Towards a Practitioner Model of Mobile Music

This practice-based research investigates the mobile paradigm in the context of electronic music, sound and performance; it considers the idea of mobile as a lens through which a new model of electronic music performance can be interrogated. This research explores mobile media devices as tools and modes of artistic expression in everyday contexts and situations. While many of the previous studies have tended to focus upon the design and construction of new hardware and software systems, this research puts performance practice at the centre of its analysis. This research builds a methodological and practical framework that draws upon theories of mobile-mediated aurality, rhetoric on the practice of walking, relational aesthetics, and urban and natural environments as sites for musical performance. The aim is to question the spaces commonly associated with electronic music – where it is situated, listened to and experienced. This thesis concentrates on the creative use of existing systems using generic mobile devices – smartphones, tablets and HD cameras – and commercially available apps. It will describe the development, implementation and evaluation of a self-contained performance system utilising digital signal processing apps and the interconnectivity of an inter-app routing system. This is an area of investigation that other research programmes have not addressed in any depth. This research’s enquiries will be held in dynamic and often unpredictable conditions, from navigating busy streets to the fold down shelf on the back of a train seat, as a solo performer or larger groups of players, working with musicians, nonmusicians and other participants. Along the way, it examines how ubiquitous mobile technology and its total access might promote inclusivity and creativity through the cultural adhesive of mobile media. This research aims to explore how being mobile has unrealised potential to change the methods and experiences of making electronic music, to generate a new kind of performer identity and as a consequence lead towards a practitioner model of mobile music

Feature selection using enhanced particle swarm optimisation for classification models.

In this research, we propose two Particle Swarm Optimisation (PSO) variants to undertake feature selection tasks. The aim is to overcome two major shortcomings of the original PSO model, i.e., premature convergence and weak exploitation around the near optimal solutions. The first proposed PSO variant incorporates four key operations, including a modified PSO operation with rectified personal and global best signals, spiral search based local exploitation, Gaussian distribution-based swarm leader enhancement, and mirroring and mutation operations for worst solution improvement. The second proposed PSO model enhances the first one through four new strategies, i.e., an adaptive exemplar breeding mechanism incorporating multiple optimal signals, nonlinear function oriented search coefficients, exponential and scattering schemes for swarm leader, and worst solution enhancement, respectively. In comparison with a set of 15 classical and advanced search methods, the proposed models illustrate statistical superiority for discriminative feature selection for a total of 13 data sets

Freedom Betrayed: NGOs and the Challenges of Neoliberal Development in the Post-Apartheid Era

This thesis explores transformations in South African NGOs in the Post-Apartheid era. It focuses on two areas in particular that are often neglected in the study of NGOs: auditing and partnerships are increasingly core activities of NGOs and impact on their logic of operation and their location in wider civil society. In applying a governmentality framework to the neoliberalisation of development in South Africa, this research investigates how development provides a context for governmental technologies and what forms of NGOs they produce. A multi-method, multi-sited research strategy was employed that included in-depth interviews, observation research and other ethnographic techniques. South Africa's democratic transition and subsequent funding crises gave birth to a new, more streamlined NGO model which can be characterised by flexibility, fluency in auditing techniques and the ability to maintain multisectoral partnerships. Partnerships transform the activities and values of NGOs and provide a crosssectoral context for the circulation of particular auditing technologies and types of expertise. Indeed, it is argued that the entanglement of NGOs in intersectoral spaces is not only heightened by the prevalence of the partnership agenda in global development and in the new South Africa's reconciliation project, but that NGO activity very much produces these kinds of intermeshing spaces. Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) is shown to be a key demand of partnerships, thus further reinforcing an audit culture. NGOs, by acting as experts and translators of these apparently mundane techniques to other civil society organisations (CSOs), actively shape practices of development and may come to substitute for civil society. There is continuity between the partnership practices by which - contrary to their emancipatory claims - NGOs become more strategically and structurally embedded in the neoliberal order, and their own governing of CSOs such as the country's strong social movements. It is contended that this is particularly dangerous given the vast developmental challenges facing South Africa and the deeply felt betrayal of freedom's promises by the majority population

Re-Visioning the Modern/ist Body: Literature, Women, and Modern Dance

This project explores the connections between modern dance and modernism Though initially, these connections might seem inchoate, modern dance provides a way to consider how expressive movement in modernism and gender restrictions prompts a physical response. Dance is inherently stylistic movement, and it is vital to explore how movement offers women a way to engage or respond to modernity. By investigating the role of movement in modernist literature and the particular tension between constraint and freedom that characterized female movement during this period, I argue that expressive movement and embodied performance offers a means of self-exploration and self-actualization. Specifically, it addresses the ways in which the work of Martha Graham is at the heart of this project, running as a thread that connects the intricacies of women’s autonomy, movement, and experience; this performance also conveys how the limited connection between modern dance and modernism allows the dance style, as a form of embodied performance, to be viewed as a form of expressive movement that coalesces and generates other dance styles that are reflective of modernism and its other various artforms. My introduction situates this project’s relevance in the fields of modernist studies and modern dance, which leads into my discussion of historicizing modern dance and elaborating on the artform’s lineage. Chapter Two explores how women’s movement is constrained, yet insurrectionary using Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal. In Chapter Three, I extend my discussion on constraint and liberated movement based on the life and work of Zelda Fitzgerald, primarily focusing on her only novel Save Me the Waltz. Lastly, Chapter Four elaborates on my previous discussions by articulating how the intersection between racial identity and expressive movement are present in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand as well as the dance stylings of Josephine Baker

The aesthetic diversity of American proletarian fiction

Almost as soon as a certain movement in early twentieth-century American literature began to be labeled proletarian, numerous literary critics defined the genre as propagandistic, formulaic, and prescribed by a hegemonic and totalitarian American Communist Party. Recently, scholars of 1930s leftist literature have challenged previous dismissals of proletarianism by noting the diversity of participants and the complexity of individual works. Frequently, however, too much emphasis is placed upon the Communist Party, shared political and literary projects, and temporal parameters, all of which would suggest that proletarianism was an isolated phenomenon within the history of American literature. This study reveals that the major proponents of American proletarian literature portrayed the movement as the successor to progressive and radical tendencies throughout the history of American literature. Furthermore, during the 1930s proletarianism was a term open to debate, one whose advocates presented vastly different definitions. Similarly, those novelists whom contemporary critics most often labeled proletarian, although they shared a support of labor and socialism, utilized disparate and frequently experimental techniques and held varied positions toward the Communist Party