abstract: Dulcinea del Toboso es todo un misterio, ya que no es una persona real, sino un personaje ficticio que nunca llega a aparecer en la novela Don Quijote de La Mancha, de Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615). Aunque Dulcinea no dice una sola palabra en el libro, existe en la imaginación de su protagonista, Don Quijote. Este hombre de edad avanzada, aficionado a la lectura de libros de caballería, fantasea con la idea de ser un caballero en busca de aventuras, motivado en todo momento por el pensamiento de su dama idealizada. La descripción que ofrece Cervantes al presentar a Dulcinea en la novela es ambigua, ya que la asocia con una campesina llamada Aldonza, pero sin llegar a emplear elementos de certeza. Dulcinea no es un ser humano, ni tampoco un verdadero personaje literario, así que la única imagen que uno puede formarse de ella reside en la imaginación. Esta investigación se centra en probar que esa imagen ha tenido una impactante evolución a través de los siglos hasta convertirse hoy día en una especie de marca distintiva. Varios intelectuales han estudiado el enigma de Dulcinea. Miguel de Unamuno la interpretó como gloria eterna, Menéndez Pidal como puro ideal, Pedro Salinas como la sombra de un personaje que nunca llegó a ser. Más recientemente Anne Cruz la describía como el cuerpo inmaterial más famoso de todas las obras de Cervantes, y Frederick de Armas como imaginación mítica en pleno desempeño. Entonces, ¿cómo se representan los cuerpos inmateriales? ¿Cómo ser Dulcinea y Aldonza y ninguna de ellas a la vez? ¿Cómo alcanzar tanta fama sin tener si quiera una voz real? El propósito de mi estudio es reinterpretar la Dulcinea de Don Quijote desde la perspectiva de los productos audiovisuales y culturales del siglo XX y XXI. La idea es abrir nuevas perspectivas a los enfoques contemporáneos de lecturas clásicas. Los estudios interdisciplinarios y las interpretaciones modernas, como las usadas en este trabajo, atraerán a los estudiantes actuales, los cuales tienden a visualizar las humanidades y el estudio de los libros clásicos como una materia intangible difícil de entender (algo así como la percepción convencional de la elusiva Dulcinea del Toboso). Esta tesis quiere contribuir a cambiar ese sentimiento. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Spanish 2020

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abstract: In the fast-paced, technology-driven society of today, new demands are placed on artists to re-think how music is presented and communicated to the world. Access to the internet, development of sound manipulation software, and broader means of use and distribution through the digital music industry have drastically shifted the way the twenty-first century artist creates and performs music. One of the most striking changes that occurred is the increased use of visual material as a vehicle to enhance and contribute to the depth and intrigue of live performances and recordings. This project researches twenty-first century works for clarinet and multimedia that specifically include a visual element (including but not limited to images, fixed and interactive video, light effects, and choreography) and highlights the prevalence of this genre in contemporary repertoire. Discussion begins with a brief overview of the history of multimedia, its relation to the clarinet, and how it has been defined by the twenty-first century. Additionally, in order to contribute to this ever-growing repertoire, three new works for clarinet and multimedia were commissioned in collaboration with composers and visual artists. These new works include: Roadrunner (2019) for clarinet and fixed electronics by Spencer Brand with video by Samuel Proctor; I’d known this place (2020) for clarinet and electronics by Dan Caputo with live audio generative animations by Andrew Robinson; and Spectral Passages (2020) for clarinet and electronics by Alvaro Varas with painting by Miguel Godoy. Background information and performance guides are included for each piece to aid future musicians in performance, as well as respective audio/video recordings. Finally, a significant portion of this document includes a catalog of works for clarinet and multimedia. The catalog was compiled by focusing on the output of twenty-first century composers to serve as a resource for future performers. / Dissertation/Thesis / Roadrunner for clarinet and electronics by Spencer Brand / Spectral Passages for clarinet and electronics by Alvaro Varas / I'd known this place for clarinet and electronics by Dan Caputo / Doctoral Dissertation Music 2020

Multimodal understanding is a vast realm of research that covers multiple disciplines. Hence, it requires a correct understanding of the goal in a generic multimodal understanding research study. The definition of modalities of interest is important since each modality requires its own considerations. On the other hand, it is important to understand whether these modalities should be complimentary to each other or have significant overlap in terms of the information they carry. For example, most of the modalities in biological signals do not have significant overlap with each other, yet they can be used together to improve the range and accuracy of diagnoses. An extreme example of two modalities that have significant overlap is an instructional video and its corresponding instructions in detailed texts. In this study, we focus on multimedia, which includes image, video, audio, and text about real world everyday events, mostly focused on human activities. We narrow our study to the important direction of common space learning since we want to bridge between different modalities using the overlap that a given pair of modalities have.There are multiple applications which require a strong common space to be able to perform desirably. We choose image-text grounding, video-audio autoencoding, video-conditioned text generation, and video-audio-text common space learning for semantic encoding. We examine multiple ideas in each direction and achieve important conclusions. In image-text grounding, we learn that different levels of semantic representations are helpful to achieve a thorough common space that is representative of two modalities. In video-audio autoencoding, we observe that reconstruction objectives can help with a representative common space. Moreover, there is an inherent problem when dealing with multiple modalities at the same time, and that is different levels of granularity. For example, the sampling rate and granularity of video is much higher and more complicated compared to audio. Hence, it might be more helpful to find a more semantically abstracted common space which does not carry redundant details, especially considering the temporal aspect of video and audio modalities. In video-conditioned text generation, we examine the possibility of encoding a video sequence using a Transformer (and later decoding the captions using a Transformer decoder). We further explore the possibility of learning latent states for storing real-world concepts without supervision. Using the observations from these three directions, we propose a unified pipeline based on the Transformer architecture to examine whether it is possible to train a (true) unified pipeline on raw multimodal data without supervision in an end-to-end fashion. This pipeline eliminates ad-hoc feature extraction methods and is independent of any previously trained network, making it simpler and easier to use. Furthermore, since it only utilizes one architecture, which enables us to move towards even more simplicity. Hence, we take an ambitious step forward and further unify this pipeline by sharing only one backbone among four major modalities: image, video, audio, and text. We show that it is not only possible to achieve this goal, but we further show the inherent benefits of such pipeline. We propose a new research direction under multimodal understanding and that is Unified Multimodal Understanding. This study is the first that examines this idea and further pushes its limit by scaling up to multiple tasks, modalities, and datasets. In a nutshell, we examine different possibilities for bridging between a pair of modalities in different applications and observe several limitations and propose solutions for them. Using these observations, we provide a unified and strong pipeline for learning a common space which could be used for many applications. We show that our approaches perform desirably and significantly outperform state-of-the-art in different downstream tasks. We set a new baseline with competitive performance for our proposed research direction, Unified Multimodal Understanding.

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Beauty standards have perpetuated ideas of how women should look forever resulting in low self-esteem of women. Media have played a key role in these standards through advertising and modeling; however, Dove launched their Real Beauty Campaign to combat these standards and promote the inclusion of “real women” when it came to marketing and beauty standards. In 2018, Dove shifted the purpose of this campaign to include young girls, The Self-Esteem Project. I conducted an inductive and qualitative content analysis of 1000 comments left on Dove’s Real Beauty and Self-Esteem campaign videos to measure how the public’s perception of body image and this campaign as well as Dove changed over time, specifically throughout this shift in campaign messaging. Guided by a critical feminist theory lens, this study finds that as Dove’s videos became more focused on young girls there was an increased cynicism towards corporations. This cynicism was directed towards Dove with consumers questioning the motives behind the campaign. Additionally, there was an increased cynicism directed towards social media companies often blamed for perpetuation of beauty standards among girls. There was also an increased discussion around intersectionality and the effects that all aspects of a person’s identity can have on their experience with body image. This study found that the fourth wave of feminism that increased conversations around intersectionality and growing public knowledge of corporate social responsibility were responsible for the changes in public perceptions regarding the Dove Self-Esteem Project. / Media Studies & Production

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