Critically Assessing Forms of Resistance in Music Education

In their classrooms, music educators draw upon critical pedagogy (as described by Freire, Giroux, and hooks) for the express purpose of cultivating a climate for conscientização. Conscientização, according to Paulo Freire (2006), “refers to learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions and to take action against the oppressive elements of reality” (p. 35). This consciousness raising is a journey teachers pursue with students, together interrogating injustices in communities and the world in order to transform the conditions that inform them. Learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions often leads to multiple forms of resistance in and out of music classrooms. This chapter explores the following question: What do critical forms of assessment look like in music classrooms that use critical pedagogy and embrace resistance to foster conscientization

Prosody in text-to-speech synthesis using fuzzy logic

For over a thousand years, inventors, scientists and researchers have tried to reproduce human speech. Today, the quality of synthesized speech is not equivalent to the quality of real speech. Most research on speech synthesis focuses on improving the quality of the speech produced by Text-to-Speech (TTS) systems. The best TTS systems use unit selection-based concatenation to synthesize speech. However, this method is very timely and the speech database is very large. Diphone concatenated synthesized speech requires less memory, but sounds robotic. This thesis explores the use of fuzzy logic to make diphone concatenated speech sound more natural. A TTS is built using both neural networks and fuzzy logic. Text is converted into phonemes using neural networks. Fuzzy logic is used to control the fundamental frequency for three types of sentences. In conclusion, the fuzzy system produces f0 contours that make the diphone concatenated speech sound more natural

Thinking through Objects

Thinking through objects: is the culmination of my research on objects and design. It is a reflection of my interest in the concise construction of a three dimensional object from cut, manipulated, and glued sheets of paper. As a material, paper has an implied commonness, familiarity, fragility, and temporariness, with clearly understood characteristics and qualities. In the same way, the objects the paper sculptures represent have a familiarity and temporariness about them, serving a specific role for a period of time before being replaced or updated. Selected from my own person experience, the works represent a personal history or narrative. Each piece serves as a bookmark in my own timeline, with the cohesive body of work illustrating an evolution of objects through my life

Moxel DAGs: Connecting Material Information to High Resolution Sparse Voxel DAGs

As time goes on, the demand for higher resolution and more visually rich images only increases. Unfortunately, creating these more realistic computer graphics is pushing our computational resources to their limits. In realistic rendering, one of the common ways 3D objects are represented is as volumetric elements called voxels. Traditionally, voxel data structures are known for their high memory requirements. One of the standard ways these requirements are minimized is by storing the voxels in a sparse voxel octree (SVO). Very recently, a method called High Resolution Sparse Voxel DAGs was presented that can store binary voxel data orders of magnitudes more efficiently than SVOs. This memory efficiency is achieved by converting the tree into a directed acyclic graph (DAG). The method was also shown to have competitive rendering performance to recent GPU ray tracers. Unfortunately, it does not support storing collections of rendering attributes, commonly called materials. These represent a given object\u27s reflectance properties, and are necessary for calculating its perceived color. We present a method for connecting material information to High Resolution Sparse Voxel DAGs for mid-level scenes, with multiple meshes, and several different materials. This is achieved using an extended Sparse Voxel DAG, called a Moxel DAG, and an external data structure for holding the material information, we call a Moxel Table. Our method is much more memory efficient than traditional SVOs, and only increases in efficiency in comparison when at higher resolutions. Because it stores the equivalent information as SVOs, it achieves the exact same visual quality at the same resolutions

Pictures of the South: a Novella

Definitions oftentimes are not definite enough. By their very nature, those little clips of what is what in our world fail to capture anything but trivia or insignificance in their attempt to label Creation. Simple definitions fail because they do not prescribe to us our concepts of environment but describe our general ideas of that stuff around us. And it\u27 s a great big world. Try to define God. You cannot. He\u27s too much; he\u27s too all-encompassing; he\u27s too personal; he\u27s too far removed. But still, mankind knows Him. We know Him through our holy texts that discuss God in His fullness--and yet leave us lacking. We know God from ongoing description. This is the stretch then: try to define the South. You can\u27t. It\u27s too much; it\u27s too all-encompassing for those born and reared there, too vague for those not; it\u27s too personal; it\u27s a notion too subjective. But still, we Southerners know it as well as we know God. We know the South through our living its fullness. What we know, however, is never complete. The South is the Southern Myth and Southern truth--a blaring former and subtle latter. It lives and dies by what it thinks of itself and what it can get the rest of the world to swallow. It\u27s the haven of magnolia blossoms in April, cotton in June, and watermelons in late August. It\u27s William Faulkner, Margaret Mitchell, Jimmy Carter, and Orval Faubus. It\u27s the only place to be and someplace you wouldn\u27t be caught dead. What ain\u27t the South we want to talk about and spread around a bit, we don\u27t talk about. That part\u27s up to a damn Yankee or two and those liberal sumbitches that skipped town early on because they couldn\u27t take the heat, the humidity, the ignorance, or whatever it was that kicked the soap box up under their feet