Music Theory Commons^™

Conga Santiaguera: A Century Of Innovation And Competition, Nick Herman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Santiago de Cuba is home to the island’s biggest, oldest, and most famous carnival.  Any local resident will confirm that “sin conga no hay carnaval (without conga there is no carnival).” In Santiago, conga refers to a vibrant street procession, the music that drives it, and the ensemble that makes the music.  Conga Santiaguera: A Century of Innovation and Competition presents a musical history of the conga from roughly 1910 to 2010.  This project, https://cuny.manifoldapp.org/projects/conga employs an eBook, musical analysis, oral histories, and audiovisual media to show how the conga has been constantly reinvigorated by innovation, competition, and Afro-Diasporic …

Reimagining Puerto Rican Sonic Identity: Musical Style And Creation After Hurricane María., Gabriel E. Bouche Caro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the manifestation of Puertorriqueñidad (Puerto Rican identity) in concert music composed after Hurricane María (2017), a catastrophe that catalyzed a profound shift in Puerto Rico's cultural consciousness. Focusing on four composers whose early careers were shaped by this period—Johanny Navarro, John Rivera Pico, Iván E. Rodríguez, and Christian Quiñones—the study combines close readings of scores and recordings with extensive original interviews to understand how musical identity is constructed in the wake of collective trauma. The analysis reveals that while the composers share a generational bond, their aesthetic practices are strikingly diverse: Navarro preserves Afro-Caribbean rhythmic structures, Rivera …

Hegemonic Microtonality: Decolonizing The Soundscape Of Music Theory Pedagogy, Ash K. Wetty

Honors Theses

This thesis examines how Western music theory pedagogy—long organized around tonal and twelve-tone equal-temperament frameworks—structures both what is taught and how students are trained to listen. Through a literature review tracing the historical construction of tonal universality in undergraduate curricula, the project argues that dominant models of music theory reproduce broader epistemic hierarchies inherited from Western conservatory traditions. Situating these histories within my own experience as a student navigating institutional listening norms, the thesis combines critical self-reflection with ethnographic research conducted across five liberal arts institutions, including the CBB consortium and JanPlan research at Wesleyan University and Amherst College. Rather …

The Public Relations Of Microtonal Music Through The Eyes And Ears Of Microtonalists, Tristan B. Young

Anthós

In this article, I attempted to answer the question of how microtonal musicians and music theorists view the general public's perception of microtonal music. To do this, I had three one-on-one interviews and one focus group with microtonal musicians, which were all audio recorded with consent from the participants. Patterns that emerged from their responses included blaming corporate and academic establishments for their conservatism in music theory, mentioning the different possible definitions one may make for microtonality based on geographic culture and so on, and bringing up the idea that people think that microtonality is less diverse than it actually …

Black On Black Sounds: Music, Migration, And The ‘Nu-K Blak’ Identity Formation In Early 21st Century Britain, Monique Charles

Sociology Faculty Articles and Research

Examining literature on the under researched areas of Afrobeats and African migration to Britain, this article identifies significant internal shifts in the ethnic diversity of Black Britain —i.e., from Caribbean (predominantly Jamaican) to West African (Nigerian, Ghanaian) (ONS 2011). Interpreting literature and applying to the British context, it highlights how Afrobeats reshapes Blackness in Britain, particularly the incorporation of desirable Africanness through Afrobeats music. It argues that demographic and musical shifts in Britain result in a renegotiation of the Caribbean and US dominant 20th century Black Britishness — ‘UK Blak’ identity (as identified by Bradley 2013, Gilroy 1993 & Palmer …

Structural Models For Lyric-Setting Analysis In Popular Song, Matthew T. Hough

Gamut: Online Journal of the Music Theory Society of the Mid-Atlantic

Studies of English text setting have long focused on "well-formed" examples, typically in 4/4 time, in which syllabic-stress-to-beat matching is prioritized (Halle and Lerdahl 1993, Hayes and Kaun 1996, Hayes 2009). Evidence of this prioritization has been presented in Palmer and Kelly 1992 and Girardi and Plag 2019, and such examples are ubiquitous in English-language nursery rhymes, children’s songs, and folk tunes. The present study contextualizes this type of text setting as one of four models for the structural interaction of English lyrics and music in popular song: 1) unified ("well-formed"), in which musical considerations and a preference for stress …

Learning Paradigms For Rhythm Detection And Generation Using Mathematical Models, Biophysical And Artificial Neural Networks, Prianka Bose

Dissertations

Humans possess an inherent ability to recognize evenly-spaced rhythms, known as isochronous rhythms, owing to the brain's predisposition to entrain to external auditory stimuli with regular temporal intervals. The central focus of this research is to understand how the brain learns and retains rhythmic time intervals in the context of music. This dissertation studies rhythm detection and generation through mathematical models, biophysical networks, and artificial neural networks, addressing both isochronous and non-isochronous patterns.

A primary focus of the thesis is on isochronous rhythms. In particular, given a perturbation to an isochronous rhythm such as a tempo change or phase shift …

Musical Semiotics In Kate Soper’S Ipsa Dixit (2010–2016), Scott A. Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the six parts of Kate Soper’s Ipsa Dixit (2010–2016). While individual parts have received some music theoretical attention, this is the first analysis of the entire Pulitzer Prize-nominated work. Ambiguity and contingency are major themes of Ipsa Dixit, and by treating each part independently and in combination, I hope to honor Ipsa’s contingent status as a unified work comprised of six complete works. Soper’s libretto unifies an assemblage of texts with adaptations of Aristotle to investigate the intersections of language and music with authority, veracity, and (un)intelligibility.

I theorize that Soper’s “philosophy-opera” dramatizes the formation of …

Kajian Konseptual Silabel Ritme Gandang Minangkabau, Aryuda Fakhleri Fallen, Yudi Sukmayadi, Tati Narawati

Paradigma: Jurnal Kajian Budaya

This article tryes to initiate the concept of Minangkabau rhythm syllables, which is a method in music learning related to audiation in rhythm learning, the urgency in this study explores the basic elements of the audiation system that can be applied to music learning related to rhythm syllables based on local approaches, taking into account previous concepts that have been popular in recent schools. In West Sumatra, the concepts of syllable rhythm such as Zoltan Kodaly, Kannokol, American Style Syllables, and Edwin Gordon are not so popular, but environments such as schools and art studios have their own ways of …

Componiendo El Núcleo: Una Exploración De La Bomba Y La Identidad Afroecuatoriana En El Valle De Chota, Ethan Guok

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Este proyecto se centra en la bomba, una tradición musical y de danza afroecuatoriana que se practica en el valle del Chota, situado entre las provincias de Imbabura y Carchi, pero también más ampliamente en el Territorio Ancestral que comprende el valle del Chota, La Concepción, Salinas y Guallupe. Históricamente y en la actualidad, la bomba ha desempeñado un papel importante en la creación de comunidad y la preservación de la identidad cultural afrochoteña, y el conocimiento de cómo tocar la bomba se ha transmitido intergeneracionalmente a través de la tradición oral. Sin embargo, como tradición negra y oral, la …

Analysis And Performance Of Osvaldo Golijov’S Hebreische Milonga, Gerardo Sanchez Pastrana

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Argentinian composer Osvaldo Golijov is one of the most important and well-recognized composers of the 21^st century. His works are unique because of the diverse mixing of styles due to the interculturalism present in his music. In the program notes of his Hebreische Milonga, Golijov mentions that this piece can connect his Argentinian and Jewish roots as well as the influence of Astor Piazzolla’s music. In addition, there is a connection between the tango and the Jewish people residing in Buenos Aires, Argentina, that is not addressed frequently when discussing the history of the tango. This research begins …

The Significance Of Sonic Branding To Strategically Stimulate Consumer Behavior: Content Analysis Of Four Interviews From Jeanna Isham’S “Sound In Marketing” Podcast, Ina Beilina

Student Theses and Dissertations

Purpose:
Sonic branding is not just about composing jingles like McDonald’s “I’m Lovin’ It.” Sonic branding is an industry that strategically designs a cohesive auditory component of a brand’s corporate identity. This paper examines the psychological impact of music and sound on consumer behavior reviewing studies from the past 40 years and investigates the significance of stimulating auditory perception by infusing sound in consumer experience in the modern 2020s.

Design/methodology/approach:
Qualitative content analysis of audio media was used to test two hypotheses. Four archival oral interview recordings from Jeanna Isham’s podcast “Sound in Marketing” featuring the sonic branding experts …

A Schema-Theoretic Approach To Hierarchy In Eighteenth-Century Tonality, Simon K. S. Prosser

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Prevalent modern-day theories of tonal hierarchy for eighteenth-century music, especially those influenced by the ideas of Heinrich Schenker, have been called into question by schema theorists such as Robert Gjerdingen and Vasili Byros, who argue from both cognitive and historical evidence that eighteenth-century tonal cognition was sequential or “windowed” rather than hierarchical. This dissertation seeks to recuperate the concept of tonal hierarchy in eighteenth-century music, drawing on research that reconstructs the implicit tonal theories of the partimento and thoroughbass traditions, as well as concepts of hierarchy from schema theory itself, to formulate a historically and cognitively grounded theory of tonal …

Sacred Music In Colonial Era Hispaniola: The Evangelization Of The Taino People, Tito J. Gutierrez

Student Theses

During the 15th-18th centuries, the major European religious orders; the Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and Jeronymites, journeyed to the newly colonized American territories in an attempt to convert the multitudes of natives peoples living there. Along with prayer books, crucifixes, and religious images, these missionaries brought sacred European music to American shores in an attempt to attract the native people to the Catholic faith.The use of music as a tool for conversion of native people in places such as Mexico, South America, California, and the South West United States, have been well researched and documented. However, the research of the spiritual …

Real Rap, Does Authenticity Even Matter In Hip Hop?, Amin Allam

Capstone Showcase

Rap and Hip hop has evolved tremendously since its inception. The collective genre has been catapulted to global influence, where in the United States it represents the largest genre based on market share. After reviewing the history of rap music there is a perceived relationship between hip hop and authenticity. To which the question arose of whether hip hop could maintain authenticity in a commercial sphere. To explore this relationship, after reviewing the literature on authenticity, a model of analysis created by Newman and Smith was used to explore 5years worth of data dealing with the Billboard top 100 list. …

Fostering Music Performers In The 21st Century: A Contemporary Professional Perspective Toward A New Curricular Agenda For Graduate Study In Music, Andre Januario

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

What if the core curriculum for graduate students in music performance were designed to prepare students to succeed in the world of the Fourth Industrial Revolution?

This dissertation offers a hypothetical answer: a structured and systematic academic curricular framework for music graduate students of performance of concert music (especially those in terminal degrees, such as doctoral students), along with music instructors, professional music performers, school administrators, and college professors, seeking to prepare such students for achieving and maintaining a music career more in keeping with the current work environment, especially those skills demanded by the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the …

A Comparative Study On Musicians And Non-Musicians’ Affective Response In Music Listening, Wai Neng Loh

Student Works (2020-2029)

This study examined the affective responses in the music listening among undergraduates’ student using Circumplex Model of Emotion (Russell, 1980). The purpose of this study was to investigate the affective responses of undergraduate music major and non-music major students in music listening to four different music genres, which were classical music, romantic music, atonal music and experimental music. A study involving of 123 participants from undergraduate music major and non-music major students in Klang Valley area was conducted using google form. By using SPSS to tabulate the data, the result showed that there were no major differences between both musicians …

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 …

The Effects Of Music Arousal Level And Tempo On Card Game Players’ Risk-Taking And Eeg Mental State Among Introverts And Extroverts, Hao Yi Ho

Student Works (2020-2029)

This is an experimental quantitative study which examined the effects of music arousal level and tempo on card game players’ risk-taking and EEG mental state among introverts and extroverts. A total of 20 male participants (through selection of 10 introverts and 10 extroverts) aged between 18 – 29 voluntarily participated by playing the card game In-Between. All participants put on the NeuroSky® MindWaveTM Mobile EEG device and played the game while being exposed to various music conditions. The conditions were no-music (control) condition, and a set of both high-arousal (hereafter HA) and low-arousal (hereafter LA) music manipulated to three different …

Peculiar Attunements: How Affect Theory Turned Musical [Table Of Contents], Roger Mathew Grant

Philosophy & Theory

Peculiar Attunements places the recent turn to affect into conversation with a parallel movement that took place in European music theory of the eighteenth century. During that time the affects—or the passions, as they were also called—formed a vital component of a mimetic model of the arts. Eighteenth-century critics held that artworks imitated or copied the natural world in order to produce copies of the affects in their beholders. But music caused a problem for these thinkers, since it wasn’t apparent that musical tones could imitate anything with any dependability (except, perhaps, for the rare thunderclap or birdcall). Struggling to …

Exploring Political Action And Socialization Through Group Improvisation Within The Music Of Frederic Rzewski And Cornelius Cardew, Marcel Rominger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the late 1960s, socialist composers, Cornelius Cardew and Frederic Rzewski, each established ensembles with the purpose of performing works consisting of experimental forms of improvisation. By employing group improvisation, and including untrained, non-musicians within their performances, they strove to use these ensembles as a model for society itself; this model includes a dissolution of the hierarchy among performers and the barrier between performer and audience. Improvisation helped music resist commodification by the culture industry or appropriation by authoritarian regimes for the purpose of propaganda. This dissertation aims to explore how Cardew and Rzewski constituted effective socialization and political action …

Thelonious Monk's Prototypical Style: Close And Distant Readings Of Jazz Stylings, Connor Davis

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Thelonious Monk’s style has been considered non-conformist, modernist, technically stilted, intentionally unconventional, even incompetent. His performing is idiosyncratic, to say the least. However, by what metric is his performing idiosyncratic, or, framed another way, in what ways do Thelonious Monk’s performances deviate from the prototypical performance? Situated within family resemblance theories of prototypicality, I utilize supervised and unsupervised machine learning approaches to categorize jazz solos based on their melodic usage of standard jazz language (novel corpus of 530 jazz solo improvisations). Using these distant readings to determine which solos are prototypical, I perform a close reading of these prototypical solos …

Modeling Melodic Dictation, David John Baker

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Melodic dictation is a cognitively demanding process that requires students to hear a melody, then without any access to an external reference, transcribe the melody within a limited time frame. Despite its ubiquity in curricula within School of Music settings, exactly how an individual learns a melody is not well understood. This dissertation aims to fill the gap in the literature between aural skills practitioners and music psychologists in order to reach conclusions that can be applied systematically in pedagogical contexts. In order to do this, I synthesize literature from music theory, music psychology, and music education in order to …

Effects Of Genre Tag Complexity On Popular Music Perception And Enjoyment, Lauren Shepherd

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The popular online streaming platform Spotify added over 1400 genre tags in the last two years. Despite that numerous artists and composition competitions claim to seek projects that “transcend the traditional notion of genre,” the industry has only added more complex and mystifying genre labels. This dichotomy between artists and industry ignores the effects these labels have on consumers. Do more complex genre tags enhance the listening experience for the average consumer by providing additional information about what they are about to hear? The current research seeks to examine the effects of the granularity of genre tags on popular music …

Iverson, Jennifer. 2018. Electronic Inspirations: Technologies Of The Cold-War Musical Avant Garde. New York: Oxford University Press., Theodore B. Gordon

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Interactive Sonification Strategies For The Motion And Emotion Of Dance Performances, Steven Landry

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The Immersive Interactive SOnification Platform, or iISoP for short, is a research platform for the creation of novel multimedia art, as well as exploratory research in the fields of sonification, affective computing, and gesture-based user interfaces. The goal of the iISoP’s dancer sonification system is to “sonify the motion and emotion” of a dance performance via musical auditory display. An additional goal of this dissertation is to develop and evaluate musical strategies for adding layer of emotional mappings to data sonification. The result of the series of dancer sonification design exercises led to the development of a novel musical sonification …

Music Theory And The Epistemology Of The Internet; Or, Analyzing Music Under The New Thinkpiece Regime, William O'Hara

Sunderman Conservatory of Music Faculty Publications

Over the past twenty-five years, the growth of the Internet has completely transformed journalism and media. «The relationship between new media and journalism», write Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis, «has become a close embrace to the point where it is difficult to imagine an exclusively offline journalism» [Siapera-Veglis 2012, 1]. This relationship has not only seen existing publications - from traditional newspapers like The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel to magazines like The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and The London Review of Books - move partially …

Splendid Disarray: The Music Of Andrew Mckenna Lee, Nina Berman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The music of composer Andrew McKenna Lee spans multiple genres and styles, and does so in a way that draws parallels to the New York City downtown new music scene as well as the progressive and experimental rock scenes. These connections are especially apparent when looking at his 2013 song cycle The Knells, written for Lee’s ensemble, also called The Knells, which he assembled expressly for the purpose of performing this work. The band consists of three female singers singing without vibrato, backed by a rock group, plus percussion and string quartet. Lee deploys these forces to create a sound …

Do Different Music Genres Differentially Affect Autonomic Activity? How Music And Sound Affect Autonomic Activity Aroused By Visual Stimuli, Andrew Manson

Online Theses and Dissertations

The primary researcher sought to determine whether different genres of music would differentially influence measures of autonomic nervous system activity (heart rate, galvanic skin response) while viewing visual stimuli in a sample of college students. All participants listened to the same songs and music genres and viewed the same International Affective Picture System (IAPS) images. Autonomic nervous system activity was recorded by attaching electrodes to participants' non-dominant hand and torso. Music order presentation and picture order presentation were randomly determined by E-Prime. Heart rate and skin conductance responses were both significant, with melodic metal music inducing greater intensity of responses …

Music, Politics, And Sociality: Ethnic Tensions And The Performance Of Gikuyu Nationalism, Peter Njagi Mwangi

Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs

This thesis examines how some selected Gikuyu popular music propagates ethnic tensions in Kenya by promoting Gikuyu nationalism at the expense of Kenyan nationalism. This music derives its themes from the historical period of the Mau Mau armed struggle against British colonists and connects this struggle with everyday experiences of the Gikuyu people. Memory and the performance of everyday life in this music solidifies the Gikuyu community as tied to a common destiny and distances other Kenyan communities from this destiny. The music consolidates Gikuyu ethnic nationalism and authenticates the position of the community as superior and a dominant force …