The Aesthetics of Motion in Musics for the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Rumi

This dissertation investigates the concept of motion as a fundamental aesthetic element in the devotional music, dance, and rituals performed in honor of the celebrated thirteenth-century Persian mystic poet and saint, the Mevlana Celal ed-Din Muhammad Rumi. The main focus of the study is threefold. First, it investigates the prevalence of the notion of movement in Islamic music and culture, specifically within the Sufi communities of Turkey, in order to arrive at a broader understanding of the relationship between music, aesthetics, and worldview. Secondly, it explores how musical performance functions as a form of devotion or religious worship by focusing on the musical repertories performed in honor of a single holy figure, the Mevlana Rumi. Finally, it provides an ethnographic account of contemporary developments in Sufi musical culture in Turkey and across the world by describing the recent activities of the Mevlana's devotees, which includes members of the Mevlevi Order of Islamic mystics as well as adherents of other Sufi brotherhoods and followers of so-called New Religions or New Age. The primary research for this study involved two short one-month field trips to Turkey and India in 2002 and 2003, respectively, and a longer one year expedition to Turkey in 2004 and 2005, which also included shorter stays in Cyprus, Syria, and Egypt. Additionally, the dissertation draws directly from critical theories advanced in the fields of ethnomusicology, cultural anthropology, and ethnochoreology and focuses on the kinesthetic parameters of music, dance, trance, and ritual as well as on broader forms of socio-cultural movement including pilgrimage, cultural tourism, and globalization. These forms of movement are analyzed in four broad categories of music used in worship, including classical Mevlevi music, music of the zikr ceremony, popular musics, and non-Turkish musics.

Cyclic Pursuit: Symmetry, Reduction and Nonlinear Dynamics

In this dissertation, we explore the use of pursuit interactions as a building block for collective behavior, primarily in the context of constant bearing (CB) cyclic pursuit. Pursuit phenomena are observed throughout the natural environment and also play an important role in technological contexts, such as missile-aircraft encounters and interactions between unmanned vehicles. While pursuit is typically regarded as adversarial, we demonstrate that pursuit interactions within a cyclic pursuit framework give rise to seemingly coordinated group maneuvers. We model a system of agents (e.g. birds, vehicles) as particles tracing out curves in the plane, and illustrate reduction to the shape space of relative positions and velocities. Introducing the CB pursuit strategy and associated pursuit law, we consider the case for which agent i pursues agent i+1 (modulo n) with the CB pursuit law. After deriving closed-loop cyclic pursuit dynamics, we demonstrate asymptotic convergence to an invariant submanifold (corresponding to each agent attaining the CB pursuit strategy), and proceed by analysis of the reduced dynamics restricted to the submanifold. For the general setting, we derive existence conditions for relative equilibria (circling and rectilinear) as well as for system trajectories which preserve the shape of the collective (up to similarity), which we refer to as pure shape equilibria. For two illustrative low-dimensional cases, we provide a more comprehensive analysis, deriving explicit trajectory solutions for the two-particle "mutual pursuit" case, and detailing the stability properties of three-particle relative equilibria and pure shape equilibria. For the three-particle case, we show that a particular choice of CB pursuit parameters gives rise to remarkable almost-periodic trajectories in the physical space. We also extend our study to consider CB pursuit in three dimensions, deriving a feedback law for executing the CB pursuit strategy, and providing a detailed analysis of the two-particle mutual pursuit case. We complete the work by considering evasive strategies to counter the motion camouflage (MC) pursuit law. After demonstrating that a stochastically steering evader is unable to thwart the MC pursuit strategy, we propose a (deterministic) feedback law for the evader and demonstrate the existence of circling equilibria for the closed-loop pursuer-evader dynamics.

Assessing the viability of studying motion indicators of autism spectrum disorders in infants at high and low risk for ASD using a passive motion capture system

Gemstone Team AMIRA

The effect of collagen organization on tensile strength loss in anterior cruciate ligament grafts post-reconstruction surgery

Gemstone Team LEGS