An understanding of the piano transcription is basic to any proper comprehension of nineteenth-century piano music and performance practice. In this study, the transcription for solo piano is examined in relation to several musical milestones in the mid-nineteenth century, including far-reaching technical developments in the piano, the beginning and growth of the public concert, the birth of the solo piano recital, and the influence of virtuosity as a Romantic ideal. In addition, as Liszt was undoubtedly the greatest transcriber of the nineteenth century, several representative transcriptions of Liszt are analyzed and compared to their original models, including Schubert's Gretchen am Spinnrade and Auf dem Wasser zu singen, Chopin's Moja pieszczotka ("My Joys"), Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, and the quartet from the final act of Verdi's Rigoletto.

Data for this study were derived from videotapes of 26 father-infant dyads, specifically from a five minute period of free-play. The first step was the creation of a literal transcription of the father-infant dyads interaction. Subsequently, nine variables of fathers' language characteristics and one infant characteristic were coded employing the literal transcriptions and observing the videotapes. The fathers' language variables were number of : (1) father utterances, (2) father words, (3) father contingent responses, (4) father teaching utterances, (5) father descriptive teaching utterances, (6) father directive teaching utterances - making commands, (7) father directive teaching utterance - asking questions, (8) percentage of father teaching utterances, and (9) mean length of father utterances (MLU). The infant variable was number of vocalizations. Eight out of the nine variables were positively correlated to infant vocalizations, indicating the importance of fathers input in child language development. The only negative correlation in the present study was between Mean Length of Utterance (MLU) and infant vocalizations and the possible reasons are discussed. The findings support the idea that there are positive relationships between fathers' language characteristics and infant vocalizations. Recommendations are made that fathers should be involved in early intervention programs.

Anyone concerned with the harp in this century knows of the genius of Carlos Salzedo. His pedagogical, compositional and professional activities have had a tremendous impact on the harp world. With this in mind, the present study considers his transcriptions for harp from other works and his editings of other composers' harp compositions. It is the purpose of this study to find in what ways his work in this area has been helpful to harpists.

Forced alignment, a speech recognition software performing semi-automatic phonological transcription, constitutes a methodological revolution in the recent history of linguistic research. Its use is progressively becoming the norm in research fields such as sociophonetics, but its general performance and range of applications have been relatively understudied. This thesis investigates the performance and portability of the Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction program suite (FAVE), an aligner that was trained on, and designed to study, American English. It was decided to test FAVE on four non-American varieties of English (Scottish, Irish, Australian and Indian English) and a control variety (General American). First, the performance of FAVE was compared with human annotators, and then it was tested on three potentially problematic variables: /p, t, k/ realization, rhotic consonants and /l/. Although FAVE was found to perform significantly differently from human annotators on identical datasets, further analysis revealed that the aligner performed quite similarly on the non-standard varieties and the control variety, suggesting that the difference in accuracy does not constitute a major drawback to its extended usage. The study discusses the implications of the findings in relation to doubts expressed about the usage of such technology and argues for a wider implementation of forced alignment tools such as FAVE in sociophonetic research.

Franz Liszt, who was the greatest virtuoso pianist in the nineteenth-century, was also a productive composer. But his tremendous technique brought the misunderstanding that his compositions were just flashy and superficial, thus creating an obstacle for appreciating his music. The purpose of this study is to encourage an understanding of the value of Liszt's music, especially his Schubert Lieder transcriptions. The study starts with an introduction, which states the revival of the art of transcription, gives the muscial background of Liszt and describes the instruments that were available to him. Then follows a discussion about his experimentation with the conventional piano techniques and how he applied them to the song transcriptions. Two transcriptions "Hark, Hark, the Lark" and "Der Lindenbaum" are analyzed in detail to show the transcriptive procedure and the relation between the poetry and the musical expression. A conclusion summarizes the study.

This dissertation investigates the process of translating contemporary African choir music for non-African choirs, as performed by African choirs themselves, in the Gauteng area, and mostly as part of the ‘traditional’ section of their repertoires, through the process of negotiation. The aim of this research is to contextualize relevant material and problematize the issues that arise when the music from an African choir culture is translated for non- African choirs in order for these choirs to perform this music as part of their repertoires. Issues that develop from the contextualization of the main problem of the research, namely translation as negotiation, are problematized and notions of hegemony, identity and cultural relationships are addressed and the compatibility of cultural systems within a performance context is explored. The methodology focuses on fieldwork, processing and publishing of the Choral Music from South Africa Series, a multimedia package of contemporary African choir music, for performance by non-African choirs as published by the researcher. The research is located within the theoretical framework of postcolonial studies, and concepts flowing from the study will be discussed, based on the works by prominent scholars in the field: firstly, the notion of difference, experienced as ‘otherness’, will refer to the world acclaimed work, Orientalism, by Edward Said (1978). Secondly, the notion of change, as expressed by Jean Comaroff (1985), in Body of Power Spirit of Resistance: Culture, Consciousness, and Structural Transformation, as well as thirdly, the negotiational aspect of dialogue between cultures as expressed by Bakhtin (1981) in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, will be addressed. Fourthly, boundaries and cultural hybridity viewed by Homi Bhabha (1994) as a concept of ‘third space’ in his work The Location of Culture and lastly the impact of commerce and technology on African music with reference to Walter Benjamin (1973), in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, as well as its significance in/for publication will be explored. The researcher argues that the translation of contemporary African music for choirs can only be brought about by means of cultural dialogue, within cultures and between cultures. / Dissertation (MMus (Music Education))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Music / unrestricted

Park "Pepper" Adams, III (1930-1986) is one of the most influential baritone saxophonists in the history of modern jazz. In addition to his time feel, his timbre, and other conceptual techniques, a great deal of Adams's improvisational style and vocabulary can be illustrated by his use of three motivic devices. These three motivic devices are: (1) his utilization of the sixth degree of the major scale as an important melodic pitch; (2) his use of a paraphrased portion of the melody of the popular song "Cry Me a River;" and (3) his use of the half-whole octatonic scale when the rhythm section sounds a dominant chord. This dissertation traces the way in which Adams applies these three motivic devices through four of his original compositions, "Enchilada Baby," "Bossallegro," "Lovers of Their Time," and "Rue Serpente." All four of these compositions were recorded by Adams on his 1980 album, The Master. In addition to the motivic analysis, a biography of Adams is included. Complete transcriptions by the author of Adams's improvised solos on the four compositions are included in the appendices.

Busoni's contribution to the art of the piano transcription is formidable. His chorale prelude transcriptions make him responsible for giving over to the piano repertoire a small portion of sacred literature. His special admiration of J. S. Bach, evidenced throughout his life, make Busoni's transcriptional practices all the more significant. Bach himself was a prolific transcriber of his own works and the works of others. This paper presents a brief history of keyboard transcriptional practices, emphasizing Busoni's methods by comparing the original works for organ with the transcriptions for piano. Four chorale preludes form the basis for this study: Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ (BWV 639), Komm, Gott, Schopfer, Heiliger Geist (BWV 667), Nun komm' der Heiden Heiland (BWV 659), and In dir ist Freude (BWV 615).

Nous abordons, dans cette thèse, une étude sur les représentations continues de mots (en anglais word embeddings) appliquées à la détection automatique des erreurs dans les transcriptions de la parole. Notre étude se concentre sur l’utilisation d’une approche neuronale pour améliorer la détection automatique des erreurs dans les transcriptions automatiques, en exploitant les word embeddings. L’exploitation des embeddings repose sur l’idée que la détection d’erreurs consiste à trouver les possibles incongruités linguistiques ou acoustiques au sein des transcriptions automatiques. L’intérêt est donc de trouver la représentation appropriée du mot qui permet de capturer des informations pertinentes pour pouvoir détecter ces anomalies. Notre contribution dans le cadre de cette thèse porte sur plusieurs axes. D’abord, nous commençons par une étude préliminaire dans laquelle nous proposons une architecture neuronale capable d’intégrer différents types de descripteurs, y compris les embeddings. Ensuite, nous nous focalisons sur une étude approfondie des représentations continues de mots. Cette étude porte d’une part sur l’évaluation de différents types d’embeddings linguistiques puis sur leurs combinaisons. D’autre part, elle s’intéresse aux embeddings acoustiques de mots. Puis, nous présentons une étude sur l’analyse des erreurs de classifications, qui a pour objectif de percevoir les erreurs difficiles à détecter.Finalement, nous exploitons les embeddings linguistiques et acoustiques ainsi que l’information fournie par notre système de détections d’erreurs dans plusieurs cadres applicatifs. / My thesis concerns a study of continuous word representations applied to the automatic detection of speech recognition errors. Our study focuses on the use of a neural approach to improve ASR errors detection, using word embeddings. The exploitation of continuous word representations is motivated by the fact that ASR error detection consists on locating the possible linguistic or acoustic incongruities in automatic transcriptions. The aim is therefore to find the appropriate word representation which makes it possible to capture pertinent information in order to be able to detect these anomalies. Our contribution in this thesis concerns several initiatives. First, we start with a preliminary study in which we propose a neural architecture able to integrate different types of features, including word embeddings. Second, we propose a deep study of continuous word representations. This study focuses on the evaluation of different types of linguistic word embeddings and their combination in order to take advantage of their complementarities. On the other hand, it focuses on acoustic word embeddings. Then, we present a study on the analysis of classification errors, with the aim of perceiving the errors that are difficult to detect. Perspectives for improving the performance of our system are also proposed, by modeling the errors at the sentence level. Finally, we exploit the linguistic and acoustic embeddings as well as the information provided by our ASR error detection system in several downstream applications.

This researcher investigates the role of communication satisfaction in job satisfaction in the Department of Communications, a government policy-making institution that deals with post, telecommunications, and broadcasting services in South Africa. This study describes communication satisfaction as the overall degree of satisfaction an employee perceives in his total communication environment and job satisfaction as the degree of satisfaction the individual feels with his job. Focus groups are used to explore the role of communication satisfaction in job satisfaction in the Department of Communications because they are appropriate and suitable in capturing the discussions reflecting emotions, particularly uncovering individuals' feelings about their environment. The emphasis is on finding out how communication motivates and makes employees satisfied in their jobs. Qualitative content analysis, based on transcriptions from audiotapes, is used for interpretation and analysis of the data. These transcnptions reflect the descriptive nature of the data and people's own spoken words. / Communication Science / M. A. (Communication)