Browsing by Subject "Semiotics"
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Item Are icons pictures or logographical words? Statistical, behavioral, and neuroimaging measures of semantic interpretations of four types of visual information(2012-05) Huang, Sheng-Cheng; Bias, Randolph G.; Dillon, Andrew; Francisco-Revilla, Luis; Schnyer, David; Sussman, HarveyThis dissertation is composed of three studies that use statistical, behavioral, and neuroimaging methods to investigate Chinese and English speakers’ semantic interpretations of four types of visual information including icons, single Chinese characters, single English words, and pictures. The goal is to examine whether people cognitively process icons as logographical words. By collecting survey data from 211 participants, the first study investigated how differently these four types of visual information can express specific meanings without ambiguity on a quantitative scale. In the second study, 78 subjects participated in a behavioral experiment that measured how fast people could correctly interpret the meaning of these four types of visual information in order to estimate the differences in reaction times needed to process these stimuli. The third study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with 20 participants selected from the second study to identify brain regions that were needed to process these four types of visual information in order to determine if the same or different neural networks were required to process these stimuli. Findings suggest that 1) similar to pictures, icons are statistically more ambiguous than English words and Chinese characters to convey the immediate semantics of objects and concepts; 2) English words and Chinese characters are more effective and efficient than icons and pictures to convey the immediate semantics of objects and concepts in terms of people’s behavioral responses, and 3) according to the neuroimaging data, icons and pictures require more resources of the brain than texts, and the pattern of neural correlates under the condition of reading icons is different from the condition of reading Chinese characters. In conclusion, icons are not cognitively processed as logographical words like Chinese characters although they both stimulate the semantic system in the brain that is needed for language processing. Chinese characters and English words are more evolved and advanced symbols that are less ambiguous, more efficient and easier for a literate brain to understand, whereas graphical representations of objects and concepts such as icons and pictures do not always provide immediate and unambiguous access to meanings and are prone to various interpretations.Item Exploring the singing style in five lyrical first movements from Beethoven’s piano sonatas(2016-05) Liu, Peng, M. of Music; Tusa, Michael Charles; Hatten, Robert S.Although Beethoven’s so-called “heroic” style dominates perceptions about the composer, he also composed a number of pieces that have a less heroic, more intimate or “lyrical” style. Up to now, the most extended discussion of this lyrical strain has been written by Carl Dahlhaus (1980), who, however, treats the topic primarily from the perspective of thematic unification. Drawing on the discussion of the singing style in recent writings on topic theory, particularly on the semiotic approach of Sarah Day- O’Connell (2014), the present paper explores multiple musical and semiotic parameters of the singing style in the first movements of five of Beethoven’s piano sonatas: Opp. 14/2, 28, 78, 101, and 110. As shown in my analysis, these five movements not only exhibit surface musical elements that signify of the singing style--conjunct melody with narrow range and long note values, continuous and flowing contours, less impetuous rhythms, soft dynamics, simple harmony, and homophonic (melody-and-accompaniment or chorale/hymn) textures--but also reveal how Beethoven solves the structural and formal problems by mitigating contrasts between principal and subsidiary themes and lessening goal-directed processes in the development. In addition, the exploration of the signifieds of the singing style--nature, beauty, simplicity; the amateur and the feminine; and private domains as well as sociability--helps us understand how Beethoven’s singing-style sonata-form first movements function in their socio-cultural and historical contexts, while also revealing a significant humanist value—loving communication and brotherhood—that is worthy of further research. The investigation of the singing style in Beethoven’s music contributes to a better understanding of Beethoven as an artist, especially as a countermeasure to the dominance of the heroic in Beethoven reception.Item Hearing as seeing : investigating the relationship between what we see and what we hear(2020-06-22) Goodman, Tucker Murray; Bloodgood, WilliamThis paper focuses on the relationship between auditory and visual elements, exploring the way in which intentional incorporation of music influences visual artists and designers’ practice. Theatrical design programs teach students how to read a text and interpret the story told by the words on the page. The words may communicate much of the story, but by the time the production reaches the audience, many other elements join in: scenery, costumes, lighting, media, and sound. If these elements do not work together, they can create a cacophony instead of clarifying the narrative. Rather than competing with the words, visual and auditory elements should work together to tell the story cohesively. Inspired by the nebulous relationship between sight and sound, I researched historical, scientific, and artistic interpretations of this relationship. The information I gathered, presented in context with my personal reflections on the use of music as inspiration for visual design, led to the creation of a thesis in two parts: an art exhibition within a reflexive research project. The art exhibition, titled “Hearing As Seeing,” investigates the question, “What is the relationship between what we see and what we hear?” The research project employs action research by inviting the artists and designers who participated in the exhibition to investigate the question, “How might the intentional incorporation of music affect the process of creating visual art?”Item Meaningful Urbanism: A human-centered approach to placemaking using form-based zoning codes(2020) Hyden, Sarah; Lopez, Sarah; Hoelscher, StevenThe professional perspectives that planners, designers, government officials, real estate developers, and other trained ‘experts’ have on urban space are often very different from the lived experiences of the people who actually live in communities. This results in the need for planning methods that not only accommodate people’s everyday perspectives, but center them in the process of designing the urban landscape. This thesis examines how the creation and conception of place are central to people’s experiences and considers form-based zoning as a potential mechanism for implementing human-centered values in actual built environments. It examines the emergence of zoning as a way of exerting control over space, phenomenological perspectives on urban placemaking, and how the conveyance of meaning in the built environment shapes people’s lives. It finds that form-based coding can facilitate meaningful placemaking in a way that conventional zoning frameworks do not. The coding process and outcomes of two form-based developments in the Austin area, the Mueller neighborhood and the Leander transit-oriented development, are then outlined as examples of implementation.Item Semiotics of music, semiotics of sound, and film : toward a theory of acousticons(2015-08) Newton, Alex Michael; Buhler, James, 1964-; Neumeyer, David; Hatten, Robert; Drott, Eric; Staiger, JanetTopic theory, the study of conventional musical figures, has emerged as a significant method of analysis for music scholars in the last thirty years. Much current research critically interprets and contextualizes topics from a variety of musical eras and styles, including film music. However, studying film presents music scholars with a new set of issues since the filmic medium not only includes visual signs in the form of the image track, but also another category of sonic signs in the form of sound design. In film sound tracks, musical signs and sonic signs frequently butt up against one another and even pass into one another’s domain. My dissertation seeks to bridge the current gap between music figures and sound figures by arguing that musical figures are best considered as a special case of general sound figures that I call acousticons. Acousticons are conventionalized figures of music or sound (e.g. reverb, fidelity) and they exist on a continuum defined by the poles of purely musical codes on the one hand and purely sonic codes on the other. Chapter 1 presents a general model of the acousticon using Peirce’s modes of the sign. It interrogates iconic models presented in media studies and iconography as possible corollaries to the sound track. Chapter 2 and 3 present case studies of acousticons. Chapter 2 gives a case study of acousticons of the subjective interior in the form of the lowered submediant and subjective, point-of-audition sound. Chapter 3 considers how films deploy reverberation and low fidelity recordings acousticonically to bring about different types of nostalgia. Chapter 4 considers the potential for acousticons outside of the sound track medium. It looks at how acousticons might work in audio branding. Specifically, it looks at the construction of sonic logos, product sound, and the use of popular music in advertising and product design.Item The fire sermon : program and narrative in Einojuhani Rautavaara's second piano sonata(2018-12) Ridgway, Zachary Matthew; Hatten, Robert S.; Brownell, Andrew; Tusa, Michael C; Marks, Brian; Maggart, Alison; Nel, AntonEinojuhani Rautavaara’s second piano sonata, op. 64, titled “Fire Sermon,” is a masterpiece of neo-Romantic piano writing. This treatise is meant as a performer’s and listener’s guide to the sonata. My analysis explores Rautavaara’s compositional techniques in this piece, especially his pervasive use of axes of symmetry, symmetrical scales, and a submerged tonal center. I also situate the piece within the macrotext of Rautavaara’s output for the piano, noting strong intertextual similarities across the piano works and detailing performance pragmatics for the use of pianists wanting to approach this music. My analysis then proceeds to discuss the title “Fire Sermon” and its implications, compiling and assessing the paratext of the composer’s brief statements and the relevant literary texts. I also present a possible program that I have discovered for the second movement of the sonata, in Rautavaara’s account of his early mystic experience on the way to the island of Valamo. Using this discovered program and structural analysis following the work of Robert S. Hatten, Michael L. Klein, and Byron Almén, I analyze the whole sonata as an overarching narrative structure. My narratological approach reads the sonata as a whole as a mystic narrative or as a cosmology.Item The fluidity of protest imagery : reading and misreading Taking a stand in Baton Rouge, The foot soldier of Birmingham, and Tank man(2022-05-05) Mensah, Michelle Oforiwa; Davis, Janet M.This report examines Jonathan Bachman’s Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge utilizing interdisciplinary analysis to comprehend its placement among other iconic protest images within public memory, Bill Hudson’s The Foot Soldier of Birmingham and Jeff Widener’s Tank Man. The public’s reception of these images maintains ramifications for the meaning of internet and media systems and their participation in the visual dynamics that penetrate people’s lives. Utilizing semiotics to deeply read Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge offers the opportunity to investigate American culture’s ideas about racial representation. Examining the signs within the photograph exposes the connection between visual imagery and public reaction. Historical analysis aids the exploration of the variegated meanings of the photograph and its reception. Examining the historical origins of the signs within the photograph, such as facial expression and the politics of dress, offers a way to read the motives of those behind nonviolent protests. Through the lens of media and technology studies, Taking a Stand in Baton Rouge illuminates the issues behind visual imagery’s powerful ability to persuade the publicItem The virtual observing agent in music: a theory of agential perspective as implied by indexical gesture(2015-08) Gerg, Ian Wyatt; Hatten, Robert S.; Almén, Byron; Drott, Eric; Pearsall, Edward; Erk, KatrinThe human body is inseparable from our understanding of music. Through embodied cognition, listeners conceptualize music as performed action. We find evidence of this in our most fundamental musical language. “High” pitches resonate high in a singer’s head, while “fast” rhythms resemble fast bodily movement. Scholars have followed the entailments of these metaphors in recent decades, developing theories of bodily gesture (Hatten 2004, Lidov 2005) and physical mimesis (Cox 2011). These hold that the bodily movement that we hear in music can imitate the physical gestures that we use in everyday communication (e.g., waving, nodding, bowing, or sighing). This has its own entailments; most fundamentally, it implies the presence of a virtual, human-like agent within music that is similar to the “virtual persona” theorized by Edward T. Cone (1974). In other words, in perceiving musical sounds as imitative of physical movement and gesture, we infer the presence of a virtual agent who enacts them. This dissertation extends these theories, demonstrating that musical gestures can be mimetic of indexical somatic movements—that is, bodily movements of pointing, looking, striving, and reaching. These indexical gestures suggest the presence of a virtual observing agent. The virtual observing agent acts a lens through which we, the listener, can experience the interior world (diegesis) of a work. This leads us to embody a single and more individualized perspective on the musical representation. I explore the implications of indexical gesture and perspective with an examination of music from the common practice period. Moreover, I bring the theory of virtual observing agency together with theories of musical narrative and emotion.Item Whose fly is this? and the beginning of Moscow linguistic conceptualism : text and image in the early works of Ilya Kabakov (1962-1966)(2011-05) Toteva, Maia; Shiff, Richard; Clarke, John; Henderson, Linda; Charlesworth, Michael; Reynolds, Ann; Wettlaufer, AlexandraThis dissertation examines the early works of the Russian artist Ilya Kabakov and traces the beginning of a linguistic trend in the development of Moscow Conceptualism. Analyzing the drawings and paintings that the artist created between 1962 and 1966, I place Kabakov’s artistic style and ideas in the context of the cultural, theoretical and scientific phenomena that affected Soviet art and society in the early 1960s. Kabakov’s works are shown as evolving in a process that renders the artist’s techniques increasingly polysemantic, dialogic and conceptual. The dissertation then demonstrates that Kabakov’s visual images and linguistic titles participated, indirectly yet actively, in the cultural debates of Moscow’s artistic underground and the Soviet society. The dynamic correspondence between a fervent cultural context, growing interest in linguistic and scientific ideas, increasing conceptualization of visual means of expression and intellectualization of the artistic approach to the image led to the appropriation of language in the works of Moscow underground artists. The dissertation establishes such a development in the early works of Ilya Kabakov, proposing that his earliest “conversational” work Whose Fly is This? was the first conceptual painting to display text in the form of a written dialogue. The colloquial style and conversational character of the depicted discourse are examined as an ironic gesture that takes its genesis from the polyphonic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin and reverses the official non-dialogical imperatives of Soviet newspeak and ideology. The main figural image of the painting—the fly—is seen as articulating the utopias and anti-utopias of avant-garde figures such as Kharms or Malevich and interpreted as alluding to a key contemporaneous scientific discovery—the chromosomes of the drosophila. In the end, the words and the image of Whose Fly is This? form the two mutually exclusive and mutually complementary aspects of a compound conceptual signifier. That is the signifier of the free artistic spirit, evanescent human existence and mundane, yet resilient human nature that ironically survives—against all odds and despite all absurdities—beyond the boundary of the social utopia and the limits of epistemological systems.