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- All Subjects: Music
- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Arguably the most noteworthy result was its flourishing musical community. Composers and performers who had worked together in Prague prior to the war were able to continue to do so freely in ways that Jewish people were not allowed anywhere else in occupied Europe. They kept the musicians in Theresienstadt—delaying their deportations to Auschwitz—longer than almost anyone else in the camp, until the threat of Soviet liberation was imminent. This thesis aims to explore the lives and works of four Theresienstadt composers: Viktor Ullmann, Pavel Haas, Gideon Klein, and Hans Krása. All four of these artists were successful prior to the war, spent time in Theresienstadt, and were sent to Auschwitz on the same transport on October 16, 1944. Three of the four died in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, and Klein was sent on to the Fürstengrube concentration camp, where he was shot and killed in January 1945. These composers and their music should be remembered, studied, and performed, not only for historical and moral reasons, but also for artistic ones. Their works represent some of the finest music in the German tradition written during this period. In conjunction with this paper, I have arranged Gideon Klein’s String Trio—one of the pieces profiled here—for saxophone quartet. Members of the Arizona State University saxophone studio will perform it twice in April. I hope that the performances will help make audiences aware of the strength of the music that came out of Theresienstadt, and reinforce the fact that it remains highly relevant. In this thesis, the composers’ careers before and during their time in Theresienstadt will be traced, as well as the measures they took to preserve their music, their interactions with each other, and their efforts to use hidden messages in their music. It is hoped that this document will help fill an important gap in the history of European music in the twentieth century.
The purpose of this project is to create a useful tool for musicians that utilizes the harmonic content of their playing to recommend new, relevant chords to play. This is done by training various Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) on the lead sheets of 100 different jazz standards. A total of 200 unique datasets were produced and tested, resulting in the prediction of nearly 51 million chords. A note-prediction accuracy of 82.1% and a chord-prediction accuracy of 34.5% were achieved across all datasets. Methods of data representation that were rooted in valid music theory frameworks were found to increase the efficacy of harmonic prediction by up to 6%. Optimal LSTM input sizes were also determined for each method of data representation.
This project consists of 2 electronic/instrumental musical albums, each with 4 songs, aimed at becoming a source of solo therapy for those affected by mental illnesses. The calm album contains calm and relaxing music to combat anxiety and the HAPPY album contains happy and uplifting music to combat depression. While the musical elements stabilize the listener’s mental state, their own internal dialogue and meditation work to heal the listener’s mental illness.
The distinctions between the neural resources supporting speech and music comprehension have long been studied using contexts like aphasia and amusia, and neuroimaging in control subjects. While many models have emerged to describe the different networks uniquely recruited in response to speech and music stimuli, there are still many questions, especially regarding left-hemispheric strokes that disrupt typical speech-processing brain networks, and how musical training might affect the brain networks recruited for speech after a stroke. Thus, our study aims to explore some questions related to the above topics. We collected task-based functional MRI data from 12 subjects who previously experienced a left-hemispheric stroke. Subjects listened to blocks of spoken sentences and novel piano melodies during scanning to examine the differences in brain activations in response to speech and music. We hypothesized that speech stimuli would activate right frontal regions, and music stimuli would activate the right superior temporal regions more than speech (both findings not seen in previous studies of control subjects), as a result of functional changes in the brain, following the left-hemispheric stroke and particularly the loss of functionality in the left temporal lobe. We also hypothesized that the music stimuli would cause a stronger activation in right temporal cortex for participants who have had musical training than those who have not. Our results indicate that speech stimuli compared to rest activated the anterior superior temporal gyrus bilaterally and activated the right inferior frontal lobe. Music stimuli compared to rest did not activate the brain bilaterally, but rather only activated the right middle temporal gyrus. When the group analysis was performed with music experience as a covariate, we found that musical training did not affect activations to music stimuli specifically, but there was greater right hemisphere activation in several regions in response to speech stimuli as a function of more years of musical training. The results of the study agree with our hypotheses regarding the functional changes in the brain, but they conflict with our hypothesis about musical expertise. Overall, the study has generated interesting starting points for further explorations of how musical neural resources may be recruited for speech processing after damage to typical language networks.