Percussion in an electronic environment

This essay is an account of the process of making work for a new percussion/software performance environment built using Max/Msp, with an electronic drum kit as control interface. Each of the works are Audio-visual responses to a number of key stimuli - the experience of urbanness, representations and accounts of mental illness, childhood and memory, and physicality - which are recurring concerns in my work. Submitted along with the supporting text are DVD documents ofthe four main pieces of work, which are presented here as medium-specific 'versions' of the pieces- i.e. edited specifically for for DVD replay rather than as 'neutral' documentation. Also submitted are the materials needed to perform each of the pieces, including written performance instructions and the Max/Msp patches (containing the relevant media) for each piece. *[N.B.: A DVD was attached to this thesis at the time of its submission. Please refer to the author for further details.]

Urbanisation Patterns: European vs Less Developed Countries

We develop a model in which the interaction between transport costs, increasing returns, and labour migration across sectors and regions creates a tendency for urban agglomeration. Demand from rural areas favours urban dispersion. European urbanisation took place mainly in the XIX Century, with higher costs of spatial interaction, weaker economics of scale, and less elastic supply of labour to the urban sector than in LDCs today. These factors, together with a bias in the transport networks of LDCs towards serving larger cities, could help explain why European countries have developed balanced urban systems while primate cities dominate in LDCs.

The Spread of Industry: Spatial Agglomeration in Economic Development

This paper describes the spread of industry from country to country as a region grows. All industrial sectors are initially agglomerated in one country, tied together by input-output links between firms. Growth expands industry more than other sectors, bidding up wages in the country in which industry is clustered. At some point some firms start to move away, and when a critical mass is reached industry expands in another country, raising wages there. We establish the circumstance sin which industry spill over, which sectors move out first, and which are more important in triggering a critical mass.

Agglomeration and cross-border infrastructure

This paper deals with the effects of cross-border transport infrastructure in the presence of agglomeration economies. Cross-border infrastructure is more likely to increase than to decrease inequalities between and within regions, and has not helped regional convergence in Europe. Under-investment due to spillovers, coordination failures, and the inadequacy of networks originally designed for national markets provide a role for supranational institutions. Hub-andspoke networks tend to increase urban primacy while cross-border transport connections tend to reduce it. Improvements in transport and communication allow firms to separate innovation, management and production, increasing efficiency and urban interdependence.transport; cross-border infrastructure; agglomeration; urban specialization

European regional policy in light of recent location theories

Despite large regional policy expenditures, regional inequalities in Europe have not narrowed substantially over the last two decades, and by some measures have even widened. Income differences across States have fallen, but inequalities between regions within each State have risen. European States have developed increasingly different production structures. And European regions have also become increasingly polarised in terms of their unemployment rates. This paper describes these trends, and discusses how recent location theories can help us to explain them and reconsider the role of regional policies, and specially of transport infrastructure improvements, in such an environment.regional policy; inequalities; transport infrastructure; location; Europe

The Betic Ophiolites and the Mesozoic Evolution of the Western Tethys

The Betic Ophiolites consist of numerous tectonic slices, metric to kilometric in size, of eclogitized mafic and ultramafic rocks associated to oceanic metasediments, deriving from the Betic oceanic domain. The outcrop of these ophiolites is aligned along 250 km in the Mulhacén Complex of the Nevado-Filábride Domain, located at the center-eastern zone of the Betic Cordillera (SE Spain). According to petrological/geochemical inferences and SHRIMP (Sensitive High Resolution Ion Micro-Probe) dating of igneous zircons, the Betic oceanic lithosphere originated along an ultra-slow mid-ocean ridge, after rifting, thinning and breakup of the preexisting continental crust. The Betic oceanic sector, located at the westernmost end of the Tethys Ocean, developed from the Lower to Middle Jurassic (185–170 Ma), just at the beginning of the Pangaea break-up between the Iberia-European and the Africa-Adrian plates. Subsequently, the oceanic spreading migrated northeastward to form the Ligurian and Alpine Tethys oceans, from 165 to 140 Ma. Breakup and oceanization isolated continental remnants, known as the Mesomediterranean Terrane, which were deformed and affected by the Upper Cretaceous-Paleocene Eo-Alpine high-pressure metamorphic event, due to the intra-oceanic subduction of the Jurassic oceanic lithosphere and the related continental margins. This process was followed by the partial exhumation of the subducted oceanic rocks onto their continental margins, forming the Betic and Alpine Ophiolites. Subsequently, along the Upper Oligocene and Miocene, the deformed and metamorphosed Mesomediterranean Terrane was dismembered into different continental blocks collectively known as AlKaPeCa microplate (Alboran, Kabylian, Peloritan and Calabrian). In particular, the Alboran block was displaced toward the SW to occupy its current setting between the Iberian and African plates, due to the Neogene opening of the Algero-Provençal Basin. During this translation, the different domains of the Alboran microplate, forming the Internal Zones of the Betic and Rifean Cordilleras, collided with the External Zones representing the Iberian and African margins and, together with them, underwent the later alpine deformation and metamorphism, characterized by local differences of P-T (Pressure-Temperature) conditions. These Neogene metamorphic processes, known as Meso-Alpine and Neo-Alpine events, developed in the Nevado-Filábride Domain under Ab-Ep amphibolite and greenschists facies conditions, respectively, causing retrogradation and intensive deformation of the Eo-Alpine eclogites.This research was funded by Project CGL2009-12369 of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, co-financed with FEDER funds, and by Research Group RNM 333 of Junta de Andalucía (Spain)

Negotiating the membership

In cooperative games in which the players are partitioned into groups, we study the incentives of the members of a group to leave it and become singletons. In this context, we model a non-cooperative mechanism in which each player has to decide whether to stay in his group or to exit and act as a singleton. We show that players, acting myopically, always reach a Nash equilibrium.Cooperative game, coalition structure, Owen value, Nash equilibrium

Implementation of the levels structure value

We implement the levels structure value (Winter, 1989) for cooperative transfer utility games with a levels structure. The mechanism is a generalization of the bidding mechanism by Perez-Castrillo and Wettstein (2001).levels structure value implementation TU games

Bargaining with commitments

We study a simple bargaining mechanism in which each player puts a prize to his resources before leaving the game. The only expected final equilibrium payoff can be defined by means of selective marginal contributions vectors, and it coincides with the Shapley value for convex games. Moreover, for 3-player games the selective marginal contributions vectors determine the core when it is nonempty.demand commitment game bargaining

The Harsanyi paradox and the 'right to talk' in bargaining among coalitions

We introduce a non-cooperative model of bargaining when players are divided into coalitions. The model is a modification of the mechanism in Vidal-Puga (Economic Theory, 2005) so that all the players have the same chances to make proposals. This means that players maintain their own 'right to talk' when joining a coalition. We apply this model to an intriguing example presented by Krasa, Tamimi and Yannelis (Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2003) and show that the Harsanyi paradox (forming a coalition may be disadvantageous) disappears.cooperative games bargaining coalition structure Harsanyi paradox