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- All Subjects: Chamber music
Description
In order to cope with the decreasing availability of symphony jobs and collegiate faculty positions, many musicians are starting to pursue less traditional career paths. Also, to combat declining audiences, musicians are exploring ways to cultivate new and enthusiastic listeners through relevant and engaging performances. Due to these challenges, many community-based chamber music ensembles have been formed throughout the United States. These groups not only focus on performing classical music, but serve the needs of their communities as well. The problem, however, is that many musicians have not learned the business skills necessary to create these career opportunities. In this document I discuss the steps ensembles must take to develop sustainable careers. I first analyze how groups build a strong foundation through getting to know their communities and creating core values. I then discuss branding and marketing so ensembles can develop a public image and learn how to publicize themselves. This is followed by an investigation of how ensembles make and organize their money. I then examine the ways groups ensure long-lasting relationships with their communities and within the ensemble. I end by presenting three case studies of professional ensembles to show how groups create and maintain successful careers. Ensembles must develop entrepreneurship skills in addition to cultivating their artistry. These business concepts are crucial to the longevity of chamber groups. Through interviews of successful ensemble members and my own personal experiences in the Tetra String Quartet, I provide a guide for musicians to use when creating a community-based ensemble.
ContributorsDalbey, Jenna (Author) / Landschoot, Thomas (Thesis advisor) / McLin, Katherine (Committee member) / Ryan, Russell (Committee member) / Solis, Theodore (Committee member) / Spring, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
American Primitive is a composition written for wind ensemble with an instrumentation of flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, alto, tenor, and baritone saxophones, trumpet, horn, trombone, euphonium, tuba, piano, and percussion. The piece is approximately twelve minutes in duration and was written September - December 2013. American Primitive is absolute music (i.e. it does not follow a specific narrative) comprising blocks of distinct, contrasting gestures which bookend a central region of delicate textural layering and minimal gestural contrast. Though three gestures (a descending interval followed by a smaller ascending interval, a dynamic swell, and a chordal "chop") were consciously employed throughout, it is the first gesture of the three that creates a sense of unification and overall coherence to the work. Additionally, the work challenges listeners' expectations of traditional wind ensemble music by featuring the trumpet as a quasi-soloist whose material is predominately inspired by transcriptions of jazz solos. This jazz-inspired material is at times mimicked and further developed by the ensemble, also often in a soloistic manner while the trumpet maintains its role throughout. This interplay of dialogue between the "soloists" and the "ensemble" further skews listeners' conceptions of traditional wind ensemble music by featuring almost every instrument in the ensemble. Though the term "American Primitive" is usually associated with the "naïve art" movement, it bears no association to the music presented in this work. Instead, the term refers to the author's own compositional attitudes, education, and aesthetic interests.
ContributorsJandreau, Joshua (Composer) / Rockmaker, Jody D (Thesis advisor) / Rogers, Rodney I (Committee member) / Demars, James R (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Dynamic channel selection in cognitive radio consists of two main phases. The first phase is spectrum sensing, during which the channels that are occupied by the primary users are detected. The second phase is channel selection, during which the state of the channel to be used by the secondary user is estimated. The existing cognitive radio channel selection literature assumes perfect spectrum sensing. However, this assumption becomes problematic as the noise in the channels increases, resulting in high probability of false alarm and high probability of missed detection. This thesis proposes a solution to this problem by incorporating the estimated state of channel occupancy into a selection cost function. The problem of optimal single-channel selection in cognitive radio is considered. A unique approach to the channel selection problem is proposed which consists of first using a particle filter to estimate the state of channel occupancy and then using the estimated state with a cost function to select a single channel for transmission. The selection cost function provides a means of assessing the various combinations of unoccupied channels in terms of desirability. By minimizing the expected selection cost function over all possible channel occupancy combinations, the optimal hypothesis which identifies the optimal single channel is obtained. Several variations of the proposed cost-based channel selection approach are discussed and simulated in a variety of environments, ranging from low to high number of primary user channels, low to high levels of signal-to-noise ratios, and low to high levels of primary user traffic.
ContributorsZapp, Joseph (Author) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Thesis advisor) / Kovvali, Narayan (Committee member) / Reisslein, Martin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
This project is a practical annotated bibliography of original works for oboe trio with the specific instrumentation of two oboes and English horn. Presenting descriptions of 116 readily available oboe trios, this project is intended to promote awareness, accessibility, and performance of compositions within this genre.
The annotated bibliography focuses exclusively on original, published works for two oboes and English horn. Unpublished works, arrangements, works that are out of print and not available through interlibrary loan, or works that feature slightly altered instrumentation are not included.
Entries in this annotated bibliography are listed alphabetically by the last name of the composer. Each entry includes the dates of the composer and a brief biography, followed by the title of the work, composition date, commission, and dedication of the piece. Also included are the names of publishers, the length of the entire piece in minutes and seconds, and an incipit of the first one to eight measures for each movement of the work.
In addition to providing a comprehensive and detailed bibliography of oboe trios, this document traces the history of the oboe trio and includes biographical sketches of each composer cited, allowing readers to place the genre of oboe trios and each individual composition into its historical context. Four appendices at the end include a list of trios arranged alphabetically by composer's last name, chronologically by the date of composition, and by country of origin and a list of publications of Ludwig van Beethoven's oboe trios from the 1940s and earlier.
The annotated bibliography focuses exclusively on original, published works for two oboes and English horn. Unpublished works, arrangements, works that are out of print and not available through interlibrary loan, or works that feature slightly altered instrumentation are not included.
Entries in this annotated bibliography are listed alphabetically by the last name of the composer. Each entry includes the dates of the composer and a brief biography, followed by the title of the work, composition date, commission, and dedication of the piece. Also included are the names of publishers, the length of the entire piece in minutes and seconds, and an incipit of the first one to eight measures for each movement of the work.
In addition to providing a comprehensive and detailed bibliography of oboe trios, this document traces the history of the oboe trio and includes biographical sketches of each composer cited, allowing readers to place the genre of oboe trios and each individual composition into its historical context. Four appendices at the end include a list of trios arranged alphabetically by composer's last name, chronologically by the date of composition, and by country of origin and a list of publications of Ludwig van Beethoven's oboe trios from the 1940s and earlier.
ContributorsSassaman, Melissa Ann (Author) / Schuring, Martin (Thesis advisor) / Buck, Elizabeth (Committee member) / Holbrook, Amy (Committee member) / Hill, Gary (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
The ability to identify unoccupied resources in the radio spectrum is a key capability for opportunistic users in a cognitive radio environment. This paper draws upon and extends geometrically based ideas in statistical signal processing to develop estimators for the rank and the occupied subspace in a multi-user environment from multiple temporal samples of the signal received at a single antenna. These estimators enable identification of resources, such as the orthogonal complement of the occupied subspace, that may be exploitable by an opportunistic user. This concept is supported by simulations showing the estimation of the number of users in a simple CDMA system using a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate for the rank. It was found that with suitable parameters, such as high SNR, sufficient number of time epochs and codes of appropriate length, the number of users could be correctly estimated using the MAP estimator even when the noise variance is unknown. Additionally, the process of identifying the maximum likelihood estimate of the orthogonal projector onto the unoccupied subspace is discussed.
ContributorsBeaudet, Kaitlyn (Author) / Cochran, Douglas (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
A unique feature, yet a challenge, in cognitive radio (CR) networks is the user hierarchy: secondary users (SU) wishing for data transmission must defer in the presence of active primary users (PUs), whose priority to channel access is strictly higher.Under a common thread of characterizing and improving Quality of Service (QoS) for the SUs, this dissertation is progressively organized under two main thrusts: the first thrust focuses on SU's throughput by exploiting the underlying properties of the PU spectrum to perform effective scheduling algorithms; and the second thrust aims at another important QoS performance of the SUs, namely delay, subject to the impact of PUs' activities, and proposes enhancement and control mechanisms. More specifically, in the first thrust, opportunistic spectrum scheduling for SU is first considered by jointly exploiting the memory in PU's occupancy and channel fading. In particular, the underexplored scenario where PU occupancy presents a {long} temporal memory is taken into consideration. By casting the problem as a partially observable Markov decision process, a set of {multi-tier} tradeoffs are quantified and illustrated. Next, a spectrum shaping framework is proposed by leveraging network coding as a {spectrum shaper} on the PU's traffic. Such shaping effect brings in predictability of the primary spectrum, which is utilized by the SUs to carry out adaptive channel sensing by prioritizing channel access order, and hence significantly improve their throughput. On the other hand, such predictability can make wireless channels more susceptible to jamming attacks. As a result, caution must be taken in designing wireless systems to balance the throughput and the jamming-resistant capability. The second thrust turns attention to an equally important performance metric, i.e., delay performance. Specifically, queueing delay analysis is conducted for SUs employing random access over the PU channels. Fluid approximation is taken and Poisson driven stochastic differential equations are applied to characterize the moments of the SUs' steady-state queueing delay. Then, dynamic packet generation control mechanisms are developed to meet the given delay requirements for SUs.
ContributorsWang, Shanshan (Author) / Zhang, Junshan (Thesis advisor) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Hui, Joseph (Committee member) / Duman, Tolga (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
This thesis aims to investigate the capacity and bit error rate (BER) performance of multi-user diversity systems with random number of users and considers its application to cognitive radio systems. Ergodic capacity, normalized capacity, outage capacity, and average bit error rate metrics are studied. It has been found that the randomization of the number of users will reduce the ergodic capacity. A stochastic ordering framework is adopted to order user distributions, for example, Laplace transform ordering. The ergodic capacity under different user distributions will follow their corresponding Laplace transform order. The scaling law of ergodic capacity with mean number of users under Poisson and negative binomial user distributions are studied for large mean number of users and these two random distributions are ordered in Laplace transform ordering sense. The ergodic capacity per user is defined and is shown to increase when the total number of users is randomized, which is the opposite to the case of unnormalized ergodic capacity metric. Outage probability under slow fading is also considered and shown to decrease when the total number of users is randomized. The bit error rate (BER) in a general multi-user diversity system has a completely monotonic derivative, which implies that, according to the Jensen's inequality, the randomization of the total number of users will decrease the average BER performance. The special case of Poisson number of users and Rayleigh fading is studied. Combining with the knowledge of regular variation, the average BER is shown to achieve tightness in the Jensen's inequality. This is followed by the extension to the negative binomial number of users, for which the BER is derived and shown to be decreasing in the number of users. A single primary user cognitive radio system with multi-user diversity at the secondary users is proposed. Comparing to the general multi-user diversity system, there exists an interference constraint between secondary and primary users, which is independent of the secondary users' transmission. The secondary user with high- est transmitted SNR which also satisfies the interference constraint is selected to communicate. The active number of secondary users is a binomial random variable. This is then followed by a derivation of the scaling law of the ergodic capacity with mean number of users and the closed form expression of average BER under this situation. The ergodic capacity under binomial user distribution is shown to outperform the Poisson case. Monte-Carlo simulations are used to supplement our analytical results and compare the performance of different user distributions.
ContributorsZeng, Ruochen (Author) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Duman, Tolga (Committee member) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
Cognitive Radios (CR) are designed to dynamically reconfigure their transmission and/or reception parameters to utilize the bandwidth efficiently. With a rapidly fluctuating radio environment, spectrum management becomes crucial for cognitive radios. In a Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Network (CRAHN) setting, the sensing and transmission times of the cognitive radio play a more important role because of the decentralized nature of the network. They have a direct impact on the throughput. Due to the tradeoff between throughput and the sensing time, finding optimal values for sensing time and transmission time is difficult. In this thesis, a method is proposed to improve the throughput of a CRAHN by dynamically changing the sensing and transmission times. To simulate the CRAHN setting, ns-2, the network simulator with an extension for CRAHN is used. The CRAHN extension module implements the required Primary User (PU) and Secondary User (SU) and other CR functionalities to simulate a realistic CRAHN scenario. First, this work presents a detailed analysis of various CR parameters, their interactions, their individual contributions to the throughput to understand how they affect the transmissions in the network. Based on the results of this analysis, changes to the system model in the CRAHN extension are proposed. Instantaneous throughput of the network is introduced in the new model, which helps to determine how the parameters should adapt based on the current throughput. Along with instantaneous throughput, checks are done for interference with the PUs and their transmission power, before modifying these CR parameters. Simulation results demonstrate that the throughput of the CRAHN with the adaptive sensing and transmission times is significantly higher as compared to that of non-adaptive parameters.
ContributorsBapat, Namrata Arun (Author) / Syrotiuk, Violet R. (Thesis advisor) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / Xue, Guoliang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
ContributorsPagano, Caio, 1940- (Performer) / Mechetti, Fabio (Conductor) / Buck, Elizabeth (Performer) / Schuring, Martin (Performer) / Spring, Robert (Performer) / Rodrigues, Christiano (Performer) / Landschoot, Thomas (Performer) / Rotaru, Catalin (Performer) / Avanti Festival Orchestra (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-03-02
ContributorsSchuring, Martin (Performer) / Stromberg, Eric (Performer) / Campbell, Andrew (Pianist) (Performer) / ASU Library. Music Library (Publisher)
Created2018-08-19