Filtering by
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
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.
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.
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.
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.
In the early history of jazz, many of the songs that were popularized by jazz musicians became known as jazz standards, and these songs remain a central component of the jazz repertoire today. Many of these jazz standards were adapted from early Broadway musicals and revues. Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! is widely considered to be the most significant musical in the history of Broadway theater. Its innovative blending of song, dance, and a cohesive dramatic story has profoundly influenced the structure of Broadway musicals to this day. However, none of the songs from this show have risen to the status of a jazz standard, and many appear to have not been adapted to the jazz idiom at all. In my Barrett Honors creative project, I have reimagined and arranged nine songs from the original Rodgers and Hammerstein production. I then led a jazz quintet through two months of rehearsals, culminating in a performance of the work for my senior jazz performance recital. A link to the performance at the ASU School of Music Recital Hall is included here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeOs4muj12M