Music Production, Technology, and Innovation

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  Syncope - An Aural Experience for Sonible Emotions

  Ishaan Jagyasi
  2023

  This project aims to create an immersive audio experience through an extended play (EP), focusing on combining electronic music with sonic experience. This EP is inspired by genres like Electronica and IDM, which use sound design tools and techniques like analog synthesis, granular synthesis and foley recordings, along with intricate arrangements and micro-editing, in order to create a dense and evolving soundscape. To elevate the listening experience, the EP is mixed using different tools available in the domain of immersive audio, like ambisonics, binaural audio and Dolby Atmos.

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  Proper Techno

  Ishan Kharche
  2023

  The idea behind the culminating experience by Ishan Kharche a.k.a. I5HAN revolves around creating a live electronic music act, with interactive audio-visual experience with the use of various Sound Design techniques. The project aims to push the boundaries of techno music and explore various sub genres in this style of music. This consists of three experiences, the first is the musical part where the artist plans on producing a multi sub-genre Techno album with creative use of self-recorded samples, hardware and software synthesizers, The second part is the visual segment, the visuals for the show will be reactive to the audio with the use of Max MSP and Resolume, The third part is the live performance of the album.

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  Frantic-A: Creating music world that empowers, embraces people's unique identities, and cures their traumas. EP and Live Performance.

  Arina Koreniushkina
  2023

  The basis of the author’s (aka Frantic A) project was to finalize an EP of 4 songs, combining art-pop with trip-hop and alternative electronics and to present it as an audiovisual live show. The author used Ableton Live for both purposes: exploring new production techniques and live performance. She mixed rich arrangements with heartfelt vocals, disruptive sound design and drumbeats, trying to create a music world that empowers, embraces people's unique identities, and cures their traumas. During the process, one of the biggest challenges was technical limitation, associated with CPU of the old computer. The new computer should allow her to mix EP further in Dolby Atmos, make spatial audio performances using Max for Live devices in Ableton and control visuals in Resolume from Ableton. Although the project is rather unusual for the pop scene, the author hopes that it takes a step toward a bridge between avant- guard and mainstream.

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  Experimental Vocal Production in Alternative Pop Music

  Martyna Kubicz
  2023

  This document outlines the proposal for the Culminating Experience by Martyna Kubicz, also known as MIN t. The project will revolve around creating an EP, involving songwriting, sound engineering, production, sound designing, and performance. The EP will consist of 6 tracks, focusing on experimental and Innovative vocal production techniques. The author will use tools like Ableton, Simpler, Sampler, Antares Studio, and Melodyne to focus on voice experimentation as an instrument and primary production element. The aim is to create a genre-expanding composition pushing the boundaries of the new electro-pop music while remaining accessible to wider audiences. The music direction of the pieces will shift around the UK- garage, R&B, leftfield, electronica, neo-soul, pop, and IDM. The project aims to release a new MIN t's EP, promote it, and perform it all over Europe.

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  A Journey of Spiritual Healing

  Zilan Li
  2023

  The healing power of music on people is obvious, especially in mental health, and many studies today have proven this to be true. Many western music pieces have themes related to mental illness, and their healing effect on people cannot be ignored. But in China, mental illness is still a topic that people avoid talking about, and even fewer literary works are based on the theme of it. When it comes to mental health, musicians are a high-risk group for mental illness, but putting emotions into music for musical composition is a great way to maintain mental health. This project will feature lyrics in Chinese, describing the lives and feelings of people with bipolar disorder through their first perspective, in hopes that it will have some positive impact on the mental health environment in China, bringing more attention to the impact of mental illness on people, and informing that it will also heal those with the same illness.

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  Nostalgera

  Dylan Madru
  2023

  The 1990’s gave birth to many new genres of music. This was due to the advancements of music technology at the time and the availability of said equipment. Some of the most notable are the genres “Boom Bap”, “Trip Hop”, and “Drum and Bass”.

  These genres all hold a similar origin but they each have their own unique characteristics. “Boom Bap” holds its ties to Hip Hop of that era and is characterized by its use of sampling. The drums usually have a laid back feel that would allow a vocalist to rap over it fairly easily. “Trip Hop” is an evolution of this use of sampling and can be “defined as the merging of hip-hop and electronica until neither genre is recognizable.”1 “Drum and Bass” also extensively utilizes sampling, utilizing sped up breakbeats and is the offshoot of the “Jungle” movement.

  This project will pay homage to the listed distinct genres by combining the three separately into a cohesive mix in an album form. The title of this project stems from the content rooted in its influence from the 1990s and combines the words nostalgia and era to denote the composition.

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  Production and Sampling: The One-Man Producer

  Filip Manzac
  2023

  The project is about the use of original material to create an entirely new project (EP) to base itself from. It explores the limits of how to use one single song to create a whole new album from it. Focusing on the sonic image of the track.

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  Prioritization of Music in Narrative Film

  Cade Margus
  2023

  For his Culminating Experience, Cade Margus sought to utilize both video and audio as equally influential storytelling devices by directing and creating original background music for a narrative short film with a personal subject. The film was set in and required partnership with an active music festival. In the film, the music initially exists as a diegetic electronic performance occurring off-screen, then evolves strategically over time as a means of contributing tension and emotional complexity to the story. The author completed the script, creatively managed pre-production, and produced the background music simultaneously, defying the standard workflow of today’s film industry. By doing so, music informed more decisions and shaped the final film more deeply than if it had been composed after shooting.

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  The Future Is Dark: An Exploration of Contemporary Underground Dance Music Styles

  Matthew Martinez
  2023

  This work is essentially a practicum in contemporary electronic dance music production. The primary objective is to compose original music, utilizing innovative production and sound design techniques, and combining compositional devices and structures from throughout the entire spectrum of dark electronic music. The stylistic goal of this music is to synergize components of dark psychedelic trance (darkpsy) and hard techno in an effort to illustrate the shared ethos at the core of each genre.

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  Reactive Mixes

  Jesus Martinez Retamal
  2023

  The present project is an interactive and immersive experience with the objective of placing the audience in the different perspectives of a live performance in the recording studio. The song used on this project is called “Love Line”, composed by Beti Strgar, and produced by Jesus Martinez. To achieve the visual perspective feeling, each musician and the mixer had an action camera attached to their point of view. In addition, to achieve the listening perspective feeling, there is one Dolby Atmos mix for each point, generating a complex mix based on the visual representation of the cameras. Furthermore, the experience is an application created with Unity due to the friendly interface and its building capabilities.

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  CR.A.FT - Deviant (Album): A Rethinking of Minimal House & Dub Techno Through Jazz and Live Production.

  Juan Moreno
  2023

  This C.E. project represented the author's (CR.A.FT) exploration of his creative manifestations through the production of a new album and live performance. It comprised the processes of thought used during the creation and production of both at Berklee Valencia's Studios.

  Its objective was to intertwine the different possibilities for creation learned through the MPTI Master's program incorporating the acquired experience in recording, production, sound design, and live performance. This project allowed for the author to approach the roles of composer, producer, recording, mixing, and mastering engineer to obtain a self- produced professional album and artistic concept to support it. The album explored minimal house and dub techno by rethinking how those were being produced and performed. It combined harmonic and improvisational elements from electronic-based jazz subgenres. It explored the composition and arrangement tools that new performance devices and technologies provided, the use of MIDI production controllers such as Native Instruments Maschine or Ableton Push 2, and how these digital tools merged with the electro-acoustic world. This exploration looked to harness the possibilities of the author as a multi- instrumentalist, by using instruments like the electric guitar, bass, and drums in an electronic music context to widen and stretch the palette of sounds found in minimal house and techno.

  The concept of the album and performance revolved around the chaotic essence of art and music creation, the confrontation of theoretical knowledge (or preconceptions), and the creative freedom to manifest art and communicate experiences and moments through sounds and songs.

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  The Inter-Compatibility of Romani Music

  Tudor Nacu
  2023

  This Culminating Experience Project has orbited around the topic of Romani traditional music with a focus on the technical similarities which can be noticed when examining the musical genres and sub-genres derived from the native sound of the Romani community. This comes as a continuation to my previously written academic paper exploring the evolution of the community’s music as a result of the systemic oppression that they have been subjected to throughout Europe and how the traditional sound has merged with the styles already present in the countries in which they have settled from the 14th century to present day. The project consisted of a short album featuring tracks from multiple Romani-influenced genre which stand as proof of both the inter-compatibility of these musical styles as well as their fusion potential with other, more common and popular genres (e.g. Funk, Lo-Fi). The short album was created in collaboration with Mirza Redzepagic, a musician from the CPPD course as well as a number of other musicians from around the world. The overall project comes as an attempted solution to the limited amount of awareness on the topic as well as to the very drastic delimitations between the genres (e.g. Flamenco and Jazz Manouche) despite the strong relationship they have based on their common roots.

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  Tropical Sensations Sound Bundle

  Emmanuel Orlando Navarro Huertas
  2023

  Since technology is continuously developing, now a days is beyond accessible to have a home studio thanks to the amount of affordable equipment. Some producers prefer to work in the box and overlook the sound quality achievable inside a recording environment. The author Emanuel Navarro Huertas, being a percussionist and a producer perceived the same drawback that whichever in a low budget recording or an in the box production percussion instruments depend on the environment that they’re being played and not everyone has the money or the time to hire a musician and book studio hours to record high-fidelity percussion tracks. Aside of the cost-effective circumstance of the recording industry, many producers are always in the exploration of new grooves and attractive rhythms to add curiosity to their productions. Tackling the concerns of both recording engineers and producers, Emanuel Navarro Huertas created the Tropical Sensations Sound Bundle. To encourage the use of traditional and cultural rhythms as tools for creation, sound design, or just forwarding the recording process, the author assembled and completed an original percussion library that unified 5 countries and merged ancient cultures with present ones. Emanuel provides samples and one shots to the need of the genre with a wide range of percussion sounds and grooves. The author, being a percussionist, has the ability to ¬play and catalog some of the most interesting and exotic percussion/drum sounds of historical cultures around South America & the Caribbean.

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  Berklee meets Indian classical music

  Harshill Nichani
  2023

  My CE is about creating six fusion tracks of different with six different artists under the common thread of Indian classical music. In my songs, I combined the patterns and instruments of Indian classical music with six different genres including techno, hiphop, house, afro, metal and pop.

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  "Stepping Out" - An Explorative EP

  Timothy Odera
  2023

  This project aims to deliver a musical body of work that demonstrates a unique sonic identity that is marketable and serve as a template for future productions. Through 4 track EP, Stepping Out, there was an exploration of the fusion of Afro influenced musical elements with those from other parts of the world such as pianos, strings and 90s Hiphop style sampling. There was an emphasis on the use of production techniques such as building of new effect and instrument racks within Ableton Live and the creative use of these effects to create new textures of sounds. The stems of the EP were also copied to Live’s Session view to facilitate live electronic performance of the music. One of the main challenges of the project was mixing without the use of reference tracks as that would defeat the purpose of creating an original sound palette. It was necessary to mix by ear and taste, eliminating unwanted frequencies and enhancing others, trusting that we would eventually arrive at a desirable sound. Hopefully this project will challenge the existing boundaries of Afro influenced music and continue to develop the Afrobeat genre.

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  Two Worlds EP

  Eric O'Hare
  2023

  The purpose of this project was be to provide Eric O’Hare with completed work for his career portfolio and to have him experiment with using electronic elements in his compositions. Eric’s work on this project has been unique from his previous work in its quality and complexity. As an aspirational composer and producer, this extended play of Eric’s original orchestral compositions expanded his portfolio. While all of Eric’s previous works in this field were confined to the limits of digital software and sample libraries, session musicians and an entire production process ensured that these final tracks truly stand out within Eric’s portfolio. The final deliverable of this project showcased all of Eric’s skills and expertise at once, including his compositional and theoretical knowledge, his technological and creative skills in the recording studio, and his new skills working with sound design.

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  My World

  Siddhant Pillai
  2023

  Global Hip Hop Album, discussing issues of race, religion, gender and Caste.

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  East Asian influenced Lo-Fi Hip Hop and Chillhop – Tales of Asia LP

  Tarik Šarić
  2023

  This project is a combination of hip hop music with influence of Asian traditional music. It creates a bridge that fuses modern with old music. It will include samples of traditional melodies from China and Japan, but not limited to only those two countries along with boom bap and hip hop styled song progression following the low fidelity effect and simple arrangement. It will later on include the process of creating the 8-track album along with how it was recorded, processed and edited in DAW. Relatively new sub-genre of lo-fi hip hop and with this project, idea is to connect people to the tradition and new sound with the same combination of sounds followed by video footage recoding every process.

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  Plastic Boy: The Production of a Record

  Rubén Segovia Cobo
  2023

  The basis of this project is to write, record, produce and mix a long play (LP) of 8 songs to experiment with technologies, methods and creative music production techniques that will strengthen the message and aesthetics from an Avant-pop and electronic perspective.

  Influenced by the work of artists such as Sevdaliza, Arca, Rosalía or Joji, this LP aims to be an experimental and innovative approach to pop production. Sound design, synthesis, creative production techniques, hybrid recording, and mixing methods were some of the tools used in this work. During the process, one of the biggest challenges was creating a unique sonic world, using sound design to represent the concepts behind the record. The creative use of Ableton’s tools and features was key to success. This LP includes feats with national and international artists. Hopefully, this project will inspire future sound designers and contemporary pop productions.

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  Circle of Love

  Tanishq Seth
  2023

  The basis of this project is to compose and produce a five-song EP (Extended Plays) called Circle of Love. The aim is to crossover different genres such as EDM, Pop and Bollywood along with unique instrumentation across the record. In addition to that, this project intends to creatively incorporate real-life samples in each record. Utilizing the resources and personnel on campus, the artist intentions to collaborate with musicians to further enrich the diversity of each record. The artist aims to continue forward with his artistic pursuit by working alongside Disrupción Records and establishing a network which eventually is targeted towards releasing records.

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  Dorothy - EP

  Aidan Siegel
  2023

  The basis of this project is to write, record, and produce an extended play (EP) about struggle, pain, demise, and ultimately self-growth/understanding. The intention of this EP is to connect with the audience through powerful music on a level it makes any listener look deeply at their life and journey to where they are in their own reality, in an honest way. This EP will be a genre blend between today’s more lyrically based rap/hip-hop, electronic music, and “alternative.” Some main influences of the project are Mariposa by Felly, Take Care by Saba, Tangerine Dream by Alex Wiley, Superhero’s vs. Villains by Metro Boomin, and College Dropout by Kanye West. Instrumentally the EP will be very driven by live drumming, synthesizers of all kinds, and electric guitar.

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  Live Transcendence

  Carlos Steinkamp Calandria
  2023

  This project consists of a performance that brings together elements of DJing and live electronic performance utilizing a minimalist, modern hardware setup. The main purpose of this performance is to provide audiences of all ages with a deep sense of connection by playing a set that juxtaposes well-known, uplifting dance music spanning five decades, with deep house and melodic house songs that weave a sense of transcendence and profoundness throughout the high energy journey of dance hits. For the purpose of creating sonic cohesion amongst the varied production styles of different decades, and to feature the musicality of the artist, the songs are also infused with new musical layers, improvisations and effects. The areas of focus are: hardware setup, song selection and programming, and elements of live performance. Keywords: DJ, Live Performance, Electronic Music

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  Vita

  Floris van Hall
  2023

  The work consists of six contemporary pop songs, containing arrangements based on bossa nova harmonies, however without the bossa nova rythms. The pieces of music are partly bossa nova classics and partly originals.

  Bossa nova harmonies have always inspired the author and he wondered whether these could be applied to contemporary music. The research part focused on dissecting the harmonies that form an integral part of bossa nova of the late 1950s and 1960s. This knowledge is then applied to rearranging songs from that era into contemporary music pieces deleting all bossa nova rhythms, as well as to newly written songs. Arrangements of lead and backing vocals play a key part, applying bossa nova harmonic progressions. The latter was more of a challenge for pop chord progressions. The author believes the “Waters of March/Joy” song is a fine example of how the concept works in practice.

  The music will be released as an EP in the fall of 2023 by the artist Vita with some additional live recordings.

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  Music Production Portfolio

  Jorge Vazquez
  2023

  The basis of the culminating experience project was to create a music producer portfolio that showcased various skills and roles performed throughout recording projects, including lead producer, recording engineer, mixing engineer, and arranger. The explored music genres ranged from classical music, contemporary jazz, and Mariachi music. Part of the portfolio includes highlighting the tasks carried out in each role. The recordings involved collaboration with artists, musicians, and a production team consisting of fellow students at Berklee College of Music, Valencia Campus and professionals from Valencia, Spain, Mexico City, Mexico, and Los Angeles, California. The music production facilities at Berklee College of Music, Valencia Campus, including studios, rehearsal rooms, and equipment, were utilized for the production process. Influential producers such as Nic Hard, Ezequiel "Cheche" Alara, and Becca Stevens played a significant role in shaping the direction of this portfolio.

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  Exploring Audio-reactive Visuals as a Inspirational Tool for Musical Composition, Improvisation, and Performance

  Jacqueline Walter
  2023

  Performing artists in the 21st century are able to create more elaborate visual spectacles than ever before with the help of pre-programming or VJs, but still many music audiences continue to seek out improvisation and spontaneity above all else in the concerts they attend. This thesis asks, how can visual spectacle respond more directly to live music played on guitar, drums, keys? The author1 explores mapping musical ideas like rhythm, harmonic relationships/tonal centers, and volume through MIDI to colors, forms, and other visual parameters in Max MSP. Beyond practical uses as a visual supplement to live performance, a musician could use the program as an inspirational or educational tool to encourage new rhythmic or harmonic ideas from their playing. Or they might even disregard sonic musicality to see what kind of exciting visuals they are able to produce with the instrument as a controller. With this framework, different audio-visual metaphors could be crafted as an extension of the musical expression, or to specifically elicit different musical ideas from a group of performers across songs or sections of songs.