Connecting Dots: Exploring Processes Behind Sound Production Through Mind and Movement

Professional musicians require a specific degree of command over their body to produce the specific sounds they desire. However, what musicians have in mind is not always what is perceived, and likewise what desired sound the musician strives for is not always attained. In this case, musicians benefit from not only structured critique, but also a deeper understanding of how to attain an expected sound. Vague comments such as, “the flow from the exposition to the development was a little too choppy and would have benefitted with a better flow,” or “I perceived this passage to be filled with passionate anger, but your performance lacked just that,” may confuse a musician even more because of the various interpretations of words like “flow” and “passionate anger.” The ability to articulate and express emotion through musical performance is a powerful tool for musicians to communicate with an audience, therefore understanding the technique needed to execute those emotions is paramount. I seek a better understanding of how performing musicians comprehend direct relationships between movement and sound, and how to concretize emotional expression through tangible motions. This study will investigate movement and sound through two different lenses: sound receivers and sound producers. The term sound receiver I reserve for trained music professionals, but it is not limited to professional musicians, who typically have had some sort of aural training. These could include choreographers, sound designers, composers, and other musical professionals. In this study, the term sound producers will apply primarily to cellists and other professional musicians of classical training. Information collected from interviewing these individuals will hopefully provide those same individuals with more tools towards developing or evolving teaching methods for future professional cellists and other performing musicians in training, as well as tools to attain their sound ideal

Visual location awareness for mobile robots using feature-based vision

Department Head: L. Darrell Whitley.2010 Spring.Includes bibliographical references (pages 48-50).This thesis presents an evaluation of feature-based visual recognition paradigm for the task of mobile robot localization. Although many works describe feature-based visual robot localization, they often do so using complex methods for map-building and position estimation which obscure the underlying vision systems' performance. One of the main contributions of this work is the development of an evaluation algorithm employing simple models for location awareness with focus on evaluating the underlying vision system. While SeeAsYou is used as a prototypical vision system for evaluation, the algorithm is designed to allow it to be used with other feature-based vision systems as well. The main result is that feature-based recognition with SeeAsYou provides some information but is not strong enough to reliably achieve location awareness without the temporal context. Adding a simple temporal model, however, suggests a more reliable localization performance

The effect conscious sedation used for an endoscopic procedure has on attention

A research project submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of MA (Research Psychology) by course work and research report in the faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, (December 2014)Past literature conducted on the effects of attention following conscious sedation highlight a significant decrease in attention. However, the sleep that occurs during sedation is associated with normal sleep and therefore there is a possibility that this sleep may repay sleep debt and could increase attention. As a result the following research explored the effects of conscious sedation on both the focus and encode elements of attention and the impact of propofol dosage on attention. The sample was formed by 31 outpatients from the Rosebank NetCare hospital undergoing an endoscopic procedure. Pre- and post-test measures of attention included the D-KEFS Color-Word Interference condition 1 and 2, Digit Span Forward subtest from the WAIS III as well as the Mental Control subtest from the WMS IV. Using a Matched Paired T-Test and a Wilcoxon Signed Ranked Test the following results were observed; significant results were found between the pre- and post-test scores on the D-KEFS Color Naming condition 1 number of corrected errors (z = -1.93 p=0.05), as well as on the Digit Span Forward subtest(z = -2.55 p=0.01). For the remainder of the attention measures non-significant results were produced (p>0.05).When assessing the impact of the dosage of propofol using an Independent Samples t-test and a Mann-Whitney U-test, non-significant results (p>0.05) were produced for all the focus and encode elements of attention. The following results indicates the sleep that occurs during conscious sedation does not improve attention, therefore individuals’ undergoing conscious sedation should adhere to post-sedation discharge guidelines