Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Western Sydney, 2008. / A thesis presented to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Humanities and Languages, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliographies.

Strong educators always look for different ways to excite and enthrall their students in the curriculum. The field of science education often loses student interest due to the complexities and vocabulary found in the scientific realm. Incorporating music into the classroom has shown positive results as a way to integrate student learning and a different way of facilitating students in the learning process (Brewer, 1992; Davies, 200). Resources for implementing the integration of music and science exist throughout the Internet in a variety of mediums. This study looks at the availability of said resources and the concepts they cover, for what students they are intended for, how are they intended to be used and the level of accuracy they maintain. Those resources upholding the accuracy desired for use in the classroom were then compiled onto one webpage for use by elementary science educators. The webpage is open and free to the public and may be shared.

The socio-musical practice of sampling is closely associated with the re-use of pre-existing sound recordings and the technological processes of looping. These practices, based on appropriation and repetition, have been particularly common within the genres of hip-hop and Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Yet early digital sampling instruments such as the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (CMI) were not designed for these purposes. The technologists at Fairlight Instruments in Australia were primarily interested in the use of digital synthesis to imitate the sounds of acoustic instruments; sampling was a secondary concern. In the first half of the thesis, I follow digital sampling instruments like the Fairlight CMI and the E-mu Emulator by drawing on interviews with their designers and users to trace how they were used to sample the sounds of everyday life, loop sequenced patterns of sampled sounds, and sample extracts from pre-existing sound recordings. The second half of the thesis consists of case studies that follow the users of digital sampling technologies across a range of socio-musical worlds to examine the diversity of contemporary sampling practices. Using concepts from the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this thesis focuses on the ‘user-technology nexus’ and continues a shift in the writing of histories of technologies from a focus on the designers of technologies towards the contexts of use and ‘the co-construction’ or ‘mutual shaping’ of technologies and their users. As an example of the ‘interpretative flexibility’ of music technologies, digital sampling technologies were used in ways unimagined by their designers and sampling became synonymous with re-appropriation. My argument is that a history of digital sampling technologies needs to be a history of both the designers and the users of digital sampling technologies.

Acompanha: Manual didático para aplicação do monocórdio como objeto lúdico perelmaniano / Esta pesquisa aborda a possibilidade de se estabelecer uma prática interdisciplinar entre as disciplinas de Física e Música, no ensino médio, integrado ao técnico, no Instituto Federal do Paraná, Campus Telêmaco Borba. O estudo teve como objetivo estabelecer uma prática interdisciplinar entre as disciplinas de Física e Música que tenha como foco a utilização do monocórdio como Objeto Lúdico Perelmaniano e, ainda, buscou compreender a concepção do conceito de som por parte dos educandos, além de criar um blog para difusão da proposta interdisciplinar, que relaciona o Objeto Lúdico Perelmaniano com a construção ativa de conhecimento por parte dos estudantes. A abordagem metodológica é qualitativa, através da Fenomenologia, com base em Husserl (1997). Cinco estudantes expõem suas concepções do que é o som, e a partir de seus discursos procede-se à redução fenomenológica. Seus discursos são compreendidos em seus horizontes e perspectivas através da reflexão. Após a compreensão das unidades, traçamos um perfil ideográfico, do qual nascem as convergências, as quais, após serem agrupadas, compõem a compreensão nomotética geral dos discursos. Assim, é estruturado o fenômeno do que é o som. A análise fenomenológica descortinou a importância de abordagens significativas, ativas e lúdicas para o ensino, a fim de impulsionar o aprendizado e auxiliar na construção e reconstrução dos conhecimentos que envolvem a relação intrínseca entre Arte e Ciência. / This research addresses the possibility of establishing an interdisciplinary practice between disciplines of Physics and Music, in high school integrated to technical, on Federal Institute of Paraná, Telemaco Borba site. The study has aimed to establish an interdisciplinary practice between the disciplines of physics and music, that focuses on the use of monochord as Perelman’s Playful Object. Also, seek to understand design of the sound concept by the students, creating a blog to spread interdisciplinary proposal, which relates the Perelman’s Playful Object with active construction of knowledge by students. The methodological approach is qualitative, by phenomenology, based on Husserl (1997). Five students display their conceptions of what is sound, and from their speeches proceeds to phenomenological reduction. These speeches were understandable in their horizons and perspectives through reflection. After understanding of units, we draw an ideographic profile, from whom born the convergences, which, after being grouped together set up the overall nomothetic understanding of speeches. Therefore, we have structured phenomenon of what is sound. The phenomenological analysis unveiled the importance of meaningful approaches, active and playful for teaching. In order to boost learning, help in the construction and reconstruction of knowledge that involving the intrinsic relationship between Art and Science.

The present thesis is an enquiry into the nature and consistency of the idea of music as a metaphor throughout the works of the English philosopher and physician Robert Fludd (1573/4-1637). Fludd was very fond of a view of the world in which man is made of the same elements and the same proportions of the cosmos. Though this idea was slowly losing credit amongst the intellectuals of the time, Fluddean thought made some impact in the British Isles, and even more so on the continent: Johannes Kepler, for instance, wrote extensively about Fludd’s use of numerical symbolism, and stressed the differences between his own idea of harmony of the spheres and Fludd’s. After Fludd’s death, his ideas were still taken seriously amongst certain intellectual circles, e.g. in England (John Webster) and Poland (John Amos Comenius), and Fluddean thought influenced German musico-theoretical writers such as Athanasius Kircher, Andreas Werckmeister, and Johann Walther. But the subsequent centuries witnessed a general obliviousness towards Fludd. His figure began to re- emerge only in the second half of the 20th century in an increasing number of essays, papers, articles and a few books dedicated to him. What is still lacking, though, is a reassessment relying upon a more organic approach, which takes into account the entirety of Fludd’s publications and the wide range of topics covered in them. My work attempts to address this issue. The musical metaphor is one of the strongest leitmotifs in Fluddean publications, thanks to its being fit for representing man, the cosmos, and their interrelationship. Indeed the monochord, which well before Fludd was the preeminent practical and philosophical demonstration of the Pythagorean ‘divine’ proportions, rules the pages of Fludd’s earlier volumes. In later volumes, though, a new instrument takes its place: the more up-to-date weather-glass, surprisingly also linked to musical proportions. I argue that the new scientific instrument retains some of the monochord’s traits, thus representing an original re-arrangement of ‘ancient’ music; in fact, Fludd even applies it to the human pulse – an under-studied topic that I survey in detail. Following the whole Fluddean opera omnia is a task that gives one a glimpse of Fludd’s reactions to the deep changes that the intellectual and scientific world was undergoing from a perspective that has been, so far, largely neglected. This opens up to new fascinating outlooks on music, medicine and science at the beginning of the seventeenth century.

Computer-generated music composition programs have yet to produce creative, natural sounding music. To date, most approaches constrain the search space heuristically while ignoring the inherent structure of music over time. To address this problem, this thesis introduces NEAT Drummer, which evolves a special kind of artificial neural network (ANN) called compositional pattern producing networks (CPPNs) with the NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (NEAT) method for evolving increasingly complex structures. CPPNs in NEAT Drummer input existing human compositions and output an accompanying drum track. The existing musical parts form a scaffold i.e. support structure, for the drum pattern outputs, thereby exploiting the functional relationship of drums to musical parts (e.g. to lead guitar, bru:is, etc.) The results are convincing drum patterns that follow the contours of the original song, validating a new approach to computergenerated music composition.