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In this dissertation, I will analyze and discuss the three pieces presented in Breaking news, a program of original percussion works I presented on January 13, 2008 in the Mandeville Recital Hall at the University of California, San Diego. This program represents my musical investigations of percussion as influenced by various aspects of television news, including its form, speech, and content. The first work, Another border crossing, is a solo for Persian tombak and pre-recorded sound that draws from both traditional Persian music and an Iranian newscast. News between copies, which focuses on local American news anchors, is a solo featuring a metal plate instrument sculpture with video and pre-recorded sound. Last on the program, Cloudy but sunny is a percussion trio accompanied by video and pre-recorded sound that navigates through three simultaneous half-hour US newscasts. In addition, I will illustrate the musical and social reasons why the news became my source for musical inspiration. As a part of that discussion, I will trace the development of this program by addressing specific works that reflect my previous exploration of speech and the news. I will also explain how the work from this program carries over and influences other areas of my musical efforts, such as my approach to other composers' work and my multi- disciplinary collaboration. It is through these analyses that I will examine my identity as a percussionist in light of the issues and demands of the Breaking News program

This dissertation presents two extensions to the phase vocoder method of sound analysis and synthesis, as well as an examination of the author's spectral subtraction audio works based on the phase vocoder. The phase vocoder technique has proved to be an effective method of "time stretching" musical sounds, however, some musical features of the original sounds are not maintained during the transformation. We consider here maintaining two of these aspects: noise levels, and sub-audio (vibrato and tremolo) characteristics within the phase vocoder. The noise levels are maintained by determining the "sinusoidality" of each spectral component, separating the spectral energy into sinusoidal and noise energy based on these sinusoidality measurements, and modulating the noise based spectrum before re-synthesizing with the traditional IFFT method. The vibrato and tremolo (sub-audio modulation) rates of a sound are maintained by modeling each channel of the phase vocoder in a higher order spectral domain, removing the modulations in this domain, and re-imposing them after time-dilation. Finally, several of the author's audio works involve use of the phase vocoder representation of sound to subtract spectral components from a long term average of a time varying sound. These works will be considered along with their aesthetic motivations and technical implementations