ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
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- Creators: Ahn, Gail-Joon
- Creators: Shen, Wei
- Creators: Feisst, Sabine
Description
In the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism, many artists in Europe had to flee their homelands and sought refuge in the United States. Austrian composer Hanns Eisler who had risen to prominence as a significant composer during the Weimar era was among them. A Jew, an ardent Marxist and composer devoted to musical modernism, he had established himself as a writer of film music and Kampflieder, fighting songs, for the European workers' movement. After two visits of the United States in the mid-1930s, Eisler settled in America where he spent a decade (1938-1948), composed a considerable number of musical works, including important film scores, instrumental music and songs, and, in collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno, penned the influential treatise Composing for the Films. Yet despite his substantial contributions to American culture American scholarship on Eisler has remained sparse, perhaps due to his reputation as the "Karl Marx in Music." In this study I examine Eisler's American exile and argue that Eisler, through his roles as a musician and a teacher, actively sought to enrich American culture. I will present background for his exile years, a detailed overview of his American career as well as analyses and close readings of several of his American works, including three of his American film scores, Pete Roleum and His Cousins (1939), Hangmen Also Die (1943), and None But the Lonely Heart (1944), and the String Quartet (1940), Third Piano Sonata (1943), Woodbury Liederbüchlein (1941), and Hollywood Songbook (1942-7). This thesis builds upon unpublished correspondence and documents available only in special collections at the University of Southern California (USC), as well as film scores in archives at USC and the University of California, Los Angeles. It also draws on Eisler studies by such European scholars as Albrecht Betz, Jürgen Schebera, and Horst Weber, as well as on research of film music scholars Sally Bick and Claudia Gorbman. As there is little written on the particulars of Eisler's American years, this thesis presents new facts and new perspectives and aims at a better understanding of the artistic achievements of this composer.
ContributorsBoyd, Caleb (Author) / Feisst, Sabine (Thesis advisor) / Levy, Benjamin (Committee member) / Oldani, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
CYOA is a prototype of an iPhone application that produces a single, generative, musical work. This document details some of the thoughts and practices that informed its design, and specifically addresses the overlap between application structure and musical form. The concept of composed instruments is introduced and briefly discussed, some features of video game design that relate to this project are considered, and some specifics of hardware implementation are addressed.
ContributorsPeterson, Julian (Author) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Thesis advisor) / DeMars, James (Committee member) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Levy, Benjamin (Committee member) / Tobias, Evan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Johann Sebastian Bach's violin Sonata I in G minor, BWV 1001, is a significant and widely performed work that exists in numerous editions and also as transcriptions or arrangements for various other instruments, including the guitar. A pedagogical guitar performance edition of this sonata, however, has yet to be published. Therefore, the core of my project is a transcription and pedagogical edition of this work for guitar. The transcription is supported by an analysis, performance and pedagogical practice guide, and a recording. The analysis and graphing of phrase structures illuminate Bach's use of compositional devices and the architectural function of the work's harmonic gravities. They are intended to guide performers in their assessment of the surface ornamentation and suggest a reduction toward its fundamental purpose. The end result is a clarification of the piece through the organization of phrase structures and the prioritization of harmonic tensions and resolutions. The compiling process is intended to assist the performer in "seeing the forest from the trees." Based on markings from Bach's original autograph score, the transcription considers fingering ease on the guitar that is critical to render the music to a functional and practical level. The goal is to preserve the composer's indications to the highest degree possible while still adhering to the technical confines that allow for actual execution on the guitar. The performance guide provides suggestions for articulation, phrasing, ornamentation, and other interpretive decisions. Considering the limitations of the guitar, the author's suggestions are grounded in various concepts of historically informed performance, and also relate to today's early-music sensibilities. The pedagogical practice guide demonstrates procedures to break down and assimilate the musical material as applied toward the various elements of guitar technique and practice. The CD recording is intended to demonstrate the transcription and the connection to the concepts discussed. It is hoped that this pedagogical edition will provide a rational that serves to support technical decisions within the transcription and generate meaningful interpretive realizations based on principles of historically informed performance.
ContributorsFelice, Joseph Philip (Author) / Koonce, Frank (Thesis advisor) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Swartz, Jonathan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This project features three new pieces for clarinet commissioned from three different composers. Two are for unaccompanied clarinet and one is for clarinet, bass clarinet, and laptop. These pieces are Storm's a Comin' by Chris Burton, Light and Shadows by Theresa Martin, and My Own Agenda by Robbie McCarthy. These three solos challenge the performer in various ways including complex rhythm, use of extended techniques such as growling, glissando, and multiphonics, and the incorporation of technology into a live performance. In addition to background information, a performance practice guide has also been included for each of the pieces. This guide provides recommendations and suggestions for future performers wishing to study and perform these works. Also included are transcripts of interviews done with each of the composers as well as full scores for each of the pieces. Accompanying this document are recordings of each of the three pieces, performed by the author.
ContributorsVaughan, Melissa Lynn (Author) / Spring, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Micklich, Albie (Committee member) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Three Meditations on the Philosophy of Boethius is a musical piece for guitar, piano interior, and computer. Each of the three movements, or meditations, reflects one level of music according to the medieval philosopher Boethius: Musica Mundana, Musica Humana, and Musica Instrumentalis. From spatial aspects, through the human element, to letting sound evolve freely, different movements revolve around different sounds and sound producing techniques.
ContributorsDori, Gil (Contributor) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Thesis advisor) / DeMars, James (Committee member) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Answer Set Programming (ASP) is one of the most prominent and successful knowledge representation paradigms. The success of ASP is due to its expressive non-monotonic modeling language and its efficient computational methods originating from building propositional satisfiability solvers. The wide adoption of ASP has motivated several extensions to its modeling language in order to enhance expressivity, such as incorporating aggregates and interfaces with ontologies. Also, in order to overcome the grounding bottleneck of computation in ASP, there are increasing interests in integrating ASP with other computing paradigms, such as Constraint Programming (CP) and Satisfiability Modulo Theories (SMT). Due to the non-monotonic nature of the ASP semantics, such enhancements turned out to be non-trivial and the existing extensions are not fully satisfactory. We observe that one main reason for the difficulties rooted in the propositional semantics of ASP, which is limited in handling first-order constructs (such as aggregates and ontologies) and functions (such as constraint variables in CP and SMT) in natural ways. This dissertation presents a unifying view on these extensions by viewing them as instances of formulas with generalized quantifiers and intensional functions. We extend the first-order stable model semantics by by Ferraris, Lee, and Lifschitz to allow generalized quantifiers, which cover aggregate, DL-atoms, constraints and SMT theory atoms as special cases. Using this unifying framework, we study and relate different extensions of ASP. We also present a tight integration of ASP with SMT, based on which we enhance action language C+ to handle reasoning about continuous changes. Our framework yields a systematic approach to study and extend non-monotonic languages.
ContributorsMeng, Yunsong (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Lifschitz, Vladimir (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Throughout history composers and artists have been inspired by the natural world. Nature's influence on music is extraordinary, though water in particular, has had a unique magnetic pull. The large number of compositions dealing with water, from Handel's Water Music (1717) to Ros Bandt's and Leah Barclay's Rivers Talk (2012), reflects this continuous fascination. Since the late 1940s, composers have ventured further and brought actual sounds from the environment, including water recorded on tape, into the musical arena. Moreover, since the 1960s, some composers have nudged their listeners to become more ecologically aware. Much skepticism exists, as with any unconventional idea in history, and as a result compositions belonging to this realm of musique concrète are not as widely recognized and examined as they should be. In this thesis, I consider works of three composers: Annea Lockwood, Eve Beglarian, and Leah Barclay, who not only draw inspiration from nature, but also use their creativity to call attention to pristine environments. All three composers embrace the idea that music can be broadly defined and use technology as a tool to communicate their artistic visions. These artists are from three different countries and represent three generations of composers who set precedents for a new way of composing, listening to, performing, and thinking about music and the environment. This thesis presents case studies of Lockwood's A Sound Map of the Danube River, Beglarian's Mississippi River Project, and Barclay's Sound Mirrors. This thesis draws on unpublished correspondence with the composers, analytical theories of R. Murray Schafer, Barry Truax, and Martijn Voorvelt, among others, musicological publications, eco-critical and environmental studies by Al Gore, Bill McKibben, and Vandana Shiva, as well as research by feminist scholars. As there is little written on music and nature from an eco-critical and eco-feminist standpoint, this thesis will contribute to the recognition of significant figures in contemporary music that might otherwise be overlooked. In this study I maintain that composers and sound artists engage with sounds in ways that reveal aspects of particular places, and their attitudes toward these places to lead listeners toward a greater ecological awareness.
ContributorsRichardson, Jamilyn (Author) / Feisst, Sabine (Thesis advisor) / Solís, Ted (Committee member) / Norton, Kay (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
With the growth of IT products and sophisticated software in various operating systems, I observe that security risks in systems are skyrocketing constantly. Consequently, Security Assessment is now considered as one of primary security mechanisms to measure assurance of systems since systems that are not compliant with security requirements may lead adversaries to access critical information by circumventing security practices. In order to ensure security, considerable efforts have been spent to develop security regulations by facilitating security best-practices. Applying shared security standards to the system is critical to understand vulnerabilities and prevent well-known threats from exploiting vulnerabilities. However, many end users tend to change configurations of their systems without paying attention to the security. Hence, it is not straightforward to protect systems from being changed by unconscious users in a timely manner. Detecting the installation of harmful applications is not sufficient since attackers may exploit risky software as well as commonly used software. In addition, checking the assurance of security configurations periodically is disadvantageous in terms of time and cost due to zero-day attacks and the timing attacks that can leverage the window between each security checks. Therefore, event-driven monitoring approach is critical to continuously assess security of a target system without ignoring a particular window between security checks and lessen the burden of exhausted task to inspect the entire configurations in the system. Furthermore, the system should be able to generate a vulnerability report for any change initiated by a user if such changes refer to the requirements in the standards and turn out to be vulnerable. Assessing various systems in distributed environments also requires to consistently applying standards to each environment. Such a uniformed consistent assessment is important because the way of assessment approach for detecting security vulnerabilities may vary across applications and operating systems. In this thesis, I introduce an automated event-driven security assessment framework to overcome and accommodate the aforementioned issues. I also discuss the implementation details that are based on the commercial-off-the-self technologies and testbed being established to evaluate approach. Besides, I describe evaluation results that demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the approaches.
ContributorsSeo, Jeong-Jin (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Yau, Stephen S. (Committee member) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Access control is necessary for information assurance in many of today's applications such as banking and electronic health record. Access control breaches are critical security problems that can result from unintended and improper implementation of security policies. Security testing can help identify security vulnerabilities early and avoid unexpected expensive cost in handling breaches for security architects and security engineers. The process of security testing which involves creating tests that effectively examine vulnerabilities is a challenging task. Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) has been widely adopted to support fine-grained access control. However, in practice, due to its complexity including role management, role hierarchy with hundreds of roles, and their associated privileges and users, systematically testing RBAC systems is crucial to ensure the security in various domains ranging from cyber-infrastructure to mission-critical applications. In this thesis, we introduce i) a security testing technique for RBAC systems considering the principle of maximum privileges, the structure of the role hierarchy, and a new security test coverage criterion; ii) a MTBDD (Multi-Terminal Binary Decision Diagram) based representation of RBAC security policy including RHMTBDD (Role Hierarchy MTBDD) to efficiently generate effective positive and negative security test cases; and iii) a security testing framework which takes an XACML-based RBAC security policy as an input, parses it into a RHMTBDD representation and then generates positive and negative test cases. We also demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through case studies.
ContributorsGupta, Poonam (Author) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Thesis advisor) / Collofello, James (Committee member) / Huang, Dijiang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Piano Quintet> is a three movement piece, inspired by music of Eastern Europe. Sunrise in Hungary starts with a legato song in the first violin unfolding over slow moving sustained harmonics in the rest of the strings. This is contrasted with a lively Hungarian dance which starts in the piano and jumps throughout all of the voices. Armenian Lament introduces a mournful melody performed over a subtly shifting pedal tone in the cello. The rest of the voices are slowly introduced until the movement builds into a canonic threnody. Evening in Bulgaria borrows from the vast repertoire of Bulgarian dances, including rhythms from the horo and rachenitsa. Each time that the movement returns to the primary theme, it incorporates aspects of the dance that directly preceded it. The final return is the crux of the piece, with the first violin playing a virtuosic ornaments run on the melody.
ContributorsGiese, Adam (Composer) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Thesis advisor) / DeMars, James (Committee member) / Feisst, Sabine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014