Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Music Performance Anxiety: Should It Be Addressed In Music Curricula And By Whom?, Kaitlynn Kamer

Honors Projects

Music performance anxiety (MPA) impacts musicians of all skill levels, as demonstrated by existing research on both student and professional musicians. Although most musicians experience MPA, it is not formally addressed in music curriculum. This study seeks to evaluate the views and discourse around MPA in the collegiate music community through a survey of 66 college music students, 17 faculty members, and a series of secondary interviews. Through the results of the surveys and interviews, the thoughts on MPA from both the faculty and student perspective will be discussed. Upon reviewing the results of study, possible avenues for addressing MPA …

The Sounds Of The Shore: An Afrofuturistic Double Record Performed Through Vernacular Technology, Collin Bright

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Predominately white institutions are socially exclusive hostile environments that uphold white heteronormative patriarchal systems (Harper, 2013; Holliday & Squires, 2021; Razzante, 2018). The everyday task of existing on campus is a struggle for students of color as they are asked to enter spaces/places that are not diverse, inclusive, equitable, or accepting. To address the oppressive and dismissive forces of campus, my thesis uses Afrofuturism to reimagine what it means to exist as a student of color at a PWI. Afrofuturism is a “counter-imaginative cultur[al]” aesthetic-based practice that uses creative postcolonial critiques to reimagine future possibilities (Asante & Pindi, 2020; Pirker …

Diversity Of Programming By Race And Gender In College And University Band Concerts, Liz Liss

Undergraduate Honors Theses

While there are many women (and others of non-male genders) as well as people of color who compose for concert bands, they are often not given equitable recognition or representation. Over the past several decades, pushes for diversity within the classical music realm and higher education have sparked numerous discussions surrounding current practices (Bond 2017, 154; Bowman 2020, 10; Cumberledge and Williams 2022, 4; Peters 2016, 22): who are we inviting into our programs, whose music are we playing, and who are we representing? Despite these concerns, there has been very little research to provide answers to these questions within …

Nous Sommes Tous Des « Djadjas » : La Question De L’Identité Dans La Musique Française Et Francophone Au 21^E Siècle, Molly Earle

Honors Theses

Le titre de mon travail fait référence à une chanson qui représente les thèmes de la race,1 du genre, de la transculturalité et de la collaboration musicale : « Djadja », une chanson écrite par la chanteuse franco-malienne Aya Nakamura qui a eu beaucoup de succès en 2018 et puis en 2020 avec le remix en duo avec Maluma, un chanteur colombien. Comme d’autres chansons de Nakamura, « Djadja » utilise des sons africains et urbains, mais l’ajout d’influences latino-américaines a aidé la chanson à toucher une plus grande partie du monde (Nakamura et Maluma). Par exemple, cette chanson est …

Enhancing The Quality Of Life For Senior Citizens: A Facilitator’S Guidebook For Mindful Music And Movement, Shannon Sexton

Mindfulness Studies Theses

Music appreciation and enjoyment enhance well-being throughout the lifespan. The challenges and constraints that people experience as they age can lead to lack of access to music, decreased physical activity, and fewer avenues for creative expression. Group music and movement interventions created for older populations offer opportunities for social connection and improved quality of life. Mindful practices add further benefit when combined with these interventions. Current available programs are scarce and most often do not encompass mixed modalities. In addition, the benefits of these programs do not show long-term sustainability. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the effects …

Celebrity, Music, And Public Persona: A Case Study Of Taylor Swift, Elaina K.M. Junes

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Studies have shown that celebrity culture is one of many significant sources of influence that inform the construction of individuals’ identities as well as their outlook on work, life ambitions, and accomplishment. Celebrity also offers a unique window with which to examine both how social structures operate in the mainstream, and how social inequalities are reproduced. This study utilizes qualitative research methodology by way of longitudinal content analysis to examine how Taylor Swift’s public persona has evolved comparatively throughout the early and late stages of her career, specifically in regard to her gender, age, and music. This study identifies ten …

The Misattuned Music Industry: An Intersubjective Perspective On The Music Industry's Mental Health Crisis, Jonathan Fricke

Graduate School of Professional Psychology: Doctoral Papers and Masters Projects

Research shows that professional musicians tend to experience higher rates of mental health challenges compared to the general population. While there are a number of underlying factors and historical experiences that may help us to better understand these psychological struggles, I will be examining the relational system between musician and the music industry beginning at the time in which an amateur musician transitions to the professional realm. With this transition comes incredible demand and pressure from the industry. Professional musicians are at the mercy of grueling tour schedules where they spend months away from loved ones, must be "on" at …

Polyrhythmic Pathways: Using Bimanual Coordination Research To Develop A New Framework For Practice, Performance, And Pedagogy, Christian Swafford

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This study reviews and compares percussion literature pertaining to polyrhythms and scientific literature pertaining to bimanual coordination. There exists a gap in the pedagogical approach to polyrhythms, and there is much disagreement between common instructional methods, especially when considered against the findings of several bimanual coordination studies. The purpose of this study is to reveal insight to the percussion community that the learning of polyrhythms is facilitated by the brain in novel ways, and the uniqueness of this learning process requires a rethinking of the current pedagogical approach. Percussion articles, method books, popular literature, and music scores are surveyed alongside …

Noted With Honor: Intersections Between Theology, Music Therapy, Psychotherapy, And Original Music Compositions For Hospice Patients, Stanton Nelson

Doctor of Pastoral Music Projects and Theses

This thesis investigates the intersections between theology, music therapy, and psychotherapy when creating a music composition that honors a hospice patient’s walk of faith. A pioneer organization inspiring this thesis is Swan Songs in Austin, Texas, where musical moments are created for the patient and family. However, its model is primarily based on collating previously composed pieces for recitals without a personalized honoring of the patient’s witness of faith. Noted with Honor is an emerging non-profit organization that creates an original work that reflects upon the testimony of the patient and forms a new narrative towards the end of one’s …

Assessing Stress In College Students After Breathing Meditation With And Without Music, Joshua L. Le Clerg

Graduate Theses

College students face increased levels of stress due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which can adversely affect their academic performance. Therefore, it is critical for students to have access to practices that reduce stress, such as breathing meditations and listening to calming music, which are cost effective and require minimal time commitment. This study aimed to examine the efficacy of combining breathing meditation and listening to music for five minutes a day, five days a week, for two weeks. Fifteen undergraduate students completed the study and were randomly assigned to a control group who completed the breathing meditation without music (n=8) …

Belonging And Banding Together: Perspectives And Insights Of Newly Recruited Ell Musicians, Edward Luckey, Edward Luckey, Edward Luckey

Education Doctorate Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to bring forward the lived experiences of English Language Learner (ELL) musicians who were new to the band program as of the Spring of 2021. This study was born out of previous coursework and reflection where it became apparent that more must be done to provide access to our band program for students who are in our ELL program. Therefore, the research question that guides this study is “What are the lived experiences of ELL band students?” The methodology is primarily a pursuit of the stories and lived experiences of the ELLs via a …

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.

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 …

Energy Portraits For Flute, Clarinet In B-Flat, Violin, Cello, Piano, And Percussion, Luis Solis

Music Theses and Dissertations

Energy Portraits is a 25-minute work for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and percussion based on the nine Enneagram personality types. The Enneagram system delves into underlying motivations and thought patterns of different people rather than only external behaviors, so this piece incorporates the typical overall energy of each number as a miniature portrait. The movements are not in the same order as the nine types from the Enneagram but are reordered and renamed for musical reasons. This allows the listeners who are not familiarized with the Enneagram to still understand the theme and energy of each movement.

Flourish is …

Coffee, Music, And Taste: Why We Like What We Like, And Why That Matters, Thomas Curdt

Honor Scholar Theses

Research Questions

In both my research and performance, I will investigate three aspects of taste:

How do we Taste?

• What are the mechanical and physiological mechanisms through which we taste food and hear music?

How do we communicate Taste?

• How do we translate physical senses and taste into language?
• What is the role of metaphor in communicating taste?

How does our worldview affect our Taste?

• How do our emotions affect our taste?
• How does our identities affect our taste?
• How does technology affect our taste?
• How can we be more intentional about our taste?

Square Pegs Community Arts On Campus, Gabrielle Marina Ortega-Miller

MSW Capstones

My capstone project started with a qualitative research study exploring the value of music through the voices of Autistic adults, for without their voices—whether verbal, non-verbal, or verbally limited—it is difficult to know what the value of music is in their lives. The inclusion and leadership of Neurodivergent Black, Indigenous, and students of color (BIPOC) in the UWT Neurodiverse community is one focus of this project; the other is to provide a community space for all Neurodivergent students at UWT to feel welcome and safe, create art, and support each other. Square Pegs Community Arts on Campus is built on …

Eye-Movements Of Vocal Performers Across Experience Levels, Charlotte Kelly

Honors Program Theses

Expertise, such as music expertise, is commonly studied through an analysis of eye-movements. Experts typically have fewer fixations, longer saccade amplitudes, and thus greater perceptual spans when reading music than non-experts. Most musical expertise literature is focused on instrumentalists and sight-reading. The current study aimed to extend the research to include vocalists and to see if there are still expertise effects when both experts and non-experts are familiar with the piece of music. Participants were recruited to sing a piece from their choir once when they had first started learning the piece and again right before their concert. They were …

Administrative Support For Music Education As Predictor Of Music Teacher Motivation, Tamara Myles

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

Public school policies that prioritize the growth and success of core academic subject areas can lead to the neglect or devaluation of other subjects, including music education. Because school administrators act as enforcers of such policies, music teachers may perceive administrators as unsupportive, which may influence these teachers’ motivation. The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which music teachers’ perception of principal support for music education predicted their self-reported motivation for teaching music. Maehr’s personal investment theory, which states that individuals exert greater effort on tasks that exhibit a higher likelihood of equal return, was the …

Music Interventions In The Treatment Of Adolescent Trauma: A Systematic Review, Diana C. Hereld

Theses and Dissertations

As multidisciplinary research continues to uncover the promise of non-invasive interventions such as music in mental health treatment, clinicians, researchers, and music scholars alike have increasingly come together through the field of music psychology. As such, it is unsurprising that some of the most significant findings have come from cross-disciplinary studies in music and medicine. The juxtaposition of music and mental health creates a unique and substantial need for integration of literature across multiple disparate settings, including clinical psychology, education, neuroscience, music therapy, behavioral medicine, and psychiatry. Through methodological application of a textual narrative evidence synthesis, this review examines multiple …

Getting Under Your Skin Until You Jump Out Of It: The Psychological Effects Of Music On The Experience Of Film, Clare Ellen Herzog

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Music is like magic. It can sweep you off your feet and spirit you away to places you never thought possible: it can serve as a teleportation device, achieve time travel, and let us read minds. Some pieces of music exist for their own sake, like Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead, while others accompany different forms of media: ballets such as The Nutcracker and operas like La Bohème are instantly recognizable for their grandiose and immersive scores. For a moment in time, audiences can really believe that they are traveling to a magical world with Clara, and even without the …

Expertise Effects On Visual Change Detection In The Music Reading Domain : Evidence From Eye Movements, Abigail L. Kleinsmith

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

Theoretical perspectives in the chess expertise literature, such as chunking and template theories, assume that experts acquire the ability to process domain-specific visual features as larger patterns. Eye tracking techniques can test predictions derived from these theories, because the eye movement record provides fine-grained information about where and when experts are looking during a domain-specific task. In this dissertation, I assessed the generalizability of chunking and template theories to the domain of music reading expertise with a novel music-related variant of the flicker paradigm. Across twoexperiments, I monitored the eye movements of 60 expert musicians (with at least 10 years …

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 …

"I Can't Breathe": Toward A Pneumatology Of Singing And Missional Musicking For Racial Justice In Jacksonville, Florida, Thomas Shapard

Doctor of Pastoral Music Projects and Theses

This thesis develops a philosophy of musicking that intersects with missional ecclesiology and expands the role of music-making beyond the church walls. The central hypothesis assumes that predominantly white congregations in the Free Church tradition located in the southern United States incorporate ways of singing that reinforce, albeit inadvertently, attitudes toward others that buttress white ethnocentricity. Musical practices arising from a Western European heritage can promote cultural exclusivity as well as a perceived—yet false— sense of superiority. Is there an implicit theology of singing in white churches that engenders a culture of complicity and apathy in matters of racial injustice, …

Studio Expressive Arts Therapy: Towards A Classroom Method That Incorporates Art And Music, Michael Greenberg

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis explored the ways in which expressive arts therapy (ExAT) could be incorporated into a small therapeutic high school’s visual arts program. Through the development and implementation of a method, intermodal exchange between visual art and music was integrated into both the school’s art program and its group counseling offerings. Informed by a literature review of studio art therapy (SAT) as related to ExAT, three different interventions were used to fit within the frameworks of the high school’s offerings. The first intervention focused on making music with a few students within art classes while the rest of the class …

"It's The Way You Sing It": Translating Music Therapy For Isolated Older Adults Affected By Covid-19 To The Television Screen, Eunice Wong

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

The current Covid-19 pandemic has increased the likelihood of loneliness and social isolation among older adults due to the restrictions on movement and visitations in care facilities. Loneliness and social isolation have consistently been identified as risk factors for poor mental and physical health in older people. Meanwhile, a growing number of older adults are utilizing technological resources to enhance their interpersonal relationships and overall quality of life. In the winter of 2020/2021, an innovative music therapy-informed television program was designed and produced for isolated older adults in need of mental and emotional support. This project, produced jointly by a …

The Voice Of The Other: The Influence Of Capitalism On The Representation Of Gender And Race In Western Classical Music, Marie Comuzzo

Masters Theses

This thesis argues that in order to understand the non-representation of women and BIPOC in the Western musical canon, the analysis of their cultural musical production and reception must start in early modern period, a time heavily influenced by the establishment of capitalism. Intertwining political feminist studies, critical race theory and musicology critique, I argue that the witch hunts and the inhumane colonial practices in Africa and the America (fundamental to establish capitalism as a global system), had an important role in shaping Western musical culture as homogeneous and monolithic. Thus, I first trace the change in female customs in …

Singing And Pronunciation: A Review Of The Literature, Kassidy Joyner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Observed differences exist in the pronunciation abilities of individual language learners, especially adult learners. Musical ability and experience are possible factors that have been attributed to language pronunciation abilities. Although there has been a large amount of research concerning the effects of general musical ability and training on language abilities, very few studies have investigated the musical sub-category of singing. Research on the use of songs in the language classroom has largely tested the effects of song on vocabulary acquisition, while very few studies have explored the effects of song on pronunciation. Given that singing and pronunciation both use similar …

Jigs, Reels, And “Realness”: An Investigation Of Ideas Of Authenticity And Tradition In New England French Canadian Music, Lowell Ruck

Honors Projects

Franco-American culture is increasingly recognized as an integral part of the heritage of Maine and New England, and has attracted growing academic attention in recent years. But while many scholars and cultural promoters focus on the French language in their work on this subject, few studies have considered the position of traditional music in Franco-American communities in the 21^st century. This thesis examines French Canadian traditional music as it is played in New England and the ways in which musicians think about authenticity and tradition in their art. Using material from ethnographic interviews, it illuminates how musicians draw from …

Sonified Hudson Valley Landscapes And The Influence Of Industry, Jess Belardi

Senior Projects Fall 2021

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College.

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

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 …