Theses and Dissertations from UMD

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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2010 - 20162

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    Sonic Movie Memories: Sound, Childhood, and American Cinema
    (2016) Cote, Paul James; Auerbach, Jonathan D.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Though the trend rarely receives attention, since the 1970s many American filmmakers have been taking sound and music tropes from children’s films, television shows, and other forms of media and incorporating those sounds into films intended for adult audiences. Initially, these references might seem like regressive attempts at targeting some nostalgic desire to relive childhood. However, this dissertation asserts that these children’s sounds are instead designed to reconnect audience members with the multi-faceted fantasies and coping mechanisms that once, through children’s media, helped these audience members manage life’s anxieties. Because sound is the sense that Western audiences most associate with emotion and memory, it offers audiences immediate connection with these barely conscious longings. The first chapter turns to children’s media itself and analyzes Disney’s 1950s forays into television. The chapter argues that by selectively repurposing the gentlest sonic devices from the studio’s films, television shows like Disneyland created the studio’s signature sentimental “Disney sound.” As a result, a generation of baby boomers like Steven Spielberg comes of age and longs to recreate that comforting sound world. The second chapter thus focuses on Spielberg, who incorporates Disney music in films like Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Rather than recreate Disney’s sound world, Spielberg uses this music as a springboard into a new realm I refer to as “sublime refuge” - an acoustic haven that combines overpowering sublimity and soothing comfort into one fantastical experience. The second half of the dissertation pivots into more experimental children’s cartoons like Gerald McBoing-Boing (1951) - cartoons that embrace audio-visual dissonance in ways that soothe even as they create tension through a phenomenon I call “comfortable discord.” In the final chapter, director Wes Anderson reveals that these sonic tensions have just as much appeal to adults. In films like The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), Anderson demonstrates that comfortable discord can simultaneously provide a balm for anxiety and create an open-ended space that makes empathetic connections between characters possible. The dissertation closes with a call to rethink nostalgia, not as a romanticization of the past, but rather as a reconnection with forgotten affective channels.
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    "IT LOOKS LIKE SOUND!" : DRAWING A HISTORY OF "ANIMATED MUSIC" IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY
    (2010) Robertson, Emily; Haggh-Huglo, Barbara H.; Music; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In the early 1930s, film sound technicians created completely synthetic sound by drawing or photographing patterns on the soundtrack area of the filmstrip. Several artists in Germany, Russia, England, and Canada used this innovation to write what came to be called "animated music" or "ornamental sound." It was featured in a few commercial and small artistic productions and was enthusiastically received by the public. It was heralded as the future of musical composition that could eliminate performers, scores, and abstract notation by one system of graphic sound notation and mechanized playback. Its popularity among mainstream filmmaking did not last long, however, due to its limited development. The artists drawing animated sound were dependent entirely upon their technological medium, and when the sound-on-film system faded from popularity and production, so did their art. By examining from a musicological perspective, for the first time, specific examples of animated music from the work of Norman McLaren, Oskar Fischinger, Rudolph Pfenninger, and several filmmakers in Russia, this thesis enumerates the techniques used in animated sound. It also explores the process of its creation, adaptation, and decline. In doing so, it reveals an important chapter in the little-known early history of modern synthesized sound alongside the futuristic musical ideas it both answered and inspired.