.

As a music student who was always more attracted to the “academic” side of music rather than the performance side, I have come to hold a great respect for music history. This interest only grew when I got the opportunity to study music for a semester in Edinburgh, Scotland. Being surrounded by so much history, both musical and artistic, only fed my passion. I began to notice many similarities between the development of music and art both during lectures at the university and in my leisure time in galleries. I noticed that composers and visual artists in the same time period would hold similar beliefs or thoughts, therefore similarities could be found between the two art forms. Oftentimes, I would come across a composer whose compositional techniques were directly influenced by an artist and/or vice versa. I became interested in this type of cross-pollination in music and soon began to ask myself the question “Have the development of art and music always been influenced by each other? How many composers were inspired by art?” When it came time to begin my honors thesis, I decided to address this topic. So, I chose to explore this type of cross-pollination in music and, in conjunction with this research, create my own musical composition based on a work of visual art of my own choosing. Specifically, I wanted to look more carefully at the technique composers had used historically to connect their pieces of music with particular pieces of visual art. I therefore chose several art-influenced compositions to examine how the music expresses the art. In the first chapter of my thesis, I discuss the problem of turning spatially existing art into a temporally existing composition and explore several compositions in which the composers chose to construct a musical narrative as an approach to this challenge. In the second chapter, I revisit the problem of turning art into music but instead explore a different set of compositions that overcome this issue using a ‘snapshot’ technique. In the third chapter, I take a look at ekprasis as a technique used to translate abstract art into music and focus on how one composition in particular expresses the artwork. The fourth chapter is a journal discussing the art I have chosen, the stages in my compositional process, and how I used what I learned from my research to create my own composition. I have included the score of my composition as the fifth chapter.

This honor’s thesis and my solo exhibition, borne from the love of wilderness, seek to connect with the reader/viewer personally as nature is connected with us. My art refers to the responsibility we all share for a connection to and stewardship of nature. Through my show and thesis and through the lens of art, I hope to inform and raise consciousness of our waning and coveted American wildernesses and natural wonders. Each piece in my show has a historical context that provides information about my thought process and my need to educate. With my research providing the backlighting, the paper starts from my education and ends with a conclusive idea for a better way to consider wilderness.

The roles of women, animals, and nature in traditional Japanese and Western folk tales continue to be parallel to the roles of women, animals, and nature in modern Japanese and Western Culture. This is a result of the values and morals that are encapsulated within these folk tales.

The purpose of this thesis was to research and emulate through composition the style and techniques of the bel canto composers (Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti). The thesis includes two art songs composed in the style as well as an analytical paper that explores their techniques on such aspects as vocal line, text setting, form, texture and performance practice.

Since the time of Descartes, it has been an implicit assumption of western thought that human reality is composed of two totally distinct substances: the physical (extended) and the non-physical (non-extended). Explaining the nature of these two substances, and the relation between them, has been a central dilemma in western philosophy ever since. Edmund Husserl believed these categories are the result of latent abstraction in our way of conceiving the world and have no place in reality itself. By explicating the implications of Brentano's observation that all consciousness is consciousness of something' (the theory of intentionality) and by effecting a radical attitude shift beyond all naive acceptances to the apodictic ground of pure experience, Husserl believed he could gain immediate access to the categories of reality itself. From the standpoint of this apodictic realm of pure experience--which Husserl believed to be prior to all mental abstractions--a non- dualistic (in the substantial sense) view of human reality could be obtained. Emphasis is placed on the collapse and replacement of Cartesian categories by the radical categories of transcendental phenomenology.