This study focuses on the soloist's path to direct musical communication. Through a subjective questionnaire, thirty-eight flute soloists describe their experiences performing concertos (flute with orchestra) in the traditional concert hall setting. With an emphasis on clarifying the most meaningful musical moments in performance, and identifying the important strategies and procedures these artists use to optimize performances, this study additionally includes a brief discussion about collaboration (involving a specific performer/composer relationship), and a sample of a performer's self-observations while performing a movement of the Christopher Rouse Flute Concerto. This primary source study endeavors to supply useful information for the aspiring soloist and the advanced or professional level flutist, as well as preliminary data about artists' experiences of optimal performance and communication with an audience for the purpose of potentially contributing to future interdisciplinary research associated with music. Compared to research on listening, relatively few scientific studies examine the performance of music from the performer's perspective. By giving world-class performing musicians a voice - using their actual words to describe what they think and how they feel, especially during optimal performances - this author hopes that future neuroscientific and psychological researchers might, through new interdisciplinary experiments involving music performance, learn more about how music and the brain work. The growing potential in this type of interdisciplinary research may provide greater insight into the most profound benefits of music and its significant power and importance in all human cultures.

This thesis expands upon the dialogue between speed and architecture, investigating how architecture reinterprets the linear city, originally defined by the continuous fabric of the freeway and more recently reconfigured by the high speed rail line. Using the linear city as a site of exploration and high speed rail as a ground to test new typologies of architectural insertions at amplified speed, this thesis produces an extended civic space along the proposed high speed rail line connecting Tampa and Orlando. Combining a series of performance and commercial programs, this new typology will make the obscured visual experience along the extended territory of the rail line legible, through a sequencing of specific architectural intersections, exploring how monumental civic space will be made and occupied in the sprawl of the American city.

This thesis defines displacement as the occupation of infrastructural voids for collective use. By calibrating patterns of appropriation, I propose displacement as a formal strategy for leveraging issues of demand. The discipline of architecture is becoming arguably subsumed by "sustainability"- an agenda which responds to demand with increased efficiency. Instead, this thesis ask how might systems of efficiency be leveraged for new modes of collectivity? Specifically, this project re-appropriates growing energy needs by proposing a pumped storage facility in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria. Current technologies accommodate the storage of energy through the physical displacement of water: a spatial exchange that I leverage to increase the city's collective space. Displacement reorganizes mass:void relationships. What if we design all voids? The Void:Void condition is a matrix of containers - some filled with people and others with water. Adjusting to changing energy and programmatic demands, displacement occurs as one void appropriates another.

An original full-length theatrical play in three parts, Hand of Jane deals with themes of faith, family and responsibility to the past, and examines human spiritual evolution through the story of a father and daughter, and Jane, a mystical guide loosely based on Jane Goodall.

This thesis is a long work of fiction, straddling the line between a cycle of short stories and a novel. The work is comprised of 35 chronological sections, with a new main character in each section. The dominant narrative of the book is a twenty-four hour period in which the individual narratives of characters gradually overlap and inform one another. Each section in the book is preceded by a meditation on a species of native bird that thematically relates to the character to follow. In sum. the project attempts to unite a number of disparate perspectives into a cohesive whole.

This thesis combines theoretical discussion with extracts from transcribed focus groups and interviews to illuminate the impact on the identity of formerly heterosexual women who become lesbians in mid-life. I have conducted my research as participant observer who has this core experience in common with the other subjects. I have also included my poetry and journal extracts to track and comment on the project and the topic. The accounts from twenty-three focus group members and interviewees contribute in two ways to the gap in published literature about the coming out process. First, this is to my knowledge the only Australian study of this kind. Second, the women's stories differ from other collections of coming out narratives because they do not, as a rule, privilege the lesbian experience over the heterosexual one. Instead the study focuses on what changed for the women when they made this transition, and on what stayed the same. They discuss these changes and lack of change with regard to personal identity, relationships with other women, children and families, friends, the workplace and the wider culture. The study investigates how all these elements of the women's lives have been influenced by their own maturity and by the prevailing social attitudes toward homosexuality at the time they came out. It also discusses the women's various attitudes toward the lesbian community and the politics of labelling themselves according to their sexual orientation. The study is underpinned by theoretical perspectives on the formation of identity, on current thinking about sex and gender, and on an understanding of the evolving positions of lesbians and gays in the eyes of the church, the law, psychology and society in general. It pays particular attention to the relationship between lesbianism and feminism, and the impact of queer theory on lesbian identity. It also examines the changing nature of representations of lesbians in popular culture.

In this thesis, I argue that socialist realism is by nature more political than literary; in the domain of politics, it is more nationalistic than socialistic; and in the domain of literature, it is more neo-classical or romantic than realist. Over many decades, writers were advised to represent reality as it ought to be; and in many cases, in so doing, they had to sacrifice not only the truth but also their intellectual and artistic status: their writing did not reflect what they really believed, felt or thought. As a result, ideologically, socialist realism became doctrinaire-ism, and artistically, it became an illustration of the Communist Party's policies. While other 'isms' in Western literature such as realism, romanticism and symbolism took at least half a century to take hold in Vietnam, socialist realism did so with record speed - in just one year. Promulgated at the first Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1934, the doctrine of socialist realism was appearing in Vietnamese newspapers just one year later. However, it had been imported by revolutionaries whose interest was mainly political, not literary: in their view, socialist realism was the best way to transform literature into a political weapon. For writers who had not divorced themselves from the Confucian aesthetics, which placed its particular emphasis on the social and educational function of literature, socialist realism became more acceptable because of the development of nationalism, especially during the Second World War, when Vietnam was dominated simultaneously by two empires: France and Japan. Despite having been imported from France, the socialist realism which was officially adopted in Vietnam was mainly that interpreted by China's Maoists. The profound impact of Mao Zedong's theory of socialist realism in Vietnamese literary thought and activity after the August 1945 Revolution can be explained by several factors, geographical, political and cultural. But it is here argued the most important factor was probably the war. Over three decades, from 1945 to 1975, Vietnam was continually at war, first with the French and later with the Americans. It can be argued that it is the very culture of war that helped to create the type of intellectual and emotional environment necessary for the easy reception of Maoism, an ideology which was originally born in wartime and aimed to serve the war. It can also be argued that, together with Maoism, the war culture itself became one of the crucial factors in shaping socialist realism in the anti-French resistance areas during 1945-54 and in North Vietnam during 1954-1975. The dominance of Maoism and the culture of war transformed socialist realism into something like a para-religion in which the leaders of the Party all became theorists of literature. These people had neither the time nor the knowledge to discuss issues of literature in depth; and consequently, the so-called canonical texts of Vietnamese socialist realism consisted only of several simple pronouncements on literature by the leaders in various forms, including letters, speeches and resolutions. As a result, Vietnamese socialist realism became a dogmatism and, in Vietnamese writers' words, a 'doctrinaire realism'. This 'doctrinaire realism', which was consolidated during the wars against the French and the Americans, was strongly challenged in peacetime - after the 1954 Geneva Agreements and after the 1975 victory by the two best known dissident movements: the Nhan Van - Giai Pham affair and the perestroika-styled doi moi campaign. Both were finally suppressed by the government; but while the former movement was harshly penalized, the latter is still fortunate to be witnessing the death of socialist realism. Although Vietnam is still a one-party ruled state, and the Vietnamese government still holds a monopoly on publishing, forbidding independent presses and journals, and trying to keep its strict control over literary life, socialist realism, both as a doctrine and as a movement, has died. This death resulted not from the activities of the dissidents but from two non-literary elements: globalization and the market-oriented economy which has been adopted by the Vietnamese Communist Party and government since the late 1980s. Now that publishers earned money solely from the number of books sold or in circulation and writers lived solely by their royalties, literary consumers played a decisive role in literary life, and writers were able to make easy contact with the world, the partiinost principle became nonsense and as a result socialist realism became a thing of the past. In short, socialist realism was born of communism, nurtured by nationalism, developed at war, challenged in peacetime, and killed by the force of a free economy and globalization.

Orthogonal Frequency-Division Multiplexing (OFDM) is now regarded as a feasible alternative to the conventional single carrier modulation techniques for high data rate communication systems, mainly because of its inherent equalisation simplicity. Transmitter diversity can effectively combat multipath channel impairments due to the dispersive wireless channel that can cause deep fades in some subchannels. The combination of the two techniques, OFDM and transmitter diversity, can further enhance the data rates in a frequency-selective fading environment. However, this enhancement requires accurate and computationally efficient channel state information when coherent detection is involved. A good choice for high accuracy channel estimation is the linear minimum mean-squared error (LMMSE) technique, but it requires a large number of processing operations. In this thesis, a deep and thorough study is carried out, based on the mathematical analysis and simulations in MATLAB, to find new and effective channel estimation methods for OFDM in a transmit diversity environment. As a result, three novel LMMSE based channel estimation algorithms are evaluated: real time LMMSE, LMMSE by significant weight catching (SWC) and low complexity LMMSE with power delay profile approximation as uniform. The new techniques and their combinations can significantly reduce the full LMMSE processor complexity, by 50% or more, when the estimation accuracy loss remains within 1-2 dB over a wide range of channel delay spreads and signal-to-noise ratios (SNR). To further enhance the channel estimator performance, pilot symbol structures are investigated and methods for statistical parameter estimation in real time are also presented.

This submission for a Master of Arts by research is comprised of a novel, 'Blue Collar, Red Dress' and a Critical Commentary. 'Blue Collar, Red Dress' is a work of fiction, based on my own experiences of growing up in Housing Commission flats in the 1960s. It is the story of Linda and Heidi, their friendship and their lives as they both make transitions across social classes, one through further education and the other through her work. Ultimately they both realise you cannot eradicate your past, but for one of them the journey ends in tragedy. The Critical Commentary, the theoretical component of the Masters, explores representations of class, and particularly Anglo working-class women, in a range of Australian women's novels from the 1930s to 1960s, and the 1970s to 1990s. My hypothesis is that these representations have taken on a particular focus, and sites of reference, due to the class background and experience of the writers themselves. This thesis involved using an range of qualitative research methods, including the use of both primary and secondary sources. The novel, whilst drawing on my own lived experience, also required historical and social research. The critical commentary was completed using more trdditional research including analysing a range of sources on class issues, analysing literary theory (particularly relating to class, race and gender), searching of literature data bases, and analysis of novels (and reviews of those novels) in the two key periods. I also referred to various sources regarding the background of the writers studied, including autobiographies and directories of Australian writers.

Dean Court - Backpackers in London, is a non-fiction text focusing upon young (18- 25) Australians living and working in London in the 1990s. The creative work emphasises the relationships between travellers living in a semi-permanent hostel in London's inner-city district of Bayswater whilst the exegesis explores the position of Dean Court within contemporary travel literature.