Review of Folksongs of Another America: Field Recordings from the Upper Midwest, 1937–1946. 2015. Produced, compiled, and annotated by James P. Leary. Dust-to-Digital, CDs (5), DVD, DTD-43.

Review of Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings, 1947-55

Stephen Wade: The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Review of Review of Music Inspired by Art: A Guide to Recordings. Gary Evans. 2002. 317p, 0-8108-4509-1, $60.00

In the 1960s, Gustav Mahler's music received renewed interest in America. While certain champions of Mahler from this period, such as Leonard Bernstein and Bruno Walter, have attracted scholarly attention, other conductors have been largely overlooked, including Maurice Abravanel (1903–1993). During Abravanel's directorship of the Utah Symphony (1947–1979), he consistently programmed Mahler's music, making the orchestra the first American orchestra to record all of Mahler's symphonies. Although the concerts contributed meaningfully to Utah's musical life and some of the recordings were well-received by critics in and outside America, they remain marginalized in accounts of Mahler's music in America. To bridge this gap, the dissertation examines primary sources, including concert and record reviews, program notes, correspondence, and interview transcripts to present the history, reception, and influence of Abravanel's Mahler journey with the Utah Symphony. By examining the musical past of a Western city and considering musical and extramusical factors, this dissertation demonstrates that local and technological histories influenced musical decisions, all of which in turn played a role in the growth of the Utah Symphony and planted Mahler's music in the community. The examination reveals that Abravanel's Mahler carried different meanings for different parties. The recordings, with low prices and superior sound, were recommended by critics and welcomed by audiophiles and music lovers. Abravanel's interpretations were commonly criticized as dispassionate, yet were embraced by those who did not prefer Bernstein's more involved, dramatic readings. Through the recordings of Mahler's music, the Utah Symphony gained national and international acclaim. In Salt Lake City, Mahler became a familiar name, and his music remains integral to the city's music culture. As of the completion of this dissertation, the Utah Symphony is nearing the end a two-season (2014–2016) Mahler cycle and has recorded two symphonies by Mahler under music director Thierry Fischer. The McKay Music Library of the University of Utah is digitizing Abravanel's Mahler scores and documenting memories about Abravanel's endeavors with the Austrian composer's music. The concerts, recordings, and efforts to preserve history again bring the collective memories of Abravanel's Mahler back to the community.

As digital communication of television content becomes more pervasive, and as networks supporting such communication become increasingly diverse, the long-standing problem of assessing video quality by objective measurements becomes particularly important. Content owners as well as content distributors stand to benefit from rapid objective measurements that correlate well with subjective assessments, and further, do not depend on the availability of the original reference video. This thesis investigates different techniques of subjective and objective video evaluation. Our research recommends a functional quality metric called Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) where failure refers to video artifacts deemed to be perceptually noticeable, and investigates objective measurements that correlate well with subjective evaluations of MTBF. Work has been done for determining the usefulness of some existing objective metric by noting their correlation with MTBF. The research also includes experimentation with network-induced artifacts, and a study on statistical methods for correlating candidate objective measurements with the subjective metric. The statistical significance and spread properties for the correlations are studied, and a comparison of subjective MTBF with the existing subjective measure of MOS is performed. These results suggest that MTBF has a direct and predictable relationship with MOS, and that they have similar variations across different viewers. The research is particularly concerned with the development of new no-reference objective metrics that are easy to compute in real time, as well as correlate better than current metrics with the intuitively appealing MTBF measure. The approach to obtaining greater subjective relevance has included the study of better spatial-temporal models for noise-masking and test data pooling in video perception. A new objective metric, 'Automatic Video Quality' metric (AVQ) is described and shown to be implemented in real time with a high degree of correlation with actual subjective scores, with the correlation values approaching the correlations of metrics that use full or partial reference. This is metric does not need any reference to the original video, and when used to display MPEG2 streams, calculates and indicates the video quality in terms of MTBF. Certain diagnostics like the amount of compression and network artifacts are also shown.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 175-188). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2002. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 175-188). Also available on the Internet.

Commercial recordings - CDs, LPs - are familiar objects. However, discussion about them has often attempted to conceal the fact that, as communicating objects, recordings pose special problems due to the fact that they unite text, image, and sound in a material commodity. This thesis examines the role of the visual in the production, circulation and use of recordings. The album cover is the primary category of study, with an emphasis on its functioning in relation to the recording as a sonic and material commodity. The label ECM, a German company which has been producing recordings since 1969, provides the main focus in this analysis. The basis of this investigation lies in the questioning of the assumptions and categories that have historically guided the activity of cover design and the discourse about it. Traditionally, recordings have been understandably seen primarily as sound-carriers; their visual aspects, even when celebrated, are most often relegated to a peripheral status, despite the fact that in certain contexts the importance of the visual can overwhelm that of sound. The usual hierarchical opposition between these elements is here questioned through an examination of both the marketing of recordings and their circulation and use. ECM provides a pertinent case through which such questions can be elaborated. Its visual marketing strategies can be characterised in terms of a desire for difference. ECM's attempt to set itself apart has resulted in a "look" which rejects many conventions. It has also resulted in a complex, conceptual group of visual strategies. In its particular use of landscape photography, blank space, and gestural markings, ECM constructs ideas of space which relate to the potential for performativity and creativity. Through the combination of these strategies, the label deemphasises creative personality of the musical performer and emphasises the space occupied by the looker/listener. In doing this, it also questions the traditional boundaries between music and the visual. ECM's covers cause these categories to become indistinct and allow new conceptions of the recording as a material commodity to emerge. One effect of this is a construction of the apprehender's subjectivity that fails to fit within the marketplace's traditional categories. The thesis considers how the visual has been implicated in more concrete processes such as the negotiation of taste and practices of consumption and use. The niche that ECM attempts to carve out for itself is considered in relation to the tension in the marketplace between the desire for distinction and the recording as a massproduced commodity.

The process of remastering old recordings comprises two basic stages: the transfer of the material from the source to a modern format, and the subsequent restoration of the transferred material through various forms of signal processing. The transfer stage in particular requires an understanding of issues which are becoming increasingly less familiar to engineers as the science of recording progresses further into the digital era. To a lesser extent, the restoration stage involves the use of certain techniques and forms of processing which are specific to this application. / This thesis is intended as a reference for those recording engineers who occasionally undertake remastering projects, but who are not thoroughly acquainted with the many different situations and problems which can be involved. Emphasis is given to those areas which are likely to be least familiar to most engineers. / In order to enable the engineer to properly assess a given source, the evolution and characteristics of each type of source--cylinder, disc and tape--is surveyed. This is followed in each case by an examination of the preparation, equipment and method used in transferring the source. Finally, the various types of processing which can be applied to the transferred material are presented, focusing on the techniques and forms of signal processing which are specific to audio restoration.