Music Practice Commons^™

Concert Audience Engagement: A Select Overview From The Post-Pandemic World, Payton Gehring

Honors Projects

A select overview of five articles outlining audience engagement practices and how they have changed throughout the 21st century.

Tubular!!: Works For Tuba(S), Christian Bush

Honors Projects

Tubular!! is an album that was produced during the Spring and Summer of 2021. It was made possible through the support of many friends, colleagues, and mentors, and will serve as a cornerstone upon which to build my career as a performer and a recording engineer. The album and liner notes can be found on my website: https://www.christianbush.com/tubular. The appendix at the end of this paper contains screenshots of the website.

Shifting The Paradigm: Revealing The Music Within Music Technology, Julie Bowers

Honors Projects

Examining perceptions of music technology raises questions about why people often overlook music technologists and why people perceive music technologists as a lesser part of the musical experience. The issue of musicianship becomes a key factor in addressing the perceived inferiority of music technologists. The examination of the dominant theory of musical communication will reveal the qualifications for musicianship, and then the work of music technologists will be evaluated using these qualifications. A brief history of music technology will provide general information about the field and a recording session case study will serve as a basis for the assessment of …

Mindfulness And Musicians: An Overview, Stephen Dubetz

Honors Projects

This overview of mindfulness begins with a basic history of the practice and filters chronologically to the application of mindfulness in the lives of modern musicians. From its origins in ancient India to its acceptance into Western culture and its eventual use in clinical, professional, and educational settings, this paper touches briefly on the story of mindfulness as it developed through time. The main questions addressed within are: What is mindfulness? Where does it come from? What use does it have? What fields of Western professional culture have adopted it so far and to what extent? and How can it …

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 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.

Fundamental Frequency Characteristics Of Modal And Vocal Fry Registers, Heidi Brubaker, Jason Albertson Whitfield Ph.D., Jane Schoonmaker Rodgers D.M.A.

Honors Projects

This study examined the distribution of fundamental frequencies in the connected speech of 14 healthy young adults. Acoustic analysis of fundamental frequency was performed on previously collected speech samples of a phonetically balanced reading passage. For the first three sentences of the reading passage, fundamental frequency contours were extracted using PRAAT, a speech analysis software package. The accuracy of these contours were visually verified and manually corrected when needed. The distribution of the fundamental frequency histories for each sample were then analyzed using Gaussian Mixture Model analyses in MATLAB. For most speakers, four statistical modes were identified in the data …