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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Have Fun Be Lighthearted– A Creative Video Portfolio
Matt Capone
2019With a mission to convey the fun and lightheartedness that can be had with electronic dance music, this project is a creative video portfolio broken down into three original video series: LIGHT-hearted, Mini Racerz, and Ableton Live Performances. It is entirely self-produced and the videos utilize many different digital and technological mediums, including dance music, phone screens, animation, LEDs, and simple dance choreography. One of the biggest challenges faced was figuring out the longevity of the video series, and whether videos within each series should be tied together through a unique storyline or should simply be made to showcase the technical and creative processes explored throughout the year. While it was ultimately decided to go with the latter to maintain the videos’ fun and momentary nature, future projects conducted by the artist may be pushed further and will continue the mission of bringing fun and lightheartedness to music and art.
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SPIRAL
Iker Cedeno
2019Spiral is music video production divided in tree parts. The theme of the first part is the Universe, the creation and evolution of galaxies. The second part is about nature and its vastness, its richness and the interconnection between the micro cosmos and the macro cosmos. The final part of Spiral is about civilization and its isolation from nature and the Universe and his direction to an uncertain future. The artist will use the skills acquired in video production, photography and sound design to make his CE project.
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DAVE SHIVAT: TRANCENDENCE, THE EMERGENCE OF AN ARTISTIC IDENTITY
David Andrés Chivatá Duque
2019The basis of this project was to create the emergence of an artistic identity. The idea consisted on inventing a creative persona that throughout a look, a sound, and a concept incorporated Contemporary Christian music within Trance (Electronic Dance Music) as an EP of 5 songs and one remix. Essential resources needed for the completion of this project came from people contributions and the facilities provided by Berklee College of Music in Valencia, Spain. The overall purpose of this project was to represent the world of Christianity through the language of Trance. Current generations, as well as the emerging ones not only will connect to this music genre, but also will relate better to the world of spirituality.
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From Nowhere to Everywhere: Lady Blackice Album
Audrey Cousineau
2019The culminating experience project called ‘‘Lady Blackice’’ is a 12 tracks album. This project was achieved by the female artist Audrey Cousineau. This album demonstrates different genres and influences like Electronic Dance Music, Deep House, Reggaeton, and Pop music. This Canadian DJ from Montreal is presenting the final project at the end of her formation in the Music Production, Technology & Innovation program at Berklee Valencia. A concert and listening party were also a part of the whole plan. For this event, the pieces were introduced by a live performance at a venue in Valencia (Spain). This project is the first album in her career as a DJ and producer. She integrated other musicians to her project as she wanted the music to be more collaborative and not only performed or created by one person only.
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Unplanned
Parth Desai
2019This project aims to produce four music tracks and videos through the production of a Visual extended play (EP), Unplanned. The goal is to merge forms of Indian folk and fusion music with electronic music and explore the dynamics of the relationship between music and video. The current Indian Electronic music scene and sound design methods were studied along with several film-making techniques. Tools like Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras and softwares like Ableton Live, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Photoshop were used to produce the videos. The challenge was to produce compelling music videos with limited resources at hand and to create an interesting fusion sound. This project aims to showcase the sound design and video production skills to the music and film industry at large and hopefully, inspire future sound designers and video producers alike.
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The Beauty of Living
Javier de Vicente-Retortillo Rubalcaba
2019The CE “The Beauty of Living” encapsulates three main projects: the production of a three songs EP, the development of artist branding and look, and the accompaniment of the music with visuals. With the songs the aim is to finish three songs at a professional level, leaving them ready to be released at a record label. With the visuals, complete visuals for the whole duration of the three songs, so there’s always a background and a story for the music. And the purpose of the artist branding is to have the presentation material ready when releasing the tracks in the future.
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Recording engineer portfolio: Transmitting a project through a personal approach and aesthetics
Elena Díaz
2019This Culminating Experience consist in the creation of a portfolio made of a set of recording engineering work made this year 2018-2019 at Berklee College of Music, along with a webpage to reach out possible customers in a personal and familiar way.
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Atomic Age: A Minimalist Approach to Music Production
Kate Ellwanger
2019Atomic Age is an electronic album that offers listeners a maximal sonic experience through the use of minimal resources. Created with a portable production set up during two years of transcontinental travel, this body of work breaks the perceived limitations of consumer-quality hardware and software by demonstrating what is possible when an artist sets out to share their story using affordable technologies. Through forward-thinking songwriting, unique sound design, and lyrical storytelling, Atomic Age seeks to inspire creators and listeners to honor the resources they have at any given time or place, and remind our society that much can be accomplished with very few resources.
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INTNSE
Dana Fakhoury
2019The project entitled “INTNSE” deriving from the word intensity. The grammar writing was changed for personal and esthetical reasons. “INTNSE” was Dana Fakhoury’s music production portfolio as Earlybird during her year spent at Berklee College of Music. It included a full branded show-reel portfolio that samples some of the producer’s best work in a creative and easily accessible manner through a website. The purpose was to feature her on the music market as an up and coming producer, artist, mix engineer, and a live programmer for Ableton. In the future the author would like to perform her own set as well as collaborative sets live and help artist reach their ultimate goal in production.
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Astral Voyage: The Big Electric Orchestra
Jason Faust
2019Astral Voyage: The Big Electric Orchestra is a thirty-nine piece ensemble that performs a fourteen movement original suite of music called Our Heart. This music blends the jazz of the past with the technology of the present, creating a unique sound of the future. The concept of the suite is based on the seven chakras of the human spirit and takes one on a journey through the cosmos and the essence of the human condition.
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EXLO: Play Your Surroundings
Meghan Gaudet
2019EXLO is a hardware/software-based system that can turn any surface into a musical instrument or controller. EXLO technology gives life to inanimate objects by enabling them to be used to create music. Producers and performers will no longer be confined by the layouts of traditional controllers; they will instead be able to incorporate their ideal workflow into their existing workspace. The EXLO system is driven by a piezo sensor, or contact microphone, which translates physical vibrations into an electrical current. EXLO’s custom software runs in the visual programming environment Max. The software analyzes vibration data from the EXLO sensor and uses the data to manipulate an organic sound as well as trigger synthesized sounds when familiar gestures are detected. The synthesized sound source can be any Digital Audio Workspace (DAW) that accepts messages of the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) protocol.
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R. Glade Music: A Digital Portfolio of Professional Studio Services
Robert Glade
2019A digital portfolio website will be launched and continuously updated, featuring content produced by R. Glade Music, either in part or exclusively, including video, audio, and images, centered around professional studio services. The intended audience of this digital portfolio is primarily future employers, including: music performance solutions teams, recording studio managers, festival bookers, and university faculty. Peripheral audiences for the digital portfolio include artistic collaborators, like-minded researchers, and fans of R. Glade Music’s productions.
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Hugh Harsher - off the beaten track: The Creative Process of an Eight Track Album
Hugo Herber
2019This CE project consists of Hugh Herber’s second album off the beaten track, that contains eight tracks of original music. The album merges organic instruments with electronic music production and it glues together genres like trip hop, chillout, ambient, fusion, rock, world, and EDM to form what Hugh calls “progressive trip hop.” His latest work will be released on all streaming platforms as well as a limited tape cassette edition in late 2019.
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Iter Musicis
Varnavas Koromias
2019This CE consists of an EP titled “Iter Musicis”, Latin for “Music trek”, which signifies a musical journey. As such, the scope of this project is to engage the listener in a melodious venture. This is done by combining the composer’s influences into a blend of progressive rock/metal, electronic, and classical music. In turn, the music is accompanied by oscilloscope visuals which are programmed using 3D modeling and sound design. The visuals accompanying the tracks revolve around the composer’s reflections on his own compositions and what imagery they bring forth when listened to by the artist. The tracks featured in this EP will be part of a full-length album. By completing this project, the composer has gained experience in composition, sound design, mixing, as well as 3D and 2D modeling.
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EMERGING: Discovering My Style as a Multimedia Artist and Collaborator
Joyce Lindsey
2019Emerging is a multimedia performance that involves the improvisation and communication between the movement of dancers and visual synthesis, ambient, electronic West-African and Afro-Cuban music and live percussion triggered and manipulated by a live musician. Emerging is the result of Joyce Lindsey’s exploration in finding her style as a multimedia artist and collaborator. She aims to provide experiences where she can combine her skills as a sound designer, composer, percussionist and visual artist, in service to collaborating with choreographers and filmmakers to actualize the vision and/or theme they seek to express in their work.
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Filtering Chaos: an Audio/Visual Performance
Vasileios Malamas
2019Filtering Chaos is an Audio/Visual (A/V) Performance. The idea of the project is to reveal the need of filtering different kinds of urban life noises in order to achieve a point of balance and harmony. The composition consists of a real-time A/V Setup, centralized around a computer that handles all the audio and video content. Most of the sounds and visuals are pre-recorded and pre-rendered, which means that the performance is focuses on the manipulation and control of the content. There were a lot of technical challenges during the creation of the piece, but the main challenge was to find the way of delivering the message in the most interesting and compelling way. Fortunately, the project was successfully implemented with a lot of promising comments for the future.
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Paradise Divide: The Evolution & Exploration of an Artistic Identity
Celestine Manno
2019Paradise Divide is a 5 track EP that tells emotive stories of transition and growth, accompanied by complete artist branding. The goal is to combine authentic lyrical storytelling with original sound design and production to develop a fusion of genres and a sonic journey that ultimately leads to the artistic presence of Celestine. This “identity” is complete with branding, two separate EP releases, a performance portfolio, and a documented live debut of the new EP. Between the business elements of release, the struggle of songwriting, and the difficulty of learning a new DAW, there were a lot of challenges along the way. However, now the project can be used as a portfolio to pursue music after Berklee.
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Virtual Reality Meets Spatial Audio: A VR experience created with 360° video and spatial audio
Claudia Marcela Rada
2019The goals of this CE are to create a portfolio piece that illustrates proficient knowledge of spatial audio recording and mixing techniques, and to demonstrate the relevance of the use of spatial audio in today’s entertainment forms. The project consists of making a virtual reality (VR) experience through the use of 360° video and audio recordings of live musical performances. The user is taken to a space where they are able to rotate and see the room in a full circle; their movement is tracked so the effects of spatial audio can be heard through headphones. The challenges encountered included the time-consuming process of stitching and rendering 360° videos and finding platforms that support high order ambisonics. This CE showcases the effectiveness of spatial audio as a medium to create realistic experiences and in the future this research will be used to develop a course to teach ambisonics.
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Electro Shock
Javier Martin Arcos
2019This paper will discuss Javier Martin’s contribution to “Electro Shock”, the final project for his Master’s degree in Music Production, Technology and Innovation. Electro Shock is a collaborative project between two peer students, Javier Martin and Leanne Moser, based on the idea of experimenting with mixing EDM and rock music. It will be presented as an EP containing 4 songs and also as an audiovisual set, with interactive live performance and original visuals. Javier’s official part in the project was to mix Leanne’s Rock demos and blend them with his own electronic parts. He found it difficult to remix them without diminishing their strong social messages and their old structure. But with an open mind and respect for the demos, Javier gained skills in the field of mixing several new instruments and musical styles and Electro Shock was completed successfully and showcased proudly during his final Master’s defense.
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Building the New Label: Family First Records, LLC
Matthew L. Maxwell
2019This paper analyzes the current state of the record label in hopes of building the foundations for a new one. The project focuses on the present structure of the label and current innovations in the music space that have disrupted some of the historic strengths of the record label. The first part of the paper gives a brief overview of the organization structure, different types of labels, and current “pain points”. The second part highlights ways The New Label (aka Family First Records, LLC) seeks to offer healthy change to the space. The final section of the paper reflects on the year spent at Berklee Valencia and future implications of the label, Family First Records, LLC.
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Ambisonic Headphones
Brett Mayer
2019This project produced a pair of multiple driver headphones which are intended to reproduce ambisonic audio for the listener. Three discrete drivers are placed in each side of the headphones, arranged in a triangle surrounding each ear, allowing sound to be localized in a 360 degrees sound field. The second step of this process was to add a gyroscopic sensor to the headphones which tracks the movement of the user’s head. Information from this sensor is delivered to an encoding program which modulates the audio based on the user’s head position.
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BREAKING DOWN THE BREAK UP
Thomas D. Mills
2019This is a culminating experience, titled, Breaking Down the Break Up! (BDTBU). BDTBU is a five song EP by the author, Tommy Mills. The songs on this EP span a wide range of genres such as rock, electronic, funk, orchestral, ragtime, and pop. The goal of the project is to explore different approaches towards making marketable pop music. This project challenged the author to modernize his composition and production techniques. Upon graduation, the songs on BDTBU will be released on Spotify, iTunes, and Apple Music. Key Words: EP, popular music, modern production, composition, sound design.
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Masterclasses with Cojemo_
Connor J. Moen
2019This project aims to find a new medium for conventional teaching environments by incorporating www.twitch.tv as a streaming platform to engage students. Using a program called Open Broadcaster Software, the author was able to simultaneously record and stream video of myself giving lessons on music production aspects such as compression, EQ, sampling, etc. The full streams remain on the author’s twitch channel (twitch.tv/cojemo_) while edited versions became part of the Cojemo_ YouTube page. While growing the viewers remains a challenge, this project was successful in that these videos can be used by future students, as well as whoever finds them online.
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Conversations With Myself
Mariah Elyse Moore
2019This purpose of this project was to grow and evolve as a storyteller. Ti is of great importance of the author to be able to communicate her ideas effectively while being able to affect the emotions of those around her. It explores the process of taking words from a piece a paper and turning them into a living breathing sonic environment, in the hopes of developing the voice and music production process for the author. Interestingly enough, it resulted in a full length spoken word album. Each track (or piece) consists of an original prose or poem, musical composition, and sound design. Major challenges, originating from mental illness, greatly impacted the project execution and its contents both positively and negatively. The resulting album will be released on all digital platforms in September of 2019. This entire process allowed the author to realize her artistry and grow not only as an artist, but as a person as well.
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Electro Shock
Leanne Moser
2019For her Culminating Experience project at Berklee College of Music, Leanne Moser used her composition and engineering skills in collaboration with a talented electronic producer, Javier Martin, and created a 4 track EP of original music, which was later on performed as an audio-visual set. Their goal was to combine their strengths, and produce audio and visuals united to highlight messages for social change. The tracks are hybrid electronic compositions with lyrical content that promotes social themes, the visuals showcase the discussed themes in a hyperbolic, ironic sense. She was challenged by cooperating the several different styles together in her arrangements, and the amount of new technologies she needed to get comfortable with. She learned how to work as part of a duo, and how to use several new software and hardware. With hard work and passion, the project was successfully completed and presented as part of her master’s degree.