The life and works of Ahmed Adnan Saygun

Ahmed Adnan Saygun (1907-1991) was one of Turkey's most prominent composers, described in The Times obituary as "the grand old man of Turkish music, who was to his country what Sibelius is to Finland, what de Falla is to Spain and what Bartók is to Hungary" (15 January 1991). Yet so far Saygun's life and works have never been the subject of a critical study in or outside Turkey. This thesis aims to create a comprehensible picture of his life and music for the first time. Divided into three parts, Part I of the thesis presents an annotated biography, preceded by a short introductory survey on the state of European music within the Ottoman Empire, which was significant in Saygun's upbringing. Taking as source material scattered newspaper articles, interviews and hitherto unpublished letters and a diary belonging to the composer, Part I focuses on Saygun's musical upbringing in Izmir and his subsequent education in Paris under Vincent d'Indy at the Schola Cantorum between 1928 and 1931. Also amongst the issues that are addressed here is the important role Saygun played in the musical life of the country on his return to Turkey from Paris, which was being rapidly transformed under Kemal Atatürk's reform movement; his enthusiasm for Turkish folk-music which led to a collaboration with Bela Bartók that finally culminated in the latter's celebrated field-trip to Anatolia in 1936 and his friendship with Michael Tippett, drawn from Tippett's original unpublished letters. The thesis shows that Saygun was not only responsible for training future musicians of Turkey in Western compositional techniques, but also himself wrote works in line with the country's modem music policy which took the principles of European polyphonic music as a model. As a prolific composer Saygun's output comprised five operas, five symphonies, three string quartets, five concertos and a wide range of chamber and choral music. Taking selective works, Part II looks at his developing style, beginning with the influence of the Schola Cantorum education and the effects of the music policy of the early republican years on his output and establishes him as the national composer of Turkey. Works discussed include the oratorio Yunus Emre (1942), his most celebrated work, which immediately became a symbol of the music reforms and was subsequently conducted by Leopold Stokowski in New York in 1958, the first two string quartets, the first two symphonies and the two piano concertos. Part III is a catalogue raisonné which has been compiled through evaluating existing lists of works and going through all the autograph manuscript scores of the composer that are housed at the Bilkent University Adnan Saygun Archives in Ankara. Since Saygun's works have never been systematically catalogued before, the information given here includes dates of composition, instrumentation, duration, dedication, location of manuscripts, publication and recording details, as well as translations of hitherto unpublished analytical notes on certain works written by the composer

Microfluidic very large-scale integration for biochips: Technology, testing and fault-tolerant design

Microfluidic biochips are replacing the conventional biochemical analyzers by integrating all the necessary functions for biochemical analysis using microfluidics. Biochips are used in many application areas, such as, in vitro diagnostics, drug discovery, biotech and ecology. The focus of this paper is on continuous-flow biochips, where the basic building block is a microvalve. By combining these microvalves, more complex units such as mixers, switches, multiplexers can be built, hence the name of the technology, “microfluidic Very Large-Scale Integration” (mVLSI). A roadblock in the deployment of microfluidic biochips is their low reliability and lack of test techniques to screen defective devices before they are used for biochemical analysis. Defective chips lead to repetition of experiments, which is undesirable due to high reagent cost and limited availability of samples. This paper presents the state-of-the-art in the mVLSI platforms and emerging research challenges in the area of continuous-flow microfluidics, focusing on testing techniques and fault-tolerant design

Creating knowledge environment during lean product development process of jet engine

Organizations invest intense resources in their product development processes. This paper aims to create a knowledge environment using trade-off curves during the early stages of the set-based concurrent engineering (SBCE) process of an aircraft jet engine for a reduced noise level at takeoff. Data is collected from a range of products in the same family as the jet engine. Knowledge-based trade-off curves are used as a methodology to create and visualize knowledge from the collected data. Findings showed that this method provides designers with enough confidence to identify a set of design solutions during the SBCE application

Recent developments in microfluidic large scale integration.

In 2002, Thorsen et al. integrated thousands of micromechanical valves on a single microfluidic chip and demonstrated that the control of the fluidic networks can be simplified through multiplexors [1]. This enabled realization of highly parallel and automated fluidic processes with substantial sample economy advantage. Moreover, the fabrication of these devices by multilayer soft lithography was easy and reliable hence contributed to the power of the technology; microfluidic large scale integration (mLSI). Since then, mLSI has found use in wide variety of applications in biology and chemistry. In the meantime, efforts to improve the technology have been ongoing. These efforts mostly focus on; novel materials, components, micromechanical valve actuation methods, and chip architectures for mLSI. In this review, these technological advances are discussed and, recent examples of the mLSI applications are summarized

Human Activity Recording Based on Skin-Strain-Actuated Microfluidic Pumping in Asymmetrically Designed Micro-Channels

The capability to record data in passive, image-based wearable sensors can simplify data readouts and eliminate the requirement for the integration of electronic components on the skin. Here, we developed a skin-strain-actuated microfluidic pump (SAMP) that utilizes asymmetric aspect ratio channels for the recording of human activity in the fluidic domain. An analytical model describing the SAMP’s operation mechanism as a wearable microfluidic device was established. Fabrication of the SAMP was achieved using soft lithography from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). Benchtop experimental results and theoretical predictions were shown to be in good agreement. The SAMP was mounted on human skin and experiments conducted on volunteer subjects demonstrated the SAMP’s capability to record human activity for hundreds of cycles in the fluidic domain through the observation of a stable liquid meniscus. Proof-of-concept experiments further revealed that the SAMP could quantify a single wrist activity repetition or distinguish between three different shoulder activities

Nanoimprinting By Melt Processing: An Easy Technique To Fabricate Versatile Nanostructures

Insights gained from rheological and contact angle measurements of plasticized and non-plasticized polymers have led to the development of a simple method to print densely packed micro- and nanoscale features without proximity effects. Versatile large-area nanopatterns and landscapes with a high degree of fidelity are successfully imprinted. This technique promises a variety of polymer nanostructures to a wide spectrum of scientific fields. © 2011 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim

Capture and X-ray diffraction studies of protein microcrystals in a microfluidic trap array.

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) promise to enable the collection of interpretable diffraction data from samples that are refractory to data collection at synchrotron sources. At present, however, more efficient sample-delivery methods that minimize the consumption of microcrystalline material are needed to allow the application of XFEL sources to a wide range of challenging structural targets of biological importance. Here, a microfluidic chip is presented in which microcrystals can be captured at fixed, addressable points in a trap array from a small volume (<10 µl) of a pre-existing slurry grown off-chip. The device can be mounted on a standard goniostat for conducting diffraction experiments at room temperature without the need for flash-cooling. Proof-of-principle tests with a model system (hen egg-white lysozyme) demonstrated the high efficiency of the microfluidic approach for crystal harvesting, permitting the collection of sufficient data from only 265 single-crystal still images to permit determination and refinement of the structure of the protein. This work shows that microfluidic capture devices can be readily used to facilitate data collection from protein microcrystals grown in traditional laboratory formats, enabling analysis when cryopreservation is problematic or when only small numbers of crystals are available. Such microfluidic capture devices may also be useful for data collection at synchrotron sources

Capture and X-ray diffraction studies of protein microcrystals in a microfluidic trap array.

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) promise to enable the collection of interpretable diffraction data from samples that are refractory to data collection at synchrotron sources. At present, however, more efficient sample-delivery methods that minimize the consumption of microcrystalline material are needed to allow the application of XFEL sources to a wide range of challenging structural targets of biological importance. Here, a microfluidic chip is presented in which microcrystals can be captured at fixed, addressable points in a trap array from a small volume (<10 µl) of a pre-existing slurry grown off-chip. The device can be mounted on a standard goniostat for conducting diffraction experiments at room temperature without the need for flash-cooling. Proof-of-principle tests with a model system (hen egg-white lysozyme) demonstrated the high efficiency of the microfluidic approach for crystal harvesting, permitting the collection of sufficient data from only 265 single-crystal still images to permit determination and refinement of the structure of the protein. This work shows that microfluidic capture devices can be readily used to facilitate data collection from protein microcrystals grown in traditional laboratory formats, enabling analysis when cryopreservation is problematic or when only small numbers of crystals are available. Such microfluidic capture devices may also be useful for data collection at synchrotron sources