Category: College of Visual and Performing Arts

My research will explore how the musical style of Nintendo’s mainline 2D and 3D Mario series has evolved overtime.
I will specifically focus on four games: Super Mario Bros. (1985), Super Mario Bros. Wonder (2023), Super Mario 64 (1996), and Super Mario Galaxy 2 (2010). The first two are 2D, side-scrolling platformers, and the last two are 3D, open-world puzzle platformer games.
Super Mario games include different “areas” that share visual and musical elements to build an immersive atmosphere. I will focus on certain “area themes” from the selected games: the overworld theme, the underwater theme, and the castle theme.
The themes will be compared through the lens of instrumentation, form, rhythm, and “reuse”. Reuse refers to recurring melodic ideas, rearrangements, and how the song connects to the idea of Mario music as a whole. Comparing these elements in the selected Mario themes will allow for the exploration of how Mario music has evolved into what it is today.

hi my name is Jessica Taylor and I am a senior in the music Technology Program here at George Mason and I did My Capstone research project on the evolution of Mario music this platforming video game series has been close to my heart ever since I was a kid and I enjoy the depth and versatility that comes in the music of such a long running and diverse Series so I wanted to look into that this is my thesis just state it more properly exploring how the musical style of Nintendo’s Mainline 2D and 3D Mario Series has evolved over time and for each game I picked an Overworld theme an underwater theme and a castle theme because there are certain elements that make these themes what they are make them immersive make them associate with these areas that they’re trying to convey to The Listener such as their instrumentation their form or maybe some recurring melodic ideas or rearrangements throughout the series um so I know that’s a lot of lenses I’ll be looking at things through but I’m going to for the interest of time go through the Overworld theme from the first and second game that I analyzed which is actually the oldest Mario game and then the most recent one that came out in 2023 Super Mario Bros Wonder um I will be analyzing the Overworld themes from them so this is the Super Mario Bros Overworld theme I will play a little

excerpt so as you you can see the instrumentation is very simple that’s due to technological limitations at the time but the composer koi condo did the best he could to make an upbeat interesting sounding piece um the form is ABC and Mario music is often very AB ABC form Reliant it’s got a lot of periodic structure um and that little intro Hook is one of the most iconic Mario music figures probably of all time and what I noticed during this project is that there are little intro hooks in a lot of Mario pieces whether it be a castle theme or an underwater theme there is something that gets the listener into the piece and then there is the actual atmosphere um and then this song has been rearranged 30 times throughout the uh just the mainline Super Mario series which I find really interesting everyone kind of knows this song If you know any Mario song you would know this one this is the newest Overworld theme from the newest game

so obviously the instrumentation is a lot more broad it’s acoustic it’s live it’s very well recorded it brings a lot of energy but both of these pieces have that upbeat Happy Feeling where Mario is adventurous and he’s saving the day and you can just tell he’s good from this um and something once again the form is AB in terms of reuse like elements that I find in a lot of Overworld themes the hook we’ve got the kind of similar to the um it kind of plays on that a little bit um and the harmony it’s very major major key in chords the melody is very focused on these main chord tones with little bits of added chromaticism here and there to give it a playful feeling and then the rhythm is very syncopated which is also one of the things that makes the original theme stick out a lot so that helps give it that um Groove and upbeat Vibe so that’s just two of the examples that I looked at over my research but across all the games and all the songs that I looked at I found that what stuck out to me as defining Mario music as a whole were three things fun drama and catchiness so by fun I mean it’s upbeat it’s easy to listen to there’s a lot of major Harmony there’s syncopation to make it groovy but there’s also drama you know there’s scary moments in these games or more deep and meaningful moments in the games that have more story um and this is backed up by chromaticism modal mixture to create a darker tone unique rhythms that allow Melodies to be weirder but still digestible to The Listener and then finally catchiness so so many songs have hooks I think literally just me singing D D D D D is enough proof that catchiness and hooks are an integral part of Mario music um there’s a lot of repetition whether that being the melody or whether it’s literally rearranging a song for a later game um there’s a lot of rearrangements and reuse in the Mario Series so these are the things that I found Define Mario music thank you and these are my sources

This is my presentation of my work for the creative project for the Music Technology Capstone. It comprises of some music I have made for an upcoming video game I am developing.

Hi, my name is Livingston Rampey I am a bachelor of music student in music technology and today I will be sharing with you my creative project for the Music Technology capstone. What I am going to be showcasing here today in this video is some of the music from a project I started last year. What originally started as me simply creating a language for fun, ended up becoming the basis video game that I am developing. The video game is called Entropy, it follows a protagonist waking up in a spaceship stranded in space. The music I will be sharing today is a mixture of mini-boss battle themes and background music that scores the beginning and middle sections of the game. I you would like to hear the full versions of the songs. I am releasing the first 5th of the game’s soundtrack onto my YouTube channel which is linked to the channel this video is on. Thank you for your time and I hope you enjoy the music!

Now, we get to the final part: bringing it all together. With how much there is to consider every time you write a song, creating a blueprint to write a song for a specific use should make it easier, but there’s a lot of different elements to think about. From tempo, to instrumentation, to rhythm, melody, and harmony, it can get kind of overwhelming. So I’m mainly going to address what I think are the most important factors of creating a song to reduce anxiety. I believe the top three elements to consider are:

1. Tempo
2. Rhythm/Time Signature
3. Melody/Harmony

Following the generalized blueprint, your final song would contain: a slow tempo, with an even, simple rhythm, with simple chord progressions and an easy to follow along with melody. Your instrumentation doesn’t quite matter, nor do the lyrics. Of course, when reducing anxiety, happier lyrics or a happier-sounding chord progression and melody would work better than something that sounds sad or angry.

Music has been proven time and time again to be good not only for your mental health, but for your physical health as well. By interacting with multiple portions of the brain, music can reduce stress levels and lower anxiety. There are certain genres and styles of music that have been found to be more beneficial than others, and listening to those genres and incorporating them into your daily life can have both short-term and long-term positive effects, and reduce negative effects. By analyzing songs that have been found to be useful in reducing anxiety through music therapy, musicians can follow a basic blueprint to create their own songs to lower anxiety levels.

Hi, my name is Hannah Polissky and today I’ll be going into part of my research for my research project in my Music Technology Capstone class, which was titled Music for Anxiety. I wanted to look into why music is good for reducing anxiety. There have been a lot of studies that were done into it over the years, and I wanted to look specifically into what parts of music have been found to actually be the most useful in reducing anxiety. Through my research, I then created a blueprint for musicians and even non-musicians to follow if they wanted to create their own music. So, there are a lot of things to consider when creating music for anxiety. The top three, in my opinion, are tempo, rhythm and time signature, and melody and harmony.
So, for tempo, you want to have a slow tempo most of the time. Not all songs that have been found to reduce anxiety are that slow, but 60 BPM, as mentioned here, is one of the most useful to reduce anxiety, because it promotes synchronization in our brain, specifically with our brainwaves, and it causes alpha brainwaves, which are present when we are calm and relaxed, maybe a little sleepy, but still conscious. They are the brainwaves that are present before you fall asleep and get to level one and level two sleep.
When addressing rhythm and time signature, these are another integral part of music that helps to reduce anxiety. Time signatures, most of the time you’ll run into 4/4 or 3/4. These are very common ones and very easy and simple to look at, listen, play as well, and anything more complicated than that can sometimes just cause anxiety, even just by looking at it, let alone playing or listening to it. You want to have a consistent time signature and a consistent rhythm, because it allows people to really feel the beat of the songs and attune themselves to it, thus promoting that synchronization effect I mentioned before. Changing the time signature or the rhythm repeatedly introduces an anticipatory response and can actually increase levels of anxiety.
When looking at melody and harmony, these are also important to keep in mind, specifically because jarring melody or harmony that clashes with your key signature can actually make anxiety worse. You want to keep them simple and you don’t want to introduce any surprises. You want to keep them, again, calm, simple, just easy to follow along with. Chord progressions are another thing that you can be aware of. There’s common chords, which I’m not going to get into here, because that’s a little more complicated than just the general audience might understand, unless they have had a musical background.
Other factors to consider are the genre, the instrumentation, the key, and whether or not you want your song to be instrumental or have lyrics. The genre doesn’t really matter. You could have rock, and it could be very slow, very easy to follow along with. It could be a power ballad, it can be techno, whatever you want. That also addresses the instrumentation in that you could have really anything you want, as long as you’re aware of what that instrument does and how it will blend with everything else that you are including in your song. The key also doesn’t matter quite as much, but you do want to keep in mind if you’re trying to reduce anxiety, happier-sounding songs might be better for that. Having happier-sounding keys would be a good thing to keep in mind. And then, like I mentioned, if you want your song to have lyrics, just make sure that the lyrics aren’t super depressing. And then you can also just have it be completely instrumental with no lyrics at all.
And then your final product. You would want the final product to have a slow, even tempo, an even and simple rhythm, simple chord progressions, and a simple melody and harmony.

This is a project I have been working on for my Music Technology Capstone class. The project essentially involves making different genres in EDM by using mostly self made samples and presets. Roughly 75-80 percent of what you’ll hear is all made from scratch. This involves using techniques like making sounds with virtual synthesizers, using audio effects, and re-sampling.

Hi, I’m Chris Arnhold
Today I will be showing you a track that I am currently working on for my capstone creative project. I composed this track in ableton live 11 which is a digital audio workstation that you use for making music on computers. For this project I challenged myself to create an EDM (electronic dance music) song in which I synthesized, re-sampled, and made almost every sound you are going to hear from scratch. This includes all melodic, chordal, bass, and FX content and some of the drums such as: hi-hats, crashes, claps, and percussion. The only things that you are going to hear that aren’t made from scratch are the kicks, snares, and two samples. The importance of these two samples is that I based the song around them. What I did is essentially took the idea of the samples such as its pitch and rhythm and expanded on them and turned them into 4 different EDM genres in one song. The samples are: this chord loop right here”¦ play the loop and this vocal loop right here”¦ play the loop. But everything else you are going to hear is from scratch. So let me go ahead and play the track for you.

In this Creative Project, lead by An Tran in completion the requirements for MUSI 489-Music Technology Capstone, is a short description about the research and discovery they made in the practice of VJ’ing. VJ’ing is a practice that combines both visual media and music DJ in a multimedia medium for entertainment.

The project will culminate in a performance day at the end of the semester, where An will perform their set in a small venue along with other VJ guests.

Hello, my name is An Tran. I am a Music Technology student and I’m presenting my capstone, specifically my creative project; which is learning an entirely new skill, also known as VJ. And basically what it is, is that it is a combination of both DJing and visual art, combined together to make an experience for audience members.

And so for the past month or so, I’ve been learning how to use this program. Rekordbox up here, you can see the BPM of the song, the song list that I have, and the cue points that I use throughout the set.

And my goal throughout the past month of learning this is to be able to learn how to do all the basics such as beat matching, how all the buttons work, and what different methods I can use to get through it. And with the visual aspect of this, usually what I would do is I would send the audio that comes out of here, for example: [Music Plays].

That audio that you hear, I would send it through an interface. I am showing a version by Paul Andrew on YouTube. He has a great tutorial on this. I am using TouchDesigner, as you can see here. The music would travel through this interface and they use the audio to change different parameters and present a unique visual. So if I can play a little bit as an example: [Music Plays].

So TouchDesigner is a really powerful tool where there’s many different nodes or known as operators. There are visual operators but there are also operators that can be changed on parameters, such as the audio coming here that would change these numbers if I were to play; and that would affect the different visual. At the very end of this chain I have an open source called Sprout.

And what that is, is that it creates some sort of network that I can send in between different programs. So this “sprout out” will then go on to Resolume, which is a software I am using in order to showcase the VJ set to the audience. So this is what the composition should look like, and I will play a little bit of the rest of it before ending this: [Music Plays].

Thank you very much for your time, I appreciate it and hopefully I will be able to put on a set for other people to view. Thank you very much!

The commodification of lofi music, from its community-driven origins in the 1990s to its mainstream popularity during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, has diluted the authenticity of the genre and undermined the independence of lofi artists, which signals a need for grassroots support of independent lofi artists in order to preserve the genre’s original spirit.

The song you just heard is Monday Loop from the album Harbor by a Finnish lofi artist named tomppabeats. It was released in May of 2016, though I’m pretty sure the first time I heard it was later that year or even sometime in 2017. In all honesty, it was probably playing in the background of a video with visuals pulled from Steven Universe, something like a sunset over a field or an ocean that paired perfectly with the kind of mellow grooves Harbor is full of. I was a freshman in high school around this time, just discovering music production, and tomppabeats‘ cassette-flipping techniques fascinated me, and stretched my ideas of how music could be created or what it could even sound like.

I fell in love with lofi around then, discovering other short-form artists like tomppabeats as well as other lofi-adjacent genres. Lofi, short for “low-fidelity”, refers to music that has elements with a more vintage or retro quality to them, sort of an antithesis to the high-fidelity movement, which aims for crystal-clear listening experiences. It’s this intentional embrace of the imperfect that makes lofi so appealing to me, it’s very human, and it doesn’t shy away from that.

The thing is, lofi doesn’t really sound like this anymore, and I’m not even sure you can call it all human. AI generation of lofi is becoming a serious problem, and even when it isn’t AI generated, people are treating lofi as more of a commodity than an art form; a side hustle purely for making money, not for making art. Long-time lofi fans like me are starting to notice, because not only have we seen our favorite genre of music lose its hallmark authentic touch, but our favorite artists are struggling, too. We know something needs to change, but what can we do?

The power to reconnect with lofi’s foundational values lies in the hands of both listeners and musicians. Resisting the 24-7 lofi livestreams you find on Youtube is one step; as they’re often run by companies with shady contracts that aren’t fair to artists. Instead, try opting for an individual artist’s page or album, and try listening through a service like Bandcamp, which tends to be more fair to artists when distributing royalties. Rekindling engagement between fans and artists is important, too, this is something that’s been lost when we put lofi on in the background as just “something to study, chill, do something else to”, we forget that a human actually made it. Listeners, find ways to support the artists making the music you love, and artists, remember you’re creators of art, not just creators of content. Whether you’re a long time fan of lofi or this is your first time hearing about it, remember: supporting artists, falling back in love with music, bringing a genre back to what it used to be, all starts with you

This video is about the creative project I did for my Music Technology Capstone course. For the project I built my own subwoofer loudspeaker and am shown in this video touring it and demonstrating it.

Hello, my name is Ian Takacs, I am a senior Music Technology student with the College of Visual and Performing Arts here at George Mason University. I am currently in my capstone class, and as part of that we have a creative project. That creative project is what I’m submitting for this Oscar Celebration. For my creative project, I undertook the process of researching, developing, and building my own subwoofer. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it is a speaker that handles low frequencies of audio, that’s its dedicated purpose. so, without further ado, here it is.

So, it is about two feet, by a little bit over one foot. That allows it to get the internal volume needed to recreate a lot of those low frequencies that I just talked about. This right here is the woofer driver, this is what actually produces the sound, it pressurizes the air using a magnetic system in the back of it which I would show you but unfortunately its all sealed up at this point. It moves the air in front of it, oscillating how a sound wave would, in turn this creates the low frequency sound waves you hear in intense music such as kick drums or a bass guitar.

Moving around to the back here, we have an amplifier. Now in order to drive that woofer driver, we need some sort of power delivery system because we can’t just make energy out of nothing. So. what we have here is called an amplifier and what it does is it drives the woofer driver up front using AC power taken from a wall or some other sort of power conditioner or power strip. That’s just the power delivery, this is what allows the device to function. In order for the driver to produce a signal, it needs a signal delivered to it. So what we have here, is two XLR ports, and that is a form of audio connection. and right here, an older standard many of you may be familiar with on your own home audio devices, this is called an RCA port. Now how they’re configured here, is we have a left, a right, over here we have a left and a right. This, these four right here is our input section. Now what that means is audio is coming into the device from these ports. Now its configured this way so what you can do is run your stereo inputs into this device, right, your left and your right audio, and then have them come out over here to other devices such as speakers that are built for high range audio, high frequency audio. Since this is only built for low frequency audio, you don’t want to be driving high frequency audio through it.

You will now hear a demonstration of the subwoofer, recorded through a Shure SM57 Microphone.

[subwoofer makes noise for the remainder of the video]

This project explores the recreation of three influential algorithmic reverbs using PlugData, a Pure Data-based interpreter integrated with JUCE, a robust C++ framework for digital signal processing. By reconstructing these iconic algorithms, the study investigates their sound and historical significance in shaping modern reverb designs. This work provides insight into the evolution of algorithmic reverbs and their influence on contemporary audio processing practices.

Hello, my name is Gage Jones and I’m here to report my findings on algorithmic reverbs through history. Algorithmic reverb are reverbs that mimic a space by a mathematical equation and they could be in real or non real spaces and it’s incredibly controllable. A famous example is a Lexicon 224 which is heard in many famous recordings from the late 70s and early 80s. Different examples of algorithms. First is the algorithm by Manfred Schroeder that started it all, and it sounds like a plate reverb due to its diffuse reverb, tail and diffuse means it’s equal over space and time. It also has no early reflections, so it has a particular sound that really sticks out compared to modern reverbs. So to start off with. I want to show a dry signal, then the Schroder reverb signal. So here’s an example of the dry signal. And here is an example with the Schroder Reverb. So as you can tell it is reverb, but it’s also very glassy and has a very particular phonic to it. So James Moore basically took Schroder’s idea and added a couple of things. He added early reflections he adds early and late reflections being controlled by the same system, and also that the late reverb tail is created by using a network of comb and all pass filters for smoother diffusion. Unlike Schroders Reverb, which just used one of each. Now what does this mean in practice? Well, you’ll notice that that one particular phonic is actually not present in the more reverb due to more smoothing. Lastly, I went for John Dattorro’s reverb, which uses a feedback delay network and also features nonlinear processing which caused a smooth diffusion of reflections. Now what this essentially means for me is I kind of visualize it as a fish tank, so it’s essentially like each reflection is a fish and each time that fish sinks further to the bottom, it gets further away. It’ll take that fish and feed it back up to the top, and then it’ll keep everything that it stored inside of the fish as it transfers it back to the top. So essentially it’s a very rich and it builds very fast into an extremely dense echo. And it also features spatial encoding, which means that each of the reflections are actually localized to wherever they are in the fish tank. If you want to call it that way, and it’s also the algorithm that’s featured in the famous lexicon reverb units, and also still used to this day. I also want to include that all of these examples were created inside of plug data, which is a software that infuses both Max MSP and Pure Data objects inside of JUCE C++ repository. So this is the Schroeder reverb. This is the Moore reverb and this is the Dattorro reverb, so hopefully you found that as cool as I did and thank you for watching.

This is my favorite song that I’m currently working on for my Capstone this semester called “Us”, which goes into more detail about a certain time in my life where I felt confused.

Hi! My name’s Johnny and this colorful screen you’re looking at right now is called FL Studio!

FL Studio’s a DAW or a Digital Audio Workstation, which basically just means a place for people to put out their ideas in a musical format

Today I wanna show you guys one of my favorite songs that I’m currently working on that’s called “Us”. The song’s revolved around a time where I felt like me and this girl were lost in our feelings. We didn’t really know where to go at the time and it definitely made me feel confused and spaced out, which I try to express with some of the more “spacey” like instruments. I had a lot of fun writing the lyrics and just getting into the groove.

Welp, that’s enough of me talking, thanks for sticking around and listening to my explanation and I hope you enjoy the song!