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    Influence of emotions: how a film score aids audience attention and understanding in documentary film
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2023) Weikert, Grace Allison; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Dennis Aig
    The music that accompanies documentaries often needs to be more valued and utilized. Although documentaries primarily focus on facts or discoveries, their musical scores, which are often secondary, house the emotional nuances and sensitivities that are the true key to their meaning and impact. Intentionally crafted scores--as the emotional undertone--draw viewers into the inner world of the film. By maximizing intellectual stimulation through the visual means of film and auditorial means of music, there is a greater chance for audience attention and understanding. This thesis seeks to examine original scores within documentary films, applications pertaining to learning capabilities, and the proper execution within documentary context to direct attention of the viewer. I include a case study using my science documentary film Holy Curiosity: Uncovering the Expansion Rate of the Universe to assess the effectiveness of sequences in aiding audiences' attention and understanding of complex scientific information through its original musical score as a structural device. Ultimately, documentary films employing an original film score may garner increased audience attention and understanding.
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    Theory Fundamentals Workbook
    (2023) Young, Gregory
    This workbook is a practical method for learning the rudiments of music, which are essential to a thorough understanding of music in general. Designed as a supplement to professional instruction rather than a manual for self instruction, the text is intentionally brief. The emphasis is on using practical exercises to develop fluency. Aural, vocal, and keyboard skills must be integrated into the study of music theory from the very beginning. I encourage all students, regardless of their principal instrument, to learn to hear, sing, and play on the piano everything that they do in theory. All exercises in this book should be completed thoroughly. Usually a sample will be completed in brackets for each exercise, as a demonstration. Fluency with these basic materials of music will be a great asset to any further musical endeavors. For students who need additional exercises, suggestions for further study will be given.
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    Structures of cultural memory: the photography of Tom Wright
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2022) Zignego, Jordan Robert; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Dennis Aig
    The photography of Tom Wright, archived at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin, is both art and history. Wright captured many musicians on stage and off at some of the most pivotal moments in both their own careers and in the history of rock music. Although Wright played an integral part with various bands, and produced an amazing body of photographical work in a career that spanned from the 1960s to the 1980s, he has remained unknown. This dissertation argues that Wright belongs in the pantheon of rock photographers as a chronicler and artist; that Wright's photography, and the manner in which it was created, represent the turmoil and conflicts of his era (1960s-1980s) on which he had a specific Anglo-American take as a photographer born in America, but educated in England; that the so-called rock 'n roll life is embodied in Wright's life, including the concept of auto-destruction, that is a primary reason for Wright's lack of recognition; and Wright's relative obscurity is due in large part to his own refusal to work for any publications but to take photographs for their own sake. Wright's photography tells a more nuanced story of rock music. By altering the collectively accepted narrative, his photographs provide a sense of awakening for all and touch on shared memories and how society remembers. Wright's work ultimately offers a more inclusive perspective on how photographs affect both memory and accepted history.
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    A timeline of how Native Americans/indigenous peoples have decolonized & indigenized: opera, jazz, & blues
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2021) Andrade, Bryce Clinton; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Walter Fleming
    At the beginning of the assimilation era, Indigenous Tribes in North America were suppressed into western civilization. Suppression of Native American culture was rampant and still is. The art of music has come back with a vengeance and has helped the progression of decolonization and indigenization within many cultures, especially indigenous ones across the United States and Canada. The purpose of this thesis is to explore how Native Americans and Indigenous people have been able to decolonize and indigenize music between 1879 and present day -- specifically in genres such as opera, jazz and blues. The specific start date of the year 1879 enables us to engage and learn about the effects of missionary schools, more commonly known as boarding schools, and the effects that these schools have had on the culture and music for these communities. The activism in this paper is gauged on a scale of minimalism and maximization. These two spectrums will be explored in every genre provided and will present a preview of how native artists define the term activism and how they use or do not use it. Within indigenous activism, the terms 'Indigenization' and 'Decolonization' are vital and need to be established because some musical forms such as jazz are already decolonized in a historical sense. These forms of music stemmed from Black communities rebelling against the Westernized system that enslaved them thus forcing Black Americans to assimilate as well and adapt to new settings, create new cultures and with that new music. Decolonization can take place in European or Western forms of music such as opera and classical music. The timeline and interviews with current indigenous musicians will help show changes over time (even though timelines are a colonial or Western aspect), what being indigenous looks like in music, and how decolonization and indigenization have evolved as theories.
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    Is music an effective intervention for improving sleep quality among adult postoperative open-heart patients: a feasibility project
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Nursing, 2019) Olds, Jenna Leann; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Alice Running
    Sleep deprivation is a common disorder known to impair the immune system and healing. Noise, pain, anxiety, and illness in general contribute to sleep deprivation. Patients admitted to the hospital setting are at heightened risk for complications related to decreased quality of sleep. Pharmacological interventions such as opioids and sleep aids are frequently administered to combat this issue. Integrative therapies are often overlooked as a way to increase quality sleep while hospitalized. One of the safest and easiest alternative interventions to employ is music. The purpose of this pilot feasibility project was to determine whether implementing music at the bedside during hours of sleep in the acute coronary-care setting addressed quality of sleep for postoperative open-heart patients. While statistical significance was not met in this project, promising results were found.
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    Predilection, progress and prejudice: coon songs and the construction of race in nineteenth century American culture
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2019) Matzinger, Ryan Joseph; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Robert Rydell; Billy Smith (co-chair)
    This is a study about the history of American culture and the construction of race through the musical idiom of coon songs. It is an examination of the jazz narrative and the role of blackface minstrelsy and coon songs, as they directly relate to the jazz tradition and the construction of race in nineteenth-century America. The modes of inquiry utilized are from the American Studies methodology and resulted in a more thorough, in-depth understanding of the construction of American race ideology, with a more complete, holistic perception of the jazz narrative. In a methodology that blends the excavation of less standard resources and research techniques that approach American history from further outside the chronological strictures and modes of conventional historical inquiry, the American Studies jazz-scholar-musician is compelled to live by, creatively inquire about, and more thoroughly comprehend the rationally intuitive values of jazz music and cultural literacy. In this study of race construction, coon songs, and the American jazz narrative as regarded from a revised conventional modality of jazz as American Studies, and American Studies as jazz, what's really on the line is the way American culture cultivates and also demolishes social and racial hierarchies through musical idioms.
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    Music and ecstatic truth alternate approaches to scoring a documentary film
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Arts & Architecture, 2019) Collins, William Campbell; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Theo Lipfert
    Music has the capacity to quickly and effectively communicate abstract emotional states. In documentary film, music has a powerful impact on how audiences' perceive and empathize with its characters. Despite this, its role can be diminished in comparison to its creative significance. This is often due to the timing of its creation during the production process. In this paper I will discuss two alternate methods of film scoring and how they can yield more authentic musical interpretations of real events. Through the works of various filmmakers and my own experience scoring the short film, 'The Traverse', this paper will discuss how scoring a film early in the production phase, or self-scoring can yield a more authentic display of 'ecstatic truth' in documentary.
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    Learning spectral filters for single- and multi-label classification of musical instruments
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Engineering, 2015) Donnelly, Patrick Joseph; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: John Sheppard
    Musical instrument recognition is an important research task in music information retrieval. While many studies have explored the recognition of individual instruments, the field has only recently begun to explore the more difficult multi-label classification problem of identifying the musical instruments present in mixtures. This dissertation presents a novel method for feature extraction in multi-label instrument classification and makes important contributions to the domain of instrument classification and to the research area of multi-label classification. In this work, we consider the largest collection of instrument samples in the literature. We examine 13 musical instruments common to four datasets. We consider multiple performers, multiple dynamic levels, and all possible musical pitches within the range of the instruments. To the area of multi-label classification, we introduce a binary-relevance feature extraction scheme to couple with the common binary-relevance classification paradigm, allowing selection of features unique to each class label. We present a data-driven approach to learning areas of spectral prominence for each instrument and use these locations to guide our binary-relevance feature extraction. We use this approach to estimate source separation of our polyphonic mixtures. We contribute the largest study of single- and multi-label classification in musical instrument literature and demonstrate that our results track with or improve upon the results of comparable approaches. In our solo instrument classification experiments, we provide the seminal use of Bayesian classifiers in the domain and demonstrate the utility of conditional dependencies between frequency- and time-based features for the instrument classification problem. For multi-label instrument classification, we explore the question of dataset bias in a cross-validation study controlled for dataset independence. Additionally, we present a comprehensive cross-dataset study and demonstrate the generalizability of our approach. We consider the difficulty of the multi-label problem with regards to label density and cardinality and present experiments with a reduced label set, comparable to many studies in the literature, and demonstrate the efficacy of our system on this easier problem. Furthermore, we provide a comprehensive set of multi-label evaluation measures.
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    Music & architecture : a study in time and space
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, 1991) Sanderson, Mark; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Jerry A. Bancroft
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    A music building for Montana State
    (Montana State University - Bozeman, 1963) Young, Dennis
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