Music Theory Commons^™

Liquid Tab, Nathan Hulet

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Guitar transcription is a complex task requiring significant time, skill, and musical knowledge to achieve accurate results. Since most music is recorded and processed digitally, it would seem like many tools to digitally analyze and transcribe the audio would be available. However, the problem of automatic transcription presents many more difficulties than are initially evident. There are multiple ways to play a guitar, many diverse styles of playing, and every guitar sounds different. These problems become even more difficult considering the varying qualities of recordings and levels of background noise.

Machine learning has proven itself to be a flexible tool …

Theoretical And Compositional Analysis Of Select Metal Works, Jacob Bird

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper is a comprehensive essay on the history, form, and compositional techniques of Extreme Metal music. Within Extreme Metal this paper will cover three sub-genres using compositions by Burzum, Death, and Gojira. This paper is meant to show a link between the compositional techniques used in Western Classical music and Extreme Metal through analysis of form, harmony, and tonality/modality. The scope of this paper primarily focuses on the popular music form verse/chorus which is compared to a variety of Western Classical music forms. The goal is to promote future research into the Extreme Metal style and other popular music …

The Touch Of Arvo Pärt, Gabriel Lane

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Honors Project Abstract

My project is on the modern Estonian composer, Arvo Pärt and his work Spiegel im Spiegel. Of all the pieces written by Pärt, this is one of his most popular and revered works. It has a major emotional impact on many people who listen to it, but also on me. Through my research, I have discovered compositional techniques which help the work achieve such a profound effect on a listener.

To help show these techniques to the reader, I include handwritten excerpts in my paper. This is also to avoid copyright issues. In each image presented, …

On Unaccompanied Horn Music, Jason D. Klinect

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Unaccompanied music provides a host of challenges for solo musicians, and especially for wind players. The performer cannot rely on accompaniment for embouchure rest or for realization of the harmonic content, due to only being able to play one pitch at a time. An unaccompanied musician has to breathe life into the music by themselves, requiring an intimate knowledge of the music, even moreso than is already required. The pacing of the music, the dynamics, phrasing, and articulation need to be clearly conveyed to the audience by the performer alone. Likely due to the horn not having valves until the …