Through three case studies this research report will explore the design and multimodal attributes of interactive installations that feature characteristics comparable to those of musical instruments. It will briefly outline and define data sonification and the five sonification techniques: Audification, Auditory Icons, Earcons, Parameter-mapping sonification and Model-based sonification. Model-based data sonification will be more closely explored, as interactivity and the incorporation of multiple modes are key elements within these types of sonifications. Pre-existing knowledge of musical instruments, their multi-modal attributes and functionality will be analyzed in relation to the case studies. The design analysis will focus on the interaction and interface design while incorporating the three modes, namely: visual guidance, real-time physical/gestural interaction, and instantaneous acoustic feedback. To conclude, this research report will demonstrate, through the case studies, that the function and design of musical instruments can be suggestive in realizing a potential way forward for digital artists and their multi-modal interactive installations.

MET4MORFOSES is an interactive multimedia project marrying ancient mythic narrative, tabloid celebrity worship, bombardment of consumerist driven advertising, social media, high technology, and futuristic forms of communication with speculative science fiction. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2018. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

This study takes a theoretical stance that relies on the notion that cognitive development is predominantly a process of learning. The study rests particularly on the Vygotskian theory that children learn within a social environment by practising cognitive skills, under expert tutelage, that they will later perform independently. If children are to develop skills in reasoning the classroom needs to be a place where reasoning skills are modelled, practised and reinforced. Certain features of interactive discourse may have the effect of emphasising the content of a discussion at the expense of the reasoning process and therefore of the practice of reasoning. This study investigated the interactive discourse of a classroom discussion that had reasoning as the sole objective of the discussion and identified the discourse features that characterised the discussion. One experimental kindergarten group and two experimental grade 1/2 groups were introduced to a reasoning-based approach using the Elfie package. A discussion, based on a children's story, was then held with these groups and with two experimental kindergartens that had received no previous exposure to the reasoning-based approach. Examination was also made of the discourse features of a control kindergarten discussion and a grade 1/2 discussion. Important differences were identified between the discourse features of the control and experimental classrooms. Analyses of the experimental discussions found a lower proportion of teacher utterances that were psuedo questions, and that included evaluation of pupil comments; a higher proportion of teacher invitations to explore the logical implications of an idea; a higher proportion of pupil utterances that were in response to other pupil comments and a higher proportion of pupil utterances that included reasons. Analyses of control discussions found that the prevailing pattern of discourse involved teacher initiation (often a pseudo question) - pupil response - teacher evaluation and re-elicitation. Discussion is included about the role such a pattern plays in emphasising content at the expense of the process of reasoning.

Encouraging audience engagement is a challenge that confronts all interactive artists. If an audience member does not interact or does so in a cursory manner, then it is unlikely that the artistic aims of an interactive artwork will be met. The research project under discussion here approached this challenge by focusing on play as a way to encourage both audience engagement and exploration. Using practice-based research methods the project aimed to develop design strategies for stimulating a play experience within an interactive art context. The research process began with the creation of two interactive artworks and the development of a framework of thirteen characteristics of a play experience. These characteristics are: creation, exploration, discovery, difficulty, competition, danger, captivation, sensation, sympathy, simulation, fantasy, camaraderie and subversion. This play framework was then used during the creation processes of a third and fourth interactive artwork. Two subsequent evaluative case studies assessed the playful characters of these four artworks within an exhibition context. They also explored the usefulness of the play framework as a tool for both evaluation and design. The findings from these case studies suggested that the play framework was indeed a useful tool for design. They also suggested three additional design strategies for evoking play experiences within an interactive art context. First, to work with patterns and ambiguity to create a rhythm between rule-based play and improvisational play; second, to use the relationship between action and representation to connect with the emotional and sensual memories of an audience; and finally, to use robustness and responsiveness to give an artwork a vital and playful character and make it an equal participant in the play experience. The findings from the case studies also led to a greater understanding of techniques for installing playful interactive art. Exhibition signage was found to be important for creating an environment conducive to play and for shaping and directing a play experience. The studies also revealed audience play preferences for either puzzle solving or sense-making. An awareness of these preferences, it is suggested, could help exhibition designers to create an environment that will maintain the boundary of play. Finally, the findings from the case studies led to a greater understanding of techniques for evaluating playful interactive art. The play framework was found to be useful during evaluation for collecting detailed data about play experiences and for developing a common language between artist and audience. The use of social pairs as participants was found to help reduce anxiety and encourage play. The sobering effect of evaluation anxiety was also reduced by using peers as participants and by giving participants some training in the practice of doing evaluations. Finally, in order to maintain the play spirit it was suggested that the experience of doing an evaluation needs to be designed to be playful itself. These findings will be valuable for any artists and curators of interactive artworks that aim to evoke a play experience. They will also be of use to those within the general interaction design community, particularly designers focused on the creation, evaluation and exhibition of playful interactive systems.

Encouraging audience engagement is a challenge that confronts all interactive artists. If an audience member does not interact or does so in a cursory manner, then it is unlikely that the artistic aims of an interactive artwork will be met. The research project under discussion here approached this challenge by focusing on play as a way to encourage both audience engagement and exploration. Using practice-based research methods the project aimed to develop design strategies for stimulating a play experience within an interactive art context. The research process began with the creation of two interactive artworks and the development of a framework of thirteen characteristics of a play experience. These characteristics are: creation, exploration, discovery, difficulty, competition, danger, captivation, sensation, sympathy, simulation, fantasy, camaraderie and subversion. This play framework was then used during the creation processes of a third and fourth interactive artwork. Two subsequent evaluative case studies assessed the playful characters of these four artworks within an exhibition context. They also explored the usefulness of the play framework as a tool for both evaluation and design. The findings from these case studies suggested that the play framework was indeed a useful tool for design. They also suggested three additional design strategies for evoking play experiences within an interactive art context. First, to work with patterns and ambiguity to create a rhythm between rule-based play and improvisational play; second, to use the relationship between action and representation to connect with the emotional and sensual memories of an audience; and finally, to use robustness and responsiveness to give an artwork a vital and playful character and make it an equal participant in the play experience. The findings from the case studies also led to a greater understanding of techniques for installing playful interactive art. Exhibition signage was found to be important for creating an environment conducive to play and for shaping and directing a play experience. The studies also revealed audience play preferences for either puzzle solving or sense-making. An awareness of these preferences, it is suggested, could help exhibition designers to create an environment that will maintain the boundary of play. Finally, the findings from the case studies led to a greater understanding of techniques for evaluating playful interactive art. The play framework was found to be useful during evaluation for collecting detailed data about play experiences and for developing a common language between artist and audience. The use of social pairs as participants was found to help reduce anxiety and encourage play. The sobering effect of evaluation anxiety was also reduced by using peers as participants and by giving participants some training in the practice of doing evaluations. Finally, in order to maintain the play spirit it was suggested that the experience of doing an evaluation needs to be designed to be playful itself. These findings will be valuable for any artists and curators of interactive artworks that aim to evoke a play experience. They will also be of use to those within the general interaction design community, particularly designers focused on the creation, evaluation and exhibition of playful interactive systems.

In the past, multimedia technology focused mainly on designing high quality audio and graphical imagery as well as providing adequate performance levels that the users demand for multimedia applications. However, the concept of multimedia has expanded into New-Media that involves variety use of multimedia data in consumer-oriented applications, such as video conferencing, virtual reality, and multimedia games with 3-D effect in video and audio. As the demands for multimedia applications increase, vendors have come up with new cost-effective microprocessor designs to satisfy the complexity of new media processing. One of the most efficient methods is to incorporate the special-purpose multimedia processor into a general-purpose processor, thereby offering multimedia-related functions at a small cost. Most effective way to integrate the two different processors is to extend the existing instruction set into a multimedia-oriented Instruction Set Architecture, called Media ISA Extension. Currently, many microprocessor vendors have produced variety of general-purpose processors with multimedia extensions. This thesis aims to provide the overall design philosophy behind Media ISA Extension and its effect on the overall performance of a general-purpose processor. In particular, Sun Microsystems' Visual Instruction Set (VIS) media extension of UltraSPARC-V9 is studied. On the average, VIS provides a speed-up of 3 to 4 for various multimedia applications. This performance improvement comes from the considerable reduction in the number of instructions executed due to Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) execution style of VIS media extensions. To examine how VIS improves multimedia performance, the thesis studies the design concept, benefits and limitations of VIS extensions, and the performance of various multimedia applications with and without VIS extension. Finally, the possible architectural modifications to the VIS extension for further performance enhancement are suggested. / Graduation date: 2000

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 1982. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-212). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center.

In the 90s of twenty century, the education innovation had come to be considered as one of the essential policies of the developed countries because it concerned the economy development and construction of a country. To cultivate talent person requires a long time and it should be started from the primary education. The elected 12th president of Republic of China on March 22nd, 2008, Ma Ying-jeou, advocates further opening policy with China and he thinks that education culture exchange will be the less sensitive and the preferential policy he will implement at the initial stage. He hopes that the secure foundation of education culture exchange would promote the direct transportation with China. My research analyzes the promotion of cross-strait primary education exchange under direct transportation with China. I use strict structure procedure interactive management (IM) as the method of operation and introduce 12 specific relevant strategies to related organizations. The 12 strategies that Kaohsiung City Government could use are as followed: 1. To establish ¡§China Affairs Bureau¡¨ to manage matters concerned about employment and education of Chinese in Taiwan. 2. To provide the conditions to attract China enterprises to establish transport business headquarters in Kaohsiung. 3. To establish China degree authentication mechanism. 4. To deregulate the law related to official business manpower and the organization. 5. To provide excellent conditions to attract China specialized and talented person and students to come to Kaohsiung. 6. To modify or adopt the related law about cross-strait exchange. 7. To expand the range of hiring foreign country specialists to contain China special technicians. 8. To establish the departments related to harbor city development and the research plans. 9. To solicit the overseas well-known scholars to come the higher educational institutions to carry on the short-term curriculum teaching. 10. To plan to establish perfect science and technology parks. 11. To integrate the investment of non-government enterprise resources and to promote the school achievements. 12. To run the related training workshops for teachers to know extremely well about the background and the policy of cross-strait cultural exchange. The continuation of social life depends on the intercommunity of social individual¡¦s aspects related to life style, value and social manners etc¡K. The specialty of intercommunity could be achieved by the same national basic education that every citizen takes. Based on this, we should promote the cross-strait exchange and cooperation of primary education as the foundation for cross-strait people to live in peace together in the future.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--West Virginia University, 2002. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vi, 32 p. : ill. (some col.). Includes sound file in the mp3 audio format. Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 29).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI Company.