Standardization is sorely lacking in the field of musical machine learning. This thesis project endeavors to contribute to this standardization by training three machine learning models on the same dataset and comparing them using the same metrics. The music-specific metrics utilized provide more relevant information for diagnosing the shortcomings of each model.

Since the genre's inception more than half a century ago, metal music has maintained its place as a major music genre and culture across the globe. With hundreds of thousands of bands spread across every continent, the genre has become a diverse canvas of continually changing translocal scenes. Serious scholarship covering metal music has been propagating across academic fields since the 90s with a wide variety of approaches, but quantitative studies of the genre almost always depict metal as a monolith; a singular uniform entity without internal variation. This research aims to illustrate how quantitative analysis of metal can accurately reflect the genre’s major content variations, first by constructing a dataset of the Encyclopaedia Metallum: The Metal Archive that reflects major subgenre and lyrical themes within metal, and then applying said dataset to understand how metals content shifts both between major subgenres and across geographic space.

“Nothing New” is a 4-song project depicting my college experience through song. All of the songs were self-written, self-recorded, and self-produced, with assistance in the mixing and mastering of the final product. Each song functions as a representation of the most important takeaways and messages from each of my four years in college, as well as a sonic representation of what best fit each year.

A huge block in the road for prospective music students may reach them when they are looking forward to the next step in their music education: the application and selection process for higher institutions of music education differs significantly from the application process that most students go through to attend college. Without the proper guidance from teachers, counselors, and other mentors in their high school education, students may find themselves completely lost in a discipline that can tend to make assumptions about student goals and cost lots of money in the process.
Throughout this thesis, undergraduate music students will offer insight about the paths that they took to receiving their degrees alongside advice from college professionals that devote their professional lives to helping ensure that these students are successful. In addition, the culture and accepted curricula of collegiate music will be analyzed with a close lens to try and answer questions of what universities and other institutions of higher learning tend to value in the music discipline. In concluding remarks, this information will be synthesized to offer specific advice to help future college music students find their way.