As the record industry’s fortunes decline, consumers experience increasing access to the world’s recorded music, legally and otherwise, through digital technologies. At the same time, recordings not only take up less physical space (on hard drives and MP3 players), they are compressed — not just as data, but in terms of dynamic range. While it allows for constant audibility in noisy environments like cars and offices, dynamic range compression has frustrated many listeners for limiting the impact of the music and causing “ear fatigue.” These listeners long for access to the purity of the original recording before it was “squashed,” but the problem is that the original recording does not, in a sense, exist. Producers and mastering engineers assemble the tracks recorded and create a particular sonic product that can later be revisited and “remastered.” Ostensibly this process is meant to get closer to the original sound, but in reality it simply comprises a different manner of interpreting the existing recording. Theodor Adorno had written of surprisingly similar phenomena more than half a century ago in essays like “The Radio Symphony” and the notes collected in Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction. Though infamous for his hostility toward popular music and its “infantile” listeners, Adorno’s writings on music contain much that is valuable for an understanding of how pop works in the digital age. Combined with a consideration of works on music and postmodernity by Fredric Jameson, Jacques Attali, François Lyotard and others, Adorno’s work helps one to consider how reification continues to work in an era where music is seemingly no longer a “thing.”

Lai Nga Ting Ada. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 86-101). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Abstract --- p.i / Acknowledgements --- p.iii / Prologue --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 1 --- The Notion of Time --- p.3 / Chapter Chapter 2 --- The Music of Time --- p.17 / Chapter Chapter 3 --- The Technique of Musical Time --- p.27 / Epilogue --- p.80 / Appendix I --- p.82 / Appendix II --- p.83 / Bibliography --- p.86

This essay discusses the work of the Venetian composer Luigi Nono (29 January 1924 - 8 May 1990) in the context of Marxist aesthetics. Nono is the most explicitly political member of the Darmstadt generation. A card-carrying member of the Communist party whose titles and texts often directly refer to political personages and events, Nono bids the listener or critic to confront the problematic of political expression in instrumental music, a subject of inquiry at least as old as Plato (to whom Nono explicitly refers in Fragmente , his late string quartet that is the subject of examination here) and of crucial relevance since World War II, the cold war, and the rise of mass media. Yet the majority of literature devoted to his work has largely ignored the question of where his work and philosophical attitude locate themselves within the four major strands of Marxist aesthetics. The relationship between Nono's his work and his political perspective is either treated in an imprecise, undisciplined fashion, relying on cliches of existentialism, mysticism, or vaguely defined alternative modes of perception to stand in for the notion of opposition (Nono's fascination with Hölderlin is often invoked); or the element of ideology is ignored altogether, and the works are submitted to traditional post-serial analysis of compositional technique. Whereas both of these approaches do shed light on a challenging body of work, a brief examination of the four major models of a Marxist approach to art - the Marx/Engels, the Benjaminian, the Adorno,and the Bloch/Jameson - and the attempt to contextualize Nono's work within or against them situates this complex personality within the universe of the poltical talis qualis. A narratological take on Nono's late sting quartet Fragmente provides a demonstration of invoking literary theory to create a productive analogy between political readings of instrumental music and that of other artforms. Various analytic techniques employed by critical theory - techniques examining communication, culture, and political consciousness which themselves are drawn from linguistic and analytic philosophy, symbolic interactionism, structural linguistics, hermeneutics, semiology, poststructural psychoanalysis, and deconstruction - may not simply be borrowed by the musicologist. These strategies can be fruitfully transposed, in the mathematical sense, wherein a limited number of elements within the critical structure are exchanged provided that others are fixed. The essays explores one example of such an exchanged element: Nono's use of polyvalent quotations. Other elements are available to the musicologist via the classic Husserlian move of Einklammerung, the "phenomenological reduction." Jameson had no particular personal or professional association with Nono, and Jameson has no important writings on music. Nevertheless, Jameson was Nono's historical contemporary; Jameson was born only ten years after Nono; and Nono's work is much closer to the Bloch / Jameson model than that of Adorno, the passionate anti-bourgeois devotee of the Second Viennese School; or that of Benjamin, the passionate anti-bourgeois proponent of the "fragment," the thinker who plays the most superficially salient role in Nono's work. Jameson's 1981 book The Political Unconscious, written at the same time Nono wrote Fragmente, describes three non-dialectical analytical approaches, or "horizons," shared by the critic, the spectator, and the artist: the political, the social, and the historical. They form concentric circles. By situating Nono's work within Jameson's theory, Nono is revealed, far from the mystical/naive poet in the style of a Rothko or a Tarkovsky, as a wily, canny dramatist whose technique is conservative and neoromantic, if never regressive, always consciously bent against the postmodernity, properly speaking, of Cage.

This dissertation is comprised of a recent series of compositions, titled the Nightmare series, and this thesis. The three compositions are Nightmare for JACK (a ballet) (2013), Second Nightmare, for KIKU/2.5 Nightmares for Jessie (2014), and Child of Chimera (2015). The thesis describes the aesthetic impulse behind this series of works, and identifies sociological and technological elements in the work. The primary topic of investigation is the “Uncanny Valley,” a term used primarily in robotics and gaming in reference to empathy towards androids and digital humanoid characters. This thesis investigates the uncanny valley in film, gaming, and psychology; examines the potential of the concept for use in experimental art; and describes the methods I have used to incite the emotion in my compositions.

What can cinema as an industry and medium teach us about the roles and parameters that define a “body” within a contemporary and globalised climate of interwoven flows of exchanges and practices? How does cinema make visible and tangible otherwise invisible transsensorial and affective modes of interactions that a body actively engages with other bodies, to create meanings beyond the limitations and capacities of a single body’s subjectivity and materiality? I address these areas of inquiry by examining four case studies of film examples produced from Singapore, Taiwan, People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and America that feature ethnic “Chinese” bodies on screen. This thesis sets out to illustrate how meaning is easily imposed on bodies—whether tied to the ethnic, visual, or tangible—rendering them passive where they are mere products of social construction with no individual agency or autonomy. However, contemporary practices of filmmaking and new ways of thinking about film experiences reveal that the body is in fact an active-affective producer of meanings. As such, the body can no longer be approached as a passive central locus where its meaning is defined solely by transnational, transcultural, or other grand narratives. This thesis posits a “transsensorial” object-oriented, and new-materialist approach within the field of transnational Chinese cinemas studies that regards bodies on-screen beyond audiovisual signs to consider the materiality and immateriality of their production and productivity. Bodies are reframed as “body-without-organs” to consider the affective processes that produce them within specific ecologies—and their productive affective potentials to interrelate and encounter other bodies not-yet-formed. Through which, this thesis makes a case for cinema’s potential to produce thinking active-bodies and how bodies make sense of the worlds they are part of beyond subjective notions of lived experiences whether construed through different various inflections of social constructed identities based on trans-national, or trans-cultural discourses.

This dissertation explores the complex and intuitive elements of the author’s musical compositions. It investigates the concept of a composer’s ‘compositional voice’ by looking at the aesthetic and compositional techniques that are used to express it. In particular, it looks at the author’s expression of astronomy through his music, along with its realisation through both advanced and elementary performers. The aesthetic is examined by looking at astronomy and its relation to music. It observes the intricate ways that concepts to do with astronomy can be expressed through music, as well as the instinctive act of self-expression that arises from emotionally engaging with these astronomical concepts. The techniques used by the author to express these aesthetical ideas are generally found to be either complex or intuitive, and in turn can result in music that is difficult or simple. The complex techniques are found to be mostly process-based, using canons and subtractive and additive repetition in a similar manner to Olivier Messiaen, Steve Reich and György Ligeti. The intuitive techniques are made of instinctive creative decisions and use elements of performer improvisation and aleatory. The performer is the physical manifestation of the compositional voice; this relationship is developed through the application of both advanced and elementary performer techniques are used to reflect the author’s engagement with complexity and intuition. Due to their advanced technique, the advanced performer is found to be especially fit to realise the multilayered processes. These processes are used by composer Brian Ferneyhough, who appears to use the notion of ‘difficulty’, especially in terms of notation, as being an aesthetic technique itself. Other composers, including Johann Sebastian Bach, Béla Bartók and Benjamin Britten have written music for elementary performers. Furthermore, Britten and Peter Maxwell Davies have also written pieces for ensembles that include both advanced and elementary performers. All of these pieces that involve elementary performers have generally been found to be written either with the intention of being a didactic tool or with the intention of contributing to the composer’s immediate community. The aim in my aesthetic, however, is to combine the complex and intuitive aesthetic with both advanced and elementary performers towards a compositional voice that can embrace the elementary within complex processes. In short, the music aims towards being not only a service to the community but also an elementary-complex compositional voice capable of being relevant to the composer’s astronomy-related aesthetic. An analysis of the author’s compositions reveals evidence of the collaboration between complexity and intuition in the astronomy-related aesthetic, which is complexly realised in Messier 7 and intuitively realised in Stellar Meditations and Celestial Dances. It can also be found in the complex techniques in Celestial Shadows and the intuitive techniques used in the first two movements of Pale Blue Dot, and the interaction between the elementary and advanced performers that occurs in the IONS suite. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis examines the relations among emotions and musical features and their changes with time, based on the assertion that there exist underlying, culturally specific, quantifiable rules which govern these relations. I designed, programmed and tested a computer controlled Two-Dimensional Emotion Space (2DES) which administered and controlled all aspects of the experimental work. The 2DES instrument consisted of two bipolar emotional response (ER) dimensions: valence (happiness-sadness) and arousal (activeness-sleepiness). The instrument had a test-retest reliability exceeding 0.83 (p &gt 0.01, N = 28) when words and pictures of facial expressions were used as the test stimuli. Construct validity was quantified (r &lt 0.84, p &gt 0.01). The 2DES was developed to collect continuous responses to recordings of four movements of music (N = 67) chosen to elicit responses in all quadrants of the 2DES: &quotMorning&quot from Peer Gynt, Adagio from Rodrigo???s Concierto de Aranjuez (Aranjuez), Dvorak???s Slavonic Dance Op 42, No. 1 and Pizzicato Polka by Strauss. Test-retest reliability was 0.74 (p &gt 0.001, N = 14). Five salient and objectively quantifiable features of the musical signal (MFs) were scaled and used for time series analysis of the stimuli: melodic pitch, tempo, loudness, frequency spectrum centroid (timbral sharpness) and texture (number of different instruments playing). A quantitative analysis consisted of: (1) first order differencing to remove trends, (2) determination of suitable, lagged MFs to keep as regressors via stepwise regression, and (3) regression of each ER onto selected MFs with first order autoregressive adjustment for serial correlation. Regression coefficients indicated that first order differenced (???) loudness and ???tempo had the largest correlations with ???arousal across all pieces, and ???melodic pitch correlated with ???valence for Aranjuez (p &gt 0.01 for all coefficients). The models were able to explain up to 73% of mean response variance. Additional variation was explained qualitatively as being due to interruptions, interactions and collinearity: The minor key and dissonances in a tonal context moved valence toward the negative direction; Short duration and perfect cadences moved valence in the positive direction. The 2DES measure and serial correlation adjusted regression models were, together, shown to be powerful tools for understanding relations among musical features and emotional response.

Educational philosophy generally and the Philosophy of Music Education in particular have been slow to consider in any real depth the findings of those sciences most concerned with explaining human nature, that is, the attributes (capacities, aptitudes, predilections, appetites) we have in common because we share the same genome, much of which we also share with other species. There are several such sciences which may collectively be called Darwinian Science in that they all take as axiomatic Darwin‘s explanation for how life evolves according to the law of natural selection – a simple, mindless and purposeless algorithm that has played out for over four billion years and which continues to do so, driving not only biological evolution but, as this study argues, cultural evolution as well. Evolutionary Psychology (including Biomusicology and Evolutionary Aesthetics), Cognitive Neuroscience and Gene- Culture Coevolution Theory are the overlapping fields that this study draws from in developing an understanding of the adapted mind useful for engaging with questions germane to the Philosophy of Music Education, principally those concerning the nature and value of music and how best it should feature in general education. These are questions that have not hitherto been addressed from a Darwinian perspective. This study develops such a perspective and applies it not only to questions around music‘s educational values and possibilities, but to more encompassing philosophical questions, wherein the goals of music education are made accountable in relation both to Dewey‘s ideal of society as a function of education, and to an ecozoic vision of a sustainable planetary habitat of interdependent and interconnected life forms. / Thesis (Ph.D.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, 2011.

This thesis examines the relations among emotions and musical features and their changes with time, based on the assertion that there exist underlying, culturally specific, quantifiable rules which govern these relations. I designed, programmed and tested a computer controlled Two-Dimensional Emotion Space (2DES) which administered and controlled all aspects of the experimental work. The 2DES instrument consisted of two bipolar emotional response (ER) dimensions: valence (happiness-sadness) and arousal (activeness-sleepiness). The instrument had a test-retest reliability exceeding 0.83 (p &gt 0.01, N = 28) when words and pictures of facial expressions were used as the test stimuli. Construct validity was quantified (r &lt 0.84, p &gt 0.01). The 2DES was developed to collect continuous responses to recordings of four movements of music (N = 67) chosen to elicit responses in all quadrants of the 2DES: &quotMorning&quot from Peer Gynt, Adagio from Rodrigo???s Concierto de Aranjuez (Aranjuez), Dvorak???s Slavonic Dance Op 42, No. 1 and Pizzicato Polka by Strauss. Test-retest reliability was 0.74 (p &gt 0.001, N = 14). Five salient and objectively quantifiable features of the musical signal (MFs) were scaled and used for time series analysis of the stimuli: melodic pitch, tempo, loudness, frequency spectrum centroid (timbral sharpness) and texture (number of different instruments playing). A quantitative analysis consisted of: (1) first order differencing to remove trends, (2) determination of suitable, lagged MFs to keep as regressors via stepwise regression, and (3) regression of each ER onto selected MFs with first order autoregressive adjustment for serial correlation. Regression coefficients indicated that first order differenced (???) loudness and ???tempo had the largest correlations with ???arousal across all pieces, and ???melodic pitch correlated with ???valence for Aranjuez (p &gt 0.01 for all coefficients). The models were able to explain up to 73% of mean response variance. Additional variation was explained qualitatively as being due to interruptions, interactions and collinearity: The minor key and dissonances in a tonal context moved valence toward the negative direction; Short duration and perfect cadences moved valence in the positive direction. The 2DES measure and serial correlation adjusted regression models were, together, shown to be powerful tools for understanding relations among musical features and emotional response.

Orientador: Lia Vera Tomás / Banca: Marcos José Cruz Mesquita / Banca: Mário Rodrigues Videira Júnior / Resumo: A primeira obra que René Descartes redigiu foi Compendium Musicæ em 1618, sendo esta sua primeira experimentação com o futuro método cartesiano. Sendo uma obra de juventude, o autor deve ter estudado sobre música em sua formação, principalmente no colégio de La Flèche. Convencionalmente, têm-se a obra de Gioseffo Zarlino como a principal fonte, devido a ser citada no Compendium; no entanto, os estudos em torno do texto têm relativizado essa influência. Como o texto parte de uma definição de música e oito proposições sobre as quais o restante é desenvolvido, verificar como estas aparecem em outros tratados da época permite deduzir as possíveis fontes musicais utilizadas pelo autor. O trabalho inicia com uma necessária reconstituição do contexto filosófico e musical de sua época; seguida de uma análise sobre as concepções jesuíticas de conhecimento e música. Dessa forma, pode-se verificar o que motivou o autor a escrever sobre música, como os debates em torna desta. A semelhança de sua obra madura, o texto propõe uma virada metodológica o qual só é percebido tendo em mente o contexto de época. Após uma interpretação tanto da definição de música como das oito proposições, pode-se compará-las com outras obras da época para verificar suas fontes musicais. Com esse processo pode-se evidenciar a influência de Aristóteles, Aristóxeno de Tarento, Jean de Murs, Pontus de Tyard, Gioseffo Zarlino e Francisco de Salinas. / Abstract: The first work that René Descartes wrote was the Compendium Mu sic æ in 1618, this was his first experiment with the future cartesian method. As a work of youth, the author must have studied music in your education, mainly in the college of La Flèche . Conventionally, the work of Gioseffo Zarlino had been considered the main source, because was cited in the Compendium . Since the text starts with music ́s definition and eight propositions, about which the rest of work was developed; check the way that them appear in other treatises of the time could help to deduce the poss ible musical sources that the author used .This dissertation starts with a necessary reconstitution of philosophical and musical context of the epoch, followed by an analysis of jesuits conceptions of knowledge and music. In this way, it can be considered w hat motivated the author to write about music, as his the debates. In resemblance to his mature work, the text proposes a methodological turn that is only perceived with the context of the time in mind. After an interpretation of the definition of the musi c and the eight propositions, it could be possible compare with the others works form the epoch to verify his musical sources. With this process, it could evidence the influence of Aristotle, Aristoxenus, Jean de Murs, Pontus de Tyard, Gioseffo Zarlino and Francisco de Salinas / Mestre