Arts and Humanities Commons^™

The Implementation Of Augmented Reality And Low Latency Protocols In Musical Instrumental Collaborations, Qixiao Zhu

Honors Theses

Past projects involving musical software have been completely virtual, while these software do well in entertainment and education, there is the question of whether these software are playable to the same extent as physical musical instruments. The software presented in this paper, "AR Jam", utilizes various software and hardware tools to form a networked mixed reality system for the users to play music on. The intention of this project is to seek new ways to explore more playable musical instruments in the digital world. The paper presents the software's implementation, challenges such as optimization problems of the synthesizer, and the …

Balancing Data- Vs. Art-Driven Decisions In Video Game Design, Jaden D. Goter

Honors Theses

Video games, like software, need to be designed. Video game development studios tend to use data-driven or art-driven decision-making to design their games. Data-driven decision-making is where active and passive data is collected in order to make informed decisions about the design of a game. Art-driven decision-making is when designers use their artistic intuition to design games, potentially ignoring player data. This paper elaborates on the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches and provides case studies of games designed under both approaches. Based on these studies, for a game to be successful, a combined approach of data- and art-driven decision-making …

Generative Art, Caleb Harmon

Honors Theses

Generative Art is systems that produce complex structures and visuals through computation.

Advanced Technologies In Music Production And Collaboration, David Besonen

Honors Theses

My Honors Senior Creative Project was to compose and produce a short album of original music alongside talented musicians here at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) as well as around the world.

Mass Incarceration In Nebraska: Data And Historical Analysis Of Inmates From 1980-2020, Anna Krause

Honors Theses

This study examines Nebraska Department of Corrections inmate data from 1980-2020, looking specifically at inmate demographics and offense trends. State-of-the-art data analysis is conducted to collect, modify, and visualize the data sources. Inmates are organized by each decade they were incarcerated within. The current active prison population is also examined in their own research group. The demographic and offense trends are compared with previous local and national research. Historical context is given for evolving trends in offenses. Solutions for Nebraska prison overcrowding are presented from various interest groups. This study aims to enlighten all interested Nebraskans on who inhabits their …

Convolutional Audio Source Separation Applied To Drum Signal Separation, Marius Orehovschi

Honors Theses

This study examined the task of drum signal separation from full music mixes via both classical methods (Independent Component Analysis) and a combination of Time-Frequency Binary Masking and Convolutional Neural Networks. The results indicate that classical methods relying on predefined computations do not achieve any meaningful results, while convolutional neural networks can achieve imperfect but musically useful results. Furthermore, neural network performance can be improved by data augmentation via transposition – a technique that can only be applied in the context of drum signal separation.

Engagement And Computational Thinking Through Creative Coding, Dana Hoppe

Honors Theses

Rising enrollments in Computer Science pose an opportunity to engage students from diverse backgrounds and interests; and a challenge to deliver on positive learning outcomes. While student engagement is the driving factor for increased learning performance and retention, it has been declining to new lows for Computer Science students in recent years. In order to further explore the potential of contextualized computing as a tool for increasing engagement in computing and developing Computational Thinking aptitude in students, we have developed an introductory computing course contextualized with Art and Design with modules centered around guiding pedagogical principles and aimed at middle …

Dworkinian Liberalism, The Right To Pornography, And The Internet, Will Nowell

Honors Theses

In a 1981 journal article, “Is There A Right to Pornography?,” Ronald Dworkin argues that we have a right to ethical independence that includes the right to consume pornography. The purpose of this thesis is to inquire as to whether Dworkinian liberalism does entail a right to specifically internet pornography. This research is primarily focused on Ronald Dworkin’s writings in Justice for Hedgehogs, Sovereign Virtue: The Theory and Practice of Equality, and Taking Rights Seriously to describe the principles and character of Dworkinian liberalism and its philosophical relationship to the question of the right to pornography. This thesis considers contemporary …

Contextualizing Sexual Assault Data Collection On College Campuses: A Socio-Technical Approach, Anushikha Sharma

Honors Theses

Sexual assault is a rampant issue on college campuses in the United States. Colleges and universities use a variety of survey instruments to collect data regarding sexual assault as a means to improve campus culture, policies, and resources. These instruments contain a wealth of associated information in the form of metadata, that is, data about data.

This project takes a human-centered socio-technical approach to understanding the data collection processes associated with sexual assault, specifically, on the campus of Bucknell University. By identifying the underlying metadata within the data collection processes, this research contextualizes and critiques the process of data collection, …

Accurately Simulating The Battle Of Thermopylae To Analyze "What If" Scenarios, Josh Wasserman

Honors Theses

The Battle of Thermopylae (480 BCE) was a last ditch effort to stall the Persian army as it marched south toward Athens. Led by Leonidas and his personal guard of 300 Spartans, a citizen army of Greeks was able to delay a Persian army of over 100,000 soldiers at the town of Thermopylae for several days. Although the Greeks were ultimately defeated at Thermopylae, the battle provided enough time for the Greek states to regroup and plan a counter attack, eventually defeating the invading Persians. This battle was crucial not only for the preservation of Greek independence, but also the …

Multi-Agent Simulation Of The Battle Of Ankara, 1402, Ruili Tang

Honors Theses

In 1402, at the north of city Ankara, Turkey, a battle between Ottoman Empire and Tamerlane Empire decided the fate of Europe and Asia. Although historians largely agree on the general battle procedure, the details are still open to dispute. Several factors may have contributed to the Ottoman defeat, such as the overwhelming size of Tamerlanes army, poisoned water, the tactical formations of the military units, and betrayal by the Tartar cavalry in the Ottoman left wing. The approach is divided into two stages: the simulation stage, which provides data to analyze the complex interactions of autonomous agents, and the …

Blending Two Automatic Playlist Generation Algorithms, James Curbow

Honors Theses

We blend two existing automatic playlist generation algorithms. One algorithm is built to smoothly transition between a start song and an end song (Start-End). The other infers song similarity based on adjacent occurrences in expertly authored streams (EAS). First, we seek to establish the effectiveness of the Start-End algorithm using the EAS algorithm to determine song similarity, then we propose two playlist generation algorithms of our own: the Unbiased Random Walk (URW) and the Biased Random Walk (BRW). Like the Start-End algorithm, both the URW algorithm and BRW algorithm transition between a start song and an end song; however, issues …

Computing The (Un)Computable: A Computationally-Augmented Perspective On The Yasukuni Shrine Controversy, Ryan Muther

Honors Theses

Computational methods have been used with increasing frequency in the social sciences and humanities, due to the availability of digital sources and computing power to study everything from changes in the meanings of words in Latin texts to how knowledge was categorized in eighteen century encyclopedias. Recent trends in the fields of digital humanities and computational social science include statistical methods like machine learning, requiring large pre-tagged and annotated sets of documents which in turn necessitates a great deal of prior work to create data to use with such methods. This reliance on large corpora of annotated data limits the …

Audio Software (Vst Plugin) Development With Practical Application, Zachary Hummel

Honors Theses

Audio engineers around the world routinely utilize small pieces of software, known as “plugins,” to help shape the sound of the media they are working with. These plugins are inserted into a digital audio workstation (DAW) and contain digital signal processing (DSP) algorithms that can affect audio in a number of ways limited only by the creativity of the software developer. Common implementations of plugins include equalizers, compressors and limiters, gain, phase rotation or polarity inversion algorithms, reverb and delay, and emulation of the non-linearities of analog audio equipment. The intent of this thesis project is to design and produce …

Cellular Automata And Music: A New Representation, Richard French

Honors Theses

For millenia, we’ve thought of musical composition as a purely human activity. However, we once also thought of an activity like chess to be purely human, but Deep Blue was able to defeat Kasparov in 1995 all the same. Could there perhaps be some tool or algorithm for musical composition that can replicate to some extent what human beings can do with music? This project explores this idea through the use of a tool called a cellular automaton. A cellular automaton is a grid space with a finite number of states for each of the ”cells” or ”squares” where a …

Gaming Classics: The Bard, Thomas Defina

Honors Theses

Technological advancement is a driving influence in the development of today’s culture. Upon the creation of electronic videogames, gaming has allowed players to not only experience new ideas previously unheard of in a gaming medium, but gaming is easily accessible to people throughout the world. Academia has begun studying games, checking the positive and negative effects videogames have on people. Might one of these positive effects be educational? If it was, college professors might use the game to help supplement their classes. The question this paper will be focused on is as follows: using the classics as our field of …

Code . Art: Code With An Art File Extension, Cole Wiley

Honors Theses

No abstract provided.

Evolution Of Flow In Games, Paul J. Tunison

Honors Theses

Every one wants to play a fun game, but ”fun” is a subjective quality. Flow, a psychological theory to define what ”fun” is, states that, for an activity to be considered fun, the chal-lenge it presents must correlate with that participant’s abilities such that the activity is neither too easy or too difficult. One of the biggest problems for game designers is balancing the difficulty of its content in such a way that it appeals to the largest audience possible. In order to broaden audiences, de-velopers need to invest effort into creating numerous, discrete balances that are aligned to varying …

Masterpiece: Computer-Generated Music Through Fractals And Genetic Theory, Amanda Broyles

Honors Theses

A wide variety of computer-generated music exists. I have writ.ten a program which will generate music by using genetic theory and fractals. The genetic theory is used to mold input pieces into a musical motif. The motif is then elaborated by the fractal formula into a composition. A brief introduction to the world of genetic theory and fractals is given. Analysis of a musical work produced in this manner shows coherent patterns and also emotion.