Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Historical Narrative In The Music Of Sid Meier’S Civilization Vi, Alec Larner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Sid Meier’s Civilization VI is a 2016 strategy video game in which the player leads a historical civilization from 4000 BC to the present. The Civilization series is the subject of much scholarly writing, especially its representation of history and non- Western cultures. My work builds on Karen Cook’s research (2014) on the technological progress and American hegemonic identity signaled by Civilization IV’s soundtrack. I argue that the music in Civilization VI contributes to a Eurocentric teleological progress narrative of history inherent in the structure of the game: the idea that history is a story of inevitable and positive …

Accompanied Solo: A Singer/Songwriter's Look Into The Music Industry From Design To Debut Album, Vivienne Mccracken

Honors Theses

Vivi McCracken is my self-titled debut Extended Play Record (or EP) that consists of five original songs. This project encompasses all of my creative passions, with the aim of gaining knowledge of the music industry and what it takes to debut an album from concept to completion. I wrote the music, sang the songs for the recordings, and, for my BFA thesis exhibition, I designed all the graphics, merchandise, and collateral.

The cover art is intentionally minimal. I wanted the imagery to be the main focus, so I chose a condensed sans serif typeface that felt playful enough to complement …

Elsewhere: In Defense Of Daydreaming, Alex Braden

MFA in Visual Art

Much like music, organic life is an absurd, improbable, and serendipitous instance. I set circular, electric, acoustic, and magnetic forces in motion and allow them to coalesce freely in the hopes of synthesizing unexpected moments of beauty, connection, and harmony.

Music Lessons, Cecilia-Rose Louise Bender

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

music lessons is a digital chapbook that explores the relationships between James Baldwin’s writing and Beauford Delaney’s paintings through music. From Delaney’s “Composition 16” (1954-56) to Baldwin’s “The Uses of the Blues” (1964), their collaboration with the core elements of jazz music gives their work rhythm and melodic contour that any/body can vibe with. Absorbing the influences of artists Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and putting them to paint and text, music lessons demonstrates how music not only transforms the ways we experience and move our bodies but also the ways that we perceive space, relationships, and time. What’s …

Goodbye? Reflections And Stream Of Consciousness On, Underneath And Around The Creation Of “Hello?”, Leonard Shevel Gurevich

Senior Projects Spring 2023

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

From Silence To Forte: Developing An Inclusive Space For Persian Musicians To Flourish, Sholeh Salimi

Theses and Dissertations

Music serves as a reflection of culture and conveys various emotional and intellectual states, such as a nation's perspective, social attitudes, and historical background. However, the Iranian revolution in 1979 led to the ban of music by the new regime, limiting the output and audience for Iranian music. In addition, the emergence of Western music accessibility through technology posed challenges for traditional Persian music, and the government's restrictions on music further compounded the problem. To support and advance the preservation and dissemination of Iranian music, this study aims to explore how an interior designer can create a space that enables …

Take Flight Music Festival Branding, Maxwell Bo Chen, Jake Oxenham

Graphic Communication

We created a branding and design campaign for the Take Flight music festival on campus. The project covered many aspects of event creation and marketing such as name, logo, content creation, social media, printed media, vendor outreach, and administration outreach. All these pieces had to work together to create a strong and cohesive brand image for this event which would help ensure a successful turnout and event overall.

Khruangbin On Tour, Meghan Eileen Connolly

Graphic Communication

My senior project, Khruangbin On Tour, creates the opportunity to ideate and promote Khruangbin’s, a three-person band, tour through branding and merchandise. The goal is to create visuals, such as a poster or t-shirt design, to complement their songs and the band as a whole through the use of color palettes, typography, objects and illustrations. The music’s feeling and aesthetic should be reflected in the visual aspects as it represents the artist overall and speaks to the audience.

Studio Expressive Arts Therapy: Towards A Classroom Method That Incorporates Art And Music, Michael Greenberg

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis explored the ways in which expressive arts therapy (ExAT) could be incorporated into a small therapeutic high school’s visual arts program. Through the development and implementation of a method, intermodal exchange between visual art and music was integrated into both the school’s art program and its group counseling offerings. Informed by a literature review of studio art therapy (SAT) as related to ExAT, three different interventions were used to fit within the frameworks of the high school’s offerings. The first intervention focused on making music with a few students within art classes while the rest of the class …

Signal To Noise: Harmonic Temperaments And Patterns Of Interference, Dylan A. Marcheschi

Theses and Dissertations

An audio/visual exploration of historical tuning systems. Most contemporary Western audiences will seldom if ever encounter harmony outside of post-Renaissance tuning conventions. This presentation highlights some of those pre-orthodox harmonic relationships which existed throughout most of history. The corresponding paper documents correlates in recent advances of acoustic ecology.

Counterpoint: Music And Art Education, Eileen Kosasih

MA Projects

Music education programming is generally not as accessible or available as museum education programming. General music illiteracy and the elitism of music education perpetuate a cycle of inaccessibility and lack of understanding of the value of music education. Meanwhile, the auditory art form is a fundamental component of culture, society, and history. Music’s language and history should be understood and appreciated widely. Art museum education programmers can work with music educators, music historians, and classical music programmers to incorporate music education into museum education programming. This project consists of three parts. The first section advocates the inclusion of music education …

Exploring The Relationship Between Music And Art Through Paint And Performance, Anna Eyink

Honors Projects

This project sought to find methods for translating musical compositions into visual compositions. After thorough analysis of each piece's structure, colors, rhythms, tonality, accompaniment, purpose, and extramusical influences, the goal was to conceptualize appropriate color schemes, shapes, mark making, paint application, and arrangements to create a visual representation of the music. As a result, each painting has elements that make sense from a musician's perspective as well as that of an artist.

Branding On A Budget: Marketing In The Nonprofit Sector, Nicholas Biere

Honors Projects

“Branding on a Budget: Marketing in the Nonprofit Sector” This service learning project combines academic research with experiential service learning. The purpose of this project was to create a strong brand for BeInstrumental, a nonprofit music education organization from Toledo, Ohio through the creation of a graphic branding plan. Principles of visual communication technology, graphic design, marketing strategies, branding, and graphic design are all implemented in this project.

Mobile Music Development Tools For Creative Coders, Daniel Stuart Holmes

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This project is a body of work that facilitates the creation of musical mobile artworks. The project includes a code toolkit that enhances and simplifies the development of mobile music iOS applications, a flexible notation system designed for mobile musical interactions, and example apps and scored compositions to demonstrate the toolkit and notation system.

The code library is designed to simplify the technical aspect of user-centered design and development with a more direct connection between concept and deliverable. This sim- plification addresses learning problems (such as motivation, self-efficacy, and self-perceived understanding) by bridging the gap between idea and functional prototype …

Expanding Experimentalism: Art And Popular Music At The Kitchen In New York City, 1971-1985, Sarah A. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores artists' engagement with popular music at the interdisciplinary alternative space, the Kitchen, from 1971 to 1985. It seeks a critical language to challenge institutional frameworks to account for the creative output of artists' bands and the relationship between parallel and hybrid popular music and avant-garde performance practices.

Audio To Architecture: House Music As A Form Generator, Polina Timchenko

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Contemporary music undergoes similar process of creation to that of the design process through computation and variation. House music as a representation of contemporary culture has a layered structure that allows specific characteristics to identify it as house music. Song components can vary and mix in different orders that form new dynamic compositions. I am going to explore the idea that every house music component can be translated into geometry with the use of parametric design techniques.

Real Goner, Nicholas Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis paper is to tell the story behind, and outline the theoretical and conceptual framework underlying the exhibition, Real Goner. The exhibition combines a number of elements drawn from music and art history, as well as the theoretical writings of Albert Camus, Guy Debord, and Joseph Kosuth. Together, these elements produce a cryptic exhibition that attempts to address the inherent chaos, and apparent meaninglessness of existence; and to see art as a proposition, a performance, and a practice. The exhibition addresses issues of celebrity, the production and consumption of culture, and where that cycle leaves us …

Music & Media: A Senior Recital & Honors Project, Kayla Luteran

Honors Projects

Music & Media: A Senior Recital & Honors Project is a cross-media marketing strategy. The main purpose of this project was to develop visually appealing, informative graphic elements and branding to effectively promote a musical performance. This is interdisciplinary in nature and includes written and oral communication.

While many music students post about their senior recital on social media or place flyers, they do not develop a thorough methodology for generating buzz about their event. Although musical preparation is of utmost importance for a performance, I believe that time should be spent on all aspects of planning the recital. With …

Music From The Harpsichord House, Julie Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

Music from the Harpsichord House is an installation and series of concerts that exists in the binary of in and out of performance. During a concert, the harpsichordist is hidden inside the house and his face is live-projected outside. Fifteen new musical compositions were commissioned for the harpsichord house.

Music And Art: An Aesthetic Experience, Samantha Martin

Honors Projects

This project sought to pair art songs performed at my senior recital with paintings. The paintings chosen had to be within one hundred years of the songs’ composition, from the same country as the composer, and have a similar theme or meaning as the art song. The goal was to create an aesthetic experience, as well as making the meanings of the songs more accessible for the audience, especially if the songs were in a foreign language.

Look At Where You Listen: A Study Of Commercial Music And Mediation, Thomas Walton Moore

Senior Projects Spring 2017

A joint senior project submitted to the divisions of arts and social studies. This project aims to reconsider the 'album' as a format of music distribution that has effects on the consumption-of and relationship-with music as commodity. This project consists of writing and recorded-music-making. Please email tom (at) dpimusic (dot) com for a link.

Sound And Vision: Marketing Recorded Music In The Age Of Radio, Daniel Martin Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

In the early 1930s, the popularity of radio and the economic austerity of the Great Depression threatened to make the phonograph record obsolete. However, by the time the United States entered World War II in 1941, records were returning to popularity. This return coincided with the first instances of the appearance of unique cover artwork on record albums. This thesis explores the cultural and industrial factors that converged in the late 1930s to make album artwork viable in ways that it would not have been earlier. This thesis also investigates how RCA Victor and Columbia, two record companies that had …

Drawing Numbers And Listening To Patterns, Loren Zo Haynes

Honors College Theses

The triangular numbers is a series of number that add the natural numbers. Parabolic shapes emerge when this series is placed on a lattice, or imposed with a limited number of columns that causes the sequence to continue on the next row when it has reached the kth column. We examine these patterns and construct proofs that explain their behavior. We build off of this to see what happens to the patterns when there is not a limited number of columns, and we formulate the graphs as musical patterns on a staff, using each column as a line or space …

Brand Identity For New Artists In The Music Industry, Drea Achacoso

Graphic Communication

The purpose of this study was to evaluate the aspects of brand identity and apply it to new artists in the music industry. The research from this study was applied to Hills & Strongholds, an aspiring alternative rock band. Designs were created for the band’s brand identity on multiple platforms that attempted to portray the band’s musical vision. A survey was conducted to determine which logo and album artwork designs were able to effectively transport the bands genre and vision based on the audience’s perception. The results of this study can be used to develop Hills & Strongholds into a …

Poiesthetic Play In Generative Music, John Priestley

Theses and Dissertations

Generative music creates indeterminate systems from which music can emerge. It provides a particularly instructive field for problems of ontology, semiotics, aesthetics, and ethics addressed in poststructuralist literary theory. I outline how repetition is the ultimate basis of musical intelligibility and of memory in general. The extension of these abstractions beyond tonal music to sound in general is afforded by the concrete iterability of audio recording media. Generative systems delineate a music that is repeatable in principle and in certain qualities, though not in specific forms; a music that produces emergent complexities from novel combinations, retaining the potential to surprise. …

Luce E Ombre - Light And Shadows, Robert L. Foah

Art and Design Theses

This thesis focuses on the oppositional and complimentary forces of light and shadows in the culture of Naples, Italy. Demonstrating, through photographs and the analysis of these photographs, how the light of Naples, a ‘northern’ light, and its resultant shadows echo (metaphorically and in reality) the light and shadows of the society, culture and history of Naples, Italy.

Renditions, Nathan Halverson

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis includes ideas and explorations behind my MFA thesis work and the work that that preceded it in late 2010 and early 2011. In it, I use a creative text by Gertrude Stein, in which she reveals ways that writing reveals and creates language and culture, to illustrate similar ideas regarding field recording and appropriation in my art practice. I use this thesis writing to investigate practices and relationships between media and how these practices can encourage an active, participatory, listening and looking. It also contains discussion of the use of popular music in torture, which inspired Rendition(s), and …

Nota: A Mark Or Sign, Claire Knob Paul

Art and Design Theses

“Nota” is a merging language of sound, instruction, and visual elements from the unique experience of performing on a wind instrument. I create improvisational drawings inspired by the nature of improvisational sound, performance, and the reflection of moment making. These works are tied to my interest in the human body and its endless variations. The anthropomorphic nature of these instruments ties closely to the human element of touch and breathing. As a focus for this experience, I create drawings that are inspired by the essence of communicating through touch what I am often trying to communicate though musical performance. The …

Argent Sound Recordings: Multimodal Storytelling, Matthew L. Klimas

Theses and Dissertations

ARGENT SOUND RECORDINGS explores the integration of visual, written and sonic elements to tell a story. "The Silver Bell," a fairy tale, is delivered through the internet – providing users an opportunity to experience and interpret a constructed narrative under the guise of an independent record label website.

Building As An Instrument, Catherine Irene Grottenthaler

Theses and Dissertations

The proposal of this thesis project is an exploration of the relationship between music and the built space. The space chosen for design is the first two floors of the Lady Byrd Hat factory located at 140 Virginia St. in the Shockoe Slip area of Richmond, VA. This project proposes the design of the building for the purposes of a music center that will benefit the community by providing music therapy, music and vocal classes, a performance space, and a café. It is to be used as an instrument for communication, health, and education. The main users of the space …