This thesis examines public school music in the making of a modern middle class in late-Victorian Toronto. Its aim is to show how this subject both shaped and was shaped by the culture of modernity which increasingly pervaded large urban centres such as Toronto during the course of the nineteenth century. In so doing, this study also examines various aspects of the acoustic soundtrack during the period under study—particularly that which witnessed the advent of industrialization—to bring additional context and perspective to the discussion. Using an approach which goes beyond pedagogic and bureaucratic justification, the overall intent is to present the evolution of school music and its public performance within a much broader acoustic framework, that is, to weave it into the increasingly-urban soundtrack of Toronto, to gain some appreciation of how it would have been heard and understood at the time. In addition to its primary historical discourse, the study also draws meaning and context from a variety of other academic disciplines (musicology, sociology and education, to name but a few). Because of this, it necessarily moves from the general to the specific in terms of its overall focus, not only to provide background, but also to help make sense of the ways in which each of these areas informed and influenced the development of Toronto’s public school system and the inclusion of music in its classrooms. It then proceeds more or less chronologically through the nineteenth century, placing particular emphasis upon the careers of prominent educators such as Egerton Ryerson and James L. Hughes, to mark significant shifts in context and philosophy. Within each, a thematic approach has been employed to highlight relevant developments that likewise informed the way in which school music was conceived and comprehended. In this way, it is hoped that a fresh perspective will emerge on the history of public school music in Toronto, and prompt further research that employs aural history as a more prominent tool of historical research.

This thesis examines public school music in the making of a modern middle class in late-Victorian Toronto. Its aim is to show how this subject both shaped and was shaped by the culture of modernity which increasingly pervaded large urban centres such as Toronto during the course of the nineteenth century. In so doing, this study also examines various aspects of the acoustic soundtrack during the period under study—particularly that which witnessed the advent of industrialization—to bring additional context and perspective to the discussion. Using an approach which goes beyond pedagogic and bureaucratic justification, the overall intent is to present the evolution of school music and its public performance within a much broader acoustic framework, that is, to weave it into the increasingly-urban soundtrack of Toronto, to gain some appreciation of how it would have been heard and understood at the time. In addition to its primary historical discourse, the study also draws meaning and context from a variety of other academic disciplines (musicology, sociology and education, to name but a few). Because of this, it necessarily moves from the general to the specific in terms of its overall focus, not only to provide background, but also to help make sense of the ways in which each of these areas informed and influenced the development of Toronto’s public school system and the inclusion of music in its classrooms. It then proceeds more or less chronologically through the nineteenth century, placing particular emphasis upon the careers of prominent educators such as Egerton Ryerson and James L. Hughes, to mark significant shifts in context and philosophy. Within each, a thematic approach has been employed to highlight relevant developments that likewise informed the way in which school music was conceived and comprehended. In this way, it is hoped that a fresh perspective will emerge on the history of public school music in Toronto, and prompt further research that employs aural history as a more prominent tool of historical research.

<p>The Senses of Fundamentalism: A Material History of Sensing Bodies in Early Twentieth-Century American Fundamentalism offers a new historical narrative about the rise of fundamentalism. I argue that sensing bodies laid the foundation of fundamentalism. New kinds of Christian sensory practices around the turn of the twentieth century established the shared frames of reference that allowed a broad fundamentalist coalition to emerge. Fundamentalists felt their faith in their guts. </p><p>Each chapter of this work explores the role of one of the senses in fundamentalist life: sight, hearing, touch, and the spiritual senses. Using visual and material evidence, I explore how fundamentalists trained their eyes to see truth from dispensationalist charts, how they taught their ears to hear the voice of God on radios and phonograph records, how they regulated and controlled contact between gendered bodies through clothing, and how they honed their bodies to sense spiritual presences. </p><p>Using the methods of visual and material culture studies of religion, I examine the how specific sensory practices structured the everyday realities of fundamentalist life. I examine the specifics of how sensation operated in fundamentalist religious practice. Current studies of fundamentalism tend to treat the movement as primarily concerned with intellectual matters. My material and visual history of fundamentalism intervenes in the historiography to show that efforts to describe fundamentalism as an intellectual movement have excluded important bodies of data. By studying ideas and doctrines, scholars have too long presumed that fundamentalists forbade material forms of religious devotion or disregarded bodies altogether. My work materializes the study of early fundamentalism, exploring how material objects and sensory practices undergird traditional concepts like “belief,” “theology,” or “literalism.” This project recovers sensing bodies as the cornerstone of fundamentalism.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis documents a series of experiments designed to investigate the mechanisms subserving sub-second duration processing in humans. Firstly, duration aftereffects were generated by adapting to consistent duration information. If duration aftereffects represent encoding by neurons selective for both stimulus duration and non-temporal stimulus features, adapt-test changes in these features should prevent duration aftereffect generation. Stimulus characteristics were chosen which selectively target differing stages of the visual processing hierarchy. The duration aftereffect showed robust interocular transfer and could be generated using a stimulus whose duration was defined by stimuli invisible to monocular mechanisms, ruling out a pre-cortical locus. The aftereffects transferred across luminance-defined visual orientation and facial identity. Conversely, the duration encoding mechanism was selective for changes in the contrast-defined envelope size of a Gabor and showed broad spatial selectivity which scaled proportionally with adapting stimulus size. These findings are consistent with a second stage visual spatial mechanism that pools input across proportionally smaller, spatially abutting filters. A final series of experiments investigated the pattern of interaction between concurrently presented cross-modal durations. When duration discrepancies were small, multisensory judgements were biased towards the modality with higher precision. However, when duration discrepancies were large, perceived duration was compressed by both longer and shorter durations from the opposite modality, irrespective of unimodal temporal reliability. Taken together, these experiments provide support for a duration encoding mechanism that is tied to mid-level visual spatial processing. Following this localised encoding, supramodal mechanisms then dictate the combination of duration information across the senses.

Methods of timekeeping have changed drastically throughout history and especially in the last century, as has humanity’s relationship to nature. Building upon existing research into the history of clocks and clock-time this study sketches a long-term chronology with a novel environmental, sensory, and aesthetic analysis. The connection between everyday time(keeping) and the environment, as well as the significant role of objects in how we tell the time. The interactions with our surroundings is explored in order to understand the material role of technology, techno-aesthetics, and eco-social cues. The thesis investigates the aesthetic and sensory dimensions of historical timekeeping, particularly with regards to sound and vision. The thesis follows a chronological narrative so that the significant shifts in European timekeeping can be identified at particular moments in history, as well as demonstrating the overall arc of change. It begins with the lead up to the invention of mechanical clocks followed by a case study – conducted using imaginative phenomenology – of an Uppsala student in 1482 interacting with the clock-bell in his local timescape. After sketching the significant inventions and shifts in the proceeding centuries, there is a comparative case study that conducts a phenomenological autoethnography of the author’s timekeeping practices in Uppsala in 2022 and aesthetic analysis of personal clock devices. This seeks to identify what characterises timekeeping in the Anthropocene. Throughout, the thesis compares the experiences of ‘time foraging’ as opposed to ‘self-referential timekeeping’ to explore how different timekeeping affects our relations on an ecological and social scale.

This thesis documents a series of experiments designed to investigate the mechanisms subserving sub-second duration processing in humans. Firstly, duration aftereffects were generated by adapting to consistent duration information. If duration aftereffects represent encoding by neurons selective for both stimulus duration and non-temporal stimulus features, adapt-test changes in these features should prevent duration aftereffect generation. Stimulus characteristics were chosen which selectively target differing stages of the visual processing hierarchy. The duration aftereffect showed robust interocular transfer and could be generated using a stimulus whose duration was defined by stimuli invisible to monocular mechanisms, ruling out a pre-cortical locus. The aftereffects transferred across luminance-defined visual orientation and facial identity. Conversely, the duration encoding mechanism was selective for changes in the contrast-defined envelope size of a Gabor and showed broad spatial selectivity which scaled proportionally with adapting stimulus size. These findings are consistent with a second stage visual spatial mechanism that pools input across proportionally smaller, spatially abutting filters. A final series of experiments investigated the pattern of interaction between concurrently presented cross-modal durations. When duration discrepancies were small, multisensory judgements were biased towards the modality with higher precision. However, when duration discrepancies were large, perceived duration was compressed by both longer and shorter durations from the opposite modality, irrespective of unimodal temporal reliability. Taken together, these experiments provide support for a duration encoding mechanism that is tied to mid-level visual spatial processing. Following this localised encoding, supramodal mechanisms then dictate the combination of duration information across the senses.

This study examines how smells were perceived in 18th century Stockholm by analyzing odor references in the poetry collection Fredman’s Epistles (1790) (Sw. Fredmans epistlar) by Carl Michael Bellman (1740–1795). Using a specific form of contextualizing, the purpose of the study is to show how the meaning of smells in 18th century Stockholm appears when the smelling objects in the epistles are put in a relevant context. By extension, the investigation will show how the smell sensations in the epistles reveal attitudes towards life, death and certain social and cultural phenomena. I argue that the inhabitants of Stockholm in the 18th century, depending on their social and cultural belonging, shared many of the attitudes towards places, people and phenomena that are reproduced in the epistles. I also argue that 18th century Stockholm was not as dominated by foul smells as has been claimed by previous research. This study sheds new light on how different smells were perceived, described and understood in 18th century Stockholm.

No description available.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, urban lives were touched by a series of innovations in the technology and aesthetics of illumination. Unfamiliar combinations of new fuel sources and auxiliary equipment (for example, curtains, blinds, glass, mirrors and lampshades) meant that cities looked and felt different during both the day and the night. The spheres of elite, popular, public and private culture explored, exploited and were fascinated by the cultural value of light. Through four case studies in the aesthetics of urban illumination, my thesis demonstrates how the acquisition of skills for the manipulation of transparent and reflective surfaces were crucial when negotiating a balance between self-expression and standards of taste, morality, gender and class. Rather than relying upon canonical examples of the period’s fascination with light, such as the high Romantic idealization of nature’s sunrises and sunsets, my thesis investigates more everyday encounters with light in the built environment: the fashionably genteel pastime of transparent painting; the gendering of light to design both domestic interiors and female identity; the appropriation of patrician top-lighting for public buildings of education and exhibition; and the popularity of illuminated spectacles in commercial pleasure gardens. I argue that these new possibilities of lighting temporarily enabled new possibilities of subjectivity. My historical phenomenology suggests that the formation of perception between 1780 and 1840 was actively directed towards changes in the world through a finely-attuned consciousness of light.