ON THE DIGITAL-POLITICAL TOPOGRAPHY OF MUSIC

The persuasive power of music is often relegated to the dimension of pathos: that which moves us emotionally. Yet, the music commodity is now situated in and around the liminal spaces of digitality. To think about how music functions, how it argues across media, and how it moves us, we must examine its material and immaterial realities as they present themselves to us and as we so create them. This dissertation rethinks the relationship between rhetoric and music by examining the creation, performance, and distribution of music in its material and immaterial forms to demonstrate its persuasive power. While both Plato and Aristotle understood music as a means to move men toward virtue, Aristotle tells us in his Laws, through the Athenian Stranger, that the very best kinds of music can help guide us to truth. From this starting point, I assess the historical problem of understanding the rhetorical potential of music as merely that which directs or imitates the emotions: that which “Soothes the savage breast,” as William Congreve writes. By furthering work by Vickers and Farnsworth, who suggest that the Baroque fascination with applying rhetorical figures to musical figures is an insufficient framework for assessing the rhetorical potential of music, I demonstrate the gravity of musical persuasion in its political weight, in its violence—the subjective violence of musical torture at Guantanamo and the objective, ideological violence of music—and in what Jacques Attali calls the prophetic nature of music. I argue that music has a significant function, and as a non-discursive form of argumentation, works on us beyond affect. Moreover, with the emergence of digital music distribution and domestic digital recording technologies, the digital music commodity in its material and immaterial forms allows for ruptures in the former methods of musical composition, production, and distribution and in the political potential of music which Jacques Attali describes as being able to foresee new political realities. I thus suggest a new theoretical framework for thinking about rhetoric and music by expanding on Lloyd Bitzer’s rhetorical situation, by offering the idea of “openings” to the existing exigence, audience, and constraints. The prophetic and rhetorical power of music in the aleatoric moment can help provide openings from which new exigencies can be conceived. We must, therefore, reconsider the role of rhetorical-musical composition for the citizen, not merely as a tool for entertainment or emotional persuasion, but as an arena for engaging with the political.

Arctic network builders : the Arctic Coal Company's operations on Spitsbergen and its relationship with the environment

In 1906, two American industrialists, John Munroe Longyear and Frederick Ayer, formed the Arctic Coal Company to make the first large scale attempt at mining in the high-Arctic location of Spitsbergen, north of the Norwegian mainland. In doing so, they encountered numerous obstacles and built an organization that attempted to overcome them. The Americans sold out in 1916 but others followed, eventually culminating in the transformation of a largely underdeveloped landscape into a mining region. This work uses John Law’s network approach of the Actor Network Theory (ANT) framework to explain how the Arctic Coal Company built a mining network in this environmentally difficult region and why they made the choices they did. It does so by identifying and analyzing the problems the company encountered and the strategies they used to overcome them by focusing on three major components of the operations; the company’s four land claims, its technical system and its main settlement, Longyear City. Extensive comparison between aspects of Longyear City and the company’s choices of technology with other American examples place analysis of the company in a wider context and helps isolate unique aspects of mining in the high-Arctic. American examples dominate comparative sections because Americans dominated the ownership and upper management of the company.

Relationship between instream habitat characteristics, emergent insects, and riparian bird communities

Streams and riparian areas can be intricately connected via physical and biotic interactions that influence habitat conditions and supply resource subsidies between these ecosystems. Streambed characteristics such as the size of substrate particles influence the composition and the abundance of emergent aquatic insects, which can be an important resource for riparian breeding birds. We predict fine sediment abundance in small headwater streams directly affects the composition and number of emergent insects while it may indirectly affect riparian bird assemblages. Streams with abundant fine sediments that embed larger substrates should have lower emergence of large insects such as phemeroptera, Plecoptera and Trichoptera. Streams with lower emergent insect abundance are predicted to support fewer breeding birds and may lack certain bird species that specialize on aquatic insects. This study examined relationships between streambed characteristics, and emergent insects (composition, abundance and biomass), and riparian breeding birds (abundance and richness) along headwater streams of the Otter River Watershed. The stream bed habitats of seven stream reaches were characterized using longitudinal surveys. Malaise traps were deployed to sample emergent aquatic insects. Riparian breeding birds were surveyed using fixed-radius point-counts. Streams differed within a wide range of fine sediment abundances. Total emergent aquatic insect abundance increased as coverage by instream substrates increased in diameter, while bird community was unresponsive to insect or stream features. Knowledge of stream and riparian relationships is important for understanding of food webs in these ecosystems, and it is useful for riparian forest conservation and improving land-use management to reduce sediment pollution in these systems.

Estimation of vertical groundwater fluxes into a streambed through continuous temperature profile monitoring and the relationship of groundwater fluxes to coaster brook trout spawning habitat

We hypothesized that the spatial distribution of groundwater inflows through river bottom sediments is a critical factor associated with the selection of coaster brook trout (a life history variant of Salvelinus fontinalis,) spawning sites. An 80-m reach of the Salmon Trout River, in the Huron Mountains of the upper peninsula of Michigan, was selected to test the hypothesis based on long-term documentation of coaster brook trout spawning at this site. Throughout this site, the river is relatively similar along its length with regard to stream channel and substrate features. A monitoring well system consisting of an array of 27 wells was installed to measure subsurface temperatures underneath the riverbed over a 13-month period. The monitoring well locations were separated into areas where spawning has and has not been observed. Over 200,000 total temperature measurements were collected from 5 depths within each of the 27 monitoring wells. Temperatures within the substrate at the spawning area were generally cooler and less variable than river temperatures. Substrate temperatures in the non-spawning area were generally warmer, more variable, and closely tracked temporal variations in river temperatures. Temperature data were inverted to obtain subsurface groundwater velocities using a numerical approximation of the heat transfer equation. Approximately 45,000 estimates of groundwater velocities were obtained. Estimated velocities in the spawning and non-spawning areas confirmed that groundwater velocities in the spawning area were primarily in the upward direction, and were generally greater in magnitude than velocities in the non-spawning area. In the non-spawning area there was a greater occurrence of velocities in the downward direction, and velocity estimates were generally lesser in magnitude than in the spawning area. Both the temperature and velocity results confirm the hypothesis that spawning sites correspond to areas of significant groundwater influx to the river bed.

Compensatory growth in moose and its relationship to sex, longevity, intraspecific competition, and senescence

Individual life history theory is largely focused on understanding the extent to which various phenotypes of an organism are adaptive and whether they represent life history trade-offs. Compensatory growth (CG) is increasingly appreciated as a phenotype of interest to evolutionary ecologists. CG or catch-up growth involves the ability of an organism to grow at a faster-than-normal rate following periods of under-nutrition once conditions subsequently improve. Here, I examine CG in a population of moose (Alces alces) living on Isle Royale, a remote island in Lake Superior, North America. I gained insights about CG from measurements of skeletal remains of 841 moose born throughout a 52-year period. In particular, I compared the length of the metatarsal bone (ML) with several skull measurements. While ML is an index of growth while the moose is in utero and during the first year or two of life, a moose skull continues to grow until a moose is approximately 5 years of age. Because of these differences, the strength of correlation between ML and skull measurements, for a group of moose (say female moose) is an indication of that group’s capacity for CG. Using this logic, I conducted analyses whose results suggest that the capacity for CG did not differ between sexes, between individuals born during periods of high and low population densities, or between individuals exhibiting signs of senescence and those that do not. The analysis did however suggest that long-lived individuals had a greater capacity for CG than short-lived individuals. These results suggest that CG in moose is an adaptive trait and might not be associated with life history trade-offs.

Evaluating the relationship between moisture induced expansion and horizontal stress orientation in samples from the nonesuch formation

High horizontal stresses can cause numerous ground control problems in mines and other underground structures ultimately impacting worker safety, productivity and the economics of an underground operation. Mine layout and design can be optimized when the presence and orientation of these stresses are recognized and their impact minimized. A simple technique for correlating the principal horizontal stress direction in a sedimentary rock mass with the preferential orientation of moisture induced expansion in a sample of the same rock was introduced in the 1970s and has since gone un-reported and unused. This procedure was reexamined at a locality near the original test site at White Pine, Michigan in order to validate the original research and to consider its usefulness in mining and civil engineering applications in high horizontal stress conditions. This procedure may also be useful as an economical means for characterizing regional stress fields.