Starting in the late 18th century a development is observable in which a new theatrical aesthetic of dramatic speech exploiting the musical potential of the voice went hand in hand with an abundance of melo-dramatic forms. Cutting across the boundaries of genre and the customary distinction between spoken art and music, theoreticians and practitioners explored the declamatory use of speech as a musical phenomenon in its own right. The present interdisciplinary study examines the development of this historical combination of the speaking voice and the musical arts, concentrating in particular on the profusion of different forms of 'Melodram' in the period in question.

This book presents the lecture notes of the 1st Summer School on Methods and Tools for the Design of Digital Systems, 2015, held in Bremen, Germany. The topic of the summer school was devoted to modeling and verification of cyber-physical systems. This covers several aspects of the field, including hybrid systems and model checking, as well as applications in robotics and aerospace systems. The main chapters have been written by leading scientists, who present their field of research, each providing references to introductory material as well as latest scientific advances and future research directions. This is complemented by short papers submitted by the participating PhD students.