Music Showcase To Feature Collaborative Tracks From Performance Studies Class
Ten music tracks created by students in a fall performance studies class will take the spotlight in a listening party on March 22 at 6:30 p.m.
The PERF Music Producers’ Showcase in Room 225 of the Liberal Arts and Humanities Building is the first event of its kind for the School of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts. It will feature students discussing their work in the Recording and the Producer course (PERF 317) and the processes they went through with the guidance of Dr. Will Connor, lecturer and expert in ethnomusicology. A Q&A session will follow, and pizza and refreshments will be served.
The course provides an entry-level introduction to studio work, equipment and production and teaches students how to explore recording techniques. The tracks have been available on a second-floor kiosk in the building and will now get a larger audience at the event.
“I’m extremely proud of the students who participated in PERF 317,” Connor said. “Their creativity continually surprised and pleased me, and they clearly exhibited their understanding of the equipment and the procedure. They found inventive ways of expressing themselves with the sounds they generated, and the sounds bestowed upon them from other producers in the course.”
As a precursor to creating the tracks, Connor shared a playlist with the students to show different forms of production, including black metal, J-pop, country and classical. Some producers are basically recording engineers, he said, but others have a much larger influence on the end result, pointing to Rick Rubin’s work with the Beastie Boys as a prime example.
The project put the 20 students in groups of four to create stems of tracks with traditional instruments — piano, drums, guitar, keyboard — along with electronic instruments, noisemakers and toys. Connor also encouraged them to take a portable recorder outdoors for environmental sounds.
The students took those elements and turned them into full-fledged tracks, piecing them together and mastering them. Studio banter and laughter were even included.
Experience levels in the class varied. Only five students were musicians, Connor said, and none had experience recording themselves in a studio. Connor arranged the groups so that each had at least one person with some experience.
“Some were well-versed in being musicians, but they didn’t have the opportunity to walk into an actual studio and put something on digital tape,” he said. “Just that opportunity was appreciated by many of the students to get in there and dig around.”
Breanna Loredo-Rayas, a freshman performance studies major, was joined in her group by Cody Barina, Sydney Do and Sam Gay. She said she felt a newfound appreciation for music through the process.
“It gave me the opportunity to make music with sounds I had never considered using before,” she said. “I also got to use programs I had never heard of. It gave me first-hand experience of what musicians and their producers go through to make the music they put out to the public.”
The free rein of resources was a bonus for Sam Payne, a senior interdisciplinary engineering major. He was joined in making two tracks by Tony Chuo, a senior economics major; Jase Hollingsworth, a sophomore engineering major; and Shannon Reed, a senior English major.
“‘Comet Cruisin’ is way laid back and has these spacey sound effects and nonrhythmic percussion,” Payne said. “Our classmates said it was sort of straddling the line between lo-fi and Tron music, which was about what we were going for by calling it ‘Comet Cruisin.’ Our second track is titled ‘Chillin’ in the Fondue Pit’ and feels a like a rave because we wanted our tracks to feel super distinct from each other.”
The collaboration in making the music was “an exercise in compromise,” Payne said.
“I loved when someone else’s idea turned out to be better than mine,” he said, “because it was really nice being in a group where everyone’s talents contributed something different to the music we were making.”
Each group created one track that was given to another group to play with, so that students could make creative decisions based on others’ ideas. Students were impressed with the results, and Loredo-Rayas called the reimagining of her group’s track “nothing short of astonishing.”
“Pretty regularly,” Connor said, “a group that had submitted a track and heard what the other group did with their track said, ‘Wow, we never would have thought to use it that way. I don’t even recognize that, what did you do to it?’”
Payne’s group was given a drum beat, which was then cut into pieces and rearranged in a different pattern. He likened it to “Where’s Waldo?” in identifying the original material.
“We gave other groups our Waldos with our own ideas in mind,” he said. “And I think hearing how they made them work for their tracks with their own ideas and motivations speaks to both my classmates’ resourcefulness and Dr. Connor’s teaching.”
The students’ work showed creativity and clever compositional ideas, Connor said. He called the music “highly impressive and exceptionally fun.”
“They paid attention to each other. They worked together very well,” he said. “They were such a friendly group. They really enjoyed giving each other tips and ideas. It was a very positive experience. I had a really good time working with the students.”
Photo: Dr. Will Connor, Stephen Cepeda, Breanna Loredo-Rayas and Sam Payne listen to tracks created in Connor’s Recording and the Producer class. Photo by Rob Clark.
