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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"Stepping Out" - An Explorative EP
Timothy Odera
2023This 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
2023The 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
2023Global 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
2023This 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
2023The 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
2023The 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
2023The 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
2023This 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
2023The 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
2023The 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
2023Performing 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.
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Integration of the traditional Chinese musical instrument, the pipa, with electronic music
Minqi Wang
2023Chinese musical culture dates back to as early as 1122 B.C.E. Despite the endeavors to adopt the traditional elements, most modern Chinese-pop songs lack the timbre, rhythm, chord sequences, and expressions of authentic Chinese music. The current project aims to bridge the gap between Eastern and Western music and to deliver authentic Chinese music through pop styles that are easily approachable by audiences with various backgrounds. In this project, an EP will be composed and produced to fuse pipa and electronic music. Inspired by Chinese elements, the music combines traditional Chinese musical instruments and electronic music to demonstrate a modern interpretation of traditional arts. The work aims to provide a starting point for the young generation and those unfamiliar with Eastern culture to experience and appreciate the invaluable sound from afar that is gradually moving to extinction.
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Premier Pas
Fiona Wicht
2023Over the course of nine months, Fiona Leila Wicht (the “author”) worked on a two-part Culminating Experience (“CE”). The author’s CE consists of five tracks, each of which explores one or more of the following seven sonic attributes: authenticity, realism, novelty, melody, lyrics, rhythm and timbre. These dimensions make up one’s listener profile, as outlined in Susan Rogers and Ogi Ogas’ book This is what it sounds like: What the music you love says about you1. Through producing five tracks in the context of the seven dimensions, the author analyzed her sonic preferences and subsequently reproduced them through her own productions. The author was in parallel uncovering her listener profile while attempting to reproduce it, which proved challenging. Having now a clear understanding of her seven dimensions, the author shall be able to apply her learnings to future productions with more clarity. The author then performed her five tracks as a live DJ set accompanied by her colleague Shabnam Kermani’s visuals.
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Worth the Wait
Julianna Banks
2022Through this project, the author intended to solidify a unique and specific artistic voice. The aim was to create a four-song extended play in order to delve into various production and recording techniques, such as varied mic placement and choices, and the exploration of different subgenres, all to express distinct ideas. Additionally, the project included a music video with an overarching storyline to connect the ideas of each piece from one to the next.
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Dreams, Death, & Love
Diego Barraza
2022The culminating experience of the author consisted of an audio visual concept EP album inspired by both, Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of The Moon” and Tame Impala’s “Currents”. The main focus of the EP surrounded a couple of deep topics in life like dreams, death, and love. Each individual topic was carried out by one song in the EP and they were all tied together by a single idea which was simply “moments in time”. The deliverables included two music videos and 4 different songs. All songs were produced fully in the box with virtual instruments and virtual analog gear modulations, except for the vocals. Songs were written, arranged, produced, mixed, and mastered by the author. Videos were recorded and edited by the author as well. This process taught the author a lot about songwriting, production, and mixing, he also learned about the process of creating music videos. He created this EP audio visual album to release it into the musical markets in the future and to use it as a showcase for future job opportunities.
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Voyager
Ozan Cicek
2022The inspiration of this culminating experience project was derived from a lineage of long- standing and modern musical styles to create an album that syndicates the former stylistic elements to offer a pristine final product. The record was created with the use of hardware synthesizers, software synthesizers, samplers, digital audio workstations, drum machines, MIDI controllers and organic instruments. The use of these resources in a congruent manner allowed the project to be borrowing from distinct musical styles in order to construct an innovative project. The album combined an extraction of classic and modern styles of electronic music such as subgenres of house and techno; combined with touches and influences from more traditional genres such as funk and jazz. Building the basis of the album electronically, and drawing inspirations, motives and ideas from traditional genres were the essential contributing factors on developing a vigorous work of art that is true to the past and paves way for the evolution of electronic music.
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Full Control Delay: an unique and innovative guitar pedal
Christian Dias
2022This project aims to design and build a prototype for a fully interactive delay pedal (for guitars or any other instrument). Delays usually need to be controlled by hand, which means bending down to reach the knobs and also taking one hand off the instrument - unless the pedal's settings keep unchanged while playing. Another possibility is attaching a controller pedal to the delay, in order to change some settings by foot, which can be done while playing. But an external controller hardware is needed. The idea behind the Full Control Delay pedal and its main difference is that it allows any of the effect's parameters to be controlled while playing and without the need of an external controller pedal. One single piece of hardware will enable the user to handle a variety of effects and soundscapes, easily changing settings between songs or even between sections in the same song.
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Tamil Independent Music and Genres : An Experimental Music Journey
Sanjeevi Easwar
2022This Culminating Experience (CE) was a multi-genre collaborative Extended Playlist (EP) in the language Tamil. It is one of the ancient languages from Southern India with a vast grammatical structure. The author worked in the past as an Independent artist and collaborated with other artists to make singles. But in this EP the author chose to make 4 songs where all of them belong to completely different genres. This was the first time a multi-genre EP was made in this language. The only common connection between each song would be the subject that was being discussed about. The EP collectively talked about different phases of a relationship and how it progressed. It was a combination of songs that portrayed a variety of moods ranging from happy to gloomy and dark. The idea was to give the audience a journey that took them through a ride of different emotions through different styles of music.
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Emotional Play
Dana Eisenhauer
2022Many people are unable to express their emotions, which can lead to many problems down the road. This Culminating Experience project aimed to help people express and process their emotions through song. The goal of this project was to produce an extended play (EP) that dives deep into the volatile range of the following human emotions: insecurity, sadness, drive, and excitement/happiness. This paper contains research on overall characteristics of what causes these emotions, and why certain people are not able to express those feelings. The paper also explores which emotions are triggered by music, and how/if these emotions can be manipulated by audio and/or music. The EP creation process incorporated electronic composition techniques including sampling, remixing, field recording, and other types of audio manipulation, to enhance the quality of the production. The hope is that field recordings (e.g. birds chirping, cars honking) will tap into people’s connection to the natural world to make them feel present; remixing will tap into people’s nostalgic/recognition/comfort parts of the brain; and audio manipulation (e.g. panning, stuttering, echo/delay) will keep people engaged and on their toes while listening to the EP.
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Hip-Hop Production As A Means Of Storytelling
Jordan Faries
2022This project combines piano performance, electronic music production, and creative vocal editing techniques in the context of an EP. At times, the techniques involved in creating modern commercial hip-hop or electronic music can leave the overall product feeling somewhat canned or lifeless, or free of a level of humanity and personality. This production counteracts that by showcasing both the capability of electronic music production and DAWs such as Ableton to create unique and innovative sounds and textures, while also maintaining a very authentic and captivating human sound through the instrumental and vocal elements of the project.
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No Borders
Benjamin Farnier
2022This one-year long experience is a conceptual project merging electronic music, hip-hop and indie rock through six songs and one live set video. It can seem difficult to draw bridges between music genres that each have their own characteristic. However, by integrating rap songwriting skills, live instruments such as guitar, and electronic music composition experience, it has been possible to find a cohesive yet unique that fits Yambow’s musical identity. Thanks to midi controllers and automation, the one-person band live experience is another challenge that this project overcomes. The live aspect of this project was captured in a creative live video of one song featured in the EP “No Borders”.
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Liminal Space
Ferdinando Fugazza Calda
2022This work intends to be a combination of two different pieces of work, one being an EP recorded by the author, and the other one being a set of visuals controlled by the activity of the brain, streaming the data from an electroencephalusgram (EEG) into MaxMSP. The idea at the foundation of this project is that every experience we go through is essentially a mediation of some form, and that complete objectivity is arguably impossible in any aspect of the human experience. The music is also inspired by the impressionist art movement, which conceptually originates from the same core idea, and the visuals try to match the stylistic features of the movement. Ultimately, the aim of the work is to fuse together the listener and the work of art, making the viewer a part of the work.
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NFT Art In The Streaming Era: A Practical Study of the Application and Ethics of NFT Art
Michael Go
2022This project serves as a practical model for contemporary artists seeking to explore the medium of NFT art as a means of revaluing their work in response to the economic unsustainability of the streaming-based music economy, as well as a model for ways in which NFT art can be used to support international mutual aid efforts while maintaining a commitment to environmental sustainability. To this end, an NFT art collection of original audiovisual work entitled "ORDINARY PEOPLE 4 CLEAN WATER" was created on Rarible.com's NFT marketplace in collaboration with the Grand’Anse Haiti based mutual aid foundation, the Julia&Jade Foundation (FJUJA). The proceeds of this NFT collection go towards funding FJUJA’s ongoing initiatives to promote sustainable and profitable agricultural practices, in this case with a focus on installing solar powered water pumps to provide clean drinking water and irrigated farmland for the people of Grand’Anse. The intention behind this project was to demonstrate that NFT art can be integrated into the contemporary artists' portfolio in a manner that is environmentally ethical and which opens new possibilities for both fan engagement and for international community building and mutual aid work.
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Renaixement: Bringing Interactivity to Live Electronic Music
Carter Guidry
2022The author proposed for his culminating experience that he would redefine the current notion of what it means to be an electronic musician. The problem that was being challenged and resolved was that current electronic musicians were more enraptured with using DJ equipment and preparing quick sets rather than focusing on their own creative music and developing their own interactive live sets. Moreover, the majority notion that artists try to copy someone else or replicate someone else’s style was another ideology that the author attempted to redefine. Therefore, the author posited three solutions to these current issues: To redefine the live music experience of electronic music, re-innovate technology by combining hardware and DJ equipment into a new medium of interactive technology, and develop a new standard of electronic music that challenges the status quo of current modern genres.
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Tug of War- EP
Armani Guy
2022Music is emotion. In most cases, people tend to base emotions off external experiences. In these experiences, humans feel certain ways that then results into internal emotion. Humans then tend to listen to music based on how they feel emotionally. This CE project consists of an EP by Wizrd Kelly (the author’s artistic persona) and is a love story. As most individuals may know, love stories do not always end in love. It starts off with pure bliss, but could end in heartbreak, and in some cases, leading to a depressed state of mind. The Ep will consist of four songs. The story is split into four major “themes/emotions.” The first of which is love. The second is lust. The third is resentment. The last of which is depression.