Digital Commons Network^™

Audiating And Vocalizing Voice-Leading In Seventh Chords: Harmonic Recognition In Freshman Ear-Training Courses, Caroline E. Dunmire

Masters Theses

Harmonic dictation is one of the most challenging topics in the aural skills curriculum. Consequently, researchers have identified sub-skills associated with success in ear-training. Among these are development of audiation skills, understanding of functional harmonic progression, and scale degree resolution. The PASS Method teaches chord quality through a four-step process of playing, audiating, singing, and solving the voice-leading paths in common tonal resolutions. This method was examined in a quantitative study of 52 freshman ear-training students in which a control group studied seventh chords through the traditional, Arpeggiated Method and an experimental group used the PASS Method. The experimental group …

Influential Women In The History Of American Music Education, Christina Genae Mathis

Masters Theses

Early American music education is rooted not only in the work of Lowell Mason and other male music education pioneers, but also in the lives of a number of women whose work in the field was largely unnoticed until the twentieth century and the evolution of women’s rights in America. This project researched the lives and contributions of five of these women: Frances Elliott Clark, one of the first educators to take advantage of the technology available at the time, who incorporated the use of phonographs in the music classroom; Julia Ettie Crane, whose legacy lives on through the Crane …

Creation, Destruction, And The Tension Between: A Cautionary Note On Individuation In Tristan Egolf, W. G. Sebald, And Niall Williams, Nicholas Kanaar

Masters Theses

The modern individual faces a psychological disconnect between his conscious mind and unconscious due primarily to the outward attachments that dictate false tenets of ontological worth. This thesis investigates the benchmark of creation and destruction and narrows in on its utility in the individual’s pursuit for individuation. The creation and destruction paradox is used to penetrate liminal space where personal transformation occurs, and it is used within those spaces to strip away old, ego-centric ideals in the service of new ones. C. G. Jung’s “archetypes of transformation” are the main tools of the psyche for assisting the conscious mind to …

The Impact Of Healthy Living Education On Parents When Selecting Snacks For Their Children, Daphnea Lou Sutherland

Masters Theses

The increasing prevalence of childhood obesity has become a major health concern in the United States and other countries. Obese children are now acquiring what is considered adult diseases, at a young age. This will have detrimental effects on their health as a child and even more so as an adult, resulting in poor quality of life and a shorter lifespan. An obese child also faces delays and shortages in meeting developmental standards, such as physical development, psychosocial, emotional development, cognitive, and so forth. When obese, children will have a harder time concentrating on learning materials and will struggle in …

Planning For A Sustainable Future: Rethinking The Role Of Bicycle Parking At Western Michigan University, Gregory J. Carlton

Masters Theses

Sustainable transportation planning focuses on addressing the needs of current users, without jeopardizing the needs of future users (Black 1997, Richardson 1999, Balsas 2003). A popular mode of sustainable transportation is the bicycle, which is frequently used by college students. One aspect of bicycle transportation that remains underexplored within the United States and on university campuses, is bicycle parking. By using rack conditioning assessments, bicycle theft density analysis, bicycle parking counts and a formative stakeholder survey of the bicycle parking at Western Michigan University’s campus, recommendations were able to be created for campus officials for use in their planning efforts. …

Where Is God In Symbolic Exchange? A Theo-Semiological Analysis Of The Sons Of Anarchy, Alex Justin Holguin

Masters Theses

This thesis attempts to uncover the religious nature of communication by re-visioning and situating French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s theory of communication within a Christian theological context. By critically engaging Lacan’s theoretical concepts of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real within this context, the thesis is able to access the intersection of rhetorical semiotics, psychoanalysis, and Christian theology to have a more fruitful understanding of how meaning is exchanged between subjects. Lacan’s inter-disciplinary affirmation of rhetoric and psychoanalysis has been able to produce incredible explanatory potential for how meaning, as the bedrock of speech and communication, operates through the psyche …

Training Functional Analysis Skills With Instruction With Video Modeling And Video-Self Monitoring, Haley Ciara Hughes

Masters Theses

When developing plans to reduce a challenging behavior, Board Certified Behavior Analysts (BCBAs) have an ethical obligation to first conduct a functional assessment (PECC, 2014, 3.01a), the goal of which is to identify the controlling variables for such behaviors and to use that information in training more appropriate replacement behaviors (PECC, 2014, 4.08b). It is important to train aspiring behavior analysts to implement an experimental functional analysis (FA) as it yields more accurate results than other types of functional assessment (Iwata & Dozier, 2008). Despite being considered a gold standard for training a variety of skills, behavioral skills training (BST) …

The In-Betweens: Exploring Integration Within The Arts, Ruchi Pathak

Masters Theses

This research analyzes the possibilities of integration within the arts and its potential in affecting change in the teaching and learning environment. To approach to this larger question, I conducted two in-depth case studies as a participatory observer playing two radically different roles:- the role of a student at New Works, a performing arts program at Brown University, and the role of a curriculum planner and programming researcher at Providence CityArts. The nature and educational level of the two programs were drastically different. Providence CityArts is a youth directed community-based nonprofit organization that offers after school art programs while New …

Throngs, Yinan Chen

Masters Theses

Ceramic is an important element of my artworks. It is a material with strong bearing capacity, and at the same time, it is a tool with the attribute of nature and social function, for the similarity with humans can be found in it. Thanks to its characteristics, I am able to transform the forms, colors, and quality to complete my works. Collected from nature, carved with human hands, the clay is cultivated and my expectation of the outside world is satisfied.

Personal Trauma, Community Healing : Reimagining Sanctuary For Survivors Of Gun Violence, Eva Mccarthy

Masters Theses

of communities who suffer through high levels of gun violence experience post-traumatic stress disorder at rates equal to military veterans. At the same time, religious participation in the US has plummeted, and churches, once the center of many of these communities, have lost their value as support systems. These structures must become a new type of sanctuary for those dealing with pervasive, gun-related trauma. The reimagined typology will prioritize progressive, sustained benefit over revelatory moments of transcendence, by opening sightlines through a space of safety and support to the outside.

The decaying Bethel Holy Temple Church in North Philadelphia is …

Film For Landscape Architecture : Learning From Alfonso Cuarón's Roma, Ramon Solis

Masters Theses

Introduction:

How can film inform landscape architectural thinking? In narrative film, we are spectators of unfolding space. In landscapes, our bodies enable us to author its unfolding.

In many ways, film is a well-suited and under-theorized territory for landscape. Its intersections are not without precedent, and in the following pages, I hope to describe the experiments, failures and potential scenarios I have uncovered for future practitioners of landscape architecture. A secondary intention of this thesis is as an articulation of my own practice, walking toward disciplinary edges, but always looking back to landscape architecture.

Site:

Roma (2018), directed by Alfonso …

Edge Of Emergence : Landscape As A Journey Of Memory, Jiayue Wang

Masters Theses

These principles formulate the strategies and finally create the six themes in the design. The whole journey in landscape is a linear system, but the stimulation in each theme is a networked system. During the whole journey, people’s emotions will be triggered when they encounter a new theme. Between each theme, they have space and time to process their emotions and adjust their experiential state. In the end, when people finish the whole journey, they will not only have their past memories brought back but also will have built new memories for future events. In this way the past, present, …

Playfulness : Exploring Experience Through A Trajectory, Yingjing Qu

Masters Theses

People of all ages feel from time to time a lack of freedom because of spiritual, physical and material constraints. The young are anxious about the future, while the old are bound by the body and both feel the pressure of the social and economic context. The desire to escape the social order makes public space
a window to catharsis. People’s behavior in public spaces like streets, surrounded by strangers, tends to be more uninhibited.

Playing games embodies several benefits such as the increasing of one’s imaginative ability, mind-hand coordination, enhancing of creativity, passing time and ‘play’ characteristics of seeing …

The Person-Less Portrait, Katelyn Ledford

Masters Theses

In an age of digital technologies, contemporary portraits look different than their predecessors did. Portraiture does not have to continue to rely only on the idea of physical likeness, even though that is generally how portraiture is conceived. Through our virtual lives, we build new versions of ourselves, gain an abundance of information, and consume technological visuals. These newfound engagements and understandings shape the portraits we build of ourselves and of other groups at large. In my painting practice, portraiture is a way to explore the contemporary landscape around me as a woman and a painter who engages in digital …

Let's Meet Over There / Eury Kim., Eury Kim

Masters Theses

Small communities that were once reliant on the land for basic sustenance progressively grew into large urban states. Our current cities manufacture items that are exchanged for other goods, by building factories that exploit resources from the ground. These commodities are providing much more than just food and shelter. Industry makes sustenance a secondary need to production by objectifying nature.

Italian writer Italo Calvino compares the weight of two Industrial Revolutions, depicting the first with “rolling mills” and “molten steel,” the second “with bits of information that flow” also noting that everything we “value for lightness quickly reveals … unbearable …

Re-Creation : A Package Design For Daily Life, Wei-Hao Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis grows out of my observations of and inquiries into daily scenes,+ which are wrapped within what I am calling a package. The human mind often puts daily encounters into manageable packages to facilitate interaction with them. This process, however, makes us dull or neglectful. Looking into daily scenes allows me to unpack these packages and reflect on ubiquitous objects, notions and actions so that I am able to see them anew. To me, it offers a break from the habitual responses in life.

Re-creation: A Package Design for Daily Life intends to create a similar occasion for my …

Spontaneous Laughter, Laughter Without Reason, Evan Gilbert

Masters Theses

What is the function of humor in today's society? What is the role of the comedian in increasingly clownish times? How does humor challenge power structures in contemporary life and art? How can painting deploy these methods in an effective manner?

The archetype of the trickster has appeared in myth and literature around the world for many centuries. In all instances it represents the disruptive side of the human imagination, a being that lives outside the rules of conventional behavior who seems to have hidden knowledge or secret understanding of how society truly functions. The archetype of the trickster can …

Game / Landscape / Us, Dongqi Zhang

Masters Theses

Assumption: Today’s game companies often try to hire landscape architects to do virtual environment design. With the prompt expansion of technology, gaming has already become a unique and huge industry worth billions of dollars. More and more people have become immersed in video and computer games. If we acknowledge this is true, what are the reasons?

Rationale: People lose focus on the physical landscape when they participate in it. In contrast, “A game, of course, is a constructed world with a narrative already baked in.” (King, 2015) Some people love virtual games because the real world lacks what they long …

Architecture As Magnet : Extension To Fort Adams, Mingyi Hu

Masters Theses

According to a study from KADK (The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture), social interaction mainly depends on whether people have common interests, such as the economy, politics or ideology.¹ However, it is difficult for some who feel they have different experiences or beliefs to interact within a group, which will affect their psychological state. These people need a physical environment designed to create conditions for more extensive and effective communication opportunities.

Architecture can provide a platform to help people gather together, share ideas, and create a sense of community. Architecture that holds visitors in an enclosure …

Externalized : Origins Of Aesthetic Motivations, Tim Miller

Masters Theses

My thoughts and behaviors are influenced by a compulsive disorder. Observing this, I’ve learned how much my outlook can be shaped by my own ritualistic patterns. I live with a heightened sense of awareness toward my particular compulsions which has shaped how I see the world. In this thesis writing and collection of designed objects, I am seeking to further explore my own experience with compulsive thoughts and behaviors, unpacking how they manifest in the day-to-day, how they direct my perception, and ultimately how they serve as a driving force behind my design process. By observing these tendencies and articulating …

Awe-Struck, Emily Robertson

Masters Theses

Awe-struck is an exploration at the intersection of embodied and situated cognition, sight, sense-making and nature with an additional layer of artistic interpretation and emotional response. Adapting elements of Terrapin Bright Green’s biophilic design principles, this work pushes past the well researched benefits of incorporating nature into a designed space, to uncover an individual’s personal connection to an environment. The connection is multi-faceted—layered with observations of space, color and location, filtered through a lense of physical, philosophical and psychological reactions and then translated into an individual personal history. With a specific focus on wild spaces, where humans have designed and …

Landscape As Framework : Downtown Revival Through Rebuilding Spatial Identity, Dawei Tang

Masters Theses

In developing revitalization strategies for depopulating, shrinking districts, the economic and psychological disciplines remain the key focus. In contrast, landscape architecture has long been underestimated as a guiding framework in city revitalization. This thesis book presents how landscape architecture could function as a framework to revive a city through spatial comfort and spatial identity. Using downtown Fall River as an example, this book speculates how landscape transforms a city physically and mentally. By rebuilding Fall River’s spatial comfort and spatial identity, landscape architecture could drive social engagement, revitalize local economy, recall lost history, and ultimately, allow the city to revive …

Distance Is A Place, Zhiqing Guo

Masters Theses

Distance is a Place documents a body of work and a process — a journey in translation, where a quality of feeling becomes an effort of physical capture in jewelry.

The desire to reveal how a deep responsiveness to the atmospheric distance of the sky is associated with an innermost nonverbal place of refuge motivates me to make perceptible this awareness for contemplation. Incorporating photographic images of the immeasurable dimensions of sky within translucent resin, a spatial distance collapses into wearable, tangible stillness to be worn on the body as an eternal present. 8

Record : From Signal To Atmosphere, And The Spaces Between Silence And Noise, Amy Auman

Masters Theses

Record is both a noun and a verb. Its meaning shifts through pronunciation, beginning with our cognitive interpretation and then emerging as a translation that we project from our mouths. This thesis book is an artifact, or record, of the past two years of artistic inquiry. My work, however, lives through movement in time—it records my impulses. This thesis is merely an open archive.

A range of stimuli competes for our conscious attention. The signals we choose to notice emerge from the periphery of our atmosphere, which includes everything from noise to silence. I use design to amplify and alter …

Addicts Of Nostalgia, Samuel Robert Campbell Drake

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I will reflect on issues of nostalgia through a series of work based upon the landscape where I grew up. I discuss how my paintings stage themes and negotiate criticality towards memory. The writing analyses my engagement towards the collaging of documentary and fictional sources: and how my paintings seek to dispel legibility and embrace slippage. Alongside discussions of personal experiences, I talk about the relationship of distancing in my practice, concerning tangible and geographic detachment. The thesis expresses my adoration for the history of British painting, and my efforts to internalize its traditions. Moreover, this investigation …

Mindful Interactions, Shreyans Bhandari

Masters Theses

Mindful Interactions illustrates how we’ve become addicted to our smart-phones, and how its use in our everyday life affects our physical, social, emotional health and wellbeing. This design study proposes four product designs that make us aware of using apps, and compel us to reconsider their use during bedtime, mealtime, on-the-go and at home. As our pocket sized devices continue to evolve, the outcome of this thesis becomes a case study for rediscovering and applying the “human” in human centered design.

Motherhood Story Project: Transforming Societal Perception Of Mothers Through Portraiture & Storytelling, Andrea Caresse Lewis

Masters Theses

In our modern western culture, there are two drastically different views of motherhood. Society often paints mothers as women who give up on their bodies and careers to pursue a life of seemingly purposeless identity. While the reality is that women devote their entire being to the growth and development of a new human, continuing the very concept of civilization as we know it. Because of this dichotomy and plurality of worlds, mothers often feel ostracized, alone, and completely unprepared for the new journey they have embraced. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the realities of motherhood and …

Secondary School Band: Student Retention And Director Issues-Challenges And Strategies, Frank James Poolos

Masters Theses

Student involvement in school band programs can be a positive learning experience. By featuring both physical activity and multi-level brain function, successful band programs support positive student results in both academic and social development. Graduation rates in band students are often higher than that of the overall student population. By recognizing this, increased graduation rates could be supported by increasing and retaining band student enrollment. This study examined and identifies the characteristics of band programs that contribute to increased effectiveness through the utilization of one director for both middle and high school. Additionally, the musical qualities band students having the …

The Effect Of Ethnic Identity On Biblical Unity In Its Role As An Apologetic, Caroline Boozer

Masters Theses

This thesis will consider the effect that ethnicity has on identity formation as it impacts church unity. Unity is the chief form of evidence by which the Christian church is supposed to be recognized. The way that believers love one another is how Jesus teaches people will know that they are His disciples (John 13:35). Ethnic tensions are a cause of disunity in both the Old and New Testaments. The issue of ethnic identity and relations and the impact that they have on unity in the church is an apologetic for the power and counter-cultural teachings of Jesus. The purpose …

The Utilization Of Visual Design Systems To Promote Higher Levels Of Learning In Educational Environments, Keenan Sultanik

Masters Theses

Traditional higher education environments have changed very little in the last hundred and fifty years, while technology has advanced in nearly every other area of society making each more productive and more capable. This study identifies key aspects of a comprehensive and universal visual learning system that incorporates a more holistic approach to design and interactivity in educational environments. The desired effect of this is elevating classroom learning to higher levels as defined by Bloom’s Taxonomy. In this thesis, I have collected and explored empirical and observational data to examine the relationship between effective learning environments and the use of …