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.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 143
Filtering by
- Creators: Baral, Chitta
- Creators: Rogers, Rodney
- Resource Type: Text
Description
A systematic approach to composition has been used by a variety of composers to control an assortment of musical elements in their pieces. This paper begins with a brief survey of some of the important systematic approaches that composers have employed in their compositions, devoting particular attention to Pierre Boulez's Structures Ia . The purpose of this survey is to examine several systematic approaches to composition by prominent composers and their philosophy in adopting this type of approach. The next section of the paper introduces my own systematic approach to composition: the Take-Away System. The third provides several musical applications of the system, citing my work, Octulus for two pianos, as an example. The appendix details theorems and observations within the system for further study.
ContributorsHarbin, Doug (Author) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Thesis advisor) / DeMars, James (Committee member) / Etezady, Roshanne, 1973- (Committee member) / Rockmaker, Jody (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
During the twentieth-century, the dual influence of nationalism and modernism in the eclectic music from Latin America promoted an idiosyncratic style which naturally combined traditional themes, popular genres and secular music. The saxophone, commonly used as a popular instrument, started to develop a prominent role in Latin American classical music beginning in 1970. The lack of exposure and distribution of the Latin American repertoire has created a general perception that composers are not interested in the instrument, and that Latin American repertoire for classical saxophone is minimal. However, there are more than 1100 works originally written for saxophone in the region, and the amount continues to grow. This Modern Latin American Repertoire for Classical Saxophone: Recording Project and Performance Guide document establishes and exhibits seven works by seven representative Latin American composers.The recording includes works by Carlos Gonzalo Guzman (Colombia), Ricardo Tacuchian (Brazil), Roque Cordero (Panama), Luis Naón (Argentina), Andrés Alén-Rodriguez (Cuba), Alejandro César Morales (Mexico) and Jose-Luis Maúrtua (Peru), featuring a range of works for solo alto saxophone to alto saxophone with piano, alto saxophone with vibraphone, and tenor saxophone with electronic tape; thus forming an important selection of Latin American repertoire. Complete recorded performances of all seven pieces are supplemented by biographical, historical, and performance practice suggestions. The result is a written and audio guide to some of the most important pieces composed for classical saxophone in Latin America, with an emphasis on fostering interest in, and research into, composers who have contributed in the development and creation of the instrument in Latin America.
ContributorsOcampo Cardona, Javier Andrés (Author) / McAllister, Timothy (Thesis advisor) / Spring, Robert (Committee member) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Pilafian, Sam (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
This study examined attitudes and perspectives of classroom guitar students toward the reading of staff notation in music. The purpose of this qualitative research was to reveal these perceptions in the student's own words, and compare them to those of orchestra and band students of comparable experience. Forty-seven students from four suburban middle and high schools on the east coast were selected through purposeful sampling techniques. Research instruments included a Musical Background Questionnaire and a thirty-five question Student Survey. Follow-up interviews were conducted with students to clarify or expound upon collected data. Guitar, orchestra, and band teachers were interviewed in order to provide their perspectives on the issues discussed. The Student Survey featured a five-point Likert-type scale, which measured how much students agreed or disagreed with various statements pertaining to their feelings about music, note-reading, or their class at school. Collected data were coded and used to calculate mean scores, standard deviations, and percentages of students in agreement or disagreement with each statement. Interviews were audio recorded and transcribed into a word processing document for analysis. The study found that while a variety of perspectives exist within a typical guitar class, some students do not find note-reading to be necessary for the types of music they desire to learn. Other findings included a perceived lack of relevance toward the classical elements of the guitar programs in the schools, a lack of educational consistency between classroom curricula and private lesson objectives, and the general description of the struggle some guitarists experience with staff notation. Implications of the collected data were discussed, along with recommendations for better engaging these students.
ContributorsWard, Stephen Michael (Author) / Koonce, Frank (Thesis advisor) / Schmidt, Margaret (Thesis advisor) / Buck, Nancy (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / McLin, Katherine (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Many of the works of Dominick Argento have been researched and analyzed, but his choral work Evensong: Of Love and Angels s has received limited attention thus far. Written in memoriam for his wife Carolyn Bailey Argento, Evensong draws its musical material from her initials C.B.A. These letters, translated into note names, form a conspicuous head motive that is present in each movement of the work, and it serves multiple functions: as a melodic feature, as the foundation for a twelve-tone row, and as a harmonic base. This paper provides an overview of the work's conception with specific relation to Argento's biographical details, compositional style, and work habits; a brief review of the critical reception of the work; and a succinct analysis of the form and cyclical materials found in each movement.
ContributorsPage, Carrie Leigh, 1980- (Author) / Rogers, Rodney (Thesis advisor) / DeMars, James (Committee member) / Levy, Benjamin (Committee member) / Oldani, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Everyday Arias for soprano and orchestra was composed largely in Arizona and completed in February 2011. The text was taken from a small collection of the composer's own poetry referencing her memories of life in rural Mississippi. Everyday Arias endeavors to elevate these prosaic experiences and settings to art, expressing the everyday as beautiful and worthy of artistic treatment. The primary compositional model for this work was Samuel Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915, but other influences included Charles Ives, Aaron Copland, Benjamin Britten, and Dominick Argento. Barber's and Argento's musical treatment of prose style seemed particularly appropriate to the goals of Everyday Arias. Ives and Copland used hymn tunes both to evoke certain associations of worship and as sources of interesting material. The vocal writing of all five composers was influential, but the orchestration techniques for winds are largely a product of studying Ives and Argento, while many string gestures are more obviously tied to Britten and - more historically - Debussy.The primary motive that weaves through the work features an ascending major second followed by a descending perfect fourth, in a long-short-long rhythmic pattern. As a melodic fragment, the motive is often inverted to a descending-ascending pattern, or distorted slightly by expanding the second interval to a perfect fifth, or used in retrograde. The motive was derived from the first measure of the melody "Toplady" (1830) by Thomas Hastings, better known as the hymn "Rock of Ages." In the first movement, the motive is used most frequently in sequences. The second movement treats the motive as a melodic element and as a unit in ostinati. The final movement humorously transforms it into a syncopated gesture to evoke ragtime.
ContributorsPage, Carrie Leigh (Composer) / Rogers, Rodney (Thesis advisor) / DeMars, James (Committee member) / Levy, Benjamin (Committee member) / Oldani, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Women's contributions to the history of Canadian music can be traced back to the late nineteenth century. However, women's achievements then, and still somewhat now, are often overlooked and as a result, piano solo works by Canadian women composers are largely unknown. The purpose of this study is to promote the wealth of solo piano repertoire composed by Canadian women, and to report the results in an accessible and comprehensible format for students, teachers, and performers at all levels. The research focuses on the most recent piano music by female composers born in or after 1950 whose compositions are available through the Canadian Music Centre (CMC) library. Brief biographies of included composers note their accomplishments, compositional output, and style characteristics. Annotations for the 103 works studied, written by twenty-six composers, include information about harmonic schemes, meters, tempos, durations, dates of the composition, CMC call number, level of difficulty, commissions, musical excerpts, premieres, and style characteristics. The style characteristics section includes composer's notes, technical challenges, musical characteristics, pedagogical values, and other pertinent information about a given piece. Since the goal of this project is to stimulate the awareness of music composed by Canadian women in a truly global sense, the research paper is supplemented by a website--www.canadianwomencomposers.com--that contains all the information found in the written portion of the annotations. This website also offers short audio samples of the compositions. The writer wishes to encourage all students, performers, and teachers to explore this resource, which reveals the richness of solo piano repertoire written by Canadian women composers.
ContributorsKim, Joo Yeon Tarina (Author) / Meyer Thompson, Janice (Thesis advisor) / Cosand, Walter (Committee member) / Hamilton, Robert (Committee member) / Humphreys, Jere T (Committee member) / Rogers, Rodney (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Reverse engineering gene regulatory networks (GRNs) is an important problem in the domain of Systems Biology. Learning GRNs is challenging due to the inherent complexity of the real regulatory networks and the heterogeneity of samples in available biomedical data. Real world biological data are commonly collected from broad surveys (profiling studies) and aggregate highly heterogeneous biological samples. Popular methods to learn GRNs simplistically assume a single universal regulatory network corresponding to available data. They neglect regulatory network adaptation due to change in underlying conditions and cellular phenotype or both. This dissertation presents a novel computational framework to learn common regulatory interactions and networks underlying the different sets of relatively homogeneous samples from real world biological data. The characteristic set of samples/conditions and corresponding regulatory interactions defines the cellular context (context). Context, in this dissertation, represents the deterministic transcriptional activity within the specific cellular regulatory mechanism. The major contributions of this framework include - modeling and learning context specific GRNs; associating enriched samples with contexts to interpret contextual interactions using biological knowledge; pruning extraneous edges from the context-specific GRN to improve the precision of the final GRNs; integrating multisource data to learn inter and intra domain interactions and increase confidence in obtained GRNs; and finally, learning combinatorial conditioning factors from the data to identify regulatory cofactors. The framework, Expattern, was applied to both real world and synthetic data. Interesting insights were obtained into mechanism of action of drugs on analysis of NCI60 drug activity and gene expression data. Application to refractory cancer data and Glioblastoma multiforme yield GRNs that were readily annotated with context-specific phenotypic information. Refractory cancer GRNs also displayed associations between distinct cancers, not observed through only clustering. Performance comparisons on multi-context synthetic data show the framework Expattern performs better than other comparable methods.
ContributorsSen, Ina (Author) / Kim, Seungchan (Thesis advisor) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Bittner, Michael (Committee member) / Konjevod, Goran (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Action language C+ is a formalism for describing properties of actions, which is based on nonmonotonic causal logic. The definite fragment of C+ is implemented in the Causal Calculator (CCalc), which is based on the reduction of nonmonotonic causal logic to propositional logic. This thesis describes the language of CCalc in terms of answer set programming (ASP), based on the translation of nonmonotonic causal logic to formulas under the stable model semantics. I designed a standard library which describes the constructs of the input language of CCalc in terms of ASP, allowing a simple modular method to represent CCalc input programs in the language of ASP. Using the combination of system F2LP and answer set solvers, this method achieves functionality close to that of CCalc while taking advantage of answer set solvers to yield efficient computation that is orders of magnitude faster than CCalc for many benchmark examples. In support of this, I created an automated translation system Cplus2ASP that implements the translation and encoding method and automatically invokes the necessary software to solve the translated input programs.
ContributorsCasolary, Michael (Author) / Lee, Joohyung (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Concerto for Piano and Chamber Orchestra was conceived in February of 2013, and conceptually it is my attempt to fuse personal expressions of jazz and classical music into one fully realized statement. It is a three movement work (fast, slow, fast) for 2 fl., 2 ob., 2 cl., bsn., 2 hrn., 2 tpt., tbn., pno., perc., str. (6,4,2,2,1). The work is approximately 27 minutes in duration. The first movement of the Concerto is written in a fluid sonata form. A fugato begins where the second theme would normally appear, and the second theme does not fully appear until near the end of the solo piano section. The result is that the second theme when finally revealed is so reminiscent of the history of jazz and classical synthesis that it does not sound completely new, and in fact is a return of something that was heard before, but only hinted at in this piece. The second movement is a kind of deconstructive set of variations, with a specific theme and harmonic pattern implied throughout the movement. However, the full theme is not disclosed until the final variation. The variations are interrupted by moments of pure rhythmic music, containing harmony made up of major chords with an added fourth, defying resolution, and dissolving each time back into a new variation. The third movement is in rondo form, using rhythmic and harmonic influences from jazz. The percussion plays a substantial role in this movement, acting as a counterpoint to the piano part throughout. This movement and the piece concludes with an extended coda, inspired indirectly by the simple complexities of an improvisational piano solo, building in complexity as the concerto draws to a close.
ContributorsSneider, Elliot (Author) / Rogers, Rodney (Thesis advisor) / DeMars, James (Committee member) / Hackbarth, Glenn (Committee member) / Solis, Theodore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
In this dissertation I develop a deep theory of temporal planning well-suited to analyzing, understanding, and improving the state of the art implementations (as of 2012). At face-value the work is strictly theoretical; nonetheless its impact is entirely real and practical. The easiest portion of that impact to highlight concerns the notable improvements to the format of the temporal fragment of the International Planning Competitions (IPCs). Particularly: the theory I expound upon here is the primary cause of--and justification for--the altered (i) selection of benchmark problems, and (ii) notion of "winning temporal planner". For higher level motivation: robotics, web service composition, industrial manufacturing, business process management, cybersecurity, space exploration, deep ocean exploration, and logistics all benefit from applying domain-independent automated planning technique. Naturally, actually carrying out such case studies has much to offer. For example, we may extract the lesson that reasoning carefully about deadlines is rather crucial to planning in practice. More generally, effectively automating specifically temporal planning is well-motivated from applications. Entirely abstractly, the aim is to improve the theory of automated temporal planning by distilling from its practice. My thesis is that the key feature of computational interest is concurrency. To support, I demonstrate by way of compilation methods, worst-case counting arguments, and analysis of algorithmic properties such as completeness that the more immediately pressing computational obstacles (facing would-be temporal generalizations of classical planning systems) can be dealt with in theoretically efficient manner. So more accurately the technical contribution here is to demonstrate: The computationally significant obstacle to automated temporal planning that remains is just concurrency.
ContributorsCushing, William Albemarle (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Weld, Daniel S. (Committee member) / Smith, David E. (Committee member) / Baral, Chitta (Committee member) / Davalcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012