Sonata for Violin and Piano by John Corigliano: A Performance Guide

John Corigliano is one of the most famous American composers of modern times having gained global recognition over the course of his career. The focus of this dissertation is on one of his earlier works, the Sonata for Violin and Piano. This sonata is the first of his compositions to have gained international attention. In the Sonata for Violin and Piano, Corigliano uses traditional music elements that are accessible to the audience. Although it is based on the traditional composition, Corigliano uses ambiguous tonality, polytonality, complicated rhythm, and polyrhythm throughout the piece. These factors cause several technical issues which occur in the violin part and also in the ensemble between the violin and piano parts. This dissertation will be presented in three chapters. The first chapter will provide biographical information about the composer and the transformation of his compositional approach in different periods. The second chapter will be the motivic analysis where I will provide new insight for performance practices. The last chapter addresses performance issues from two perspectives: violin technique and ensemble issues that I have encountered in performing the piece. I will explore some solutions and provide suggestions based on original markings on the score and recordings of different performers. I will give insight from a violinist’s point of view and seek to alleviate some of the inherent difficulties of the piece

Channel characterization for 1D molecular communication with two absorbing receivers

This letter develops a one-dimensional (1D) diffusion-based molecular communication system to analyze channel responses between a single transmitter (TX) and two fully-absorbing receivers (RXs). Incorporating molecular degradation in the environment, rigorous analytical formulas for i) the fraction of molecules absorbed, ii) the corresponding hitting rate, and iii) the asymptotic fraction of absorbed molecules as time approaches infinity at each RX are derived when an impulse of molecules are released at the TX. By using particle-based simulations, the derived analytical expressions are validated. Simulations also present the distance ranges of two RXs that do not impact molecular absorption of each other, and demonstrate that the mutual influence of two active RXs reduces with the increase in the degradation rate

Parameter Estimation in a Noisy 1D Environment via Two Absorbing Receivers

This paper investigates the estimation of different parameters, e.g., propagation distance and flow velocity, by utilizing two fully-absorbing receivers (RXs) in a one-dimensional (1D) environment. The time-varying number of absorbed molecules at each RX and the number of absorbed molecules in a time interval as time approaches infinity are derived. Noisy molecules in this environment, that are released by sources in addition to the transmitter, are also considered. A novel estimation method, namely difference estimation (DE), is proposed to eliminate the effect of noise by using the difference of received signals at the two RXs. For DE, the Cramer-Rao lower bound (CRLB) on the variance of estimation is derived. Independent maximum likelihood estimation is also considered at each RX as a benchmark to show the performance advantage of DE. Aided by particle-based simulation, the derived analytical results are verified. Furthermore, numerical results show that DE attains the CRLB and is less sensitive to the change of noise than independent estimation at each RX.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures, accepted by Globecom 202

Myopic Versus Farsighted Behaviors in a Low-Carbon Supply Chain with Reference Emission Effects

The increased carbon emissions cause relatively climate deterioration and attract more attention of governments, consumers, and enterprises to the low-carbon manufacturing. This paper considers a dynamic supply chain, which is composed of a manufacturer and a retailer, in the presence of the cap-and-trade regulation and the consumers’ reference emission effects. To investigate the manufacturer’s behavior choice and its impacts on the emission reduction and pricing strategies together with the profits of both the channel members, we develop a Stackelberg differential game model in which the manufacturer acts in both myopic and farsighted manners. By comparing the equilibrium strategies, it can be found that the farsighted manufacturer always prefers to keep a lower level of emission reduction. When the emission permit price is relatively high, the wholesale/retail price is lower if the manufacturer is myopic and hence benefits consumers. In addition, there exists a dilemma that the manufacturer is willing to act in a farsighted manner but the retailer looks forward to a partnership with the myopic manufacturer. For a relatively high price of emission permit, adopting myopic strategies results in a better performance of the whole supply chain

A Conceptual Hybrid Wing Body Design with Powered High-Lift Device

Blended wing body configuration is becoming popular in recent designs, and it is not covered as much as conventional configurations. This project originated from individual work is focusing on a hybrid wing body designed to carry heavy cargo and land on a relatively short runway. It requires the group to evaluate the validity of design with canards to resolve problems caused by the center of pressure shifting under different configurations of the aircraft. In the process, three students will conduct CFD (mainly panel method and VLM for lower cost) and wind tunnel testing to learn and improve the design. The group will first verify the validity of the simulations taking advantage of the DIY experiment of AE315 at the end of this semester, and then conduct more simulation in winter. Depending on the time required for the research and development, the group may propose a prototype design using CAD model in May 2021. A more detailed timeline will be determined after the method of simulation is verified with faculties. The goal of this project is to end up with a hybrid wing body design and to utilize the skills and knowledge we obtained in college

Emotion-Conditioned Melody Harmonization with Hierarchical Variational Autoencoder

Existing melody harmonization models have made great progress in improving the quality of generated harmonies, but most of them ignored the emotions beneath the music. Meanwhile, the variability of harmonies generated by previous methods is insufficient. To solve these problems, we propose a novel LSTM-based Hierarchical Variational Auto-Encoder (LHVAE) to investigate the influence of emotional conditions on melody harmonization, while improving the quality of generated harmonies and capturing the abundant variability of chord progressions. Specifically, LHVAE incorporates latent variables and emotional conditions at different levels (piece- and bar-level) to model the global and local music properties. Additionally, we introduce an attention-based melody context vector at each step to better learn the correspondence between melodies and harmonies. Experimental results of the objective evaluation show that our proposed model outperforms other LSTM-based models. Through subjective evaluation, we conclude that only altering the chords hardly changes the overall emotion of the music. The qualitative analysis demonstrates the ability of our model to generate variable harmonies.Comment: Accepted by IEEE SMC 202