Audio Arts and Acoustics Commons^™

"When I Wore A Younger Man's Clothes": The Nostalgia Topic In The Music Of Billy Joel, Kendall Waters

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

My father and I often listened to Billy Joel together as I grew up, and I eventually formed nostalgic connections to Joel’s music. While music is well known as a conductor of nostalgia, this paper explores the idea that the nostalgia I feel while listening to specific songs in Joel’s catalog is not simply a result of the indexical connections I have built with these tracks. Rather, it is a result of a “nostalgia topic” in Joel’s work. This paper compares the soundtrack and select works from Joel’s catalog to reveal that there is no one gesture, melody, or harmonic …

Generating Acoustic Projections Using 3d Models, Jake A. Brazelton

Senior Honors Projects, 2020-current

Raytracing is used in commercial graphics engines most commonly for lighting effects, but it also has many uses when it comes to acoustic simulation. Adopted directly from these computer graphics programs, the formulas presented herein enable the visualization of acoustic intensity levels throughout a 3D space using Python 3 and the OpenGL library. In addition to visualization, they also provide the ability to calculate the reverberation time and critical distance of an enclosed space in relation to its size and material makeup. The described application bundles all of these components together in a Qt5 application that allows users to view …

Morpho: Expectations & Mutations, Lynda Bostrom

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

Morpho: Expectations & Mutations is a written document accompanying the culmination of my three years painting at a graduate level. The result of which is an autobiographical body of work navigating the tension of being a human with an invisible disease, while straining to understand Western societal constructs of women. I simultaneously reject these fairy tales as a standard recipe for happiness, yet identify with its visual language that is rooted in the vernacular of my generation. Redefining the elements I reject or embrace helps me to look beyond the boundaries of these constructs, and adopt an attitude of curiosity …

Growing Process, Mengjiao Wang

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

My MFA thesis exhibition, “growing process” is inspired by many occurrences in my life, and is especially influenced by my childhood memories. The artworks represent my loneliness and how I face and solve problems, which helped me mature as an adult. This monograph explores the shift and thought process in different life stages.

I join a long tradition of ceramic production in China by using clay as a meaningful material. Clay may contain soil, carcasses and leaves, which decompose in the earth. There is a saying in China that “fallen leaves return to the roots,” which suggests a return to …

Material Poetics, Ellen G. Reid

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

quench: /kwen(t)SH/

a : put out, extinguish

b : to put out the light or fire

c : to cool suddenly by immersion

d : to cause to lose heat or warmth

e : to bring to an end typically by satisfying, damping, cooling, or

decreasing

f : to relieve or satisfy with liquid

This is often how projects begin, a haunting idea, word, or experience inundates my consciousness and sub-consciousness. How could the body directly relate to an experience of quenching? This provoked the idea of the extreme sport: freediving. To adequately depict the definition of quenching, any …

The Incorporation Of Hungarian Folk Song In Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus, Sebastian A. Haboczki

Showcase of Graduate Student Scholarship and Creative Activities

My project is an introductory work that lays the foundations for my graduate dissertation. In this work I have taken numerous Hungarian folk songs and mapped what I consider important elements that identify these melodies as "Hungarian folk music". I then took these elements and compared them to Zoltán Kodály's work Psalmus Hungaricus. As he was commissioned to write this piece for the 50th anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest, the composed material is all original. My argument is that although it is all newly composed material, Kodály clearly uses the elements of Hungarian folk tunes. Whether this …