The Doctor of Musical Arts at the Bienen School of Music is designed to foster the development of both musical artistry and scholarly achievement. All DMA students must submit written documents that must represent intensive, original research that makes a meaningful contribution to knowledge in the student's field.
The finite element method is used to investigate failure mechanisms in pin-hanger connection in aging highway bridges. Bridge pins and hangers are typically considered as critical elements whose failure may result in partial or entire collapse of the structure. The primary function of a pin-hanger connection is to allow for...
How can gatekeeping theory in the circulation of cultural objects, including knowledge production, inform the way cultural sociology investigates the role of the producer and the cultural object as “gated” entities? Using the case of producers working under the rubric of “Contemporary African art” to investigate opportunities and restrictions to...
It is becoming increasingly evident that the nanoscale organization and structure of macromolecules play a significant role in determining the function and properties of biological systems. To understand the relationships between biological structure and function at nanometer length scales, there is a need for methods which enable imaging of intact...
Beethoven’s late compositional style is known for bending conventions he learned as a young man. Many discussions of his late style concentrate on adherence to and deviations from the conventions of functional harmony, fugal techniques, and sonata form. This document sheds light on an additional, previously unexamined aspect of Beethoven’s...
Kaija Saariaho’s vocal music offers singers a rewarding challenge. Her works contain extended techniques and innovative performance practices, which allow her to create interesting and moving timbral effects. Her musical language has its foundation in her cultural identity, formed when she was a girl in the forests of Finland. The...
Chaya Czernowin’s opera 'Pnima…ins innere' is about the encounter between a young Israeli boy and his grandfather, a Holocaust survivor so traumatized by his past that he cannot speak. Fittingly, the opera does not contain any words: the four singers in the work instead sing phonemes and other non-verbal sounds....
Ever since Jean-Baptiste Lully welcomed the horn to the stage as an instrument capable of producing music suitable for indoors, a tradition of horn methodology and pedagogy has been developed and expanded over the centuries. Despite the volume and variety of pedagogical materials available to the horn student and pedagogue...
Starting in the late 1950s, the advertising world rapidly became a fertile arena for experimentation in the realm of electronic music. Composers explored new forms, such as the sound logo; new technology, such as the Moog synthesizer; and new semiotic relationships between music, words, images and concepts, including attempts to...
Since the standardization of the modern brass quintet in the middle of the twentieth century, extensive research has been dedicated to the history of the genre, ensembles which have promoted and advanced brass chamber music and the growing body of original brass quintet repertoire. Such scholarship has provided practical benefits...
Since Ottorino Respighi included the recording of a nightingale in his Pini di Roma (1924), composers have used prerecorded nature sounds, or field recordings, to help establish a specific sense of place. The purpose of this project is to examine how modern composers utilize field recordings to create natural-world settings,...
This document gives a brief history of classical music (Western art music) in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, with a focus on recent events and developments from the beginning of the siege (1992) to the present. Further focus is placed on the effects of Sarajevo's cultural pluralism on the city's largest...
Stroke is the leading cause of death and long term disability in the industrialized world. With the current population aging, the number of individuals at risk of stroke along with the associated health care costs are anticipated to rise considerably in the coming years. Consequently, there is an unmet need...
The first chapter of this dissertation develops a two-stage inference method for structural parameters in the linear instrumental variables model. In the first stage, a new statistic is used to detect whether the correlation between the structural error and the reduced form error is small. In the second stage, a...
The behavior of type-II superconductors is modeled using the time-dependent Ginzburg Landau equations (TDGLE). Pinning centers (inclusions) and geometries which maximize the critical current that can be passed through a superconductor are numerically obtained. Previous analytical results are summarized and new results are obtained for the critical current in one...
Refugees gain access to benefits and services in the United States through the bureaucratic birthdates recorded in the documents they carry when they first enter the country. Examining how and why chronometric age based on these documents was essential to resettlement was the starting point for my dissertation, which explores...
Anisotropic semiconducting thin films have attracted attention in recent years for important applications such as electrical interconnects, electronic sensors, field-emission devices and thermoelectric devices. However, the characterization of the full conductivity tensor, especially the cross-plane conductivity, remains a great challenge for anisotropic thin films. In addition, the synthesis of large-area...
Meeting the exploding demand for wireless data services will require access to new wireless spectrum. However, the traditional approach of clearing spectrum and reallocating is becoming increasingly difficult. This in turn has led to much interest in new approaches for sharing spectrum among different users, such as the those being...
Pattern recognition-based myoelectric control of upper limb prostheses has been made clinically available to individuals with more proximal upper limb amputations and can restore intuitive control of a prosthetic hand. This control method has yet to be implemented for individuals with amputations distal to the wrist (i.e. partial-hand amputations) and...
We study analytic functions on the open unit p-adic poly-disk centered at the multiplicative identity and prove that such functions only vanish at finitely many n-tuples of roots of unity unless they vanish along a translate of the formal multiplicative group. (Note that a root of unity lies on the...
Using Eynard-Orantin topological recursion, we prove here a result concerning the equivariant Gromov-Witten invariants for the projective line equipped with the standard action of the 2-torus. Our result is that the genus g, n point Gromov-Witten potential with arbitrary primary insertions may be written as a sum over certain genus...
Plasmonic nanostructures can confine light at their surface in the form of surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) or localized surface plasmons (LSPs) depending on their geometry. SPPs are excited on nano- and micropatterned surfaces, where the typical feature size is on the order of the wavelength of light. LSPs, on the...
Catalyzed by the invention of magnetic tape recording, audio production has transformed from technical to artistic, and the roles of producer, engineer, composer, and performer have merged for many forms of music. However, while these roles have changed, the way we interact with audio production tools has not and still...
Data mining for materials discovery is concerned with representing materials science problems into a statistical framework, and learning models that describe observations about the processing, structure, and property of materials. The type of materials includes metals, ceramics, glass, polymers, and composites which are mixtures of multiple types. Observations come from...
Consent is at the center of feminist politics and theory; the importance of this concept is evident in the recent campus activism around sexual assault. Because consent has become so critically important, it is necessary for feminists to interrogate the concept of consent. In this dissertation, I argue that consent...
Myocardial perfusion is an important marker of cardiovascular health that is routinely evaluated clinically. Perfusion is measured most often using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) imaging, but magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has many advantages over SPECT. Measuring perfusion quantitatively in ml/min/g would theoretically allow for improved characterization of cardiac...
The growth of incarceration in the United States, a symptom of the concomitant broader institutionalization of a ‘carceral state’, is unquestionably one of the most significant developments in the nation's history. Despite this significance, the public response to the growth and deleterious consequences of incarceration has been notably restrained. This...
Pattern recognition algorithms have been proposed as a way to control powered lower limb prostheses, specifically for transitioning between the different pre-programmed locomotion modes of the prosthesis (e.g., level ground walking, stair ascent, etc.). However, these algorithms cannot track changes in the statistical characteristics of input signals, and do not...
The purpose of the dissertation is to develop a framework for equilibration of activity-trip chain demand in an integrated system of activity scheduling and travel choices within a dynamic network equilibrium framework. Activity-based modeling systems generate detailed activity chain schedules for individuals, which have to be assigned to transportation networks....
The microwave, optical, and electro-optic properties of epitaxial barium titanate thin films grown on (100) MgO substrates and photonic crystal electro-optic modulators fabricated on these films were investigated to demonstrate the applicability of these devices for telecommunication and data networks. The electrical and electro-optical properties were characterized up to modulation...
In the past few decades, psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic research has shown that nouns and verbs are processed differently in cognitively healthy individuals, and can be selectively impaired in aphasic individuals. However, this noun-verb dichotomy is poorly understood. This dissertation investigated cognitive and neural distinctions between nouns and verbs by studying...
How do households confront insecurity? This dissertation is a study of how households navigate insecurity as observed through struggles with homeownership and foreclosure. I discuss insecurity as a multi-dimensional experience that puts important resources at risk of loss and reaches into many areas of family life, including health, wealth, food,...
When we speak, we communicate not only with the words we choose, but also with the patterns of sound we create. As auditory experts, musicians are especially adept at making sense of sound, and accumulating research reveals that this extends to their processing of speech and other communication signals. Much...
I present research in systems of biomedical relevance consisting of agents near or com- prising surfaces using computational approaches. The research topics include formation of bacterial biofilms, behavior of charged species near stacked, like-charged lamellae, and the the conformational behavior of lamellae with strong self-attraction.
In chapter 2, I present...
This dissertation presents some development of the single molecular ion precision spectroscopy experiment including construction of the project, spectroscopy state readout, and production of ultracold molecules. Such molecular ion spectroscopy aims at testing fundamental physics such as probing the time variation of electron-proton mass ratio.
The theories and characterization of...
The properties of crystalline materials are controlled by their composition and by their structure, however, the structure of a crystal is only partly controlled by its composition. Development of specifically directed inorganic syntheses will require an understanding of the dynamics of crystal phase forming processes, especially those processes involved in...
Lattice models of fermions, bosons, and spins have long served to elucidate the essential physics of quantum phase transitions in a variety of systems. Generalizing such models to incorporate driving and dissipation has opened new vistas to investigate nonequilibrium phenomena and dissipative phase transitions in interacting many-body systems. Circuit- QED...
We argue that a country’s level of wealth inequality can be viewed as a reflection of the quality of its housing rental market. Using the ECB’s Household Finance and Consump- tion Survey (HFCS), we document that the aggregate homeownership rate and various measures of wealth inequality are negatively correlated across...
Mixing of granular materials is an important engineering process, and a very complex problem. In this thesis, I use granular mixing in a half-full biaxial spherical tumbler (BST), a spherical container that rotates sequentially about two orthogonal axes, to motivate the study of mixing with piecewise isometries (PWIs), a rich...
Amorphous In-Ga-Zn-O (a-IGZO) and other amorphous oxide semiconductors are attracting increasing attention from the display industry for their high electron mobility, ease of large-area manufacture, and potential for future flexible electronics. However, such amorphous materials often show instability under gate voltage bias, temperature, and illumination stress, with extremely slow relaxation...
The behavior of ions in liquids confined between macromolecules determines the outcome of many nanoscale assembly processes in synthetic and biological materials such as colloidal dispersions, emulsions, hydrogels, DNA, cell membranes, and proteins. Theoretically, the macromolecule-liquid boundary is often modeled as a dielectric interface and an important quantity of interest...
Tribological behaviors of lubricated interfaces are strongly affected by the interactions between mating surfaces and the rheological properties of the lubricant between them. This research aims to improve lubrication through two approaches: 1) designing surface textures for lubrication enhancement and adhesion reduction, and 2) developing lubricants of desired rheology.
Molecular...
Broadband networks are one of the most economically significant and fastest growing sectors of the Internet. Recent studies have shown that providing broadband Internet access is instrumental for social and economic development. Several governments, as well as the UN, have gone so far as to label broadband access a basic...
Even though renal blood flow accounts for nearly a quarter of cardiac output, the renal medulla operates in an environment with a scant supply of oxygen. The reason for this apparent discrepancy is thought to be threefold. Blood flow to the outer medulla is less than 50% of that received...
Glaucoma is a neurodegenerative blinding disease associated with increased intraocular pressure, which is caused by an increased resistance to the outflow of aqueous humor. Although the cause for increased resistance remains unknown, it has been associated with a decreased density of pores in the cells of the inner wall endothelium...
This dissertation develops and applies coupled marine sulfur and strontium cycle modeling to the highly dynamic Early Cretaceous demonstrating the value of increased model constraint from linkage of biogeochemical cycles with shared forcing factors. A foundation for this work is first provided by review of relevant geochemical, sedimentological, and paleontological...
Chronic pain is a prevalent and under-treated condition that remains a mystery to the medical system and a major social and economic problem. Unfortunately, there is no single treatment superior to others for relieving chronic pain. While recent scientific discoveries have provided us with functional and anatomical brain biomarkers of...
The FDA approvals of afatinib and ibrutinib in 2013 led to a heightened interest in cysteine-reactive covalent inhibitors. However, there are few methods to discover new cysteine-reactive inhibitors for enzymes for which reversible binding scaffolds are not known. To this end, we rationally designed a chemical system to attach a...
The striatum is a subcortical nucleus that regulates a number of complex activities ranging from voluntary action selection to the subconscious formation of habit. The coordination of these operations is mediated by the principle cells of the striatum, spiny projection neurons (SPNs). SPN activity is dictated by a confluence of...
E2F-2 is a Retinoblastoma (Rb)-regulated transcription factor induced during terminal erythroid maturation. Cyclin E-mediated Rb hyper-phosphorylation induces E2F transcriptional activator functions. E2F-2-loss causes reduced peripheral red blood cell (RBC) counts, without altering relative abundances of erythroblast subpopulations. To determine how E2F-2 regulates RBC production, we comprehensively studied erythropoiesis using knockout...