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A PhD by publication comprising two of my books, My Elvis Blackout and Neverland, accompanied by a reflective and critical exegesis, which examines notions of truth, fiction and celebrity in the composite novel through a broadly analytical and practice-based methodology. The exegesis begins by exploring the links between the methodology of the fine artist and the new creative writer. It then demonstrates that My Elvis Blackout and Neverland represent an original contribution to knowledge in the way that they explore and develop literary form (the ‘composite’ novel), and, in their exploration of celebrity, myth-making and fictional hagiography, and that the two books function as performative critiques which probe the boundaries between fiction and the fabricated reality of celebrity culture. My exegesis analyses Linda Boldrini’s term ‘heterobiography’ (2012) with particular reference to Michael Ondaatje’s The Collected Works of Billy The Kid (1981), which as a bricolage relies upon the reader’s pre-conceived recognition of the historicity of its protagonist and continually tests the boundaries between fact and fiction. In this section of the exegesis, I propose that what sets My Elvis Blackout and Neverland apart from Billy The Kid is that whilst Ondaatje’s book certainly does exploit the confusions between fact, fiction, autobiography and history, it remains firmly set within the timeframe that its historical protagonist inhabits. My Elvis Blackout and Neverland remain grounded within their readers’ expectations of American settings contemporary to their nominative protagonists, but both books also feature dilations in both historical and geographical setting. Through analysis I have come to perceive ‘the celebrity persona’ as an identikit image assembled by thousands of witnesses. A photo fit photomontage tiered with impressions of subjective provenance, each layered transparency filtered through the fears and desires of fans and critics. Whereas other historiographic metafictions use historical figures as singular characters, My Elvis Blackout and Neverland can be seen to be utilising an ‘identikit’ concept to present their respective protagonists as manyheaded Hydras, or multiple probability ‘versions’ from parallel universes. By a conflation of terms, Hutcheon’s ‘historiographic metafiction’ (1988) and Boldrini’s ‘heterobiography’ (2012), My Elvis Blackout and Neverland are in fact historiobiographic metafictions. The exegesis concludes by establishing my own works’ live impact on the overarching celebrity metanarratives, and their inevitable organic status.

Theý principal focus of the thesis is Anthony Burgess, a prolific novelist whose first and enduring creative passion was music in general and composition in particular. Burgess criticism is limited and largely out-of-date, showing little recognition of the aural or musical elements in his fiction, and virtually no specialist commentary on the music and its relationships with the literature. The main aim of the thesis, therefore, is to demonstrate the variety and strength of the widespread musical elements in Burgess's literature, including the importance he attaches to the sonic basis of language, and to show that these are supported by the musical sensibility and technical competence evident in his. compositions. It is suggested that in the inevitable reassessmenot f his work following his death in 1993, the effects of his musicianship on his literary work should play a greater part than hitherto, and the thesis makes a contribution to this reassessmenbt oth through its original critical commentaries on his music and through the music-orientated discussion of his literature. After an introduction and literature review, the first chapter examines three examples of Burgess's little-known music. All are associated with verbal texts, though the range is otherwise wide, and through them it is possible to draw conclusions about the competence of his handling of musical language and structure. The second and third chapters examine the more familiar work of Burgess the acclaimed author, but from the unfamiliar viewpoint of its musical content, including not only surface references but also hidden allusions and technical puzzles aimed at the musician reader. Two instances of music serving as a structural template for literature are analysed in detail, and attention is also drawn to Burgess's awareness of musical elements in the content and language of the, work of some. of his predecessors. The final core-chapter,e xamines the fusion of Burgess's literary and,m usical skills in the context of his music and words for stage and radio. What emerges is the clear intermeshing of his parallel careers;, and the production within his distinctive literary output of work which, due to the radical extent of its musicalisation, has to be viewed as musically-aware literature for specialised readers, at times evincing, it is proposed, a logic which springs primarily from music.

This thesis alms to identify and explore the ideas of John Cage, then looks at their impact on and absorption by a variety of American composers. This in turn provides the context for my own compositional work which forms the main substance of this submission and which is presented on compact disc (accompanied by indicative scores). The source material for the second half of the thesis comes largely from my own book of interviews with composers, American Originals (co-authored with Nicola Walker Smith), which is included as an appendix.

This Literature Review contextualises the work I undertook for 'Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head', a 140,000 word biography based on the life of the musician Syd Barrett, lead guitarist, vocalist, and principal songwriter in the original line up of Pink Floyd. The book is based on two and a half years of focussed research, carried out between January 1997 and August 2009. During this time I interviewed family, friends, schoolmates, fellow college students, musicians, artists, and admirers from every stage of Barrett‟s life, from his earliest days growing up in Cambridge, through his period as an active musician and pop star, to his final years as a reclusive and enigmatic figure in his home town. However, these 65 interviews comprise only one element of my research. In addition I utilised an extensive range of primary and secondary source material, and the bibliography for the book runs to some 49 texts. (See appendix.) I also drew upon significant audio and video material including rare and hard to find television transmissions, and archive and bootleg recordings, many of which are not in the public domain.

There can be little doubt that the usage of the concept of genre remains widespread in discourses around music, cinema, theatre, literature. However, for a long period of time, musicologists have paid little attention to genre which is considered to be an outdated legacy of positivism: a concept belonging to amateurish criticism or daily musical practice – and incompatible with the hegemonic ideology of ‘absolute music’. In the commentary that follows, the history of my own efforts to bring genre back to the theoretical core of musicological debate is outlined, and intertwined with the work of other scholars (sociologists, cultural theorists, anthropologists) who helped re-define genre as a useful concept in the scholarly study of music. Popular music, as a set of genres from which paramusical elements – and related social conventions – were never expelled as spurious (as formalist musicology did with respect to Western art music), was obviously my main focus, although in some writings I deal with classical music, electronic music and traditional (folk) music. After examining at some length the development of my theory of genre (definitions, ‘rules’ and conventions, inter-genre relations and intra-genre diachronic development), the commentary focuses on a number of studies of specific (mostly popular) genres, music scenes, forms, artists, where genre is an underlying concept. One of the most delicate aspects of any theory about genre, and one that has been at the centre of my investigation for so long, is that of diachronic development; as a consequence, the history of popular music became at some point a favourite subject for my study – my contributions are outlined in the commentary which can be read in conjunction with my writings on the subject. Finally, a section is dedicated to my writings on music technology, music industry, and media. In the conclusions my work on genre is contextualised nationally and internationally, with some considerations on linguistic issues; the commentary ends with a brief outline of my future research plans.

The first part of this thesis will consider how a range of eighteenth-century novels represented the relationship between non-professional musical performance and femininity. Chapter one will consider music‟s status as a female accomplishment, focussing on the debate about the value of musical accomplishment as it appeared in polemical writing and novels by Jane Austen, Frances Burney, Elizabeth Hervey and anonymous writers. It will examine how far these novelists presented music as a leisure activity that benefitted women in their daily lives and how they responded to a prevalent dichotomy of intellectual endeavour and musical accomplishment. It will trace the changing function of music throughout Jane Austen‟s fiction, placing it in the context of other novels of the time, while arguing that these women writers managed to criticise certain attitudes that motivated the pursuit of musical accomplishment without rejecting music as a creative skill. Broadly, the first chapter will investigate eighteenth-century polemical writing and novels with an eye to examining how musical accomplishment became a marker of femininity in novels. Chapter two will scrutinise the role of concerts in four eighteenth-century novels in order to consider the currency of a binary opposition between non-professional and professional spaces. It will also examine how novelists evaluated such spaces through their representations of musical performance. The second section of chapter two will explore the social and political associations given to musical instruments, examining how far the representation of musical instruments, in Frances Burney‟s Camilla and Sarah Harriet Burney‟s Geraldine Fauconberg led to a criticism of disability and foreignness. Both sections will consider how music has contributed to a debate about the rise of consumerism, the organisation of spaces, the tenuous female move into professionalism and the meaning of the term luxury. I will show that Jane Austen, Frances Burney and Ann Thicknesse responded to the premise that the professional space was an unsafe place for women by including concerts that involve both performing and non-performing heroines in various ways. Thus, they were unafraid to implicitly comment on the divides between the private and public spheres. The second half of the thesis examines responses to music in the eighteenth century by analysing the relationship between music-making, sensibility and the responsive body. The third chapter will assess how male observers and suitors responded to female musicmaking, questioning both how far this altered the way in which sensibility has been understood and the central role of the body in scenes of music making. It will traverse a wider segment of literary genres and include analysis of French and Irish, as well as English, novels to assess how far nationality affected the relationship between gender, sensibility and music. Chapter four will examine musical courtship scenes, considering how far music was used as a tool in courtship and identify it as a language specifically suited to the rules of marriage-making. It will also explore the relationship between music, femininity and courtship in novels published between 1750 and 1814.

Machine Learning for Analysis of Brain Signals / Event-Related Potential (ERP) measures derived from the electroencephalogram (EEG) have been widely used in outcome prediction of brain disorders. Recently, the ERPs that are transient (EEG) responses to auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli, have been introduced as useful predictors of a positive coma outcome (i.e. emergence from coma). In this study, machine learning techniques were applied for detecting the Mismatch Negativity (MMN) component, which is a transient EEG response to auditory stimuli, and its existence has a high correlation with coma awakening, through analyzing ERPs signals recorded from healthy control brain signals. To this end, two different dimensionality reduction methods, Localized Feature Selection (LFS) and minimum-redundancy maximum-relevance (mRMR) were employed, where a localized classifier and the support vector machine (SVM) with radial basis function (RBF) kernel are used as classifiers. We trained both LFS and mRMR algorithms using signals of healthy brains and evaluated their performance for MMN detection on both healthy subjects and coma patients. The evaluation on healthy subjects, using leave-one-subject-out cross-validation technique, shows the detection accuracy performance of 86.6% (using LFS) and 86.5% (using mRMR). In addition to analyzing brain signals for MMN detection, we also implemented a machine learning algorithm for discriminating healthy subjects from those who have experienced TBI. The EEG signals used in the TBI study were recorded using an ERP paradigm. However, we treated the recorded signals as resting state signals. To this end, we used the mRMR feature selection method and fed the selected features into the SVM classifier that outputs the estimated class labels. This method gives us a poor performance compared to the methods that directly used ERP components (without considering them as resting signals.). We conclude that our hypothesis of treating ERP data as resting data is not valid for TBI detection. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

Malicious URL detection is important for cyber security experts and security agencies. With the drastic increase in internet usage, the distribution of such malware is a serious issue. Due to the wide variety of this malware, detection even with antivirus software is difficult. More than 12.8 million malicious URL websites are currently running. In this thesis, several machine learning classifiers along with ensemble methods are used to formulate a framework to detect this malware. Principal component analysis, k-fold cross-validation, and hyperparameter tuning are used to improve performance. A dataset from Kaggle is used for classification. Accuracy, precision, recall, and f-score are used as metrics to determine the model performance. Moreover, model behavior with a majority of one label in the dataset is also examined as is typical in the real world. / Graduate

Lorsqu’il a commencé à être plus communément utilisé au début des années 1930, le terme « haute-fidélité », appliqué à l’enregistrement sonore, faisait référence à la transparence des technologies d’enregistrement, à leur habileté à reproduire aussi fidèlement que possible une réalité sonore préalable à l’acte d’enregistrer. Ensuite, à mesure que les technologies de production et de reproduction en enregistrement sonore ont progressé et que de nouvelles idéologies ont émergé, la définition du terme est devenue de plus en plus floue, tout comme les caractéristiques distinctives des systèmes de reproduction haute-fidélité, des phonogrammes haute-fidélité, et de la musique haute-fidélité. Cette étude vise à déterminer quelles sont, en 2012 et selon la perspective des membres de la communauté haute-fidélité, ces caractéristiques qui distinguent la musique « haute-fidélité » de toute autre forme de musique. Pour répondre à cette problématique, les principaux concepts fondamentaux et idéologies de la haute-fidélité seront explorés et discutés. / When it started being commonly used at the beginning of the 1930s, the term “high-fidelity”, applied to recorded sound, referred to the transparency of recording technologies, to their ability to reproduce as faithfully as possible an external reality that existed a priori to the act of recording. In the following decades, as the technologies of production and reproduction in phonography evolved and new recording ideologies emerged, the definition of the term became more and more blurred, as did the distinctive characteristics of high-fidelity systems, phonograms, and music. This paper aims to determine what are, in 2012 and from the perspective of the hi-fi enthusiasts, the distinctive characteristics of high-fidelity music, when compared to any other form of music which would not qualify as such. To answer this central question, today’s main high-fidelity concepts and ideologies will be explored and discussed.