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The purpose of this project is to create a useful tool for musicians that utilizes the harmonic content of their playing to recommend new, relevant chords to play. This is done by training various Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) on the lead sheets of 100 different jazz standards. A total of 200 unique datasets were produced and tested, resulting in the prediction of nearly 51 million chords. A note-prediction accuracy of 82.1% and a chord-prediction accuracy of 34.5% were achieved across all datasets. Methods of data representation that were rooted in valid music theory frameworks were found to increase the efficacy of harmonic prediction by up to 6%. Optimal LSTM input sizes were also determined for each method of data representation.
The purpose of this project is to assess how well today’s youth is able to learn new skills<br/>in the realm of engineering through online video-conferencing resources. Each semester of this<br/>last year, a class of students in both 3rd and 6th grade learned about computer-aided design (CAD)<br/>and 3D printing through their laptops at school. This was done by conducting online lessons of<br/>TinkerCAD via Zoom and Google Meet. TinkerCAD is a simple website that incorporates easy-to-learn skills and gives students an introduction to some of the basic operations that are used in<br/>everyday CAD endeavors. In each lesson, the students would learn new skills by creating<br/>increasingly difficult objects that would test both their ability to learn new skills and their overall<br/>enjoyment with the subject matter. The findings of this project reflect that students are able to<br/>quickly learn and retain new information relating to CAD. The group of 6th graders was able to<br/>learn much faster, which was expected, but the class of 3rd graders still maintained the<br/>knowledge gained from previous lessons and were able to construct increasingly complicated<br/>objects without much struggle. Overall, the students in both classes enjoyed the lessons and did<br/>not find them too difficult, despite the online environment that we were required to use. Some<br/>students found the material more interesting than others, but in general, the students found it<br/>enjoyable to learn about a new skill that has significant real-world applications
My proposed project is an educational application that will seek to simplify the<br/>process of internalizing the chord symbols most commonly seen by those learning<br/>musical improvisation. The application will operate like a game, encouraging the<br/>user to identify chord tones within time limits and award points for successfully<br/>doing so.
Using two interviews with local Phoenix professional chamber musicians, this document aims to compare their experiences across musical styles to find common ground and understand the value of chamber music as a professional and educational tool.
The topic of my thesis is Louis Armstrong and his influence on society and the Civil Rights Movement. The intent is to demonstrate how Louis Armstrong aided the Civil Rights Movement by using his music to promote social justice and racial equality. The focus will be on the context of African-Americans, their social status, and rights from the early 1900s to the mid-1900s. I will connect this to important events in that time such as the fight against Jim Crow Laws and how Louis Armstrong played a role in ending segregation. He accomplished this by pushing the movement forward through speeches, fund-raising events, and his innovation of jazz. Armstrong’s gift was a form of swing jazz that advanced improvisation and emotion of music.
He was criticized for playing to segregated audiences and was thought to keep offensive stereotypes alive. However, Louis Armstrong battled against these conspiracies by performing fund-raising events and through public political stances against the oppression of African-Americans. As an example, he was outspoken about his disapproval of government and the public for their treatment of the nine African-American students enrolled at Little Rock. This resulted in the first time the school would be unsegregated between whites and blacks. Louis Armstrong worked hard in the fight against segregation and used his mastery of jazz to advance the civil rights movement. Finally, I will make a proposal as to how society can learn from Louis Armstrong and how to inspire new innovative forms of positively influencing society to help the less fortunate.
For the second part of my thesis I talk about how I came to create the creative project aspect. I discuss how and why I designed the narrative that I did, and also analyzed the music I have created to illustrate how I implemented the various methods of musical storytelling that I detail in the first part of the paper. Lastly, I discuss my plans for publication and release of the creative project.
The third part of this thesis is a sample of the creative project. There is a version of the narrative that goes along with the creative project, as well as one of the eight pieces of original music on the creative project, entitled Journey.
Overall, I found that music does have meaning, it is just meaning that society ascribes to it based off of artistic intent and context, and as to whether music should mean anything, I believe that this is a question best left to be answered on an individual basis. Music can be whatever it wants to be.