What is a record producer? There is a degree of mystery and uncertainty about just what goes on behind the studio door. Some producers are seen as Svengali-like figures manipulating artists into mass consumer product. Producers are sometimes seen as mere technicians whose job is simply to set up a few microphones and press the record button. Close examination of the recording process will show how far this is from a complete picture. Artists are special—they come with an inspiration, and a talent, but also with a variety of complications, and in many ways a recording studio can seem the least likely place for creative expression and for an affective performance to happen. The task of the record producer is to engage with these artists and their songs and turn these potentials into form through the technology of the recording studio. The purpose of the exercise is to disseminate this fixed form to an imagined audience—generally in the hope that this audience will prove to be real. Finding an audience is the role of the record company. A record producer must also engage with the commercial expectations of the interests that underwrite a recording. This dissertation considers three fields of interest in the recording process: the performer and the song; the technology of the recording context; and the commercial ambitions of the record company—and positions the record producer as a nexus at the interface of all three. The author reports his structured recollection of five recordings, with three different artists, that all achieved substantial commercial success. The processes are considered from the author‘s perspective as the record producer, and from inception of the project to completion of the recorded work. What were the processes of engagement? Do the actions reported conform to the template of nexus? This dissertation proposes that in all recordings the function of producer/nexus is present and necessary—it exists in the interaction of the artistry and the technology. The art of record production is to engage with these artists and the songs they bring and turn these potentials into form.

This thesis contributes a novel, cross-disciplinary framework to the field of sound studies. It examines how our inherent capacities as listeners are manifested in transitional urban environments, and the primary role of voice as a vehicle for perception in field recording and soundwalking practices. Using the conceptual triad of ‘node, counter-atmosphere and meshwork’ as its analytical device, this research considers the polyphonic physical, personal and social ecologies at play in our encounters within transitional spaces. By doing so, it highlights the importance of sound for countering their functionality and opening them up to a more engaged perception. In its theoretical scope, this conceptual triad draws on and re-contextualises existing terminologies from a variety of disciplines: urban planning and Kevin Lynch’s notion of the node; philosophy and Gernot Boehme’s theory on the atmosphere as well as Gaston Bachelard’s concept of seeping through; anthropology and Tim Ingold’s idea of the meshwork. Coined as a sonic perceptual ecology, this triad is a new analytical tool that is the immediate result of the practice developed as part of this research. Involving three consecutive stages, the work spans across intensive fieldwork, workshops, hybrid telematic soundwalks, radioart pieces, public events and performances engaging with different sites in London and elsewhere. This thesis presents a constellation of original outputs, essential to creating and understanding the novel conceptual framework of the sonic perceptual ecology. This is achieved by testing new methodologies, by analysing, in new terms and through the Sensing Cities interviews series, existing creative work and by developing a portfolio of practice that has been presented as part of commissions, conferences and curated events. Key to these activities is the proposition that we perceive not as authoritative presences but as organisms whose voice is, as Mikhail Bakhtin would suggest, a chain of human and non-human utterances.

M.Ing. (Electrical And Electronic Engineering) / A need was established for the development of a acoustical sensor in silicon. The acoustical sensor is based on the silicon pressure sensor. This sensor consists of a silicon membrane which is formed from silicon bulk material by means of etching. By transforming the movement of the membrane into a variation of capacitance, it is possible to detect a change in pressure. Signal processing is needed to insure that the : information, received from the sensor, is useable and accurate. The physical aspects of sound was investigated. An important relationship was derived between the intensity of a sound and the pressure associated with it. Because silicon was used in a mechanical environment, the mechanical properties of the material were investigated. A model was developed to simplify the design of the senor. A expression was derived for the movement of the membrane for any uniform load applied to it. The variation in capacitance was given by integrating over the area of the membrane. The condense microphone was used as a example of a design of a acoustical sensor. Arising from the example, the natural frequency of the silicon membrane was looked into. A variety of diaphragms were made to provide for a wide working area. Some of the manufacturingprocesses were individually examincd and changed to comply with the manufacturing of the diaphragms. The important process of etching was thoroughly investigated. An excellent etching agent was found with which accurate micro machining could be done. Using this etching agent, a variety of silicon and poll silicon diaphragms were made. Most of the silicon diaphragms were suceossfully formed. The. poli silicon diaphragms were however deformed because of internal stress which developed during the forming process. A signal processing circuit was developed to perform the task of transforming the variation in capacitance to a variation in voltage. The circuit utilised the current through the capacitor to establish the variation in capacitance. The current was transferred to a voltage by a differencing current amplifier. Further signal processing is done by a analogue multiplier.

Gazelle Kianoush's the Master essay "Jag ska skapa en människa!" concists of a voice and sound recording. A recorded reading of the text is mixed with sounds and gives emphasise to vocal and acoustic rather than textual and grammatical qualities. Attention is redirected from reading to listening, and thus a greater intimacy between "writing" and "reading" is sought for. The latter is also further accentuated by the low sound of the recording which demans complete concentration of the listener. The recording begins with quoting a prophecy present in the Quran, the Torah as well in the Bible before the voice immediately turns to observing that all societies are ruled by political agendas and that anyone who wants to put them into play and at stake will be punished. This observation is connected to the remark that art seems to have lost its power to cause political change, i.e change that transcends the art world and manage merge life with art. Kianoush wants to challenge and revolt against this inertia and lost faith and instead see art as a utopian project where the impossible can become possible. At heart of such attempt and project is the appreciation of the sensorial, affective body. The body is as clever and rational as consciousness, and in order to create "new worlds" and encountering the world through art in positive ways, dualist thinking has to be abandoned in favour of thinking and doing that takes bodily experience as starting point: "The greater possibilities he have to be affected, the more clear-sighted". Bodily experience is thus highlighted, and so is the fact that we at first sight always approach other beings as bodily entities through our senses. How we perceive the other as well as the impact perception has on identity construction is brought up. Gender and ethnicity are also pointed out as crucial for the way we understand and interact with other people and orientate ourselves in the world. Emancipatory politics and egalitarian claims regarding gender, ethnicity and cultural background form the recurrent theme of the essay, emphasised by quotes from among others Antonio Gramsci and activist Stokely Carmichael and expressed as everyone's right to write and perform his or her own history. For this, art can be an efficient form; but only if it is "more than a thing" and affirm its ageless appeal which is conclued by Kianoush in that "art belongs to the streets": At the end of the essay the shared origin of culture that was hinted in the opening qoute is further emphasised by a short outline of the great historical impact the so called "Orient" has had on the history of Western culture. / [I examensarbetet ingår utställningen "Där vi bor!":] Jag tänker, alltså är jag! Om man tänker så finns man...men är det verkligen så? För mig har tänkandet inte något högre ontologiskt värde än kroppen. Sinnesförnimmelser och kroppsliga erfarenheter är lika intellektuella som tänkandet själv. Ju större affektionsmöjligheter vi har desto skarpsyntare är vi. Tankeverksamheten kan ses som den mentala spegelbilden av den kroppsliga erfarenheten. Jag bjöd in tre konstnärer i ett samarbete kring varandet! Kroppen och maktförhållandet mellan tankevärlden och det kroppsliga var utgångspunkten. Vi använda lera, rösten och avidentifierandet av personligheten för att undersöka ämnet. Fyra kvinnor gör en kropp inom loppet av en 5 dagars performance. Teknik: Performance i fyra delar. / <p>Mitt examensarbete består av ett 30 min ljudverk som är min masteressä och en gestaltande del som består av fyra performances av fyra olika kvinnor som tillsammans bygger en gemensam fysisk kropp.</p>

Room modes are a recognised problem in small critical listening rooms and are known to cause colouration of sound reproduced within them. Investigations on the causes and solutions for this problem have been carried out for some time. Interest in the topic has extended to loudspeaker manufacturers who have mainly concentrated in developing methods for controlling the loudspeaker-room interaction in order to ameliorate low frequency reproduction. Compared to objective work on passive and active control methods, the study of the subjective perception of room resonances has been somewhat neglected. Available publications mostly concern the effects of single resonances, which are perhaps not fully representative of conditions as experienced in real rooms. A study into the subjective perception of room modes is presented. The experimental methodology employs psychoacoustic techniques to study the perception of factors such as modal distribution, and effects of resonances on single tones. Results show that the subjective perception of room modes is strongly affected by temporal issues, and that changes exerted merely on magnitude frequency response are detectable but not likely to remove the effects of resonances for all listeners. Furthermore, it is shown that a reduction of the modal Q-factor, associated with a reduction of decay rates, has a significant effect in decreasing the detection of resonances. Q-factor difference limen were evaluated for three reference decay characteristics corresponding to reference Q-factors of 30, 10 and 1. The limen were 6±2.8, 10±4.1 and 16±5.4 respectively, meaning that detection of changes to modal decay decreases with decreasing decay time. These results may be used to define more perceptually relevant design guidelines for critical listening environments, and indicate target criteria for control techniques used in room correction. The outcomes of this investigation will have repercussions on the design of better rooms for critical listening.

Claims for originality in this thesis lie in bringing together many different disciplines in art, music, sound studies and performance. The methodology, contextually indebted to the dialogues of site specific art, performance, and sound improvisation, has emerged as a multi-disciplinary one, informed in part by the study of those artists from the 1960s onwards who actively sought to resist the gallery system. The practice has driven the thesis in developing and continuously testing the requirement to respond uniquely to chosen sites. By using relevant references, instruments, and sonified materials, a compulsion to convey something of the particularity of the site’s associations through sound, is performed on site. In the course of considering the wider implications of a site through both the sound performances and the critical writing, I propose that there are essentially three aspects to identify when working with sound on site. I define these as: the actual the activated the associative The first aspect describes what is essentially inherent to the place, the second what can be encouraged to be ‘sounded’ through physical intervention, and the third outlines and forms what I have coined as the wider material of the site. This term draws on any relevant aspects of the social, physical, historical, anecdotal, and aural associations that a site may proffer. However, it is the notion of the associative that primarily informs the research by providing a methodology for the practice and in proposing a new paradigm of a live, site specific, performed, sound art work. The twenty or so works in the portfolio undertaken hitherto have existed not only as live performances but also in virtual and physical documentation, critical 4 analyses, and in the potential possibilities brought to the form by the response of others. By addressing this new taxonomy of approach in defining the actual, the activated and the associative as a kind of aural ground to the site (borrowing a term from painting), significant live sound art works have been developed to temporarily inhabit a space by exploring this latent material of the site.

The Earwitness endeavours to explore the sonic qualities of the city, the spaces that sounds occupy and possibilities of how these spaces can be inhabited. The ability of sound to travel around corners and through walls led to a process of urban exploration within the Pretoria Central Business District that identified a diverse range of ‘inbetween’ spaces that are not traditionally seen as inhabitable. The diversity of these spaces led to the development of an architectural strategy based upon the chair as a spatial device. Its ability to be interpreted on an individual level and employed in the widest range of scenarios makes the chair an ideal candidate to respond to the unique acoustic qualities of the spaces identified. The chair is thus seen as the earwitness to the acoustic qualities of the city and, through a process of transformation and mutation, begins to respond spatially to the personalities of the spaces encountered, taking on mythical personalities of its own. Through occupying the inbetween spaces of the city block, the chairs become a subversive inhabitant of the city – locating spaces that can be listened to. The investigation of the chair as a spatial device is grounded within a sonic festival scenario for the city of Pretoria that aims to re-establish the relationship between the user, sound and the spaces of the city. The festival is operated from a proposed infill typology that completes a more traditionally architectural element to the thesis, whilst maintaining the initial conceptual integrity of the exploration. The process of critical investigation and exploration followed in the thesis aims to reveal methods with which architectural-acoustic installations can promote user engagement with, and awareness, of the city. The Earwitness thus explores the fictions and fragments inherent in the experience of the city through probing the effects of audio culture and architecture. It hosts a set of curious confrontations between the field of the real and imaginary through a collection of quasi-cultural artefacts. These artefacts range from object to installation to event and engage the auditory aspects of the city – questioning the role of design in an immersive world in which freak mutations and mistakes are the norm, perhaps even the key, to success. Copyright / Dissertation (MInt(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Architecture / unrestricted

A detailed analysis of data taken on an oceanographic survey of Chatham Sound in the spring and summer of 1948 is presented. The primary purpose of the survey was to determine, if possible, whether there was any obvious characteristic of the water in the region which could be correlated with the known migration of salmon to the spawning grounds up the Nass and Skeena Rivers. The path taken by the fresh water between the river mouths and the more open waters of Dixon Entrance and Hecate Strait is shown to depend on the volume of fresh water discharged from the rivers. The rivers reach their peak discharge in late May or early June and during this period the amount of fresh water in the sound is 3 - 4 times the average. The effect of tides on the distribution of properties is also discussed. Anchor stations occupied for periods varying from 10 - 40 hours indicates that as a rule there is a good correlation between tidal, salinity, and temperature cycles. Dynamic calculations giving velocities, volume and fresh water transports have been made. During normal river discharge conditions, the agreement with the observed velocities, and fresh water discharge determined from gauge readings, suggests that even in these coastal waters there is an approximate balance between the horizontal pressure gradients and the coriolis force associated, with the motion. Stations at the mouth of Portland Inlet exhibit an apparent balance at all times which suggests that transverse inertial and fractional forces are slight compared with the transverse pressure gradient and coriolis force. Evidence of a variation in geopotential slope as the result of tidal variation is proposed. The relatively large tidal amplitudes together with the wide and rapid fluctuations in river discharges make it exceedingly difficult to obtain reliable synoptic observations over the entire Sound. / Science, Faculty of / Physics and Astronomy, Department of / Graduate

No abstract included. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

Efficient and accurate solutions of acoustic wave diffraction by a rigid step discontinuity and a curved half-plane are derived by the uniform geometrical theory of diffraction. These solutions can be used in seismic data processing to evaluate and, eventually, to improve the existing data processing procedures. They can also find applications in electromagnetics, microwave antenna design, acoustic design and sound engineering. The rigid step discontinuity solution given in this thesis is more accurate than the existing solutions which are based on Kirchhoff theory of diffraction. This solution removes the previous restriction on the source and the receiver arrangement. It also provides high efficiency by the use of ray theory. This solution is further generalized to two offset half-planes and an inclined wedge. Solutions for more complicated structures can be obtained by superposition of these solutions with added interactions. The complex source position method is used to extend the omnidirectional point source solution to a beam source solution. The effect of changes of the directivity and orientation of the beam source is studied. Time-domain single and double diffraction coefficients are determined through direct Fourier transforming and convolution. An infinite impulse response filter is applied to the time-domain direct computation of single diffraction. This combination achieves a total saving of 75% of computing time over the frequency-domain approach. Diffraction by a curved half-plane is analyzed with the inclusion of creeping wave diffraction and second order edge diffraction. An acoustic model of a curved half-plane is designed to verify the theory. The experimental results obtained by Mellema have verified the existence of the creeping wave diffraction and weak traces of the second order edge diffraction. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of / Graduate