Chord Bunch Walks for Recognizing Naturally Self-Overlapped and Compound Leaves

Effectively describing and recognizing leaf shapes under arbitrary variations, particularly from a large database, remains an unsolved problem. In this research, we attempted a new strategy of describing leaf shapes by walking and measuring along a bunch of chords that pass through the shape. A novel chord bunch walks (CBW) descriptor is developed through the chord walking behavior that effectively integrates the shape image function over the walked chord to reflect both the contour features and the inner properties of the shape. For each contour point, the chord bunch groups multiple pairs of chords to build a hierarchical framework for a coarse-to-fine description that can effectively characterize not only the subtle differences among leaf margin patterns but also the interior part of the shape contour formed inside a self-overlapped or compound leaf. Instead of using optimal correspondence based matching, a Log-Min distance that encourages one-to-one correspondences is proposed for efficient and effective CBW matching. The proposed CBW shape analysis method is invariant to rotation, scaling, translation, and mirror transforms. Five experiments, including image retrieval of compound leaves, image retrieval of naturally self-overlapped leaves, and retrieval of mixed leaves on three large scale datasets, are conducted. The proposed method achieved large accuracy increases with low computational costs over the state-of-the-art benchmarks, which indicates the research potential along this direction

Music as a birthright: Chicago's Old Town School of Folk Music and participatory music making in the twenty-first century

The Old Town School of Folk Music (OTSFM), founded in 1957 on Chicago???s North Side, has over the course of its history developed pedagogies and social practices to transform its urban, cosmopolitan students from music consumers to music participants. By the 2000s, it had become the largest not-for-profit folk arts organization in the United States, offering affordable classes in a wide variety of multiethnic music and dance traditions to about 6,000 adults and children each week, as well as a concert series, a music festival, and other events and services. Despite its scale, engendering tensions between the discourses of late-capitalist, corporate management styles and those of egalitarian, anti-commercialist folk revival values, it continued to foster and sustain intimate, music-based communities within its walls. Fundamentally, my dissertation is a biography of an institution. It illustrates the way that institutional structure and strategy can facilitate and even shape face-to-face, amateur, participatory music making, in a society where music is most commonly understood to be a professional pursuit. The Old Town School has consistently committed to the core principle, rooted in the leftist values of the Popular Front of the 1930s and 1940s, that music is a social, participatory experience accessible to all, not the preserve of a professionalized elite, but everyone???s birthright. This dissertation explores the processes and means???cultural, pedagogical, historical and material???by which OTSFM has pursued this principle. It has three purposes: the first is historical, tracing the Old Town School???s story from its roots in the 1930s through the end of the twentieth century; the second is ethnographic, examining social music-making and learning at the School in the early twenty-first century; and the third is biographical, to show throughout how learning to become social participants in music changes individual human lives. ?? I contextualize OTSFM???s history within several larger narratives of U.S. and Chicago music and social history, highlighting Chicago???s distinctive contribution to the folk revival and how the School has been implicated in neighborhood gentrification processes. Drawing connections from the political and popular strains of mid-century folk revivals to the rise of rock music, world music, and other trends of the late twentieth century, I argue, through the example of the Old Town School???s story, that the most enduring legacy of these folk revivals is in the musical and social processes it introduced into middle-class, cosmopolitan America, a legacy that extends far beyond the original political or aesthetic orientations of the revivalists. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted in 2004-2005, I show how the Old Town School???s participatory ethos, which values music making as inclusive, social, egalitarian, and rooted in tradition, and has promoted an educational approach that prioritizes orally-based group learning, as exemplified by OTSFM???s distinctive tradition of the Second Half, a nightly, multi- level sing-along and jam session, as well as classes and other social and educational environments. This is a study of fun and friendship in music, exploring how the skills for building musical friendships can be developed in place of competitive models of music learning, and how this contributes to the overall well-being of individuals, relationships, and communities. ?

J R R Tolkien\u27s lecture On Fairy -Stories : The qualities of Tolkienian fantasy

Tolkien\u27s 1939 lecture, On Fairy-stories, is viewed by fantasy critics as a statement of Tolkien\u27s aesthetics, rather than a critical framework for interpreting Tolkienian fantasy. This work will attempt to show that this lecture by Tolkien actually creates a framework for interpretation, the four qualities of Tolkienian fantasy, that will be applied later on to four contemporary fantasies by David Eddings, Roger Zelazny, Stephen R. Donaldson, and J. K. Rowling, along with Tolkien\u27s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; After surveying fantasy criticism from George MacDonald\u27s late 19th Century essay to the present, we look at Sir Philip Sidney\u27s Defence of Poesy and his place in fantasy criticism. Following the lead of Italian humanist Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Sidney responds to critics of his day, arguing that the poet should not be subject to the restraints reality, but rather, should be free to go as far as his or her imagination will carry him or her. He also borrows from neo-Platonist ideas as also Aristotle, creating a space for the poet to operate outside of the limits of our world. Joseph Addison\u27s Spectator essays on the pleasures of the imagination, expands upon Sidney, noticing the power of words to create images of things not present, requiring a reader of equal imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his Biographia Literaria, posits that this ability to create on the part of the author is a reflection of the creative act of the divine creator who made man. Oscar Wilde\u27s essay, The Decay of Lying, defends imaginative literature against the realists of his day, arguing for a return to the art of lying, which is the creation, through art, of beautiful, untrue things. Tolkien seems to respond to Wilde\u27s challenge, picking of the threads of Sidney and Coleridge to explain his idea of sub-creation on the part of the author, who creates through writing secondary worlds that contain fragments of the truth, which is, for Tolkien, the truth of his Catholic beliefs in God and his creation of man. If the author does his work well then he creates in the reader secondary belief in the secondary world of the narrative, taking up Addison\u27s ideas and taking exception to Coleridge\u27s willing suspension of disbelief. The reader believes the created world is real, in the sense that it exists while the reader is inside the narrative world; These ideas lead Tolkien to give the four qualities of a fairy-story, as he names them, fantasy, recovery, escape, and consolation. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Country Music's "Hurtin' Albertan" : Corb Lund and the Construction of "Geo-Cultural" Identity

Le concept de lieu fait partie intégrante de la musique country, genre musical traditionnellement associé à certaines aires géographiques, à des paysages ruraux et aux valeurs communautaires. Bien que la littérature sur la musique country ait bien cerné les liens entre ce genre musical et la notion de lieu, en particulier en ce qui concerne la géographie des origines du genre et de ses scènes importantes, on observe un intérêt scientifique croissant envers les chansons de plus en plus nombreuses explorant le thème du lieu. Cette tradition trouve ses racines dans les chansons hillbilly, les chansons de cowboys chantants, le bluegrass du Kentucky et le western swing, où les artistes ont exprimé la nostalgie des lieux familiers et du temps de leur enfance. Ces récits ne décrivent pas seulement le paysage et la culture d’aires géographiques données; plutôt, ils définissent la relation entre les individus et leur environnement, dévoilant ainsi le caractère, les valeurs et les croyances de l’artiste. En se concentrant sur la musique de l’artiste canadien de country alternatif Corb Lund, cette thèse vise à définir cette relation entre cet artiste de musique country et son environement, et à interroger la façon dont il utilise (à l’instar d’autres artistes du genre) ces chansons afin d’explorer plus à fond les liens avec ses origines albertaines. Plus précisément, il s’agit d’étudier comment ces récits de lieu contribuent à la construction de l’identité de l’artiste, ce que Simon Frith (1996) appelle la persona. Selon Richard Peterson (1997) et Pamela Fox (2009), les artistes country ont tendance à se référer à leurs origines dans un acte de « sincérité authentique », afin de construire une conception personnalisée du lieu (souvent autobiographique). Cette recherche a dû considérer les multiples couches de signification entourant l’artiste en tenant compte du genre, des niveaux identitaires et des rapports géoculturaux. Les approches géoculturelles et écomusicologiques permettent de mieux comprendre les façons dont les individus réagissent au lieu et aux liens intimes entre le « sentiment de soi » et le « sentiment de lieu » (Tuan 1974; Cantrill 1993; Solomon 2000). Le concept d’identité « géoculturelle », issu des sciences politiques (Talukder 2013), est invoqué pour décrire cette relation. Par l’analyse de la musique de Lund, cette thèse explore les manières dont l’artiste aborde la vie quotidienne, le travail et les questions socioculturelles propres à l’Alberta en proposant diverses conceptions du lieu, tout en construisant sa propre identité géoculturelle albertaine.The concept of place is integral to country music, a genre conventionally associated with geographic regions, rural landscapes, and community values. While country music literature has defined the genre’s connection to place in relation to the geography of its origins and prominent scenes, there has been a growing scholarly interest in the place-themed songs that proliferate the genre. The tradition of place songs finds its roots in early hillbilly recordings, songs of the singing cowboy, Kentucky bluegrass, and western swing, where songwriters expressed nostalgia for the seemingly simpler places and times of their childhood. These narratives do not just describe the landscape and culture of geographic regions, but rather, they also define the relationship between individuals and their surrounding environment and community, unveiling elements of the artist’s character, values, and beliefs. Focusing on the music of Canadian alt-country artist Corb Lund, this dissertation seeks to define this relationship between country singer-songwriter and place, and interrogate how he (like many other country artists) uses place songs to explore more fully his ties to his Albertan origins. More specifically, it is interested in how place-based narratives contribute to the construction of an artist’s identity, what Simon Frith (1996) calls the artistic persona. As both Richard Peterson (1997) and Pamela Fox (2009) have noted, country artists tend to refer to their origins as an act of “authentic sincerity, ” constructing personalized (often autobiographical) conceptions of place. For a study of this nature, it was important to consider the multiple layers of signification surrounding a singer-songwriter including genre, levels of artistic identity, and geographic-cultural (“geo-cultural”) association. Cultural geographic and ecomusicological discourse offers a rich understanding of the ways in which individuals respond to place and the intimate connection between the “sense of self” and the “sense of place” (Tuan 1974; Cantrill 1993; Solomon 2000). The concept “geo-cultural” identity, drawn from the political sciences (Talukder 2013), is invoked to describe this connection and define the geographic-cultural elements of an artist’s identity. Through an interrogation of Lund’s music, this dissertation explores how the singer-songwriter describes life, work, and socio-cultural issues in his native Alberta, creating diverse conceptions of place, all while constructing his uniquely Albertan “geo-cultural” identity

Catching the “Wild Note”: Listening, Learning, and Connoisseurship in Old-Time Music

As we approach the century mark for audio recording projects that began documenting traditional music forms in the southern U.S., it is worth interrogating the profound ways that old commercial and field recordings shape contemporary performance practices and understandings of these genres, especially as copies of older recordings circulate widely and unexpectedly and accumulate new meanings. This project examines the ways that sound recordings and technologies mediate contemporary performance practices, aesthetics, and social relationships in the context of Old-time music, especially among Old-time practitioners in East Tennessee, a site long associated with the genre. An ethnography of listening, learning, and performance practices among expert Old-time musicians, this dissertation brings conversations about the splitting and circulation of sounds from their sources to bear on long-standing concerns about modes of transmission of traditional and local knowledge. Thinking about the transmission of traditional music as a process thoroughly imbricated with sound technologies yields new questions, stories, and understandings about Old-time music making and the study of expressive culture. This project traces a circulatory flow that runs from Old-time’s emergence as commercial and field recordings into the learning, listening, and performing bodies of contemporary musicians and, then, back into the realm of recorded sound as contemporary experts make new recordings. Based on the author’s experience as a performer/researcher, and on fifteen years of fieldwork with expert musicians around Chattanooga, Tennessee, and beyond, this project reveals the intensely creative processes of emulation that lead to masterful performances on fiddle and banjo, the intimate relationships that form between players and between listener/learners and sound recordings, and emergent forms of connoisseurship. As this project foregrounds and interrogates the role of sound technologies in mediating and sustaining local forms of expressive culture, it invites researchers to consider carefully the entangled relationships between technologies, aesthetics, and masterful performances in contemporary traditional art forms. Rather than dismissing artistic projects that draw on recordings as less authentic than projects built around face-to-face learning, this project invites researchers to recognize the creative labor and social relationships that form as mediated repertories and styles return to embodied performances.Doctor of Philosoph

Queering the classroom: a study of performativity and musical engagement in high school

Creating inclusive environments that are safe and respectful of all students in the spectrum is paramount to students’ success and well-being in music (Carter, 2011). When students feel safe and supported, they may express themselves more freely and participate in music more fully (Hill, 2019). Yet, freedom to express oneself is inhibited by heteronormative beliefs and practices that perpetuate gender stereotypes, suppress queer thinking, and form the origins of homophobia and transphobia (Butler, 2004; Sedgwick, 1990/2008; Warner, 1993). This study featured a narrative inquiry design which utilized the lens of queer theory and Butler’s (1990/1999) concept of gender performativity to examine high school musical engagement through the recollections and perceptions of three trans young adults. The purpose of this study was to explore ways that gender and music intersect in high school, as well as illuminate behaviors that constrained or enabled the participants’ abilities to participate fully in school music. Data was gathered through interviews with the participants during which they recounted past musical experiences in school, family, and community contexts. Findings from a comparative analysis revealed eight areas that were crucial to the participants’ affirmation of identity and musical engagement: supportive people, singing alone and with others, negotiating traditions, meaningful performing experiences, safe spaces and safe people, role of media, personal agency, and role of the music teacher. This study contributes to a growing body of music education research rooted in queer theory that dismantles the binary gender categories of “male” and “female” and, instead, considers the entire spectrum of gender. Results of this study may help educators remove barriers between gender identity and musical engagement by informing practice that opens channels for learning and builds stronger connections to music

The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change

Abstract The Foreign Ear: Elizabeth Bishop\u27s Proliferal Wit & the Chances of Change Elizabeth Bishop has been widely celebrated as a painterly or photographic poet, a naturalist and geographer, and yet she was a subtly exquisite musician of wordplay attuned to subvocal effects. This dissertation examines a network of Bishop\u27s affinities and aesthetic commitments, including her wish to say the most difficult things and be funny, if possible. One surprising claim regarding the poet\u27s variously called All Eye, the famous eye, etc., is that her sense of the spiritual is rather antithetical to an ocular regime: even those extremely fluid, revising, surprising land and seascapes for which she is celebrated, are but the tip of the seas we are to attend. Tracing her more properly experimental challenge to her explorations at Vassar, humoring her interest to get an intense sense of consciousness in the tongue, in sensational revisionary moments, I argue that she is a much more radical: and witty) poet than has been granted, and that even those taking her up in a postmodern vein have underappreciated this. Hers is the Emersonian/Pragmatist challenge of transition, and she positioned it particularly in the surface sounds of her words, profoundly attuned as she was to the liminal fringes of a Jamesian stream of thought. Her wish to portray not a thought, but a mind thinking is a commonplace in the criticism, whereas the discussion of the phonotextual creations of sound by way of breath, gestures of transformation, and the affirmation of play, are less lit up. Her poems early to late, and comments outside them, assert her Transcendentalist and Pragmatist affinities, folding them into a radical aesthetic she called the proliferal style. Though her use of religious imagery and language are often believed to evince nostalgic longings, or signal her entrapment in outmoded forms of thinking, I argue that, as part of this project, she made a canny and rigorous effort to adapt her religious inheritance toward the Darwininan understandings of proliferation, error and the ear-rational, pleasure and the chances of change

Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money

Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money is a groundbreaking study covering a range of contemporary authors and issues, from Haizi to Yin Lichuan and from poetic rhythm to exile-bashing. Its rigorous scholarship, literary sensitivity and lively style make it eminently fit for classroom use

On Musical Self-Similarity : Intersemiosis as Synecdoche and Analogy

Self-similarity, a concept borrowed from mathematics, is gradually becoming a keyword in musicology. Although a polysemic term, self-similarity often refers to the multi-scalar feature repetition in a set of relationships, and it is commonly valued as an indication for musical ‘coherence’ and ‘consistency’. In this study, Gabriel Pareyon presents a theory of musical meaning formation in the context of intersemiosis, that is, the translation of meaning from one cognitive domain to another cognitive domain (e.g. from mathematics to music, or to speech or graphic forms). From this perspective, the degree of coherence of a musical system relies on a synecdochic intersemiosis: a system of related signs within other comparable and correlated systems. The author analyzes the modalities of such correlations, exploring their general and particular traits, and their operational bounds. Accordingly, the notion of analogy is used as a rich concept through its two definitions quoted by the Classical literature—proportion and paradigm, enormously valuable in establishing measurement, likeness and affinity criteria. At the same time, original arguments by Benoît B. Mandelbrot (1924–2010) are revised, alongside a systematic critique of the literature on the subject. In fact, connecting Charles S. Peirce’s ‘synechism’ with Mandelbrot’s ‘fractality’ is one of the main developments of the present study