Inference of synchrosqueezing transform -- toward a unified statistical analysis of nonlinear-type time-frequency analysis

We provide a statistical analysis of a tool in nonlinear-type time-frequency analysis, the synchrosqueezing transform (SST), for both the null and non-null cases. The intricate nonlinear interaction of different quantities in the SST is quantified by carefully analyzing relevant multivariate complex Gaussian random variables. Several new results for such random variables are provided, and a central limit theorem result for the SST is established. The analysis sheds lights on bridging time-frequency analysis to time series analysis and diffusion geometry

Childless Women in the Plays of William Inge, Tennessee Williams, and Edward Albee

This dissertation is an examination of three major twentieth-century American playwrights—William Inge, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee—and their dramatic use of childless women characters in Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955), and Who\u27s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) respectively. Although the plays of Inge, Williams, and Albee have been analyzed individually by numerous scholars, they have not been studied together as works about procreation and childlessness. The study\u27s historical focus is the post World War II era during which time the three plays proposed for analysis were written and produced. Commonly called the baby boom era, the postwar years saw a marked increase in this country\u27s birthrate. By turning to the perceived security of domestic life and traditional family values following the upheaval of war, many Americans created a cultural mandate that emphasized marriage and parenthood as essential to success, happiness, even national patriotism. This study argues that Sheba, Cat, and Virginia Woolf complicate the idealistic view of domesticity many Americans embraced during the postwar years by truthfully exposing the underlying anxiety and disturbing sense of tragedy that characterized much of family life in the 1950s. Through extended readings of the individual works, this study seeks to illuminate the complex ideas about gender roles and family structures that emerge from the texts of the plays by exploring the socially, culturally, and psychologically subversive and disruptive potential represented in the presence of childless women characters

Music of the Martial Arts: Rhythm, Movement, and Meaning in a Chinese Canadian Kung Fu Club

This dissertation is an investigation of the percussion used to accompany Chinese martial arts and lion dancing at Toronto, Canada’s Hong Luck Kung Fu Club. It is based on six years of participant-observation and performance ethnography there, as well as a nine-month period of comparative fieldwork in Hong Kong. The diasporic environment presented questions of identity, and the research also engaged with the emerging field of martial arts studies. The discussion’s primary lines of inquiry are the use of percussion-accompanied lion dance and kung fu in the construction of identity for performers and audiences in a multicultural context; embodied knowledge in the movement and music that undergirds a Chinese, martial way of being-in-the-world; and the experience of learning, performing, and observing these practices. This study draws on phenomenology, semiotics, practice theory, and cognitive semantics, which have been tempered by discipleship at Hong Luck. The primary argument of this dissertation is that, despite the challenges of diaspora, Hong Luck’s transmission process uses intense physical training to engrain a distinctly Chinese, martial habitus onto practitioners; this set of dispositions is the prerequisite for becoming a drummer and is sonically—and physically—manifested in percussion-accompanied kung fu and lion dancing with important implications for the identity of performers and patrons. The main thesis is augmented by an argument for experiencing combat skills through music. With over fifty years of history, the ideals of self-strengthening, resistance to domination, and respect for Chinese culture that are embodied in Hong Luck’s practices have had a lasting impact on not only the local Chinatown community, but also the Greater Toronto Area and beyond

Complex Neural Networks for Audio

Audio is represented in two mathematically equivalent ways: the real-valued time domain (i.e., waveform) and the complex-valued frequency domain (i.e., spectrum). There are advantages to the frequency-domain representation, e.g., the human auditory system is known to process sound in the frequency-domain. Furthermore, linear time-invariant systems are convolved with sources in the time-domain, whereas they may be factorized in the frequency-domain. Neural networks have become rather useful when applied to audio tasks such as machine listening and audio synthesis, which are related by their dependencies on high quality acoustic models. They ideally encapsulate fine-scale temporal structure, such as that encoded in the phase of frequency-domain audio, yet there are no authoritative deep learning methods for complex audio. This manuscript is dedicated to addressing the shortcoming. Chapter 2 motivates complex networks by their affinity with complex-domain audio, while Chapter 3 contributes methods for building and optimizing complex networks. We show that the naive implementation of Adam optimization is incorrect for complex random variables and show that selection of input and output representation has a significant impact on the performance of a complex network. Experimental results with novel complex neural architectures are provided in the second half of this manuscript. Chapter 4 introduces a complex model for binaural audio source localization. We show that, like humans, the complex model can generalize to different anatomical filters, which is important in the context of machine listening. The complex model\u27s performance is better than that of the real-valued models, as well as real- and complex-valued baselines. Chapter 5 proposes a two-stage method for speech enhancement. In the first stage, a complex-valued stochastic autoencoder projects complex vectors to a discrete space. In the second stage, long-term temporal dependencies are modeled in the discrete space. The autoencoder raises the performance ceiling for state of the art speech enhancement, but the dynamic enhancement model does not outperform other baselines. We discuss areas for improvement and note that the complex Adam optimizer improves training convergence over the naive implementation

Gerard Manley Hopkins and the pattern of language : a consideration of his writings in the light of some modern formalist and structuralist theories of language and poetry

Hopkins's work is better comprehensible as a unity if considered as anticipating Structuralist views of language and associated attitudes to poetic structure. Hopkins's investigations of "inscape" emphasize systemic, organization and the ontological priority of patterns of relationship over individual phenomena. His writings on language reveal a comparable inclination, inviting a special interpretation of his phrase "inscape of speech".Hopkins's attitude to poetic language centres on a notion of poetry as "metalingual" activity, and is illuminated by reference to earlier and subsequent recurrences of the idea, particularly Formalist- Structuralist variations such as Jakobson's. This discussion clarifies general questions about the functions of poetic structure. Like some Formalists, Hopkins saw versification as creative "deformation" of language, parallelism in his verse working most typically to this end and also emphasizing the interrelated wholeness of the language-system.By this stage the notion in Hopkins's work of a "language of nature" seems more than a vague metaphor. In two particular late poems,Hopkins's "framing" of language becomes (in a specially defined sense) "iconic" of his world-view, the principle of this correspondence being the notion of a system whose components (words or things) only exist or have meaning in terms of the whole.Formalist notions of literary evolution help us better to appreciate consistency of development in Hopkins's own style,and the nature of his critical attitudes(especially to Victorian poetry). His concern was for the maintenance of creative tension between form and language. His own experiments, often counter-productive, led to an exemplary revitalization of the sonnet.Further implications of the relationship in Hopkins's thought between linguistic and natural organization may now be explored.His cosmology (particularly where it involves "inscape" and "instress") is clarified by further reference to Structuralism and to Gregory Bateson' "ecology of mind"

The Baroque Requiem Mass at the imperial Habsburg Court in Vienna: musical and historical context, rhetoric, and signification

Thesis (D.M.A.)--Boston UniversityThis study of the Baroque Requiem Mass at the imperial Habsburg Court in Vienna explores the historical and musical context of six settings composed from 1621 to 1720. The Austrian Habsburg Emperors Ferdinand II, Ferdinand III, Leopold I, Joseph I, and Charles VI supported the imperial musical establishment, the Hofkapelle, due to a nearly consistent zeal for music and religion. The Hofkapelle expanded in size and incorporated an increasing variety of singers and instrumentalists throughout this period. This institution was musically influential throughout the Holy Roman Empire and magnified the prestige of each emperor through its prominent role at public performances. Hofkapelle liturgies incorporated unique practices, and they commemorated the deaths of emperors and other important members of the Habsburg family with concerted settings of the Requiem Mass. Composers of these Requiem Masses reflect the German and Italian constituency and musical style espoused by the Hofkapelle. Musical analyses identify common and unique characteristics among six compositions: Christoph Straus's Missa Pro defunctis, Giovanni Felice Sances's Missa Defunctorum à 12 and Requiem Ferdinand III à 20, Johann Heinrich Schmeltzer's Requiem aeternam dona eis Domine, Johann Kaspar Kerll's Missa Pro defunctis, and Johann Joseph Fux's Requiem à 5. The analyses address compositional context, performing forces, structure, motivic characteristics, text illustration, counterpoint, and text setting. The analyses also establish the influences of rhetoric and oratory upon these compositions. The study distinguishes between techniques of musical rhetoric, such as large-scale structures and Figurenlehre, and musical oratory, including elements of speech-like delivery. Correlations between compositional theory and the Hofkapelle repertoire are explored through primary sources of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These correlations focus on elements of musical rhetoric and oratory with treatises by Johannes Nucius, Athanasius Kircher, Christoph Bernhard, Tomàš Baltazar Janovka, Mauritius Johann Vogt, and Johann Mattheson. These primary sources lead to inquiries regarding the signification of Hofkapelle Requiem Masses. This investigation explores possible meaning conveyed at specific commemorations, beliefs regarding death and the Habsburgs, and perceptions about the relationship between the living and the deceased

Outlaws and Traitors: Justifying Rebellion in the Old French Epic of Revolt

The plot of many chansons de geste hinges on acts that would have been considered treasonable by medieval legal custom. Yet despite conspicuously treasonous behavior, rebel characters remain the heroes of the tales. Coming to an understanding of the esoteric way that medieval poets and their audiences would have perceived the difference between rebel characters and traitor characters is the pursuit of this study. Through an investigation of the narrative logic and poetic details of epic poems like Girart de Vienne and other chansons de geste, the divergence between treachery and rebellion can be shown to reside in narrative strategies like the noble robber tale, in essentializing discourse that ascribes traits to characters through lineage and essence regardless of actions, and in appeals to an audience largely made up of young knights whose late twelfth-century world was undergoing massive changes that threatened their expectations about life. This study shows that it is not so much about a difference between rebellion and treachery, but a difference between rebels and traitors

Becoming Sonic: Ambient Poetics and the Ecology of Listening in Four Militant Sound Investigations

This dissertation Becoming Sonic: Ambient Poetics and the Ecology of the Ear in Four Militant Sound Investigations offers a critical and historical analysis of acoustic ecology and soundscape recording —the sounds, noises, and silences that make up our ambient sonic environment and are found and recorded “in the field” by artists to create recordings and performances are then experienced by listeners. Field recording captures the diverse and often unwanted or inconsequential sounds of a space, which can then be used to bring attention to the often unheard and unconscious processes that stratify space. By stratification I am referring to the processes of urban planning, architecture, business, policies, and governance that shape and grid the environment. Analyzing four case studies by the sound collective Ultra-Red, sound activist Christopher DeLaurenti, and field recording artist Chris Watson, that explore the soundscapes of housing redevelopment, using a food bank, public sex in parks, and the slow violence of ecological devastation, this dissertation builds on and analyzes the sonic environmental and spatial implications of ecology by both critiquing acoustic ecology and employing it as a concept to explore the political, aesthetic, and epistemological consequences of soundscape recording. The purpose of this dissertation is to examine what sound indicates through cultural practice and how it can be used and deployed to create different understandings of the places we live and act. This research articulates a poetics of listening to space that constructs worlds and questions how the environment can be used for aesthetic purposes, how the sounds of the city and ‘nature’ influence artists, how artists practice and experience sound by listening, and what kind of knowledges these aesthetic practices produce. In order to accomplish this, it relies on critical approaches to ecology, space and urbanism (Gilles Deleuze and Fèlix Guattari, David Harvey, Nigel Thrift, and Edward Soja); ecologies of sound and listening (Steve Goodman, Murray Schafer, Susan Bickford, Frances Dyson); and affective politics (Brian Massumi, Erin Manning). This dissertation makes substantiative use of interviews, newspaper articles, and artist’s writings and statements to elucidate its investigation