This paper is about the sound iconicity of the Late Middle Chinese entering tone in two of Du Fu's long narrative poems, "The Journey to the North" and "Singing my Heart out in Five Hundred Characters on the Way from the Capital to Fongxian County", as well as Du Fu's grammar of poetry in these two poems. In poetry, rhyme is an arbitrary and 'visible' figure reiterated with regulation which forms an axis of sequence, and this axis will work jointly with all the other poetic elements—semantics, images, and grammar to form the whole of a poem. In these two poems, all the rhyme characters carry a voiceless —t ending, which is classified with —k and —p endings as the entering tone in Late Middle Chinese reconstructed by Edwin Pulleyblank. These voiceless stops are short, tense, and uncomfortable to utter; when they are repeated fifty and seventy times at the end of each couplet, it naturally brings about a strong, rough, and uncomfortable feeling which correlates with the feeling of suffering in both poems. It is sound iconicity, because an icon resembles the object it stands for in an immediate and concrete manner, and the —t ending rhyme characters do have the characteristics to make the reader grasp the feeling of suffering when she reads the poems. In terms of Du Fu's grammar of poetry, I used Jakobsonian methodology and found how Du Fu's poeticity was created with lexical meaning and grammar. Although Classical Chinese does not have a huge grammatical repertoire (e.g., person, case, gender, finite, non-finite . . .) which can figure in a poem, this language still has its own obligatory categories that will provide for the 'grammar of poetry'. Classical Chinese is already known for its grammatical parallelism in poetry, because this language is extremely isolating and analytical. However, grammatical parallelism is little in these two poems, but there are different kinds of grammatical tropes. They are mainly anti-syntactic inversions interacting with semantics. I found Du Fu a fascinating artist of grammar; he may be anti-grammatical but never agrammatical.

This thesis explores the sound recording aspects encountered on the creation of an album containing Rock music. It follows each project from the recording of the basic tracks through the final album mixes. Microphone technique, signal processing, studio setup, and instrument selection are also dealt with. This thesis documents two separate recording projects.

Research efforts concerned with the implementation of reliable computer-based score followers were first presented at the 1984 International Computer Music Conference independently by Roger Dannenberg and Barry Vercoe. Over the past ten years, much has been done to advance the accuracy and reliability of such systems and yet, little of this development has integrated new or existing ideas concerning the tracking of a performer's rhythm. The research undertaken in this study has attempted to suggest one possibility for such an integration through the design and implementation of a prototype score follower that uses temporal patterns from a live performer as its primary information to determine score location. The simultaneous tracking of pitch information provides an alternate performer position when temporal pattern prediction fails. Testing of the system was performed on both monophonic and polyphonic works spanning four musical eras.

The World-Wide Web (WWW) is currently witnessing a dramatic trend toward the incoporation of multimedia elements into on-line publishing. These elements can be very effective for communicating ideas that are difficult to explain with text alone. For the presentation of music, the WWW brings the capability of embedding audio files (recordings) into a document, thus providing audible musical excerpts in addition to textual references to selected points of interest in a musical score. However, there are technical challenges and copyright issues to be addressed when providing musical excerpts on the WWW. The research undertaken in this study brings one possible solution to these issues through the design and implementation of a hybrid system using a combination of the internet and commercially available audio compact discs.

This research presents new audio creation and processing tools for the virtual electronic music studio. The Tools were created by the author in the Max/MSP authoring environment. Some Tools model analog production techniques lost when studios moved inside computers, and provide additional functionality only possible in the digital world. Others make use of traditional processing ideas but add a level of control difficult to find in today's audio software plug-ins. The Tools are small, simple, real-time, and user-controllable devices for working with sound.

Although it is widely accepted that the diffusion of early reflections in acoustic spaces intended for music performance greatly improves the perceived quality of sound, current manufacturers of synthetic reverberation engines continue to model reflecting surfaces as having almost perfectly specular characteristics. This dissertation describes a hybrid method of simulating diffusion based on both physical and phenomenological modeling components. / In 1979, Manfred Schroeder described a method of designing and constructing diffusing surfaces based on a rather simple mathematical algorithm which provides diffused reflections in predictable frequency bands. This structural device, now known as a "Schroeder diffuser," has become a standard geometry used in constructing diffusive surfaces for spaces intended for music rehearsal, recording and performance. While it is possible to use DSP to model the characteristics of reflections off such a surface, a reflection model based exclusively on a surface constructed of a Schroeder diffuser has proven in informal tests to be as aesthetically inadequate as a perfectly specular model. Control of both the spatial and temporal envelopes of the diffusive reflection are required by an end user in order to tailor the reflection characteristics to the desired impression. / In 1974 an empirical model for computing light reflections off objects in a three-dimensional environment was developed by Phong Bui-Toung. This algorithm incorporated both a specular and diffuse component with relationships controlled by an end user. / This dissertation describes the adaptation and implementation of the Phong shading algorithm in conjunction with a physical model of components of the Schroeder diffuser for the modeling of diffuse reflections in synthetic acoustic environments. The inclusion of the Phong algorithm provides precise control over the balance between the spectral and diffusive components of the reflection. In addition, directivity functions for sound sources and receivers in the virtual space are described. / Analysis and evaluation of the model using mathematical and empirical methodologies are discussed and stereo and multichannel audio examples produced by the system are included.

Dolby Surround technology offers consumers surround sound in their home via a 4:2:4 encode/decode matrix. Although originally intended for audio accompanying visual media, the system has potential as a music-only playback system. / The purpose of the thesis is to investigate this potential, particularly as it applies to acoustic music recording. Dolby Surround encode and decode technology and its relevance to acoustic music reproduction is reviewed. The classic stereo microphone techniques are discussed with particular attention paid to each one's theoretical ability to "encode" information for the Dolby Surround decoder. Practical limitations and benefits of these well-known methods are considered. / Recently proposed microphone techniques are reviewed in theory and in practice and are found to provide many solutions. Methods for optimizing the decoder technology for music reproduction are suggested. The paper is relevant to any acoustic recording application for a number of surround systems as well as for conventional stereo and mono.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.