O trabalho consiste na análise do processo de construção do sentido, a significação, na linguagem musical do compositor Hermeto Paschoal, por meio da Teoria Semiótica de linha francesa fundada por A. J. Greimas. Estudar a música instrumental, através da abordagem semiótica greimasiana, coloca-nos diante de uma série de questões teóricas, relativas à possibilidade de um sentido definido no plano de expressão, bem como à própria definição de sentido que procuramos desenvolver. Segundo a orientação que tomamos, procuramos verificar as possibilidades e os limites da teoria semiótica quando aplicada às linguagens abstratas, no nosso caso, a linguagem musical. Além dos problemas teóricos, encontramo-nos diante do desafio de investigar a intrigante música de Hermeto Paschoal que, se por um lado é realmente complexa, por outro, a capacidade do compositor transformar em música qualquer dado sonoro e criar incessantemente sobre todos os parâmetros do som, como altura, duração, intensidade e timbre, faz de sua obra um objeto muito rico para o trabalho que pretendemos desenvolver. Mais que isso, Hermeto vale ser estudado pela sua importância na cultura brasileira e no cenário da música internacional, tanto quanto pelo grande valor estético de sua arte. Embora nossa proposta seja a de investigar os problemas relativos ao plano da expressão e estudar a Teoria Semiótica aplicada linguagem musical, orientamo-nos, mais simplesmente, pela curiosidade de compreender o que ?diz? a música de Hermeto Paschoal, e pela convicção de que as sonoridades da música instrumental fazem sentido / This study analyzed the construction process of meaning of the musical language of Hermeto Paschoal\'s instrumental music using the A.J. Greimas\' semiotics theory. The evaluation of instrumental music using Greima\'s semiotic approach raises many theorical questions regarding the possibility of a defined meaning on the plan of expression, as well as the definition of meaning by itself, which we tried to develop. According to direction that we followed, we tried to verify the possibilities and limits when the Semiotic Theory is applied to abstract languages, such as the musical language. Besides the theoric issues, we faced the challenge of investigating the intriguing Hermeto Paschoal\'s music, which may be considerably complex, but on the other hand is an extremely rich object to be evaluated considering the composer\'s ability to convert to music any sound, and to incessantly create music varying all parameters such as volume duration, intensity and timbre. Furthermore, the study of Hermeto Paschoal\'s music is valuable not only because of the esthetic quality, but also due to its remarkable importance for the Brazilian culture and the International musical scenario. Although our aim is to investigate the issues related to the expression field and to study the Semiotic Theory applied to the musical language, we more simply attempted to focus and comprehend the meaning of Hermeto Paschoal\'s music and confirm the evidence that the sounds created on the instrumental music have a meaning

The problem with which this investigation is concerned is that of developing a theory in vocal pedagogy, voiception, which could provide teaching techniques with tangibility for gaining control of both voluntary and involuntary functions of the singing act. This study appears to show that feeling tone and cognition are innately involved with singing, since the vocal instrument is actually a part of the singer. Analysis of the sung vowel through the singing sensation is the connecting link for gaining control of involuntary vocal functions.

Lu, Mengwei. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 52-54). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Introduction of P2P-VoD Systems --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Major Components of the System --- p.5 / Chapter 2.2 --- Peer Join and Content Discovery --- p.6 / Chapter 2.3 --- Segment Sizes and Replication Strategy --- p.7 / Chapter 2.4 --- Piece Selection --- p.8 / Chapter 2.5 --- Transmission Strategy --- p.9 / Chapter 3 --- Detection Methodology --- p.10 / Chapter 3.1 --- Capturing Technique --- p.11 / Chapter 3.2 --- Analytical Framework --- p.15 / Chapter 3.3 --- Results of our Detection Methodology --- p.24 / Chapter 4 --- Protective Architecture --- p.25 / Chapter 4.1 --- Architecture Overview --- p.25 / Chapter 4.2 --- Content Servers --- p.27 / Chapter 4.3 --- Shield Nodes --- p.28 / Chapter 4.4 --- Tracker --- p.29 / Chapter 4.5 --- A Randomized Assignment Algorithm --- p.30 / Chapter 4.6 --- Seeding Algorithm --- p.31 / Chapter 4.7 --- Connection Management Algorithm --- p.33 / Chapter 4.8 --- Advantages of the Shield Nodes Architecture --- p.33 / Chapter 4.9 --- Markov Model for Shield Nodes Architecture Against Single Track Anonymity Attack --- p.35 / Chapter 5 --- Experiment Result --- p.40 / Chapter 5.1 --- Shield Node architecture against anonymity attack --- p.40 / Chapter 5.1.1 --- Performance Analysis for Single Track Anonymity Attack --- p.41 / Chapter 5.1.2 --- Experiment Result on PlanetLab for Single Track Anonymity Attack --- p.42 / Chapter 5.1.3 --- Parallel Anonymity Attack --- p.44 / Chapter 5.2 --- Shield Nodes architecture-against DoS attack --- p.45 / Chapter 6 --- Related Work --- p.48 / Chapter 7 --- Future Work --- p.49 / Chapter 8 --- Conclusion --- p.50

In clear and lively prose that avoids jargon, the author carefully and systematically examines the many kinds of subtly nuanced words or word-pairs of everyday discourse such as 'and'-'but', 'before'-'ere', 'Chinese'-'Chink', and 'sweat'-'perspiration', that have proven resistant to truth-conditional explanations of meaning. / https://dc.etsu.edu/etsu_books/1108/thumbnail.jpg

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Social psychological theorizing assumes that 1) members of dominant and oppressed racial groups subscribe to the same set of cultural beliefs regarding the racial hierarchy in the United States and 2) that patterns of deference in task groups reflect broader patterns of inequality in society. With the use white and black research participants at two research sites, this thesis examines these assumptions with regards to the proposed tri-racial hierarchy of the Latin Americanization Thesis, which asserts that the racial hierarchy in the U.S. is now primarily determined by phenotype, as opposed to traditional racial and ethnic boundaries. Do White and Black Americans associate similar perceptions of status with members of the proposed tri-racial hierarchy? In addition, skin tone is associated with socioeconomic status among blacks in the U.S., but do research participants defer to members of the pigmentocracy in a manner consistent with these broader patterns of inequality? These questions are assessed by matching white and black research participants with either a white, light-skinned black, or dark-skinned black partner for the completion of a joint task. The results of the multi-site experiment suggest that there is racial invariance with the perceived status associated with members of the pigmentocracy. More generally, whites exhibit patterns of active denial and report that most others believe dark-skinned blacks are more competent than light-skinned blacks, who most others believe are more competent than whites. Whites purportedly personally subscribe to these pattern of beliefs. Blacks, however, exhibit a pattern of active resistance to stigmatizing beliefs: while they report that oppressed members of the pigmentocracy are held in lower regard by most others in society, they refuse to personally endorse these stigmatizing beliefs. These attitudinal reactions had implications for the patterns of deference that emerged when jointly completing the group task. While patterns of influence emergent in group tasks generally reflect broader patterns of stratification in society, this failed to be the case when participants interacted with members of the pigmentocracy most phenotypically distinct from themselves. That is, when racial distinctions were most salient, research participants consciously reacted against the pigmentocracy, obstructing the activation of the status generalization process. The implications of these results for model testing and development, and for identifying racial biases in the current racial climate are discussed.

Objective: The air conduction click is currently the most widespread stimulus used to estimate the pure tone audiogram as part of auditory brainstem response (ABR) testing. The click is characterized by its broad spectral content and rapid onset, which may not make it the best choice for frequency specificity. An alternative stimulus is a short duration tone burst stimuli with notched noise masking. When obtaining an ABR using standard unmasked tone bursts, the brief stimulus onset may cause spectral splatter producing response contributions from unwanted regions of the cochlea; thus reducing the frequency specificity of the ABR. Notched noise masking used in conjunction with the tone burst ABR, limits the evoked response to those frequencies within the notch, thereby reducing the likelihood of spectral splatter and increasing frequency specificity. The presence of a sloping sensory hearing impairment creates additional difficulties for achieving frequency specificity because of the likelihood that lower frequency cochlea regions, with less sensory damage, will contribute to the evoked response. It is theorized that notched noise masking will reduce the neural contributions from regions of the cochlear outside those within the notch, resulting in more frequency specific results than those achieved with a standard unmasked tone burst stimulus. The present study was designed to investigate the differences in Wave V latency between the notched noise ABR and the standard unmasked tone burst ABR as a measure of frequency specificity. Design: Twenty-five participants with normal hearing in at least one ear and 16 participants with bilateral SNHL participated in this investigation. Each participant was given an audiological evaluation, a click ABR screening to determine neural synchrony, a standard tone burst ABR and a notched noise tone burst ABR. Results: An Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) failed to reveal any significant Wave V latency differences between the ABRs obtained with unmasked tone bursts versus ABRs obtained with a notched noise tone burst. Conclusion: The results of this study do not support the use of notched noise tone bursts for improved ABR frequency specificity. This finding is contrary to previously reported results (Stapells & Picton, 1981), which indicated improved frequency specificity when obtaining a tone burst ABR in notched noise versus a standard unmasked tone burst ABR.

In speech, vowels and consonants are two the basic sounds that combined result in lexically meaningful items in all languages. In tone languages, changes in pitch, tone differences also make meaningful lexical distinctions in spoken words. Young infants appear to have no trouble perceiving speech sounds and their production of sounds peculiar to their particular language environment proceeds relatively smoothly and rapidly compared with adults’ acquisition of foreign languages. One way of looking at how infants come to acquire speech sounds of their first language is by examining the speech input they receive. The term infant-directed speech (IDS) has been coined to describe the special way adults and even older children speak to infants. IDS is different to adult-directed speech in various acoustic/phonetic modifications, such as exaggerated prosody, increased pitch and vowel hyperarticulation (Burnham, Kitamura, and Vollmer-Conna, 2002; Kuhl et al., 1997). The exaggerated prosody and increased pitch appear to be related to the expression of affect and gaining infants’ attention (Burnham, Kitamura, and Vollmer-Conna, 2002), whereas vowel hyperarticulation appears to be related to infants’ speech development for a number of reasons. Firstly, investigating how adults speak to foreigners, Uther, Knoll, and Burnham (2007) found that vowels are also hyperarticulated in foreigner-directed speech as in IDS, while other acoustic modifications such as exaggerated prosody and increased pitch, related to affective and attentional factors, are not present in foreigner directed speech. Secondly, Liu, Kuhl, and Tsao (2003) found a positive correlation between vowel hyperarticulation and infants’ native speech perception; mothers who hyperarticulated their vowels more had infants who were better able to discriminate native consonant contrasts.\ While vowel hyperarticulation in IDS to 6-month-olds has been investigated in both tone languages such as Mandarin (Liu et al., 2003), and non-tone languages such as Russian, Swedish, American English (Kuhl et al., 1997) and Australian English (Burnham et al, 2002), no parallel studies have been conducted on the possibility of tone hyperarticulation in tone language IDS. If vowel hyperarticulation is related to infants’ language development then tones in tone hyperarticulated. The possibility of tone as well as vowel hyperarticulation in IDS of the tone language Cantonese, and the development of hyperarticulation across the first 12 months of infancy were investigated here using a longitudinal sequential cohort design. Two groups of native Cantonese mothers were recorded speaking to their infants, the first group at 3, 6, and 9 months, and the second at 6, 9, and 12 months. The study had four main aims (1) to investigate whether tone hyperarticulation occurs in IDS in a tone language Cantonese (2) to investigate whether vowel hyperarticulation occurs in IDS in Cantonese (IDS in this languages had not yet been investigated) and if 1 and 2 are the cases (3) to compare tone and vowel hyperarticulation, and (4) to chart the development of tone and vowel hyperarticulation across the infant’s first 12 months. Contrary to previous findings of vowel hyperarticulation in English Russian, Swedish, and Mandarin IDS to 6-month-olds (Burnham et al., 2002; Kuhl et al., 1997); vowel hyperarticulation was not found for Cantonese IDS. More detailed acoustic analysis examining different dimensions of the vowel space suggest that after the infant is 3 months old, mothers’ vowels begin to be hypoarticulated in IDS compared to ADS on dimensions of back versus front, and high versus low. This pattern of results is consistent with vowel perception studies which suggest that infants have already tuned into the native vowel categories by 4 to 6 months (Polka and Werker, 1994). Tone hyperarticulation, on the other hand, was indeed present at 3 months and increased to peak at 6 to 9 months before declining at 12 months. This pattern of tone hyperarticulation across the first year of infancy is consistent with infant language development – in which attenuation of perception of non-native tones had been found between 6 to 9 months (Mattock and Burnham, 2006). Moreover, detailed phonetic analysis revealed that while the level tones are more hyperarticulated than the contour tones, tones with similar onsets and offsets (i.e., the two rising tones) are actually hypoarticulated in IDS at 9 and 12 months, a time when infants have already tuned into native tones. Finally, results from a preliminary native speech discrimination study using the same infants provide some initial indication that mothers who hyperarticulate tones more also had infants who are better able to discriminate native Cantonese consonants. Together these results suggest that in Cantonese IDS vowels are underspecified whereas tones are consistently over-specified particularly at 6 months when infants are tuning into native tones. Moreover, during this initial period of tone acquisition, only level tones are over specified while tones with similar onsets and offsets are underspecified. It seems likely that for Cantonese language environment infants, during the early stages of language acquisition, pitch information specified by level tones is sufficient for initial acquisition of information about the Cantonese tone space and that information about vowels is not so essential at this time. These studies show that there is indeed tone hyperarticulation in IDS in tone languages, and that in order to make sense of the vowel hyperarticulation data in tone languages, it is important to investigate both vowels and tones in tone languages with complex tone systems such as Cantonese, instead of simply applying Anglocentric notions of vowel hypoarticulation. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)