No description available.

No description available.

Research regarding liveness and embodiment in electronic music has tended to explore the relationship of bodies and instruments, audience perception, interfaces, and shifting definitions, less theoretical and empirical study has considered network situations, perhaps given their relative cultural novelty. Network music has seen many advances since the time of the Telharmonium, including the invention of the personal computer and the widespread proliferation of internet connectivity. These advances have fostered a unique approach to live electronic music that facilitates collaboration in a field where solo performance is perhaps more common. This thesis explores the design of network music interfaces, and how those interfaces mediate collaborations. Three new network music system interfaces, each using different a different paradigm for interface design are presented in this study. One an instrument for creating modular feedback lattices. Another is a three dimensional virtual pattern sequencer. And the last is a web based collaborative live coding language. Accompanying each system is an evaluation using quantitative and qualitative analysis to frame these instruments in a larger context regarding network music. The results highlight important themes concerning the design of networked interfaces, and the attitudes of musicians regarding networked collaborations.

Audio is an effective but often overlooked component of World Wide Web delivery. Of the nearly twenty billion web pages estimated to exist, statistically few use sound. Those few using sound often use it poorly and with hardly any regard to theoretical and rhetorical issues. This thesis is an examination of the uses of audio on the World Wide Web, specifically focusing on how that use could be informed by current and historical rhetorical theory. A theoretical methodology is applied to suggest the concepts and disciplines required to make online audio more meaningful and useful. The thesis argues for the connection between the Web and the modern orator, its embodiment, its place in sound reproduction technology, and awareness of the limitations placed on it by design and convention.

There are many facets that influence the quality of a musical theatre production. The visual appeal is created from the décor, costumes and lighting, whereas the plot, pace, and relationship a listener develops with the characters are fundamental to the performance quality. However, one often overlooked factor is the impact of sound quality. The perception of sound quality is subjective but is greatly impacted by the environment in which the listener finds themselves. If the projection of the music is underwhelming in depth and expression, or the balance of the dynamics and timbre are badly mixed, this can jeopardise the production’s success, regardless of the quality of the composition or the visual aspects. The production budget for a musical performance can be prohibitive. As a result, prerecorded music is often used as an alternative substitute to live musicians. However, the subjective authenticity of a musical may be jeopardized by the exclusion of live musicians and create additional challenges and performance limitations. One such challenge is the environment in which music will be played. Recorded music is usually created in a single format such as compact disc or for broadcasting, and the cost of recording be can just as expensive as a live performance, especially on large scale works. Time and budget constraints may impact the sound quality. In addition to this, the varying acoustic properties of potential venues may emphasise sonic gaps and flaws contributing to a listener’s negative perception of the sound quality, resulting in a compromised experience of the performance as a whole. This mixed method dissertation offers a systematic explanation to potentially resolve these challenges and limitations by conceptualising established knowledge of sound, audio and acoustics to formulate a framework for adaptive sound. These concepts are put into practice by creating a specifically designed audio recording that is experimented with in multiple theatre scenarios to successfully achieve optimal adaptation of the sound for the theatre environment. / Dissertation (MMus)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Music / MMus / Unrestricted

The diffusion of innovations is a fundamental aspect of the innovative process, to which the literature on innovation dedicated a lot of attention. This voluminous literature covers a variety of themes, such as different kinds of innovations, potential adopters, and mechanisms by which the innovation spreads among its potential users. However, some aspects of this vast literature still deserve some further investigation. The objective of the thesis is to study the adoption and diffusion of a consumer technology, the portable digital audio player (DAP) market in Europe and Japan. The methodology is quantitative and consists on the collection and analysis of two original datasets. The first dataset regards the demand-side consisting in a survey of 1562 young potential adopters from 9 countries (France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, UK, and Japan). The other source of data is a dataset of 585 DAPs marketed between 2001 and 2009, including information on product characteristics (storage space, size, etc.) and price. The analysis of the data is carried out at three levels. The first one regards the demand-side, with the aim of assessing how users' characteristics shape the adoption decision, and providing a classification of potential adopters that goes beyond the usual classification based on timing of adoption or on the distribution of a single variable such as income. The second level concentrates on the supply-side, testing if there is a systematic relationship between product price and its objectively measurable characteristics and evaluating how technical change in the sector influences the diffusion path by matching products' quality change with users' preferences and patterns of adoption over time. Finally, the third level aims at providing evidence on whether conventional models of diffusion are able to provide an adequate explanation of the diffusion of DAPs, and moreover, on how the assumptions underlying these models might be combined or synthesised into a coherent framework.

Ces travaux concernent l'évaluation perceptive de la reproduction sonore. Le but de notre étude est de proposer un protocole permettant la caractérisation perceptive des non-linéarités et des phénomènes de distorsion modifiant le signal reproduit par un système tel qu'une enceinte acoustique. L'élaboration d'un tel protocole nécessite de rassembler de nombreuses enceintes et d'utiliser une méthode d'évaluation adaptée. Nous ne cherchons pas à évaluer la distorsion en terme de qualité globale mais plutôt à estimer les dissemblances perçues entre différentes enceintes distordues afin de révéler, grâce à une analyse multidimensionnelle MDS, les critères sur lesquelles les auditeurs se basent pour les différencier. Dans un premier temps, nous avons utilisé des signaux de synthèse afin de générer des échantillons dont la distorsion est contrôlable. Nous avons ainsi créé un corpus composé de nombreux échantillons distordus simulant ou se rapprochant du fonctionnement d'une enceinte acoustique avec différents types de non-linéarités. Ensuite nous proposons une méthode adaptée à l'évaluation de la dissemblance sur des corpus étendus que nous avons validée à partir de simulations et de tests d'écoute. Enfin, nous avons appliqué cette méthode d'évaluation sur le corpus d'enceintes que nous avons élaboré afin de tester l'utilisation du protocole proposé et de donner quelques résultats préliminaires concernant les dimensions perceptives liées à la distorsion non linéaire. / This work deals with the perceptual evaluation of the sound reproduction. Our aim is to elaborate a protocol allowing to assess the influence of nonlinearities and distortions of a loudspeaker. Such a protocol requires gathering a large set of loudspeakers together with an appropriate method for its evaluation. This study deals with the perceptual evaluation of dissimilarities between different loudspeakers rather than their absolute quality judgements. Thanks to a multidimensional scaling technique, this approach allows to uncover the criteria used by the listeners to differentiate various distorting loudspeakers. First, we used synthesized signals to generate samples of sounds resulting from controlled distortion. Numerous distorded stimuli have been generated that simulate sounds radiated by a loudspeaker. Then, we propose a method suitable for the evaluation of a large set of stimuli. In order to verify its application to the estimation of dissimilarity, simulations and listening tests have been conducted. Finally, this listening test method has been applied to the created set of distorting loudspeakers in order to verify the use of our protocol and provide some preliminaries results concerning the perception of nonlinear distortion.

Listening to Birth asserts that structures of power reproduce themselves by instituting particular modes of listening and sound production. Situating my research within feminist sound studies, I argue that meanings conjured around the audible, material bodies of women were carefully crafted by elites in antiquity, in order to construct gendered ideologies of kingship, civilisation, and nature. I examine these power dynamics as expressed in mythic and magical texts and iconographies, dating from the Bronze Age to later Roman antiquity. Throughout the thesis, I examine the development of symbolic systems and narrative tropes that linked mining and metallurgy with reproduction and vocality. My analysis emphasises how the invention of nature was accomplished, in part, through a metallurgical reclassification of the voices and sexualities of women as indiscrete phenomena: womb, mouth, and voice were elided with mining and smelting to form a unified semantic realm. I argue that this invention of ‘vulvar vocality’ reclassified female sounds as illicit, providing a plaform for the removal of women from the public sphere. I attempt to connect the gendered discourse found in myths and magical rituals to the political and economic domain of state-craft, to demonstrate the importance of hegemonic mythopoeic control of audible female reproduction for establishing ideologies of colonisation and extraction. I link analyses of texts and iconographies from the Bronze Age Mesopotamians, Hittites, Canaanites, Minoans, and Egyptians to later materials from the Iron Age Greeks, Israelites, and Romans—my goal is to demonstrate both the ubiquity and the continual reproduction of metallurgical ideology across the ancient world. I also present my preliminary research into the lasting impact that antique notions of vulvar vocality had on later state-craft. I begin to trace the preservation and elaboration of antique metallurgical literature by Byzantine and Islamic scholars, who in turn exerted strong influence on the Ottomans and late medieval and early modern Europeans. I outline future work to investigate the exponential rise of entrepreneurial metallurgy in late medieval and early modern Europe, arguing that this metallurgical discourse provided symbolic re-enforcement for the rapidly-accelerating mining and metal trade that formed the core of European colonial expansion. I suggest that vulvar vocality was central to early modern metallurgical, demonological, and colonial discourse, and that specific female vocalities and silences were purposefully crafted into the colonial project in order to forcibly redefine women, along with the lands and children stolen from them, as mere natural resources.

Cette thèse de recherche-création explore certaines des causes esthétiques, techniques et inter- artistiques qui font du cinéma un domaine privilégié pour l’étude du son. Les hypothèses de cette recherche sont formulées à partir de ma posture de concepteur sonore pour le cinéma et émergent des conditions pratiques et esthétiques singulières ayant menées à la création sonore de différentes œuvres. La première partie de la thèse explore ces trois axes (esthétique, technique et inter- artistique) par la mise en résonance d’expériences pratiques et de recherches théoriques : mon travail de conception sonore pour le film Le silence des semences (Guillaume Roussel-Garneau, 2021) m’amène d’abord à rendre compte de l’émergence du courant expressiviste à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (Taylor) et de la reprise de l’expression comme modèle théorique en art (Abrams) pour ensuite mettre ces modèles à l’épreuve des théories du son au cinéma (Chion, Fano) ; mon travail de post-production sonore pour le film Le rêve et la radio (Renaud Després-Larose et Ana Tapia- Rousiouk, 2022) m’entraîne à explorer ce qui, dans la nature mécanique et matérielle du son capté, monté et reproduit par différentes techniques (Altman, Lastra, Schaeffer, Schafer, Cardinal), permet de rejouer ces tensions entre représentation et expression ; ma « sensibilité technicienne » (Tapia-Rousiouk) me permet de faire l’étude des modes d’articulation et d’interaction des sons entre eux, avec l’image, avec le spectateur ou l’auditeur ; ces modes d’articulation et d’interaction sont empruntés aux autres arts sonores, et ils survivent dans l’univers cinématographique à travers les œuvres et la pratique des musiciens et créateurs sonores Ernst Karel (Heard Laboratories, Heard Laboratories Performed, Leviathan) et Christian Calon (Continental Divide). La deuxième partie de cette thèse prend la forme de quatre œuvres sonores crées pour l’exposition La couleur du temps, le son d’un espace, présentée au Centre d’exposition de l’Université de Montréal à l’été 2022. Chacune d’elles, par leur mise en scène du son, de l’écoute et du corps, permettent de rejouer ces enjeux esthétiques et techniques fondamentaux de la création sonore au cinéma : tension entre espace sonore et espace visuel ; matérialité du sonore, entre sens et sensation ; malléabilité des qualités temporelles du son ; qualités transformatives de l’écoute, tant au niveau de la création que de la réception. / This research-creation thesis explores some of the aesthetic, technical and inter-artistic reasons that make cinema a privileged field for the study of sound. The hypotheses of this research are formulated from my position as a sound designer for film and emerge from the singular practical and aesthetic conditions that led to the sound design of different works. The first part of the thesis explores this question along these three axes (aesthetic, technical and inter-artistic) through practical experiences and theoretical research. My sound design work for the film Le silence des semences (Guillaume Roussel-Garneau, 2021) leads me first to recount the emergence of the expressivist current at the end of the 18th century (Taylor) and the use of expression as a theoretical model in art (Abrams) and then confront these models to theories on sound in cinema (Chion, Fano). My audio post-production work for the film Le rêve et la radio (Renaud Després-Larose and Ana Tapia-Rousiouk, 2022) leads me to explore what, in the mechanical and material nature of recorded, edited and reproduced sound with the use of sound reproduction technologies (Altman, Lastra, Schaeffer, Schafer, Cardinal), replays the tensions between representation and expression. My “technical sensibility” (Tapia-Rousiouk) allows me to study the modes of articulation and interaction between sounds, between sound and image, with the spectator or the listener. These modes of articulation and interaction are borrowed from other sound arts, and they survive in the cinematic world through the works and practice of musicians and sound artists such as Ernst Karel (Heard Laboratories, Heard Laboratories Performed, Leviathan) and Christian Calon (Continental Divide). The second part of this thesis takes the form of four sound works created for the exhibition La couleur du temps, le son d’un espace, presented at the Centre d'exposition de l'Université de Montréal in the summer of 2022. Each of these works, through their staging of sound, listening and the body, reformulate these fundamental aesthetic and technical questions regarding sound creation in cinema: the tension between auditory space and visual space; the materiality of sound, between meaning and sensation; the plasticity of the temporal qualities of sound; the transformative qualities of listening, both in terms of creation and reception.

Ce mémoire présente une composition d’études et de travaux de recherche orientés autour de trois grandes thématiques : la synthèse, la reproduction et la perception des sons, en considérant à la fois les sons de nature musicale mais aussi environnementale. Il vise en outre un champ d’application, le design sonore, qui implique globalement la création intentionnelle de sons du quotidien. La structure du document est conçu selon un schéma relativement uniforme et comporte, pour chaque partie, une présentation générale de la thématique apportant des éléments théoriques et des données relatives à l’état de l’art, suivie de développements spécifiques permettant de converger vers les sujets d’étude propres à chaque thème – explicitement, formalisme modal dans la synthèse par modélisation physique, pour la partie "Synthèse" ; mesure et contrôle de la directivité des instruments de musique, pour la partie "Reproduction" ; timbre et identification des sources sonores, pour la partie "Perception"– puis d’une présentation détaillée des travaux personnels relatifs à chacun des sujets, le cas échéant, sous la forme d’un article publié. Ces divers éléments de connaissance et d’expérience propose donc une contribution personnelle et originale, volontairement inscrite dans un cadre de recherche élargi, pluridisciplinaire et appliqué. / This dissertation presents a composition of studies and research works articulated around three main topics : synthesis, reproduction and perception of sounds, considering both musical and environmental sounds. Moreover, it focuses on an application field, the sound design, that globally involves the conception of intentional everyday sounds. The document is based on a rather uniform structure and contains, for each part, a general presentation of the topic which brings theoretical elements together with an overview of the state-of-the-art, followed by more precise developments in order to focus on the specific matters related to each topic – in detail, modal formalism in sound synthesis by physical modeling, for the "Synthesis" section ; measurement and control of musical instruments directivity, for the "Reproduction" section ; timbre and sound sources identification, for the "Perception" section – and then followed by a detailed presentation of the personal works related to each matter, in some cases, in the form of published papers. Then, these several elements of knowledge and experience offer a personal and original contribution, deliberately put in a broad, multidisciplinary and applied framework.