Author: mlavengo

Final Project

Your final project is an analysis of piece of your choosing. The purpose of the project is for you to apply the skills you’ve learned in class, to a piece that you enjoy and want to share with the rest of the class.

Due dates

May 1: Project worksheet

  • After doing some preliminary analysis, complete the project worksheet.
  • Submit the worksheet to me on Blackboard.
  • Send me a recording if your piece is not available on Spotify or Youtube.

May 8: Presentation

  • Submit script/notes to me (hard copy or email).
  • Prepare either a powerpoint-type presentation or a handout to act as a visual aid for your presentation.
  • More details below.

May 9–15: Essay (may submit any day)

  • Due on Blackboard in .pdf format
  • More details below.

Presentation

In this presentation, you will apply knowledge you gained in our seminar to a piece of your choosing. It is worth 15% of your final grade.

Additionally, and more practically, the presentation will be like a first draft of your final paper. This will be an opportunity for you to get feedback from me and your peers.

Presenting and submitting

  • On May 8, you will give a ten minute presentation, followed by a five minute Q&A.
  • You must have either a powerpoint-type presentation or a handout to share with the class as a visual aid. Submit this on Blackboard.
  • Submit your script/notes to me on Blackboard. It won’t be graded, but I use this to see how you improve/develop your ideas compared to the paper.

Content

  • Use the worksheet you submitted and my feedback as a guide for your content.
  • Analysis must engage with one or more methodologies discussed in class.
  • You should have a clear thesis statement by the time you present. Doctoral students are expected to have an especially insightful thesis statement.
  • We do not have time for historical context—get straight to your analysis!

Style

  • Presentations must be professional, rehearsed, well-organized, and polished, in order to maximize the effectiveness of your limited time. Doctoral students will be held to a higher standard of professionalism.

Presentation grading rubric

Helpful tips

Expand to show additional tips
  • I suggest using a script so that you don’t lose track of time. 1 double-spaced page will equal 2 minutes of talking.
  • Print out your script in size 16 font, double-spaced. Try to make page breaks occur at the end of paragraphs, rather than mid-sentence. Staple your script, or better, put it in a binder.
  • Use the powerpoint to bring out the structure of your presentation to the reader. Show the reader an outline of how the paper will go at the beginning. Title your slides. Etc.
  • The classroom has HDMI and VGA. I will bring a USB clicker and Macbook adapters (mini Displayport and USB-C). Otherwise, you’re on your own. I don’t recommend the classroom computer.

Essay

The analytical essay is the capstone project of the course, and is worth 35% of your final grade. The purpose is to demonstrate what you learned in our seminar by performing your own creative analysis of piece of your choosing. The paper will be an expanded (at least twice as long) and refined version of your presentation.

Submission

Content

This is a music analysis paper. Some additional requirements and guidelines:

  • Your music analysis must rely on and deeply engage with the analytical approaches we learned in class. This is the most important aspect of this paper. Master’s students should use one approach; doctoral students should combine two approaches.
  • Your paper should be bound together with a thesis statement of some kind, i.e., some kind of central feature that you discovered while analyzing the piece. For doctoral students, you will still have a single unified thesis, which ties together both lenses of your analysis.
  • The vast majority of your paper should be music analysis. If historical context directly enhances your central music-analytical thesis, then you may include it. Otherwise, restrict your biographical information to one paragraph.
  • You should have chosen at least three aspects of the piece to focus on as examples which prove your thesis statement.
  • Avoid qualitative language and irrelevant personal experience. The purpose of this paper is to show your understanding of the piece and the analytical techniques used, not to convince someone else to like the piece.
  • Your tone and focus should be extremely similar to the readings we did throughout class. You might like to view my sample paper as a guide.

Length

  • Master’s students: your paper should be at least 8 pages, but no more than 13.
  • Doctoral students: your paper should be at least 14 pages, but no more than 20.
  • Page counts include musical examples (within reason).
  • If the length is causing you issues in any way, please talk with me and I’ll see if I can help you expand or condense your paper as needed.

Style

  • 1” margins; professional 12 point font, such as Times; double-spaced
  • Add a header with your name, the class, and the date you submitted it.
  • Add page numbers.
  • You must properly cite all authors whose techniques you use.
  • You should have a bibliography at the end.
  • Use Chicago or MLA format, whichever you are more familiar with.
  • Proofread carefully.

Essay grading rubric

Spectrogram video examples

Many of you are using spectrograms in your final paper. I think the best way for you to include these as an example for me is to make a video of the spectrogram (as I do in my dissertation—see here).

To do so, you will make a screen recording of the spectrogram playing in the Sonic Visualizer app. Here are instructions for Mac and for Windows (the Windows one is for recording games, but you can actually use it to record anything).

Because embedding a video into a PDF is a fussy business, I’m okay with you submitting these examples as separate files. Just number them accordingly and reference them in the paper (e.g., “see Video Example 1”).

Helpful tips

Expand to show additional tips
  • Come talk with me one-on-one to improve your paper! Students who meet with me always end up with better projects than students who do this on their own.
  • Begin your project by analyzing the music. Make your musical examples (transcriptions/lead sheets/whatever). Then, begin writing the paper by explaining your analysis. Write down the “low-hanging fruit” first to get the ball rolling so you’re not staring at a blank Word document.
  • Read your paper out loud to another human being before you submit it. This is the fastest way to find weird grammatical errors that you made.
  • Words and phrases to avoid: very, it, interesting, unique, thing, genius, “it is ___ that,” “some say,” “I believe,” “it seems.” Maybe also “to be.”

Weeks 1–5: Foundations

To begin our seminar, we will read sources that were trailblazing in the relatively new field of timbre research: Hermann von Helmholtz, Cornelia Fales, and Stephen McAdams. Each one of these authors brings something quite different to timbre research: Helmholtz is a 19th-c. physician who was able to discuss, for the first time, the physiology of timbre perception; McAdams is a currently-working cognition scientist specializing in timbre; Wallmark is one of McAdams’s collaborators who has a musicology background and often bridges science and musicology; Cornelia Fales is an ethnomusicologist; I am a music theorist.

Continue reading Weeks 1–5: Foundations

Weeks 6–10: Pop and Non-Western Music

Many experts on timbre are drawn to the great timbral diversity that can be found in popular musics and in non-Western musics, where aesthetics often diverge from concert hall music. For the next several weeks, we will study intersections between identity, genre, and timbre in these musics.

Continue reading Weeks 6–10: Pop and Non-Western Music

Weeks 11–14: Orchestral music

Western concert music also boasts timbral diversity, even if we are not always aware of this. For the last unit of the course, we will focus on the use of timbre within Classical and 20th-/21st-c. orchestral music.

Continue reading Weeks 11–14: Orchestral music

Week 15: Writing a final paper

Our focus for the remaining weeks of the semester will be creating your own projects and learning to write a music-academic paper. Essentially, a music theory paper is an argument paper. You are going to argue for your own interpretation of a piece/idea, and you will support your argument through musical facts.

Consider a more straightforward argument paper as an analogy. Say I’ve decided to write an argument paper that argues that we should build a public library. That is my thesis statement, and notice that it is an opinion of mine, not a fact. To make a persuasive argument paper, though, I need to support that argument with facts. So I do research and I find facts (note: the following are not real facts) that say that 1) public libraries provide an important community gathering space for children, youths, and the elderly; 2) libraries provide internet access for people who can’t afford to pay for it, and 3) libraries can provide learning programs for free. These would be the facts that I use to support my argument that we should build a public library.

Now the musical version of that: your thesis statement will be an interpretation of the piece, such as “The use of chromatic harmony in this song enhances the lyrics.” What musical facts would I use to support that? It’s actually implied in the thesis statement itself. I have to show factually that some chords are chromatic. And, I also have to show how those harmonies relate to the lyrics.

What not to do

A common pitfall in writing about music is thesis statements along the lines of “This is a good song [or a popular song, or a genius song] because of this Music Theory Thing.” You may have seen lots of examples of this kind of writing in program notes or in online magazines like Slate. They  make catchy headlines and entertaining program notes, but for a scholarly argument paper, it doesn’t work—music is far too complicated to have its success or value attributed to a music-theoretical concept. This is a music theory class, so I’m asking you to focus on music theory—so to succeed, make your thesis a thesis that you can prove using music theory. You’re never going to prove something is popular because of music theory, because to really prove why something is popular, you’d need to talk about marketing, social aspects, sex appeal, cultural context, etc. (all of which are extremely valid lines of questioning, but which are nonetheless far beyond the purview of this course).

To emphasize this point, let’s go back to the hypothetical public library argument. This thesis statement is not as good as my first attempt: “The reason libraries are so successful is that they provide important gathering spaces.” This argument is far more susceptible to counterarguments: what about libraries that don’t provide gathering spaces at all? what about the other reasons that libraries might be successful, like pretty buildings, good collections, or location? etc. etc. There’s too many things for you to prove—because of this, the argument is basically doomed from the start.

Assignment: How to construct an argument

This is the kind of thinking you need to get into to write a good paper. To get you started, I have designed a worksheet that helps you think through your project.

Final Project WorksheetDownload

Submission

Submit this worksheet to me by uploading it to Blackboard as a .pdf, like an analysis assignment.