This dissertation investigates the somatic politics of postcolonial masculinity and mass media in British Gibraltar. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic and archival research over the course of 5 years in Gibraltar and London, I trace the interconnections between the ways of listening promoted by colonial administrators and scientists in Gibraltar during the post-World War II democratization of mass media and the contemporary listening practices of Gibraltarian men as they engage with, think about, and decry the use of emerging media technologies among women and children. Using a practice theoretical framework developed out of women's studies, anthropology, and science and technology studies, I move beyond "reading" the sounds that represent intersecting gender, race, and class stereotypes; instead, I examine how Gibraltarian men's media listening practices are both product and productive of a complex calculus of colonial masculine domination that legitimates British colonial violence - symbolic and physical - in Gibraltar today. In this way, listening to media technologies is transformed into a political technology for the maintenance and operationalization of colonialism in Gibraltar. / 10000-01-01

Despite the breadth of research on the educational transition of young children, there has been little evidence, in Scotland, of this knowledge impacting on every day practice. The overall contention that emerges from the literature is that some children positively embrace the experience, while others face challenges and risk failure and regression. There is a need for research into the transition from the early years setting to school, which holds promise that the findings will be disseminated to stakeholders locally, nationally and internationally with the aim that the perspectives of young children are heard. This ethnographic study is an examination of the perspectives of 16 young children as they transition from an early years centre, Lilybank, to four primary schools, Northfield, Southfield, Eastfield and Westfield, in a Scottish city. Seven key qualitative questions were asked which explored how children, parents and professionals experienced this educational transition. Data was gathered from empirical methods such as participant observations, mind–mapping sessions, interviews and documentation – e.g., council procedures and school handbooks. Participant observations took place in the early years setting and the participating schools. Most of the interviews took place in the children’s homes, or in a convenient environment for the family, such as a local cafeteria. An analysis of the data shows that power is a central concept in understanding transitions. The voices of children, and their families, are often silenced by policy-makers, bureaucrats and professionals during the process, or overshadowed and undermined by mainstream procedures. Children are expected to become acquiescent, adjusting to coercive practices used in the school institution. However, the findings also show that some children find ways to creatively resist organisation. Unique life journeys involve differences and from their individual experiences, children construct elaborate knowledge. The views of children can (and do) add nuance to our understanding of how power impacts on their transition experience. Children’s accounts of discipline strategies used by the schools were insightful. The concept of power is under-theorised and under-explored in transitions. This study, therefore, adds to the growing body of transition research. Further, the findings of this study stress the need for policy makers and institutions to reflect on and question the complex role of power in young children’s transitions.

This dissertation considers the music and technical practice of composers affiliated with French spectralism, including Hugues Dufourt, Gérard Grisey, Tristan Murail, Jean-Claude Risset, and Kaija Saariaho. They regularly described their work, which was attuned to the transformative experiences that technologies of electronic sound production and reproduction could inspire in listeners, using metaphoric appeals to construction: to designing new sounds or exploring new illusory aural phenomena. To navigate a nascent but fast-expanding world of electronic and computer music, the spectralists appealed to physical musical attributes including gesture, space, and source-cause identification. Fascinated by gradual timbral transformations, they structured some of their pieces to invite speculative causal listening even while seeking to push it to expressive extremes. I hypothesize that, much as the immersive technology of the cinema can create the illusory feeling of flight in viewers, electronic music can inspire listeners to have experiences in excess of their physical capabilities. Those feelings are possible because listening can be understood as empathetic and embodied, drawing on a listener’s embodied and ecological sensorimotor knowledge and musical imagery alongside referential, semiotic, and cultural aspects of music. One way that listeners can engage with sounds is by imagining how they would create them: what objects would be used, what kind of gestures would they perform, how much exertion would be required, what space would they inhabit. I cite recent research in psychoacoustics to argue that timbre indexes material, gesture, and affect in music listening. Technologies of sound production and reproduction allow for the manipulation of these tendencies by enabling composers to craft timbres that mimic, stretch, or subvert the timbres of real objects. Those electronic technologies also suggest manipulations to composers, by virtue of their design affordances, and perform an epistemological broadening by providing insight into the malleability of human perceptual modes. I illustrate these claims with analytic examples from Murail’s Ethers (1978), Saariaho’s Verblendungen (1984), and Grisey’s Les Chants de l’Amour (1984), relating an embodied and corporeal account of my hearing and linking it to compositional and technological features of spectral music.

Este trabalho apresenta relatos, reflexões e memórias da formação artística e pessoal do pesquisador. Entendemos como formação não apenas as atividades desenvolvidas na educação formal, mas também os encontros dentro e fora de instituições de ensino. Entendemos também como formação a convivência com professores, colegas, funcionários, amigos e familiares nos mais diversos espaços ao longo da trajetória do pesquisador. Para que esta tarefa fosse realizada, procurou-se uma habitação entre experiências de escuta e escutas da experiência, para revelar, através da escritura, o saber de uma experiência de doutoramento. / This work presents reports, reflections and memories of the researcher\'s artistic and personal education. We understood as education not just the activities developed in the formal education, but also the encounters inside and outside of educational institutions. We also understood as education the coexistence with teachers, colleagues, employees, friends and family in the most several spaces along the researcher\'s trajectory. In order to accomplish this task, a place was sought between listening experiences and listening of the experience, to reveal through the scripture the knowledge of the subject of a doctoral experience

The study tested the effects of different presentations using pictures and video cues for improving listening comprehension of English news programs. Four experiments are reported, studying listening comprehension of English as a second/foreign language with 687 Korean secondary students. Comparisons on listening comprehension showed better performance with visual cues than with no visual cues. Listening comprehension with video cues was more successful than that with pictures. The advantage of the combination of verbal and visual information over the presentation of verbal information alone was in accord with dual coding theory. When contextual information presented using priming techniques was compared to using feedback and simultaneous presentations, listening comprehension was better using priming. In the comparison of feedback with simultaneous presentations, listening comprehension was improved more when pictures with headlines were presented using feedback than using simultaneous presentations. In contrast, no differences were found between feedback and simultaneous presentations when video cues with headlines were presented. Visual cues with headlines presented using priming might enable learners to activate prior knowledge or schemata to improve listening comprehension. Headlines presented at the beginning stage of listening were effective for listening comprehension. In addition, the effects of presentations were enlarged by adding headlines to visuals. Applying the priming presentation along with the enrichment of contextual cues resulted in improved listening comprehension. Less proficient students benefited relatively more from the contextual cues with headlines and pictorial cues for comprehending the news than more proficient students. In particular, for less proficient students, video cues with headlines were more helpful in listening comprehension than pictures with headlines. This was because more abundant visual cues such as paralinguistic cues were more likely to be provided in video than in picture formats. The best listening comprehension occurred when presenting pictorial cues with headlines using priming presentation. The present study concluded that more abundant pictorial cues were useful for improving listening comprehension. Headlines added to the pictorial cues improved performance, especially for less proficient students, who benefited relatively more. The pictorial cues with headlines presented using a 'priming' technique were most effective in improving listening comprehension, probably because they activated prior knowledge or schemata.

While emerging technologies such as interactive multimedia are increasingly being employed in computerised music instruction, understanding of participant music listening behaviours in interactive multimedia music instruction is currently very limited. With the aim of elucidating music listening behaviour, the central concern of this work is to identify and explain participant interactions with the audio components of interactive multimedia music instruction. The investigation employs a novel documentation procedure, which extends the application of digital audio recording technology, to provide a finely calibrated analysis of the audio activity of a sample of 20 undergraduate music education majors during individual sessions with two commercially-available interactive multimedia music instruction programs. Graphically-based Sound Activity Profiles, which the researcher developed specifically for the current investigation, characterise and summarise participant interactions with audio components, while an analysis of questionnaire responses and follow-up interview transcripts provides supplementary information that further explains participants' music listening behaviours. The results of the investigation show that music listening behaviours during the study sessions were highly variable. While extensive participant interaction with music examples occasionally reflected attentive music listening behaviours, many study sessions were characterised by brief, fragmentary music excerpts and lengthy periods of silence. Participants spent as little as five percent of their session time listening to music and as much as 88 percent of the session time in silence. A substantial number of the study cohort frequently interrupted the music examples they had activated. Participants' perceptions of the extent of their interaction with music examples were frequently inaccurate, as subjects often substantially overestimated the amount of session time they had spent listening to music. The study findings suggest that many interactive multimedia music instruction participants would benefit from interventions that elicit more extensive and prolonged interaction with music examples. Accordingly, recommendations include a call for research to develop and test software designs that incorporate automated monitoring of session audio activity so that dynamic on-screen information about music listening behaviour can be provided to interactive multimedia music instruction participants. Such information may encourage participants to modify inappropriate music listening behaviours.

The link to subjective parameters and objective parameters in the field of room acoustics has been the source of much research. This thesis surveys some of the available objective room acoustical analysis methods, quantify their advantages and disadvantages with respect to the measurement of acoustical qualities of professionally operated critical listing rooms, and implements these methods in a range of critical listening rooms. In conjunction with the objective room analysis, a subjective component of research was also performed. A series of anechoically recorded standard instrument sounds were presented to professional listeners in their critical listening spaces with the listeners asked to alter the sounds to taste: to

Thesis (M. Sc.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Over the last few decades increasing rates of single mother households in the United States have triggered a national alarm over the effects of father absence on society. Father absence has been linked specifically to many of the problems plaguing black communities in the United States (e.g. poverty, low educational attainment, etc.) and as a result community and political leaders alike have consistently promoted responsible fatherhood practices as a way to address them. Although responsible fatherhood has received, in this context, a considerable amount of social attention, this attention has come intertwined with considerable political and moral rhetoric at all levels, making an idea invested with a wide variety of often-conflicting meanings and interests. <br>Given the paucity of academic studies giving voice to black fathers at the metaphoric "front line" of the national responsible fatherhood effort, this author used a variation of The Listening Guide (Gilligan 2003) to capture the narratives of four black fathers volunteering in a local responsible fatherhood program. Critical Social Representations Theory was used to frame the interaction between participants and the social contexts within which they are embedded, paying particular attention to participants' positioning in regard to social representations of race and gender. The widely different understandings of fatherhood present within the results point to fatherhood as a highly dynamic concept. Responsibility, on the other hand, was understood primarily as father presence, a middle class ideal that I argue is problematic given the realities of poor black fathers. Finally, all fathers tended to resist ideas of race as essence, even if in regard to gender all fathers adopted hegemonic positions endorsing views of gender difference as essential and as grounded in biology. Overall, results reveal complex portrayals of black fathers and their lives in communities where race, poverty, incarceration, drugs, violence, or family court all pose additional challenges to responsible fatherhood. / McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts / Clinical Psychology / PhD / Dissertation

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 1999. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 171-186). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.