The Salience, Shapes, and Functions of Continuous Processes in Contemporary Electronic Dance Music

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. 2019. Major: Music. Advisor: Sumanth Gopinath. 1 computer file (PDF); 384 pages.This dissertation examines the salience, shapes, and functions of continuous processes in contemporary electronic dance music (EDM), providing an analytical framework for discussing their structural and aesthetic roles in this repertoire. Continuous processes are musical gestures with continuous changes to musical parameters, rather than discrete, “step-by-step” ones. Examples include glissandos, crescendos, fade-ins, accelerandos, and filter sweeps. Most of the music discussed is from the 2010s, and from the large category of genres under the umbrella of house and trance. All the music referenced is available for listening through the supplemental files for this dissertation. The dissertation develops a multifaceted approach to the analysis of continuous processes in EDM. First, continuous processes are categorized according to their length and parameter altered (chapters 2 and 3), then according to their shape as compared with mathematical functions (chapter 5), then according to their musical functions as providing orientation, disorientation, ornamentation, and/or intensification (chapter 6). Continuous processes often provide sonic instructions for dancers. For example, “uplifters” (ascending pitch slides) in buildup sections create a sense of tension in listeners, and an expectation that a highly-energetic main section is coming up. Conversely, “downlifters” signal that the energy of the track is decreasing and that dancers can take a break. Continuous processes can also have specific semiotic meanings, as is shown in the hermeneutic analyses of two tracks by Deadmau5 and The Chemical Brothers in chapter 7. Throughout the dissertation, nine analytical guidelines for comparing continuous processes in terms of their salience are outlined gradually. These add another dimension to the analysis of continuous processes, making explicit the kinds of foreground-background parsing involved in listening and pointing towards how continuous changes saturate EDM with multiple levels of prominence. Existing analytical scholarship on EDM has focused on discrete processes, especially the sudden addition or subtraction of sound layers. Certain types of continuous processes have been explored, but they have not previously been discussed systematically. This dissertation adds to existing scholarship by drawing attention to the many roles of continuous processes in EDM, and showing how they contribute to the emotional waves experienced when listening to this music

The Semantics and Acquisition of Time in Language

This dissertation is about the structure of temporal semantics and children’s acquisition of temporal language. It argues for the importance of investigating semantics both at the abstract level of linguistic structures and at the concrete level of the time-course of acquisition, as these two levels provide natural constraints for each other. With respect to semantics, it provides a computationally inspired analysis of tense, grammatical aspect and lexical aspect that uses finite state automata to dynamically calculate the progress of an event over a time interval. It is shown that the analysis can account for many well-known temporal phenomena, such as the different entailments of telic and atelic predicates in the imperfective aspect (the imperfective paradox), and the various unified and serial interpretations of sentences involving a cardinally quantified phrase, such as Three Ringlings visited Florida. With respect to children’s acquisition of temporal language, the dissertation investigates the Aspect First hypothesis which states that children initially use tense and grammatical aspect morphology to mark the lexical aspect property of telicity. Two forced-choice comprehension experiments were conducted with children aged 2.5 to 5 years old to test children’s understanding of tense and grammatical aspect morphology; in a control condition, open class cues were used to test children’s conceptual competence with tense and grammatical aspect information independently of their competence with the relevant morphology (e.g., in the middle of and in a few seconds were the open class cues for imperfective aspect and future tense, respectively). Results showed that even the youngest children understood the concepts underlying tense and grammatical aspect as measured by their performance with the open class cues but they did not demonstrate adult competence with the closed class morphology for grammatical aspect and did so only marginally for tense. Comprehension of tense morphology preceded that of grammatical aspect morphology and in particular, children showed an early facility with markers of the future tense

Seeking the neural basis of grammar : English noun and verb morphological processing investigated with rapid event-related fMRI and intracortical electrophysiology

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2003.Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 268-271).(cont.) the functionality of the fMRI data analysis and visualization tools used at Massachusetts General Hospital. I analyze and interpret an 18-subject fMRI experiment I ran using the new task design and software tools. Finally, I present preliminary findings on linguistic questions as well as the nature of fMRI signal, using direct Electrophysiological data recorded from electrodes implanted in the brains of two Epilepsy patients. These patients had electrodes implanted through or near classical language areas of their brains, as a necessary clinical step in locating and surgically removing the seizure-causing tissue. The main findings of this thesis are: 1.) Morphology alone can activate Broca's area, 2.) Other areas are involved, including BA47, anterior insula, and SMA, 3.) Broca's area and BA47 respond to application of abstract grammatical features, even without phonological manipulations, 4.) Morphophonological manipulation additionally recruits insula and SMA, 5.) While simply accessing nouns versus verbs may involve separable brain regions, inflectional processing of the two categories may be done by the same process, 6.) Regularly and Irregularly inflected verbs show a double dissociation of activation in frontal and medial regions, 7.) Processing of English noun more than verb morphology may rely on some contribution from number processing brain systems ...Inflectional morphology is the component of language concerned with changing a word's form to reflect context-specific meaning, such as the affixing of"-ed" for English verbs in the past tense, or adding "-s" in order to signal a noun's plural form. Although it is but one part of language, morphology may be useful as a model system for larger issues in language and cognition. Morphological processing touches on: the manipulation of memorized items (the vocabulary of words, and maybe word endings), the application and power of combinatorial rules (to generate correct forms, even of unknown words), and the binding of units of information into meaning. Morphology's relationship with other more traditional facets of language such as syntax (sentence structure) and semantics (meanings of individual words) is debated, as is the objective reality of grammatical categories (e.g. noun/verb) as well as combinatorial rules. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is an exciting technique for peering into the brain and answering questions about its function. However, the technique has limited temporal and spatial resolution, and indexes the brain basis of cognition only indirectly, via blood response to cellular metabolism. In this thesis I propose a task for manipulating morphological production, embedded in a 2*2*3 design simultaneously varying grammatical class (nouns versus verbs), regularity of inflection (e.g. words like "walk" which take the stereotyped or regular ending "-ed", versus those like "bring" and "sing" which have idiosyncratic past tense forms), and three types of morphological task aimed to separate the assignment of grammatical features (e.g. present/past tense) from changes in word sound. I introduce and utilize software to extendby Nedim T. Sahin.S.M

Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies - Part 1

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue titled "Contemporary Natural Philosophy and Philosophies" - Part 1 that was published in the journal Philosophies

Human error in the design of a safety-critical system

From the introduction:This thesis is an investigation into some o f the causes and possible remedies to the problem of human error in a complex human-machine system. The system in question is engaged in the design of computer software for the control of railway signalling infrastructure. Error in its operation has the potential to be lethally destructive, a fact that provides not only the system’s epithet but also the primary motivation and significance for its investigation

Stepping Beyond the Newtonian Paradigm in Biology. Towards an Integrable Model of Life: Accelerating Discovery in the Biological Foundations of Science

The INBIOSA project brings together a group of experts across many disciplines who believe that science requires a revolutionary transformative step in order to address many of the vexing challenges presented by the world. It is INBIOSA’s purpose to enable the focused collaboration of an interdisciplinary community of original thinkers. This paper sets out the case for support for this effort. The focus of the transformative research program proposal is biology-centric. We admit that biology to date has been more fact-oriented and less theoretical than physics. However, the key leverageable idea is that careful extension of the science of living systems can be more effectively applied to some of our most vexing modern problems than the prevailing scheme, derived from abstractions in physics. While these have some universal application and demonstrate computational advantages, they are not theoretically mandated for the living. A new set of mathematical abstractions derived from biology can now be similarly extended. This is made possible by leveraging new formal tools to understand abstraction and enable computability. [The latter has a much expanded meaning in our context from the one known and used in computer science and biology today, that is "by rote algorithmic means", since it is not known if a living system is computable in this sense (Mossio et al., 2009).] Two major challenges constitute the effort. The first challenge is to design an original general system of abstractions within the biological domain. The initial issue is descriptive leading to the explanatory. There has not yet been a serious formal examination of the abstractions of the biological domain. What is used today is an amalgam; much is inherited from physics (via the bridging abstractions of chemistry) and there are many new abstractions from advances in mathematics (incentivized by the need for more capable computational analyses). Interspersed are abstractions, concepts and underlying assumptions “native” to biology and distinct from the mechanical language of physics and computation as we know them. A pressing agenda should be to single out the most concrete and at the same time the most fundamental process-units in biology and to recruit them into the descriptive domain. Therefore, the first challenge is to build a coherent formal system of abstractions and operations that is truly native to living systems. Nothing will be thrown away, but many common methods will be philosophically recast, just as in physics relativity subsumed and reinterpreted Newtonian mechanics. This step is required because we need a comprehensible, formal system to apply in many domains. Emphasis should be placed on the distinction between multi-perspective analysis and synthesis and on what could be the basic terms or tools needed. The second challenge is relatively simple: the actual application of this set of biology-centric ways and means to cross-disciplinary problems. In its early stages, this will seem to be a “new science”. This White Paper sets out the case of continuing support of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for transformative research in biology and information processing centered on paradigm changes in the epistemological, ontological, mathematical and computational bases of the science of living systems. Today, curiously, living systems cannot be said to be anything more than dissipative structures organized internally by genetic information. There is not anything substantially different from abiotic systems other than the empirical nature of their robustness. We believe that there are other new and unique properties and patterns comprehensible at this bio-logical level. The report lays out a fundamental set of approaches to articulate these properties and patterns, and is composed as follows. Sections 1 through 4 (preamble, introduction, motivation and major biomathematical problems) are incipient. Section 5 describes the issues affecting Integral Biomathics and Section 6 -- the aspects of the Grand Challenge we face with this project. Section 7 contemplates the effort to formalize a General Theory of Living Systems (GTLS) from what we have today. The goal is to have a formal system, equivalent to that which exists in the physics community. Here we define how to perceive the role of time in biology. Section 8 describes the initial efforts to apply this general theory of living systems in many domains, with special emphasis on crossdisciplinary problems and multiple domains spanning both “hard” and “soft” sciences. The expected result is a coherent collection of integrated mathematical techniques. Section 9 discusses the first two test cases, project proposals, of our approach. They are designed to demonstrate the ability of our approach to address “wicked problems” which span across physics, chemistry, biology, societies and societal dynamics. The solutions require integrated measurable results at multiple levels known as “grand challenges” to existing methods. Finally, Section 10 adheres to an appeal for action, advocating the necessity for further long-term support of the INBIOSA program. The report is concluded with preliminary non-exclusive list of challenging research themes to address, as well as required administrative actions. The efforts described in the ten sections of this White Paper will proceed concurrently. Collectively, they describe a program that can be managed and measured as it progresses

Aspects of the Grammar of Eastern Khanty

A reference grammar of the endangered indigenous dialects of Vasyugan and Alexandrovo Eastern Khanty of the Uralic language family is the study based on the corpus of natural narrative discourse, and is set in a general cognitive -functional paradigm. The description addresses the main patterns of the Eastern Khanty language system and offers typological contextualization of the reviewed language data. The description covers the issues in phonology (backness vowel harmony, consonant-vowel harmony), word-classes, morphology (derivation and inflection), syntax and semantics of simple and complex clauses (typical SOV patterns with occasional non-canonical argument ergative marking against the general background of Nom-Acc system and robust use of non-finite and finite constructions as relative, adverbial and complement clauses)