Symphony in One Movement: Score and Analysis

This thesis consists of the composition, Symphony In One Movement, accompanied by an analytical study. The piece is composed for large orchestra and has a duration of twelve minutes. It comprises three connected but distinct sections, whose contrasts suggest individual movements. Each section is based on a traditional formal structure: sonata, passacaglia, and rondo-variations. The intention was to acknowledge the traditional symphony through these formal structures while applying more modem approaches to elements such as harmony, melody, and rhythm. The analytical study that follows the score provides insight to the compositional methods and tools which were employed in the work. Separate chapters discuss form, pitch content, melody, harmony, rhythm, and texture/orchestration/dynamics. I explain the essential building blocks of the music in detail and provide musical examples and form graphs to support the text. Through the analysis, I show how I achieved my goal of writing a musically satisfying piece which combines traditional and modern techniques of composing for the symphony orchestra. The thesis includes a compact disc which contains an electronic realization of the work, along with supplemental recordings of the examples found in the body of the paper

Tracking Liberty

Barbara Young Welke, Recasting American Liberty: Gender, Race, Law and the Railroad Revolution, 1865-1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xx, 405. $65 (cloth),$23 (paperback). This deeply researched and highly intelligent book revisits the theme of personal liberty in American life. Welke\u27s aim, admirably fulfilled in the course of nearly 400 pages of minute illustration and discussion, is to show how American perceptions of bodily integrity and autonomy of action ( self-sovereignty or self-ownership ) in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries were transformed by mechanised technology, corporate power, and modernized space. This then is a study of American self-consciousness as a nation of free men and women. My central question, Welke writes, is how Americans\u27 interactions with technology, with corporate power, and with each other in these years reshaped the lived experience and thus meaning of liberty. Her book describes the collision between the cherished American ideal of the free man moving uninhibited in the world and an illiberal trinity of machines, corporations, and states. Railroads and streetcars were chosen as the focal point of the study because they were instrumental in fulfilling a condition of individual liberty: freedom of movement. By the 1870s, railroads had become an integral and indispensable aspect of American life. As Welke stresses, however, the site of mechanised transportation was always a contested social, moral, and legal terrain. By the turn of the century the railroad car, station, and platform were among the most comprehensively regulated of all American spaces. American men and women became dependent on an industry that had steadily eroded their personal autonomy

The Color Splitting System for TV Cameras - XYZ Prism

One of the dominant aspects, which prejudices the quality of color image reproduction, is the first operation in TV chain - scanning. Up to this day, the color splitting system, working in RGB colorimetric system, is still entirely used. The existence of negative parts of the color matching functions r(l), g(l), b(l) causes complications by optical separation of partial pictures R, G, B in classic scanning system. It leads to distortion of reproduction of color images. However, the specific technical and scientific applications, where the color carries the substantial part of information (cosmic development, medicine), demand high fidelity of color reproduction. This article submits the results of the design of the color splitting system working in XYZ colorimetric system (next only XYZ prism). Shortly the way to obtain theoretical spectral reflectances of partial filters of XYZ prism is described. Further, these filters are approximated by real optical interference filters and the geometry of XYZ prism is established. Finally, the results of the colorimetric distortion test of proposed scanning system are stated

Die Rolle der Notizentechnik beim Konsekutivdolmetschen

Ziel dieser Arbeit war die Untersuchung von Notizen, die professionelle DolmetscherInnen und Studierende beim Konsekutivdolmetschen nehmen. Dabei sollten Unterschiede zwischen den Notizen dieser beiden Gruppen ermittelt werden und herausgefunden werden, in welchen Bereichen Studierende in der Endphase ihres Studiums noch Probleme haben und wie professionelle DolmetscherInnen in diesen Fällen vorgehen. Anhand der Ergebnisse sollte daher Studierenden in der Endphase ihres Dolmetschstudiums geholfen werden, ihre Notizentechnik zu perfektionieren und darauf hingewiesen werden, worauf im Unterricht kurz vor dem Abschluss des Studiums besonders Acht gegeben werden sollte. Grundlage für diese Untersuchung bildete ein Experiment, das von Bettina Hiebl und mir im März 2011 an der Universität Wien durchgeführt wurde. Dabei dolmetschten vier Studierende und drei professionelle Dolmetscherinnen drei Reden vom Italienischen ins Deutsche. Während die Dolmetscherinnen die Originalreden hörten, notierten sie mit dem LivescribeTM EchoTM Smartpen auf dem dazugehörenden Papier. Auf diese Weise konnten die Notizen digital gespeichert werden und nicht nur das Endprodukt der Notizen, sondern auch der Notationsprozess analysiert werden. Die Ergebnisse der Analyse zeigten, dass es drei große Bereiche gab, bei denen die Notizen von Studierenden und professionellen Dolmetscherinnen voneinander abwichen. Der erste Unterschied betraf die Struktur der Notizen, die bei den Studierenden oft nicht so übersichtlich und logisch war, wie bei den professionellen Dolmetscherinnen, was auch die Flüssigkeit der Vortragsweise beeinträchtigt haben dürfte. Der zweite Unterschied ergab sich im Zusammenhang mit der Ökonomie und Automatisierung der Notizen. Studierende schrieben oft lange Wörter aus oder notierten Sinneinheiten doppelt. Außerdem hatten sie viele Notationsstrategien noch nicht ausreichend automatisiert und wechselten während einer Rede bei gleichen Sinneinheiten die Notationsweise. Dadurch verloren sie unnötig Zeit und mussten andere Elemente auslassen. Der dritte Unterschied betraf die Notation von Eigennamen und Zahlen, bei denen die Studierenden zum Teil noch große Schwierigkeiten hatten. Diese Schwierigkeiten waren unter anderem auf mangelndes Allgemeinwissen und Fehler im logischen Denken zurückzuführen, was also ebenfalls ein wichtiger Bestandteil der Dolmetschausbildung sein sollte. Auf diese drei Kernpunkte sollte daher in der Endphase der Ausbildung noch einmal gezielt geachtet werden. Die Untersuchung zeigte aber auch, dass die Studierenden meist sehr gute Leistungen erbrachten und die Lehre der Notizentechnik im KD-Unterricht daher auf jeden Fall sinnvoll ist.The aim of this thesis was to analyze the notes that professional interpreters and students take in consecutive interpreting. The analysis focused on the differences between the notes taken by both groups, the problems that students in the final phase of their studies still have as well as the strategies professional interpreters apply in order to cope with these problems. The results should therefore help students in the final phase of their studies to perfect their notation system and at the same time indicate which areas should be in the centre of attention at the end of training. The basis of this study was an experiment carried out by Bettina Hiebl and myself at the University of Vienna in March 2011. In this experiment, four students and three professional interpreters interpreted three speeches from Italian into German. While the interpreters listened to the original speeches, they took notes with the LivescribeTM EchoTM Smartpen on the respective paper. In this way, the notes could be digitally saved, and not only the final product of the notes, but also the process of note taking itself could be analyzed. The results of the analysis showed that there were three critical areas revealing clear differences between the notes of students and professional interpreters. The first difference concerned the structure of the notes which students hadn’t arranged as clearly and logically as professional interpreters; a fact that might have also affected the fluency of their delivery. The second difference could be found in the economy and automatization of notes. The students often wrote out long words in full or they wrote down units of meaning twice. Furthermore, they had not yet sufficiently automatized their strategies of note taking and showed a tendency towards changing the type of note for the same unit of meaning during one speech. As a result, they unnecessarily lost time and had to omit other elements. The third difference concerned the note taking of proper names and numbers that in many cases constituted a big problem for the students. These problems were caused among other things, by a lack of general knowledge and mistakes in logical reasoning. Therefore, they have to be part of the interpreter training as well. Hence, these three core issues should once again be in the focus of attention in the final phase of training. The study, however, also revealed that students performed creditably in most of the cases and that the teaching of note taking as part of consecutive interpreting training is therefore definitively useful

Moth olfactory receptor neurons adjust their encoding efficiency to temporal statistics of pheromone fluctuations

The efficient coding hypothesis predicts that sensory neurons adjust their coding resources to optimally represent the stimulus statistics of their environment. To test this prediction in the moth olfactory system, we have developed a stimulation protocol that mimics the natural temporal structure within a turbulent pheromone plume. We report that responses of antennal olfactory receptor neurons to pheromone encounters follow the temporal fluctuations in such a way that the most frequent stimulus timescales are encoded with maximum accuracy. We also observe that the average coding precision of the neurons adjusted to the stimulus-timescale statistics at a given distance from the pheromone source is higher than if the same encoding model is applied at a shorter, non-matching, distance. Finally, the coding accuracy profile and the stimulus-timescale distribution are related in the manner predicted by the information theory for the many-to-one convergence scenario of the moth peripheral sensory system