Dissertation (M.Mus(Uitvoerende Kuns))-Universiteit van Pretoria, 2004. / Summary in English and Afrikaans. Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1983. / Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 357-365).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF file. Document formatted into pages; contains xvii, 190 p.; also includes graphics. Includes bibliographical references (p. 181-190). Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center

Treatise (D.M.A.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

The purpose of this study was to chronicle the genesis of cultivated choral tone in the United States from 1906 to 1928. That transformation was led by three conductors whose disparate careers represented a shared trajectory. Individually and collectively, they pioneered two singing genres with European provenance--a cappella and senza vibrato singing--as early techniques to isolate and refine choral tone. Their work converged in 1928, when it expanded to become the American A Cappella Movement (1928-1938). The earliest of the three conductors was Peter C. Lutkin (1858-1931). After study in Europe, he became dean of the School of Music at Northwestern University. Through his publications and university a cappella choir, founded in 1906, he placed greater responsibility on singers, and employed diction and breath control to improve intonation and tonal purity. German-educated Norwegian-American F. Melius Christiansen (1871-1955) was guided by his experience as a violinist and influenced by the choir of St. Thomas Church, Leipzig, Germany. In 1907, he began to gradually transform the choir of St. John's Lutheran Church choir in Northfield, Minnesota. By 1920, his St. Olaf Lutheran Choir toured nationwide and eventually epitomized a choral prototype through his publications, compositions, ideology, and methods, both original and derivative. Self-reliant and confident, Christiansen championed Russian choral literature, symphonic form for programming, and self-referential choral singing. His "inner choir" technique, "instrumental" tuning for choirs, and "conductorless" onset of tone were widely imitated. Spiritual beliefs undergirded his work. Originally inspired by Christiansen, Ohioan John Finley Williamson (1887-1964), a trained singer, cultivated choral tone by recontextualizing solo vocal Lamperti technique into choral methods. In 1920, he modeled his ensemble's results via national tours with his Dayton Westminster Choir. By 1926, he co-founded a choir school in a Dayton church where he implemented his theory of the choral rehearsal as a class voice lesson. His unorthodox tenets included his belief that vowels were controlled by volume and phrase conducting, that vowel color was dictated by overtones, and that a conflict existed between time beating and "rhythmic magic" (or "pace").

The P300 complex has been dissociated into a parietally maximal P3b and a more anteriorly distributed P3a in auditory, visual and somatosensory modalities. The seven experiments reported in this thesis investigate the variables affecting the elicitation of the P3a. The Knight et al. (1989) paradigm was used which involves the presentation of frequent, rare target and rare nontarget auditory stimuli. Experiment 1 showed that the P3a was elicited by novel sounds (environmental noises) when presented as rare nontargets in a sequence of frequent and target tones. When the rare nontarget novel sounds were presented in a sequence of other novel sounds the P3a was not elicited (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 showed that making the rare novel sound a target abolished the P3a, as did omitting the frequent stimuli from the sequence (Experiment 4). In the experiments in which the P3a was abolished, the novel sounds were found to elicit a P300 deflection with a parietally maximal scalp distribution (P3b). Other experiments showed no indication of habituation of the P3a over subsequent stimulus presentations (experiment 6) but did show that the amplitude of the P3a was larger when preceded by several stimuli different to the eliciting novel sound, than when immediately preceded by the identical sound (experiment 7). In contrast to novel sounds, tones did not elicit a P3a, even when presented as rare nontargets among frequent and target novel sounds (experiment 5). The findings were related to a recent model of auditory attention (Naatanen, 1990). The P3a was interpreted as reflecting a process related to the orienting of attention resulting from the detection of a mismatch between present and previous stimuli.

Blotterkrossed is a twelve-minute work for wind ensemble which elaborates on a compositional system known as the Circle of 12 Tones, originally developed by Ron Jarzombek and used to compose music performed by death metal supergroup Blotted Science. Jarzombek’s system presents an intuitive method of selecting pitch-class segments from twelve-tone aggregates. These individual segments are articulated until the aggregate structure is completed. At that point, a new permutation of the aggregate is initiated. This method is compositionally attractive as it is somewhat open-ended and unordered, but the absence of deeper pitch relations projects a certain lack of musical coherence. In order to add a deeper level of structural integrity to this system, a method is utilized which structurally relates multiple forms of the initial row, in effect creating four distinct subsets of the ordered aggregate collection, each one related by transposition and/or inversion. The result is a palate of hundreds of pseudo-serialized aggregate permutations. In Blotterkrossed, each one of these aggregate “row forms” is used as the basis of respectively independent sections of the piece. The sonority of each row form evokes distinct character changes to better aurally convey the transformation from one row form to the next.

The notion of harmonic ‘function’ was introduced by Riemann in 1891 to describe aspects of tonal music, but, as musical language evolved, its meaning and application developed beyond the premise of tonality. This study re-evaluates the relevance of harmonic functionality for composers today, through a reassessment of what may constitute functionality in post-tonal music and a practical exploration of the concept in ten new compositions. The general openness of harmonic systems since the 1980s has led composers across a variety of aesthetic standpoints to often combine diverse types of harmonic material in one same piece; this thesis argues that, within such a framework, harmonic functionality is potentially an important instrument of coherence, strength and inventiveness in the musical argument. The first part examines the main terminology, including the notions of ‘harmony’, ‘post-tonality’ and the origin and development of the idea of ‘harmonic functionality’. Several composers and theorists are considered, with a particular focus on Riemann. The second part centres on the ten compositions, particularly on Nachtmusik, with both detailed and large-scale analysis aiming to clarify how each piece informed specific aspects of the study. For the sake of comparison, aspects relating to harmonic functionality in other composers’ work are also discussed, namely in Stravinsky’s Requiem Canticles and Adès’ Polaris and Tevot. It is concluded that harmonic functionality is generally related to formal functions, and that the combined action of pitch and other parameters establishes functional properties very much depending on musical context. Certain elements play a central role in the definition of functionality: 1) sense of direction; 2) recurrence and change; 3) hierarchy; 4) pitch polarity; 5) extra-musical meaning. The creation of harmonic functionality in post-tonal music is a problem which composers often deal with intuitively in their practice, and the notion is still frequently considered in a strictly tonal sense by theorists; through the clarification and discussion of the process in post-tonality, its potential is likely to be more fully explored, both theoretically and practically.

This paper focuses on the prosody of spontaneous speech in specific field - service-oriented speech and non-service-oriented speech. It investigates the prosodic features of "service attitude utterances" and "neutral attitude utterances" in Mandarin Chinese. As study of spontaneous speech, the corpus is collected from service workplaces and two participated are included. Based on adjusted definition of prosody and intonation, this research examines the prosody factors of pitch range, mean pitch, tempo and involving accent of phrase. The research problem of this paper is to investigate prosodic patterns of service attitude utterances and neutral attitude utterances. The study defines the attitudes of "service attitude" to contrast with "neutral attitude", and classifies utterances according to prosodic structures into two types. Contrastive analyses include prosodic features of different attitudes speeches as well as of different prosodic structures. The conclusion of this study is pitch range and pitch scale both contributes to the expression of service attitude and they are not exclusive. Widening the pitch range and enlarging the pitch scale are realizations of service attitude utterances. Tempo and the accent of prosodic phrase show little relation to service attitude speech. 本文研究具體的語言場所一服務業和非服務業的自然話語的韻律特徵，考察漢語中“服務態度”和“中性態度”的韻律特點。作為自然話語研究，本文實驗的語料來自兩位發音人的其實工作場所。為了研究需要，本文重新定義了韻律和語調的關條，在此基礎上考察音域，平均基頻值，語速，以及韻律短語重音等韻律因素。 本文的研究問題是考察“服務態度”和“中性態度”兩種話語中的韻律特徵。為此，本文定義了自然話語中的“服務態度”和“中性態度”，並且將話語按照韻律結構分為兩組。文章涵蓋了兩種態度話語的韻律特徵對此，以及不同韻律結構問話語特徵的對比分析。 最終， 研究得出結論， 話語的音城和音階都有助於表達“服務態度”，兩者並不衝突，擴大音域和提高音階實現是“服務態度”表達的方式。同時發現，語速和韻律短語重音對表達“服務態度”沒有直接影響。

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