Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Practical Podcasting: A Technical Guide To Producing Studio-Quality Podcasts, Jacob Sarmiento

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

Podcasting exists at the intersection of the technical aspects of audio engineering and disciplines such as journalism and story-telling. Podcasts at KCPR, the student radio station, cover a wide range of topics including the soundscape of the DIY music scene in San Luis Obispo (SLO) on SLO-Fi, the intricacies of navigating SLO on Cal Poly 101, the best of Cal Poly Athletics on The Gallop, and the voices of underrepresented populations on campus on Different Matters. KCPR utilizes podcasts to entertain and inform its audience of the various experiences possible as a Cal Poly student. As a student-run entity, KCPR …

Immerse, Interact, Impact: A Comparative Analysis On Selected Experiential Marketing Activations At Outside Lands Music And Arts Festival 2022, Phoebe R. Saul

Experience Industry Management

The commercial marketplace is becoming increasingly experiential. Experiential marketing activations, particularly those done at music festivals, are emerging as a highly valuable marketing tool to impact brand recognition and loyalty through the creation of unique branded experiences. The purpose of this study was to examine the experiential marketing design practices utilized at selected branded activations within Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival 2022. A comparative analysis was conducted on three selected experiential marketing activations at Outside Lands: The House by Heineken, the Music Den by Toyota, and the Ocean Love Tour by Gray Whale Gin. The findings concluded that the …

Wordmuse, John M. Nelson

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Wordmuse is an application that allows users to enter a song and a list of keywords to create a new song. Built on Spotify's API, this project showcases the fusion of music composition and artificial intelligence. This paper also discusses the motivation, design, and creation of Wordmuse.

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.

The Purpose Of Shanties From The Time Of Sailors To The Musical Masters Of The Twentieth Century, Madison Grant

The Forum: Journal of History

The folk songs of the high seas traveled across hundreds of ships, changed in sound and lyric, and ultimately became known today as maritime folk music. Although many historians choose to analyze maritime history through physical artifacts, one less-appreciated aspect of the sea is known as the sea shanty. With modern musicians paying homage to their older nautical counterparts, the revival of shanty tunes sprung forth an almost lost appreciation into the lives of both historians and musicians alike. Referenced in this essay is the James Madison Carpenter Collection, an array of recorded and inscribed sources of shanty tunes that …

Full Issue

The Forum: Journal of History

No abstract provided.

Development Of A Low-Cost Hybrid Music Synthesizer, Spencer Rollins Drewry

Electrical Engineering

Until recently, affordable music equipment has always been seen as “budget”, providing a poor user experience. Inexpensive equipment was plagued with audible noise, signal integrity issues, and convoluted user interfaces. Companies like Teenage Engineering have proven that this does not have to be the case, in 2019 introducing their "Pocket Operator” series for $89. Due to the modern availability of low cost, high quality, consumer off the shelf [COTS] analog and digital components as well as creative engineering, the quality of inexpensive audio equipment has increased significantly. Despite these industry advances, the market is relatively small and shows a great …

“Beychella:” Beyoncé’S Homecoming To A Futuristic Queer Utopian, Jolie V. Brownell

sprinkle: an undergraduate journal of feminist and queer studies

Beyoncé’s 2018 Coachella performance and 2019 Homecoming film set the stage for a radical Black queer reimagining. Yet, how can Beyoncé—who is straight—be located within a queer critique? In this paper, I argue that through a radical and political expansion of queer, the creative deployment of dis/identification, and the unapologetic expression of the erotic, Beyoncé performs an embodiment of queer of color critique. These creative gestures within “Beychella” invite viewers into a queer futuristic utopian and provide new creative modes to politically inhabit, resist, and reimagine interlocking systems of oppression.

Keywords: Beyoncé, queer, dis/identification, erotic, QoCC, …

Analyzing Perceptions Of Music From A Songwriting Perspective, Jackson Stephen Reynosa

Communication Studies

This study seeks to understand listeners’ perceptions of music from a generational and songwriting approach. A total of 123 participants aged 18 and older took part in an open-ended survey design that measured their subjective music preferences. Four different sections tested participants’ music taste, music tied to generations, an original song made by the researcher, and songwriting in a holistic sense. It was found that participants exercised individualism and authenticity in their responses throughout. By using the Uses and Gratifications Theory, it is explainable that people listened and sought out music for their own unique reasons. By applying Mood Management …

Dynamic Procedural Music Generation From Npc Attributes, Megan E. Washburn

Master's Theses

Procedural content generation for video games (PCGG) has seen a steep increase in the past decade, aiming to foster emergent gameplay as well as to address the challenge of producing large amounts of engaging content quickly. Most work in PCGG has been focused on generating art and assets such as levels, textures, and models, or on narrative design to generate storylines and progression paths. Given the difficulty of generating harmonically pleasing and interesting music, procedural music generation for games (PMGG) has not seen as much attention during this time.

Music in video games is essential for establishing developers' intended mood …

A Dip Into Frank Ocean's Music And Marketing, Katharine E. Gardias

Music

No abstract provided.

Real-Time Audio-Midi Controller, Brian Shino Balberchak

Computer Engineering

Most MIDI controllers used in music production use a regular keyboard to generate the MIDI notes that are sent to the synthesizer. This project aims to provide the user with a different way of generating MIDI data: by playing an instrument of their choice with a passive electronic pickup to generate MIDI notes that correspond with the fundamental frequency of the musical pitch being played. The pitch-detecting algorithm used in this application utilizes a modified form of auto-correlation.

As an embedded systems project that uses signal-processing techniques, the knowledge of topics from the following courses was essential:

EE 211: Op-Amp …

Automatic Music Transcription With Convolutional Neural Networks Using Intuitive Filter Shapes, Jonathan Sleep

Master's Theses

This thesis explores the challenge of automatic music transcription with a combination of digital signal processing and machine learning methods. Automatic music transcription is important for musicians who can't do it themselves or find it tedious. We start with an existing model, designed by Sigtia, Benetos and Dixon, and develop it in a number of original ways. We find that by using convolutional neural networks with filter shapes more tailored for spectrogram data, we see better and faster transcription results when evaluating the new model on a dataset of classical piano music. We also find that employing better practices shows …

Eighteenth Century Women And The Business Of Making Glass Music, Kate M. Hepworth

History

During the relatively short period from the mid-to-late eighteenth century when glass musical instruments were manufactured and gained popularity, several women made names for themselves in the realm of avant-garde musical performance. The lives of three female glass instrument players: Anne Ford, Marianne Davies, and Marianne Kirchgassner, show how these successful performer-entrepreneurs operated in an age of emerging feminine public identity. Their journeys reveal much about the gender dimensions of the age, the role of music in the modern era, the consumption of it, and their approach to business. The financial opportunities presented to women looking to challenge the limitations …

Music Industry Sales: How Streaming Services Such As Spotify, Apple Music And Tidal Affect Album Sales, Gurpreet Bhoot

Journalism

No abstract provided.

Review Of Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm And Noise, Jonathan L. Friedmann

Between the Species

Review of Bug Music: How Insects Gave Us Rhythm and Noise, by David Rothenberg. This book proposes that the human sense of rhythm derived in part from insect sounds.

Music And Language Development: Traits Of Nursery Rhymes And Their Impact On Children's Language Development, Ashley Lauren Gonzalez

Music

From birth--possibly even before birth--the amount and array of external stimuli profoundly affect a child’s cognitive and linguistic development. In addition to verbal communication from parent to child, singing proves to be an integral aid to a child’s development of speech and language, allegedly due to repetitions of words and rhythms. Nursery rhymes are, from infancy, among the most commonly presented forms of musical stimulus for children. The repetitive nature of the nursery rhymes undoubtedly supports language and speech development, but various characteristics of nursery rhymes, specifically pitch interval, meter, phrase length, contour, and harmony, also contribute substantially to the …

The Ideology Of Commodification In The Music Industry, As Exemplified By Taylor Swift, Sydney Taylor Jordan

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.

How To Make The Jailhouse Rock: An Evaluation Of Effective Music Therapy Methods Among Juvenile Offenders, Katelyn Rose Tomasello

Music

No abstract provided.

Pianote: A Sight-Reading Program That Algorithmically Generates Music Based On Human Performance, Drew Schulz

Master's Theses

Sight-reading is the act of performing a piece of music at first sight. This can be a difficult task to master, because it requires extensive knowledge of music theory, practice, quick thinking, and most importantly, a wide variety of musical material. A musician can only effectively sight-read with a new piece of music. This not only requires many resources, but also musical pieces that are challenging while also within a player's abilities.

This thesis presents PiaNote, a sight-reading web application for pianists that algorithmically generates music based on human performance. PiaNote's goal is to alleviate some of the hassles pianists …

Concatenative Synthesis For Novel Timbral Creation, James Eric Bilous

Master's Theses

Modern day musicians rely on a variety of instruments for musical expression. Tones produced from electronic instruments have become almost as commonplace as those produced by traditional ones as evidenced by the plethora of artists who can be found composing and performing with nothing more than a personal computer. This desire to embrace technical innovation as a means to augment performance art has created a budding field in computer science that explores the creation and manipulation of sound for artistic purposes. One facet of this new frontier concerns timbral creation, or the development of new sounds with unique characteristics that …

Project Llama: Making A Cappella Arranging Easier, Jason Lu

Liberal Arts and Engineering Studies

This project was intended to improve the current state of a cappella arranging. It explains the problems with current tools and explores other options.

Smoke & Mirrors, Justin R. Pecot

Music

No abstract provided.

Nocturne: The Life And Music Of Chopin, Bethany Springer

Music

No abstract provided.

M-1: The Mealy Open Source Custom Midi Controller, Garrett Leung, Darren O. Mistica

Electrical Engineering

With the high price of large mixing consoles, aspiring artists are restricted to using a mouse to control digital facsimiles of knobs, faders, switches, and buttons. Though using the software controls is considered a simple task, dedicated hardware allows for tactile, visual, and utility. At a low cost, the heart of the MTech M-1 can be customized and placed into any shell with any combination of controls as possible with the underlying platform.

Modern MIDI controllers require significant physical space due to their preset button layout and space consuming setups. Despite their high price, modern MIDI controllers have only one …

Shaina Levin, Voice Recital, Shaina Michele Levin

Music

Shaina Levin's Senior Vocal Recital. Performance and Program Notes in partial fulfillment of a Bachelors of Music degree at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo.

Leah Ginsky, Mezzo Soprano Senior Recital, Leah Ginsky

Music

A senior vocal recital given by Mezzo Soprano Leah Ginsky and accompanied by Susan Azaret Davies. Selections include French, Italian, German, Spanish, and English arias and art songs.

Consumer Perceptions Of Cross Promotional Strategies: Exploratory Research In The Music And Fashion Industries, Nora E. Heally

Journalism

The aim of this study was to explore how cross-promotion and experiential marketing influence brand building within the context of the music and fashion industries.

A-B testing was used to collect data on user perception of different design elements on a point-of-purchase web page. The data was analyzed to determine which design elements were most successful in positively influencing purchase intent of the user.

Overall, the participants is this study favored the treatment websites (58% average) to the control websites (42% average). To appeal to the consumer and begin the experiential marketing process for an event, a website should contain …

Entering A Musical Haze: How Music Festivals Have Created Their Own Culture, Kaitlyn Weaver

Communication Studies

No abstract provided.