Toward a Quarter-Tone Syntax: Selected Analyses of Works by Blackwood, Hába, Ives, and Wyschnegradsky

UPDATE: It was recently brought to my attention that most of the links to my dissertation pages were not working. I have restored all of the content and most of the playable examples and will continue to patch up the remaining issues as I find them. I am also working to update the images. The 12-year-old image files are starting to look fuzzy, especially on retina monitors.

This is where I am storing copies of my dissertation work. Although it is a web cliché to say that pages are under construction, I think it's fair to say that I still have a lot of work to do to get these pages quite where I want them. I did submit a final draft of my dissertation on Sept. 01, 2006, and defended successfully two weeks later. There were some corrections and improvements to be made, thanks to the probing questions of my committee. The PDFs on this website represent the final version of the dissertation, in the form accepted by the Graduate School at the University at Buffalo.

One of the problems that readers face when confronted with my material is that most will not have any convenient way to play the microtonal examples and so may not get a good sense of how the quarter tones actually sound. My original intent was to render as many of the musical examples (quarter-tone or otherwise) in MIDI format as is practical. At the time, I thought that most browsers would know what to do with .mid files well into the future. However, it turns out that browser MIDI playback did not emerge with any sort of reliable web standard, and so instead I've converted the audio examples into short .mp3 files. The MP3s sound better than MIDIs anyway.