Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes special study report entitled: Film in architecture. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1985. / Vita. Abstract. Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--University of Detroit Mercy, 2008. / "28 April 2008". Includes bibliographical references (p. 156-157).

Thesis (M.Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes special study report entitled : Film in architecture. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

ABSTRACT The small professional independent recording studio (commonly known as a ‘home recording studio’) has arisen in South Africa as it has in other countries over the past fifteen years. It has become an alternative service to that of major recording studios such as EMI and Gallo. My research discusses the history and development of the home studio with relation to technologic and socio-economic expansion in the commercial industry. I use ten established home studios in Johannesburg and its surrounding areas as case studies, working towards a definition of this phenomenon and exploring its influence on the South African music industry as a whole.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes special report study entitled : Degree of publicity and privacy. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

Tamil cinema is marked by its remarkable output of films and reception across the globe. More than 5000 films were produced in Tamil during the last century alone, and Tamil films have a longer and denser history of reception among the South East Asian diaspora--in countries like Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Singapore, mainly among the Tamilians and other South Indians--than films made in any other Indian language. The studios of Madras, arguably the most influential in shaping a film industry in terms of its form and content outside the classical Hollywood system, were at the center of Tamil cinema's productivity during the defining decades of the 1940s and 50s, a period marked by British Rule, the Second World War, India's independence, and the electoral politics of the Dravidian movement. However, a sustained and scholarly study of this history has been marked by its absence, primarily due to the enormity of the task, the challenges associated with data collection, and the availability of archival materials. Therefore, my primary objective in this dissertation is to fill this void, and study the most eventful period in the history of the Madras studios (1940-57) when they produced their landmark and seminal films. An understanding of the history of the studios and a detailed reading of their major films sheds light on the complex intersection of the cultural, economic, and political factors which shaped the studios and their owners, and the type of productions they were interested in. Tamil cinema is often criticized as verbose and theatrical mainly due to lack of parallel and art cinema movements like in neighboring states of Kerala and Karnataka. The "Madrasi Picture" has become the convenient way to label a melodramatic tearjerker juxtaposed with comedy. My challenge to this perception in this thesis, therefore, is to foreground Tamil Cinema's theatrical roots embedded in folk traditions and the Parsi theatre, and its ability to navigate through multiple influences, and yet retain a specificity of its own in terms of innovative genres, narrative devices, and formats which keep significantly influencing Indian popular cinema.

This thesis studies the development of the British recording studio from the mid-1960s to the early-1990s. Although there are now a growing number of academic studies of popular music they have, so far, largely failed to study the evolving process by which artists were able to reproduce their music for mass distribution. Consequently, this dissertation investigates the image portrayed of the studio and its utilisation and representation by a combination of human, technological and locational factors. The first part of the thesis constructs an overview of the recording studio industry, as based on contemporary trade journals, in order to produce a traditional historical narrative, so far absent from music’s historiography, which provides the framework in which to place more detailed research. The prominence given by the industry to the ‘progress of technology’ is then compared to the public perception of the recording studio, as shown by the extent and content of its inclusion in the popular culture media of the period, both print and film based. How far the process of producing recorded music managed to permeate through the presentation of a music industry that was becoming increasingly reliant on the image and personality of the artists themselves is then analysed. The second part of the thesis is based on Latour’s concept of actor-networks and deconstructs the recording studio into three main components; technology, architecture and the human element within it. Using one particular studio (Strawberry Recording Studios in Stockport) as being representative of the increasing proportion of small independents in the industry, the further deconstruction of these three components into their constitutional networks, provides the key theme of the dissertation. Consequently, studio technology can be viewed not simply in terms of functional machinery in the studio setting (of Latourian ‘black boxes’) but more as a confusing and intrusive element that was developed, shaped and created by the requirements of those in the studio. And, whilst contemporary society has always elevated the status of the performer in the music industry, the human element in the studio can also be shown to comprise the industrial and social interaction between a wide range of support staff, whose roles and importance altered over time, and the artists themselves. Finally, studio buildings were not just backdrops to the work taking place in them but were seen to extend their boundaries and influence beyond their immediate location through their architecture, interior design and geography. In other words, the recording studio might be seen as the combination of a number of fluctuating networks rather than just as a passive element in the production of recorded music. As a result of the content of the subject being studied, this thesis utilises a number of sources that, in Samuel’s terminology, moves the study away from a ‘fetishization’ of the traditional historical archive towards those of ‘unofficial learning’. Given the immediacy of the period being studied, the personal accounts of those involved in the studio, mainly through the use of oral history, form a major part of the research material.

The link to subjective parameters and objective parameters in the field of room acoustics has been the source of much research. This thesis surveys some of the available objective room acoustical analysis methods, quantify their advantages and disadvantages with respect to the measurement of acoustical qualities of professionally operated critical listing rooms, and implements these methods in a range of critical listening rooms. In conjunction with the objective room analysis, a subjective component of research was also performed. A series of anechoically recorded standard instrument sounds were presented to professional listeners in their critical listening spaces with the listeners asked to alter the sounds to taste: to

Mémoire d'études--UP6--Paris-La Villette--Ecole nationale supérieure d' architecture, 1972-1973. / Bibliogr. (2 p.).