The inspiration for The Fallow Ground is the time period of the Second Great Awakening (1790-1840s) and, in particular, the life and impact of one of the period's central figures: Charles Grandison Finney. Finney was a lawyer-turned-evangelist whose preaching style led to explosive and emotional conversions and helped spread the fire of revival throughout the state of New York and eventually throughout the country. In The Fallow Ground I have taken different events from Finney's life and the revivalist culture to create musical analogs that examine and critique the events within a twenty-first century musical aesthetic. Quotation and allusion of revival period hymns play a significant part in The Fallow Ground. Inspired by the works of Ives, Crumb, Ligeti, and Schnittke, quotation is used in this piece to develop or subvert the material, thus creating different contextual meanings from familiar material. In this way, the quotation not only alludes to an idea outside of the piece, but also casts a critical view of that idea by its placement in the context of the piece. Concerning the instrumentation, The Fallow Ground is written for what is commonly called the Pierrot ensemble (flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion) with male soloist. In my piece, the soprano has been replaced by a baritone soloist. The piece, approximately thirty minutes in length, has a chiastic five-movement structure with each of the movements depicting certain events or concepts that were prevalent during the time of Charles Finney and the Second Great Awakening.

Typically, students have had limited voice in their schooling (Erickson & Schultz,1992). The purposes of this study were to explore the concept of student voice in the elementary school and to develop strategies that develop student voice in the curricula. An elementary school principal and four teachers participated in an action research study that examined and attempted to develop student voice in their classrooms. Acting as a coach, the principal supported the four teachers as they implemented their classroom research on student voice. Four case studies were developed based on artifacts such as journals (student and participant), lesson plans, meetings, surveys and observations. Data were analyzed for emerging themes and compared across cases.Findings indicate that there was a difference in the teachers' emerging understanding and promotion of student voice. These differences were explained on the evolving commonalities being discovered in each case study. First and foremost were the instructional strategies utilized by the participants that engaged the learners and promoted their voice? Next, the organizational structure of the building and classes played an important role. Time and size of classes either promoted or restrained student voice. Finally, the culture of the organization and the belief system of the individual teacher played an important role. / Ed. D.

Thesis (M.A. (Fine Art))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, School of Art, 2016 / This thesis examines the concept of authorship in literary and artistic practice by travelling the concept of authorship from literature to artistic practice. To achieve this the thesis will be guided by the questions, ʻwhat is an author?ʼ, ʻwhen is authorship?ʼ and more importantly the title question, what difference does it make who is speaking? To unpack these questions and those that will follow, my research will begin by thinking through the idea of authorship and authorial voice in literature and to identify the ways in which this is performed in artistic practice. Additionally the thesis will explore the authorship and authority, particularly how the author uses the power of language to impose authority over the reader and the West language still holds power the postcolonial subject or authors. In retaliation of this authority, the thesis also looks at how postcolonial writers/artists have developed a language of power. This analysis will be directed by a selection of theorists, writers and artists. Theorists such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault whose questions on authorship are the bases of my research and Miek Bal Traveling Concepts in the Humanities, Jacques Derrida Of Grammatology, Ngugi Wa Thiongo Writers in Politics, Walter Benjamin The Task of the Translator and Jean Fisherʼs Embodied Subversion as well as other supporting reading. In addition to that, investigating methods of writing in Dambudzo Marecheraʼs novella House of Hunger and Willimam S. Burroughs The Naked Lunch and how these ideas are reflected by artistic practice .To help envisage the idea of the ʻartist as authorʼ I look very closely at specific works of three postcolonial artist and their relationship with language. I have selected works by artists Kemang Wa Lehulereʼs Some Deleted Scenes Too, Tracey Roseʼs Span I, and Danh Voʼs Last letter of Saint Théophane Vénard to his father before he was decapitated copied by Phung Vo as well as drawing from my own practice. / MT2017

This purpose of this study is to develop a technique which will serve to evaluate the practices in public speaking in the light of the declared principles.

A subset of speech recognition is the use of speech recognition techniques for voice authentication. Voice authentication is an alternative security application to the other biometric security measures such as the use of fingerprints or iris scans. Voice authentication has advantages over the other biometric measures in that it can be utilized remotely, via a device like a telephone. However, voice authentication has disadvantages in that the authentication system typically requires a large memory and processing time than do fingerprint or iris scanning systems. Also, voice authentication research has yet to provide an authentication system as reliable as the other biometric measures. Most voice recognition systems use Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) as their basic probabilistic framework. Also, most voice recognition systems use a frame based approach to analyze the voice features. An example of research which has been shown to provide more accurate results is the use of a segment based model. The HMMs impose a requirement that each frame has conditional independence from the next. However, at a fixed frame rate, typically 10 ms., the adjacent feature vectors might span the same phonetic segment and often exhibit smooth dynamics and are highly correlated. The relationship between features of different phonetic segments is much weaker. Therefore, the segment based approach makes fewer conditional independence assumptions which are also violated to a lesser degree than for the frame based approach. Thus, the HMMs using segmental based approaches are more accurate. The speech polynomials (feature vectors) used in the segmental model have been shown to be Chebychev polynomials. Use of the properties of these polynomials has made it possible to reduce the computation time for speech recognition systems. Also, representing the spoken word waveform as a Chebychev polynomial allows for the recognition system to easily extract useful and repeatable features from the waveform allowing for a more accurate identification of the speaker. This thesis describes the segmental approach to speech recognition and addresses in detail the use of Chebychev polynomials in the representation of spoken words, specifically in the area of speaker recognition. .

The project herein described is an experimental attempt to con- struct visual aids for the study of voice. Its purposes are: (1) to ako possible the visual perception of pitch change on a vertical scale; (2) to isolate certain overtones of the fundamental frequency in the hope of deriving some assistance to the improvement of quality. The principle of operation is the psychological phenomenon of stroboscopy, the illusion of stationary, constant light, as a result of synchronized interrupted vision. The Vocascope is composed of four essential parts: (1) the scanning drugs, (2) the light source, (3) the amplifier, (4) the filter.

<p> This thesis sets out to examine how street youth use art as a mode of voice and what messages they choose to bring forward in their art. To complete this research a critical, post-modern framework was consulted. Alongside this a threeday, art-based research activity was planned and developed for street youth to participate in. Six street youth gathered at a drop-in centre/shelter to work on a collective art piece. Once the art piece was finished, messages from the art were analyzed through interview discussions with the youth, the literature, field notes and my own interpretations of what I was seeing. Findings of the street youth's messages were categorized as follows: public perception of street youth, being ignored/not being heard, expressions of hunger, sadness/pain, and coping/strengths. Art as a tool for voice was explored in the literature, and it was found that it has the ability to send powerful messages that can have consciousness-raising abilities, and even has instances of impacting organizational/structural changes. This research contributes to knowledge in various ways. First the community can learn from street youth voices that were gathered by an alternative medium. Also art-based methods can prove to be a more accessible way of collecting and interpreting data depending on the population you are working with. Finally, in the field of social work, it could be that art-based research is an alternative way to engage communities in research while at the same time challenging dominant knowledge processes.</p> / Thesis / Master of Social Work (MSW)

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