On this page, you can find the Culminating Experience (CE) Projects for all graduate students from the Berklee College of Music master’s program Music Production, Technology, and Innovation (MPTI) from 2015 – present. Click on any title for more information and access to the full paper and other deliverables (if available).
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L’aVaaz
Harshit Jain
2016My Culminating Experience is a collaborative project with a student from the Performance Program - Danielle Turner. Together, we have formed a duo under the moniker L’aVaaz, under which we will produce music with electronic, indie and dance music influences. The final product will be an EP consisting of 4-6 tracks, all written and recorded at Berklee Valencia. We will be writing one track each week until the time comes to decide which compositions will makeup the EP. Danielle and I are from different parts of the world (New Delhi, India – Austin, Texas, USA), which acts as one of our biggest strengths as our unique backgrounds and influences complement our similar music taste.
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Music Producer, Live Artist & Innovator
Mayur Jumani
2016As an electronic music lover, my main complaint with electronic dance music events has been the lack of a ‘live’ element to it. Throughout my life, I have been involved in different fields including Music Production, live performance, Technology & Design. As technology progressed, my fascination towards midi controllers increased and I was overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of live electronic performances. So I knew my cumulative experience here at Berklee had to be more than just original music. In brief, my project was to identify my artistic brand by developing a custom live show with excessive use of Innovative technology (including a custom designed controller), original music and multimedia elements for a unique audio/visual experience.
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CE Project
Nitish Kulkarni
2016My Culminating Experience project will feature a new album of original instrumental music accompanied by a variety of supporting visual materials that will aid in promoting the album online and across social channels.
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THE CELNATIC EXPERIENCE: Celtic + Carnatic music
Shruti Kumar
2016It is rarely that phenomenon takes place in this world. In the world of Indian art music, the advent of trinity changed the course & perception of music. This project is my initiative to revive the famous compositions of Shri Muthuswami Dikshitar, a famous composer of Carnatic Indian classical music whose compositions are famous and he has left behind a legacy to cherish. As a project I want to lay my hands on the publications of C.P.Brown (1833) and that of Manali Chinnaswami Mudaliar (1893) and create a fusion performance of this using the school ensemble, fusing the vocals with piano, western strings and wind international rhythms maintaining the original identity and spirit of the compositions. I would like to take up this project due to my predilection towards this field of art, this genre of music. This project is a collaboration with Ms. Sahana Kumar from the Global entertainment & Music Business program who will be heading the management aspects of this project- dealing with event management, marketing and production activities throughout the process. We have kept Sporting Club Russafa as a probable venue to perform.
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Soul Found
Rebecca Liberman
2016I am going to create an EP of original music belonging to a genre I would like to popularize called soulful pop- technically falling under popular music but with more grit and spice than your average radio hit.
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Clutter Monster
Debbie YJ Lin
2016d.Cluttering is a narrative exploring the relationship between physical/digital clutter in our daily lives and our individual mental/emotional spaces. Expressed through an installation composed of sound and video, the piece comments on the correlation and contribution of the clouding vision and our collective culture’s obsession with stuff. Building on this topic, made popular by the recent NY Times BestSeller book “The Life- Changing Magic of Tidying Up:The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organzing” by Marie Kondo and ancient traditions of Chinese Feng Shui, d.Cluttering questions the attachment to material goods that are often superimposed with meaning. Similarly to every day objects, sound (music) and words can also be conceived as clutter. By intentionally using methods of “participatory culture” to comment on “consumer culture,” the piece uses text, sound clips and video footage deliberately composed and arranged as ‘symbols’ to represent “clutter” in a collagery fashion, with digital “cutting up” of sonic palettes, letters, punctuation and visuals. Playing with unorthodox methods in sound creation, d.Cluttering is composed to represent sonic clutter, by aurally illustrating the duality of near-silence and chaotic mess to depict a sensory process of mental de-cluttering. In addition to the auditory portrayal of ‘clutter’, the piece utilizes video footage to create visual collages inspired by the historical narrative initiated by “dadaism,” “sound poems,” and “sacred art,” this piece intends to comment on the importance of being mindfully aware of clutter and the decluttering in our very own kind of “sacred space.”
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CE project
William Lydgate
2016The new sound: I will make a record, featuring myself as an artist/producer. I will sing, I will make tracks, I will dub mix, I will make my beautiful music, as Ben put it, my Dark Side of the Moon. I will try every technique I can, quantity, to arrive at quality. My years as an engineer/producer have taught me how to flesh out tracks, make them solid, and shine. Now it’s time to use the resources of Berklee Valencia to add some captivating details and future roots dubs to that experience.
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Sense 6 Project: A New Way of Listening to Music
Luis Miguel Castillo
2016The objective of the project Sense 6 (S6) is to have a very unique experience while listening to music and to become aware of all of your senses involved in the process. The sense of touch through vibrations; smell, through fragrances; sight, through visuals; taste, through flavors; and hearing, with an original piece of music; to boost the senses into a memorable adventure that will create an amazing number of new possibilities to express and perceive art. S6 brings the artist the possibility to create a complete masterpiece, which means to be able to show the total artistic perception of the composer, and deliver to the public a song with an original and interesting sensorial combination. It is important to add that for the reasons exposed, this experience is also directed to people with any kind of sensory disabilities, offering them the possibility of perceiving a song with their other senses.
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Drum Track Hacks
Joe Miller VI
2016My CE is an open source collection of drum tracks for the upcoming musicians and / or producer.
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MIDI-MIC
Rafael Oviedo
2016My project is based on the same ideology of MIDI, but through a microphone, which I intend to call a MIDI-MIC. This microphone will allow us to seize the moment of inspiration. Without a means of capturing that particular idea at that particular moment, the inspiration is often forgotten within minutes. This project, for example, will allow us to log into Protools, add a MIDI track and by pushing a button on the MIDI-MIC, we have the ability to select the key that we want the song to play in. The MIDI-MIC will automatically transpose the notes we sing or hum into the selected key and tempo of the song. We can then assign any musical instrument into the track, which will then create "our master piece". Through this automated process, we can take advantage of that moment of inspiration that is often times lost from not being able to seize the moment before the inspiration leaves our head. The MIDI-MIC will also have the ability to be used for live sound concerts (performance), professional productions, recording studios, etc. Quite simply, just by giving a tune with our voice and choosing an assigned instrument, you can create complex compositions quickly without scores and without forgetting the idea.
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Invisible Subtleties
Qiufan Qu
2016The work is conceptual sound installation. It embodies its meaning and aesthetic through its appearance, the components, the sound and the process of the making it. It mainly explores the idea of Minimalism and its impact on mass culture.
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Indian Power Metal
Arjun Roy
2016For my CE, I intend to produce, compose, record, mix and perform a collection of 5 power-metal songs, with a professional level music video to accompany one song.
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The Polygong: A Polyhedronic Digital Instrument
Michael Samuel
2016The polygong is a new kind of conceptual instrument that maps familiar theoretical harmonic and melodic structures to a geometrically intuitive physical interface.
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Migrations
Reid Swartz
2016Moving to a new place can often be difficult and uncomfortable. I would like to create an interactive installation which uses live tweets to show instances of relocation and immigration throughout the world. If successful, the project will allow viewers to feel some kind of connection between their own experiences and the stories shown in the installation.
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![O.D. [On Deck] - kfoxproductions by Kevin Volpe](https://remix.berklee.edu/graduate-studies-production-technology/1049/thumbnail.jpg "O.D. [On Deck] - kfoxproductions by Kevin Volpe")
O.D. [On Deck] - kfoxproductions
Kevin Volpe
2016The creative process of O.D. [On Deck], the name of the project, has been rewarding. It is a five track EP featuring collaborations with seven artists and two producers. What makes this EP innovative is that its productions consist of recording, composing, sequencing, sound design and sampling. The skills I acquired over this year consisted of recording techniques, production within Ableton Live, and mixing and mastering techniques across all DAW’s. These skills were put into practice and made this project come to life.
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Multidimensional Multimedia Performance
Amelia Warren
2016This project will be a live multimedia performance using three dimensional visuals and original music, which have a unified concept and story arc. Not dissimilar from a musical theatre performance, the audience experience will be an immersive one. Visuals and audio will be synced so that the audience perceives itself as both inside and outside the story.
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Leap-motion Midi Controller Software
Wan Zhao
2016My CE will focus on building Midi controller software, which can control by Leap-motion. And side project of my Electronic Music Productions for my controller software demonstration. My Goal is build one Leap-motion Midi controller desktop software and one Leap-motion Midi controller software under virtual reality world that have 360-degree controllable faders.
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DJANK YUCCA
Gianni Abbott and Nick Bernstein
2015The DJANK YUCCA Performance System utilizes a production technique that DY has coined audio-quilting. Audio-quilting involves aspects of DJing – threading together short musical fragments into a larger, cohesive musical journey – and yet, audio- quilting involves production along with performance. Rather than focusing on producing complete tracks, DY focused on creating segments that would fit together and move the narrative forward. This catalogue of segments can be arranged in a variety of sequences in Ableton Live’s session mode, all the while maintaining cohesion and momentum.
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WILD PRISON OF YOUTH
David Acosta and Robert Cooper
2015Our Culminating Experience is a six track album titled “Wild Prison of Youth” to be finished by June 28th with an additional live performance on July 3rd as part of the Lagos de Conciertos Series at Berklee Valencia. Our CE melds analog hardware and digital software with an emphasis on creating studio and live versions of each song. Our music does not fit into any particular genre. Instead, we have blended musical styles from our two countries of origin, the United States and Ecuador, as well as those of our fellow classmates at Berklee Valencia with whom we have collaborated. They go from House and Techno electronic music to folk music from different parts of South America.
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The Performance and Creation of Flex Sleeves: A study and execution of wearable technology
Alexander (Xander) Arnold
2015My name is XANDR. I am a singer, songwriter, producer, keyboardist, and dancer. Those last two things have never really gone together; being a pianist and dancer. Hence I set forth to manipulate music through means of my movement in order to organically incorporate my dance into music. It was a long road, but I developed a performance utilizing gestural control to manipulate my voice, music, and projected visuals.
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EP and Live Performance
Oscar Bahamonde
2015My Culminating Experience is the end of my search for an artistic identity. It is also the beginning of a path full of hard work, continual learning and innovation. My work consists of an EP called “Noespor nada.” It features 3 original tracks, produced in Ableton Live, that merge Ecuadorian sounds and rhythms with styles like hip-hop, glitch and bass music. I am making ‘’Postcolonial’’ electronic music under the alias Fantoche. In addition to the EP, I created a live performance that includes visual projection onto a mapped structure and a custom mask equipped with LEDs for a mini light show on my face. Both visual elements are synchronized to the music to create a synesthetic experience.
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The Art of Dub: Rediscovering the techniques of 1970s reggae production
Nathaniel Bridges
2015Reggae and dub are really two separate genres. Take a song like Bob Marley’s “Three Little Birds” for example. By itself it is obviously a Bob Marley song, with him as the main creative engine and focus behind the song. But if a dub producer like Lee Perry were to take the master tracks of that recording, strip away the vocals and instruments periodically, add an enormous amount of delay and reverb, and possibly talk or sing over it himself; you now have not only a new song by a new artist, but an entirely new genre of music that exists almost completely in the electronic realm. This in a sense is what I’ve been trying to accomplish this year for my Culminating Experience.
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The Emergence of an Electronic Music Artist
Ian M. Cahill Serrano
2015My career in music began in Puerto Rico in 2003 at the age of 16 as the bass player and founder of the reggae band Natural Soul. From the first sound I was able to make on my instrument, I knew that music was what I wanted to dedicate my life to. Since then I’ve played in many bands, toured, graduated “cum laude” from Berklee College of Music with a dual major in Performance and Electronic Production & Design, but most importantly I have discovered my passion for DJing and producing electronic dance music; Techno and House, to be more specific.
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Ecuadorian Grooves: Innovating music heritage
Juan Fernando Cifuentes Moreta
2015Ecuadorian Grooves was born in the Spring of 2014. Its main goal was redefining and innovating Ecuadorian music by rescuing traditional rhythms and music styles and fusing them with contemporary music genres, thereby creating new sounds that will attract a young audience as well as future generations. The main objective of this culminating experience was to produce an EP called ALMA (that means, soul), comprised of two original songs, written using traditional Ecuadorian rhythms, and two modern arrangements of folk songs, with redefined contemporary music elements, including hybrid composition and innovative technology. The second objective was to produce a live performance focusing on the interaction between Ableton Live and a live ensemble, creating unique compositions that combined the organic sound of the musicians on stage with the new electronic sound design.
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The Oak App
Kareem Clarke
2015As I embarked on my second year here at Berklee Valencia, I made a choice from the beginning to do things different. I didn’t want to take the easy way out. I wanted to challenge myself by dong something I never thought I would or could. After some careful thinking, I decided to combine my two years at Berklee into a project that would have real world applications (no pun intended).