Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references. Available also from UMI/Dissertation Abstracts International.

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR38797

Thesis (M.A.)--York University, 1997. Graduate Programme in Music. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-125). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/yorku/fullcit?pMQ22876.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Committee on Human Development, August 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2003. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains iii, 45 p. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 34-37).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 506-521). Also available on the Internet.

Musical labor entered a new phase of alienation following the advent of recording technology in the late 19th century. Whereas prior to recording musicians had a relatively direct relationship with their audience—the sum of the two groups constituting “musicking”—sound reproduction created a spatial and temporal dislocation between them. Most narratives of American popular music trace out a particular genre formation, and relate it to the culture from whence it emerged. By contrast, this dissertation begins from the point where musicking began to disengage from commodification, both at the level of social formation and of the creation of sound itself. Drawing on anthropologist Pierre Clastres’ notion of “Anti-State” modes of organization and cultural critic Ivan Illich’s concept of “conviviality,” or a human-centered rather than mass production-oriented use of tools—in this case musical instruments both handmade and modified—each chapter of this project tackles a different dimension of the quest for autonomous musicking, or a “permanent underground.” Chapter 1 examines the organizational principles that have run in parallel to the bureaucratic, capitalist manifestation of a “music industry” in the 20th century. Beginning with a critique of either/or fallacy of the opposition posited between “modernism” and “nostalgia,” the reminder of the chapter demonstrates the reconciliation between these two aesthetic and political positions; topics include the seizure of public space by itinerant blues musicians in the rural-industrial prewar South, the self-released recordings of gospel artists after WWII, the formation of experimental jazz collectives in the 1960s, and the relationship between psychedelic music and cults/communes in the 1960s. Chapter 2 critiques the function of genre in musicking as means to a reproducible sonic commodity, and argues for “noise” as an aesthetic intervention that disrupts the saleable nature of music—a political act in itself. Chapter 3 suggests several strategies for achieving “noise.” These include the re-purposing of industrial machines as musical instruments, the incorporation of foreign musical traditions, and the use of collage as a formal principle. The final chapter profiles six collectives that have emerged since the late 1960s that adhere to the aesthetic and political values established throughout this dissertation. / text

This project seeks to determine the extent to which rock music brought an end to the Hollywood film genre of the musical. It stresses the importance of rock and post-1960s popular music scholarship to film studies and vice-versa. Both objects of popular music inquiry remain relatively unexamined within film studies. But while the value of film studies to popular music scholarship has been much more widely acknowledged, much more work remains in these areas. Therefore, this project will look at the workings of rock ideology and how it impacted the development of the Hollywood musical. It will also examine recording technology and the ways in which it transformed both the film and music industries. The second half of this project is an extended analysis of how Hollywood films of the post-rock era (1970 onward) have reflected these changes. It theorizes that it was not so much the musical that “died” in this era as it was a particular kind of musical number – the Spontaneous Outburst of Song. The later chapters use the concept of mode as opposed to genre to examine how the pleasures offered by the musical of the classical Hollywood era remain available albeit in different guises and genres. Furthermore, these pleasures are capable of fostering the kinds of communities, if not utopias, that some scholars claim have died along with the classical Hollywood era. / text

 In tone languages, tones, in addition to phonemes, are used to differentiate meanings. The tone of a word changes its meaning. This gives rise to a question regarding vocal music in such languages: does the melodic contour have to depend upon the lexical tones of the text so as to enhance the understanding of the text? This question has motivated a number of studies to examine the relationship between lexical tones and melody in different vocal genres of different tone languages. Yet a satisfactory answer is still missing. While existing studies reveal that the degree of conformity between speech tone and melody varies according to the genre as well as the language, some genres of Cantonese vocal music, such as Cantonese opera and Canto-pop, show a strikingly higher degree of tone-melody correspondence. Taking Canto-pop as the focus, the present study seeks to investigate the principles of tone-melody mapping—the underlying rules which govern the realization and perception of Cantonese speech tones in sung melody. It also seeks to gain a deeper understanding about how the constraints of speech tones affect the text-music interaction and why the preservation of speech tones is particularly prominent in this genre. Drawing insights from musicology, linguistics and psychology, the thesis presents an interdisciplinary research that casts new light on the subject of tone-melody relationship—the relationship between speech tones and sung melody in vocal music. It is found that the correspondence between musical intervals and tonal transitions in Cantonese speech can be crucial to tone perception in sung melody. But there are also occasions where the speech tones are still perceived correctly despite the occurrences of physical tone-melody mismatch, largely on account of the tonal, melodic, syntactic and semantic context. While a misperception of the speech tones may not always necessarily lead to a miscomprehension of the lyrics, it is still an aesthetic requirement for Cantopop to maintain perfect tone-melody mapping. This requirement even has an influence on the creative process of Cantopop. / published_or_final_version / Music / Master / Master of Philosophy

This PhD research aims at revealing the underlying complexity of the grammar of tone-melody mapping in Cantonese pop music. While linguists have shown a growing interest and invested painstaking effort in finding out whether lexical tones and musical melody interact in vocal music, the attention of these scholars mainly focuses on whether a lexical item remains intelligible to speakers of the given language when the tonal integrity is not preserved in the song. Others are interested in quantifying the degree of tone-melody correspondence and in carrying out cross-linguistic comparisons. The majority of such research studies fail to unravel the details of how tone and melody interact. This research challenges the methodologies and assumptions made in some previous studies that fail to account for the discrepancy between structural and perceptual ‘correspondence’ or ‘mismatch’. The notions of ‘correspondence’ and ‘mismatch’ are revisited and redefined from a perceptual perspective – a ‘perfect match’ refers to the mapping between a melodic transition and a tonal target transition that is satisfactorily accepted by native speakers of the language, whereas a ‘mismatch’ refers to a tone-melody pairing that sounds awkward to the native ear, whether or not the string of syllables are comprehensible, ambiguous or unintelligible when set to the song. Through conducting perception tests, songs are grouped into two main categories for two different purposes – the songs without perceptual mismatch are used for a profound analysis of the well-formed mapping patterns at the abstract level. The most frequently attested correspondence pattern concerns the pairing between tonal target transition and melodic transition progressing in the same direction. The directionality constraint is satisfied in about 80% of the cases. It is also revealed that level tonal target sequences can be mapped to non-level melodies and still remain well-formed. This mapping, however, is strictly conditional and only occurs when licensed. The other group of songs are those in which native speakers have identified cases of perceptual mismatch. By examining the ill-formed examples, other mapping constraints are uncovered – the interval constraint requires that the pitch distance of a melodic transition be comparable to that of the corresponding tonal target transition. The mapping criterion is therefore more like a ‘vector’, obliging the two transitions to agree not only in direction but also in slope. The Hidden Structure Alignment constraint is the third important mapping constraint discovered that succeeds in providing solutions to account for unusual pairings or mismatches that directionality and interval fail to explain. In order that a tonal target transition match a melodic transition, the hidden or phonetically unexpressed semitones on both tonal and melodic scales should be aligned to or absent from the same edge. This constraint is helpful to account for the extremely restricted mapping patterns at the song-final cadence. By investigating a large corpus of Cantonese pop songs written by various lyricists, this research proposes a detailed description of the grammar of Cantonese tone-melody mapping in terms of the interaction of the directionality, interval and hidden structure alignment constraints. / published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy