Matching Items (624)
Filtering by
- All Subjects: Clarinet and piano music
Description
ABSTRACT 1. Aposematic signals advertise prey distastefulness or metabolic unprofitability to potential predators and have evolved independently in many prey groups over the course of evolutionary history as a means of protection from predation. Most aposematic signals investigated to date exhibit highly chromatic patterning; however, relatives in these toxic groups with patterns of very low chroma have been largely overlooked. 2. We propose that bright displays with low chroma arose in toxic prey species because they were more effective at deterring predation than were their chromatic counterparts, especially when viewed in relatively low light environments such as forest understories. 3. We analyzed the reflectance and radiance of color patches on the wings of 90 tropical butterfly species that belong to groups with documented toxicity that vary in their habitat preferences to test this prediction: Warning signal chroma and perceived chromaticity are expected to be higher and brightness lower in species that fly in open environments when compared to those that fly in forested environments. 4. Analyses of the reflectance and radiance of warning color patches and predator visual modeling support this prediction. Moreover, phylogenetic tests, which correct for statistical non-independence due to phylogenetic relatedness of test species, also support the hypothesis of an evolutionary correlation between perceived chromaticity of aposematic signals and the flight habits of the butterflies that exhibit these signals.
ContributorsDouglas, Jonathan Marion (Author) / Rutowski, Ronald L (Thesis advisor) / Gadau, Juergen (Committee member) / McGraw, Kevin J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Despite the wealth of folk music traditions in Portugal and the importance of the clarinet in the music of bandas filarmonicas, it is uncommon to find works featuring the clarinet using Portuguese folk music elements. In the interest of expanding this type of repertoire, three new works were commissioned from three different composers. The resulting works are Seres Imaginarios 3 by Luis Cardoso; Delirio Barroco by Tiago Derrica; and Memória by Pedro Faria Gomes. In an effort to submit these new works for inclusion into mainstream performance literature, the author has recorded these works on compact disc. This document includes interview transcripts with each composer, providing first-person discussion of each composition, as well as detailed biographical information on each composer. To provide context, the author has included a brief discussion on Portuguese folk music, and in particular, the role that the clarinet plays in Portuguese folk music culture.
ContributorsFerreira, Wesley (Contributor) / Spring, Robert S (Thesis advisor) / Bailey, Wayne (Committee member) / Gardner, Joshua (Committee member) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Schuring, Martin (Committee member) / Solis, Theodore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
A multitude of individuals across the globe suffer from hearing loss and that number continues to grow. Cochlear implants, while having limitations, provide electrical input for users enabling them to "hear" and more fully interact socially with their environment. There has been a clinical shift to the bilateral placement of implants in both ears and to bimodal placement of a hearing aid in the contralateral ear if residual hearing is present. However, there is potentially more to subsequent speech perception for bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant users than the electric and acoustic input being received via these modalities. For normal listeners vision plays a role and Rosenblum (2005) points out it is a key feature of an integrated perceptual process. Logically, cochlear implant users should also benefit from integrated visual input. The question is how exactly does vision provide benefit to bilateral and bimodal users. Eight (8) bilateral and 5 bimodal participants received randomized experimental phrases previously generated by Liss et al. (1998) in auditory and audiovisual conditions. The participants recorded their perception of the input. Data were consequently analyzed for percent words correct, consonant errors, and lexical boundary error types. Overall, vision was found to improve speech perception for bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant participants. Each group experienced a significant increase in percent words correct when visual input was added. With vision bilateral participants reduced consonant place errors and demonstrated increased use of syllabic stress cues used in lexical segmentation. Therefore, results suggest vision might provide perceptual benefits for bilateral cochlear implant users by granting access to place information and by augmenting cues for syllabic stress in the absence of acoustic input. On the other hand vision did not provide the bimodal participants significantly increased access to place and stress cues. Therefore the exact mechanism by which bimodal implant users improved speech perception with the addition of vision is unknown. These results point to the complexities of audiovisual integration during speech perception and the need for continued research regarding the benefit vision provides to bilateral and bimodal cochlear implant users.
ContributorsLudwig, Cimarron (Author) / Liss, Julie (Thesis advisor) / Dorman, Michael (Committee member) / Azuma, Tamiko (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
During attempted fixation, the eyes are not still but continue to produce so called "fixational eye movements", which include microsaccades, drift, and tremor. Microsaccades are thought to help prevent and restore vision loss during fixation, and to correct fixation errors, but how they contribute to these functions remains a matter of debate. This dissertation presents the results of four experiments conducted to address current controversies concerning the role of microsaccades in visibility and oculomotor control.
The first two experiments set out to correlate microsaccade production with the visibility of foveal and peripheral targets of varied spatial frequencies, during attempted fixation. The results indicate that microsaccades restore the visibility of both peripheral targets and targets presented entirely within the fovea, as a function of their spatial frequency characteristics.
The last two experiments set out to determine the role of microsaccades and drifts on the correction of gaze-position errors due to blinks in human and non-human primates, and to characterize microsaccades forming square-wave jerks (SWJs) in non-human primates. The results showed that microsaccades, but not drifts, correct gaze-position errors due to blinks, and that SWJ production and dynamic properties are equivalent in human and non-human primates.
These combined findings suggest that microsaccades, like saccades, serve multiple and non-exclusive functional roles in vision and oculomotor control, as opposed to having a single specialized function.
The first two experiments set out to correlate microsaccade production with the visibility of foveal and peripheral targets of varied spatial frequencies, during attempted fixation. The results indicate that microsaccades restore the visibility of both peripheral targets and targets presented entirely within the fovea, as a function of their spatial frequency characteristics.
The last two experiments set out to determine the role of microsaccades and drifts on the correction of gaze-position errors due to blinks in human and non-human primates, and to characterize microsaccades forming square-wave jerks (SWJs) in non-human primates. The results showed that microsaccades, but not drifts, correct gaze-position errors due to blinks, and that SWJ production and dynamic properties are equivalent in human and non-human primates.
These combined findings suggest that microsaccades, like saccades, serve multiple and non-exclusive functional roles in vision and oculomotor control, as opposed to having a single specialized function.
ContributorsCostela, Francisco M (Author) / Crook, Sharon M (Committee member) / Martinez-Conde, Susana (Committee member) / Macknik, Stephen L. (Committee member) / Baer, Stephen (Committee member) / McCamy, Michael B (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
ContributorsBurton, Charlotte (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-04-08
Description
The ability to plan, execute, and control goal oriented reaching and grasping movements is among the most essential functions of the brain. Yet, these movements are inherently variable; a result of the noise pervading the neural signals underlying sensorimotor processing. The specific influences and interactions of these noise processes remain unclear. Thus several studies have been performed to elucidate the role and influence of sensorimotor noise on movement variability. The first study focuses on sensory integration and movement planning across the reaching workspace. An experiment was designed to examine the relative contributions of vision and proprioception to movement planning by measuring the rotation of the initial movement direction induced by a perturbation of the visual feedback prior to movement onset. The results suggest that contribution of vision was relatively consistent across the evaluated workspace depths; however, the influence of vision differed between the vertical and later axes indicate that additional factors beyond vision and proprioception influence movement planning of 3-dimensional movements. If the first study investigated the role of noise in sensorimotor integration, the second and third studies investigate relative influence of sensorimotor noise on reaching performance. Specifically, they evaluate how the characteristics of neural processing that underlie movement planning and execution manifest in movement variability during natural reaching. Subjects performed reaching movements with and without visual feedback throughout the movement and the patterns of endpoint variability were compared across movement directions. The results of these studies suggest a primary role of visual feedback noise in shaping patterns of variability and in determining the relative influence of planning and execution related noise sources. The final work considers a computational approach to characterizing how sensorimotor processes interact to shape movement variability. A model of multi-modal feedback control was developed to simulate the interaction of planning and execution noise on reaching variability. The model predictions suggest that anisotropic properties of feedback noise significantly affect the relative influence of planning and execution noise on patterns of reaching variability.
ContributorsApker, Gregory Allen (Author) / Buneo, Christopher A (Thesis advisor) / Helms Tillery, Stephen (Committee member) / Santello, Marco (Committee member) / Santos, Veronica (Committee member) / Si, Jennie (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
ContributorsDruesedow, Elizabeth (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-04-07
Description
Image Understanding is a long-established discipline in computer vision, which encompasses a body of advanced image processing techniques, that are used to locate (“where”), characterize and recognize (“what”) objects, regions, and their attributes in the image. However, the notion of “understanding” (and the goal of artificial intelligent machines) goes beyond factual recall of the recognized components and includes reasoning and thinking beyond what can be seen (or perceived). Understanding is often evaluated by asking questions of increasing difficulty. Thus, the expected functionalities of an intelligent Image Understanding system can be expressed in terms of the functionalities that are required to answer questions about an image. Answering questions about images require primarily three components: Image Understanding, question (natural language) understanding, and reasoning based on knowledge. Any question, asking beyond what can be directly seen, requires modeling of commonsense (or background/ontological/factual) knowledge and reasoning.
Knowledge and reasoning have seen scarce use in image understanding applications. In this thesis, we demonstrate the utilities of incorporating background knowledge and using explicit reasoning in image understanding applications. We first present a comprehensive survey of the previous work that utilized background knowledge and reasoning in understanding images. This survey outlines the limited use of commonsense knowledge in high-level applications. We then present a set of vision and reasoning-based methods to solve several applications and show that these approaches benefit in terms of accuracy and interpretability from the explicit use of knowledge and reasoning. We propose novel knowledge representations of image, knowledge acquisition methods, and a new implementation of an efficient probabilistic logical reasoning engine that can utilize publicly available commonsense knowledge to solve applications such as visual question answering, image puzzles. Additionally, we identify the need for new datasets that explicitly require external commonsense knowledge to solve. We propose the new task of Image Riddles, which requires a combination of vision, and reasoning based on ontological knowledge; and we collect a sufficiently large dataset to serve as an ideal testbed for vision and reasoning research. Lastly, we propose end-to-end deep architectures that can combine vision, knowledge and reasoning modules together and achieve large performance boosts over state-of-the-art methods.
Knowledge and reasoning have seen scarce use in image understanding applications. In this thesis, we demonstrate the utilities of incorporating background knowledge and using explicit reasoning in image understanding applications. We first present a comprehensive survey of the previous work that utilized background knowledge and reasoning in understanding images. This survey outlines the limited use of commonsense knowledge in high-level applications. We then present a set of vision and reasoning-based methods to solve several applications and show that these approaches benefit in terms of accuracy and interpretability from the explicit use of knowledge and reasoning. We propose novel knowledge representations of image, knowledge acquisition methods, and a new implementation of an efficient probabilistic logical reasoning engine that can utilize publicly available commonsense knowledge to solve applications such as visual question answering, image puzzles. Additionally, we identify the need for new datasets that explicitly require external commonsense knowledge to solve. We propose the new task of Image Riddles, which requires a combination of vision, and reasoning based on ontological knowledge; and we collect a sufficiently large dataset to serve as an ideal testbed for vision and reasoning research. Lastly, we propose end-to-end deep architectures that can combine vision, knowledge and reasoning modules together and achieve large performance boosts over state-of-the-art methods.
ContributorsAditya, Somak (Author) / Baral, Chitta (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Aloimonos, Yiannis (Committee member) / Lee, Joohyung (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Growing understanding of the neural code and how to speak it has allowed for notable advancements in neural prosthetics. With commercially-available implantable systems with bi- directional neural communication on the horizon, there is an increasing imperative to develop high resolution interfaces that can survive the environment and be well tolerated by the nervous system under chronic use. The sensory encoding aspect optimally interfaces at a scale sufficient to evoke perception but focal in nature to maximize resolution and evoke more complex and nuanced sensations. Microelectrode arrays can maintain high spatial density, operating on the scale of cortical columns, and can be either penetrating or non-penetrating. The non-penetrating subset sits on the tissue surface without puncturing the parenchyma and is known to engender minimal tissue response and less damage than the penetrating counterpart, improving long term viability in vivo. Provided non-penetrating microelectrodes can consistently evoke perception and maintain a localized region of activation, non-penetrating micro-electrodes may provide an ideal platform for a high performing neural prosthesis; this dissertation explores their functional capacity.
The scale at which non-penetrating electrode arrays can interface with cortex is evaluated in the context of extracting useful information. Articulate movements were decoded from surface microelectrode electrodes, and additional spatial analysis revealed unique signal content despite dense electrode spacing. With a basis for data extraction established, the focus shifts towards the information encoding half of neural interfaces. Finite element modeling was used to compare tissue recruitment under surface stimulation across electrode scales. Results indicated charge density-based metrics provide a reasonable approximation for current levels required to evoke a visual sensation and showed tissue recruitment increases exponentially with electrode diameter. Micro-scale electrodes (0.1 – 0.3 mm diameter) could sufficiently activate layers II/III in a model tuned to striate cortex while maintaining focal radii of activated tissue.
In vivo testing proceeded in a nonhuman primate model. Stimulation consistently evoked visual percepts at safe current thresholds. Tracking perception thresholds across one year reflected stable values within minimal fluctuation. Modulating waveform parameters was found useful in reducing charge requirements to evoke perception. Pulse frequency and phase asymmetry were each used to reduce thresholds, improve charge efficiency, lower charge per phase – charge density metrics associated with tissue damage. No impairments to photic perception were observed during the course of the study, suggesting limited tissue damage from array implantation or electrically induced neurotoxicity. The subject consistently identified stimulation on closely spaced electrodes (2 mm center-to-center) as separate percepts, indicating sub-visual degree discrete resolution may be feasible with this platform. Although continued testing is necessary, preliminary results supports epicortical microelectrode arrays as a stable platform for interfacing with neural tissue and a viable option for bi-directional BCI applications.
The scale at which non-penetrating electrode arrays can interface with cortex is evaluated in the context of extracting useful information. Articulate movements were decoded from surface microelectrode electrodes, and additional spatial analysis revealed unique signal content despite dense electrode spacing. With a basis for data extraction established, the focus shifts towards the information encoding half of neural interfaces. Finite element modeling was used to compare tissue recruitment under surface stimulation across electrode scales. Results indicated charge density-based metrics provide a reasonable approximation for current levels required to evoke a visual sensation and showed tissue recruitment increases exponentially with electrode diameter. Micro-scale electrodes (0.1 – 0.3 mm diameter) could sufficiently activate layers II/III in a model tuned to striate cortex while maintaining focal radii of activated tissue.
In vivo testing proceeded in a nonhuman primate model. Stimulation consistently evoked visual percepts at safe current thresholds. Tracking perception thresholds across one year reflected stable values within minimal fluctuation. Modulating waveform parameters was found useful in reducing charge requirements to evoke perception. Pulse frequency and phase asymmetry were each used to reduce thresholds, improve charge efficiency, lower charge per phase – charge density metrics associated with tissue damage. No impairments to photic perception were observed during the course of the study, suggesting limited tissue damage from array implantation or electrically induced neurotoxicity. The subject consistently identified stimulation on closely spaced electrodes (2 mm center-to-center) as separate percepts, indicating sub-visual degree discrete resolution may be feasible with this platform. Although continued testing is necessary, preliminary results supports epicortical microelectrode arrays as a stable platform for interfacing with neural tissue and a viable option for bi-directional BCI applications.
ContributorsOswalt, Denise (Author) / Greger, Bradley (Thesis advisor) / Buneo, Christopher (Committee member) / Helms-Tillery, Stephen (Committee member) / Mirzadeh, Zaman (Committee member) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Optometry is a field in the United States dedicated to analyzing the health of eyes and offering corrective lenses and/or treatments to improve a patient’s ocular health and vision. Since its origin in the U.S. in the late 19th century, the field of optometry has been met with strong opposition from the medical community, ophthalmologists in particular. This ongoing feud between optometrists and ophthalmologists, medical doctors who also specialize in eye health and perform eye surgeries, continues today as ophthalmologists push back against optometrists’ attempts to expand their scope of practice. With this expansion to include certain eye surgeries, it would save patients both time and money. This is just one factor impacting patients, with another being the widely varied state laws surrounding eye health. Procedures optometrists are able to perform is decided by state laws, which leads to vast discrepancies. Optometrists in one state can perform laser eye surgeries, while optometrists in a nearby state cannot even provide simple treatments for ocular diseases they diagnosis. In this study, three states were analyzed to showcase these variations in possible treatment and demonstrate both the positive and negative impacts they are having on patients. First was Massachusetts which has one of the best medical care systems in the U.S., but one of the worst vision care. As the only state to not allow optometrists to treat glaucoma and one of two states to not allow optometrists to prescribe medications for patients, these limitations have caused patients the inconvenience of having to then visit an ophthalmologist for treatment which adds additional costs and delay in treatment which can cause the conditions to possibly worsen. Second was Oklahoma which was the first U.S. state to allow optometrists to perform laser eye surgeries in 1998. This legislation expanded Oklahoma residents access to treatment as before patients would have to travel to other cities or counties to visit one of the few ophthalmologists in the state. Lastly was Maine which in 2015 passed legislation to allow optometrists to regain control of their field from vision insurance companies who can no longer dictate fees patients are charged if the insurance companies will not cover it. This study concluded that there needs to be a universal vision care system across the U.S. that includes expansion of practice for optometrists and allow them to be in control of their own field, not the state government or vision insurance companies.
ContributorsFoskit, Nevada Anaid (Author) / Gaughan, Monica (Thesis director) / Chung, Sonia (Committee member) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05