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This dissertation follows the history of functional ideas and their pedagogy, illuminates with many examples the implementation of my updated system of Functional Analysis, and discusses the pedagogical implications that this updated system implies. The main goal is to update a system of labeling to be as pedagogically friendly as possible, in order to assist students and teachers of harmony to more easily and enjoyably learn, teach, and engage with common-practice tonal harmonic practice. Example syllabi, assignments, classroom demonstrations, and long projects are also included, and each aspect of the labeling is carefully discussed as it is presented. By surveying the history of functional thinking in music theory, we find that desire to analyze for function is not a new idea, and has been a goal of many theorists and harmony teachers for centuries. However, the current methods for instructing in function still leave students confused or baffled, as they struggle to match functional concepts to labels that do not exemplify their analysis goals and methods that insist on starting from tiny detail instead of coming from a more complete musical perspective. The elaboration of each detail of my Functional Analysis system shows how each part of Functional Analysis has been designed to help make harmonic analysis quicker, easier, more intuitive, and more personalized. The greater pedagogical implications on a larger scale involving courses and curricula are also covered, informed by my experience both as a teacher of today’s standard system and from teaching Functional Analysis in the classroom.

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The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra is a useful tool in determining the number of zeros of complex-valued polynomials and rational functions. It does not, however, apply to complex-valued harmonic polynomials and rational functions generally. In this thesis, we determine behaviors of the family of complex-valued harmonic functions $f_{c}(z) = z^{n} + \frac{c}{\overline{z}^{k}} - 1$ that defy intuition for analytic polynomials. We first determine the sum of the orders of zeros by using the harmonic analogue of Rouch\'e's Theorem. We then determine useful geometry of the critical curve and its image in order to count winding numbers by applying the harmonic analogue of the Argument Principle. Combining these results, we fully determine the number of zeros of $f_{c}$ for $c > 0$.

<p>In this paper I give a description and derivation of Dirichlet's problem, a boundary value problem, for p-harmonic functions on graphs and study an iterative method for solving it.The method's convergence is proved and some preliminary results about its speed of convergence are presented.There is an implementation accompanying this thesis and a short description of the implementation is included. The implementation will be made available on the internet at http://www.mai.liu.se/~anbjo/pharmgraph/ for as long as possible.</p>

In this paper I give a description and derivation of Dirichlet's problem, a boundary value problem, for p-harmonic functions on graphs and study an iterative method for solving it.The method's convergence is proved and some preliminary results about its speed of convergence are presented.There is an implementation accompanying this thesis and a short description of the implementation is included. The implementation will be made available on the internet at http://www.mai.liu.se/~anbjo/pharmgraph/ for as long as possible.

This dissertation explores the influence of melody on harmonic function in pop and rock songs from around 1950 to the present. While authors define the term "function" in several ways, none consider melody in their explanations, and I contend that any discussion of harmonic function in rock must include melody. I offer a novel perspective on function by defining it through what I call tension-as-anticipation, and I define a "melodic function" that accounts for the sense of tension and relaxation a melody creates within a particular moment in a track. My dissertation defines two types of melodic function—dominant and tonic—based on the melody's goal-directed scale-degree content, position within a phrase, and relation with the harmony. Dominant-melodic function results in two musical phenomena that I call the "imposed dominant" and the "dominant remainder." An imposed dominant occurs when a dominant-melodic function is initially dissonant with the harmony and resolves over a tonic. A dominant remainder occurs when a dominant-melodic function occurs over a harmonic resolution to the tonic, creating a slower dissipation of tension. Tonic-melodic function produces a phenomenon I call the "tonic anticipation," where a melody outlines a tonic mode over a pretonic harmony, creating a maximum sense of tension-as-anticipation. By including melody in considering harmonic function, we can more adequately describe the cycles of tension and resolution found in pop styles.

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The interaction between the study of geometric and analytic aspects of Riemannian manifolds and that of graphs is a very amazing subject. The study of synthetic curvature notions on graphs adds new contributions to this topic. In this thesis, we mainly study two kinds of synthetic curvature notions: the Ollivier-Ricci cuvature on locally finite graphs and the combinatorial curvature on infinite semiplanar graphs. In the first part, we study the Ollivier-Ricci curvature. As known in Riemannian geometry, a lower Ricci curvature bound prevents geodesics from diverging too fast on average. We translate this Riemannian idea into a combinatorial setting using the Olliver-Ricci curvature notion. Note that on a graph, the analogue of geodesics starting in different directions, but eventually approaching each other again, would be a triangle. We derive lower and upper Ollivier-Ricci curvature bounds on graphs in terms of number of triangles, which is sharp for instance for complete graphs. We then describe the relation between Ollivier-Ricci curvature and the local clustering coefficient, which is an important concept in network analysis introduced by Watts-Strogatz. Furthermore, positive lower boundedness of Ollivier-Ricci curvature for neighboring vertices imply the existence of at least one triangle. It turns out that the existence of triangles can also improve Lin-Yau\'s curvature dimension inequality on graphs and then produce an implication from Ollivier-Ricci curvature lower boundedness to the curvature dimension inequality. The existence of triangles prevents a graph from being bipartite. A finite graph is bipartite if and only if its largest eigenvalue equals 2. Therefore it is natural that Ollivier-Ricci curvature is closely related to the largest eigenvalue estimates. We combine Ollivier-Ricci curvature notion with the neighborhood graph method developed by Bauer-Jost to study the spectrum estimates of a finite graph. We can always obtain nontrivial estimates on a non-bipartite graph even if its curvature is nonpositive. This answers one of Ollivier\'s open problem in the finite graph setting. In the second part of this thesis, we study systematically infinite semiplanar graphs with nonnegative combinatorial curvature. Unlike the previous Gauss-Bonnet formula approach, we explore an Alexandrov approach based on the observation that the nonnegative combinatorial curvature on a semiplanar graph is equivalent to nonnegative Alexandrov curvature on the surface obtained by replacing each face by a regular polygon of side length one with the same facial degree and gluing the polygons along common edges. Applying Cheeger-Gromoll splitting theorem on the surface, we give a metric classification of infinite semiplanar graphs with nonnegative curvature. We also construct the graphs embedded into the projective plane minus one point. Those constructions answer a question proposed by Chen. We further prove the volume doubling property and Poincare inequality which make the running of Nash-Moser iteration possible. We in particular explore the volume growth behavior on Archimedean tilings on a plane and prove that they satisfy a weak version of relative volume comparison with constant 1. With the above two basic inequalities in hand, we study the geometric function theory of infinite semiplanar graphs with nonnegative curvature. We obtain the Liouville type theorem for positive harmonic functions, the parabolicity. We also prove a dimension estimate for polynomial growth harmonic functions, which is an extension of the solution of Colding-Minicozzi of a conjecture of Yau in Riemannian geometry.

We present a variational method for unfolding of the cortex based on a user-chosen point of view as an alternative to more traditional global flattening methods, which incur more distortion around the region of interest. Our approach involves three novel contributions. The first is an energy function and its corresponding gradient flow to measure the average visibility of a region of interest of a surface from a given viewpoint. The second is an additional energy function and flow designed to preserve the 3D topology of the evolving surface. This latter contribution receives significant focus in this thesis as it is crucial to obtain the desired unfolding effect derived from the first energy functional and flow. Without it, the resulting topology changes render the unconstrained evolution uninteresting for the purpose of cortical visualization, exploration, and inspection. The third is a method that dramatically improves the computational speed of the 3D topology-preservation approach by creating a tree structure of the triangulated surface and using a recursion technique.