While large performance spaces fulfill important cultural, civic, architectural and artistic needs, few performing artists begin their careers playing in large halls. As in professional sports, the “minor leagues” play a critical role for professional performing artists by allowing them to both reach out to new audiences and hone their performance skills. Niche and emerging performing artists, therefore, rely on small performance spaces as their principal means exercising their craft. In addition to size, one important difference between large and small performance spaces is the criticality of the social experience. Small performance spaces are often informal, with entertainment being secondary to social functions - as in the case of the neighborhood coffee house, bar or restaurant that offers periodic performances in addition to their standard fare. The hybridization of social and performance functions offers a “ready-made” audience for niche and emerging performing artists, engendering the new and random audience-performer connections that are so critical to nurturing performing artists and the performing arts in general. The disparate social and attentive programmatic functions of these hybrid spaces offer a challenge to architects and designers. Providing a hybrid social/performance space that is optimized for niche and emerging performing artists is the central design problem that this thesis seeks to address.

In the creation of my thesis project, I aimed to record a collection of music that highlights my influences and creative voice as an artist within the bluegrass/acoustic music genres. In collaboration with friends and colleagues that I have met during my time at East Tennessee State University, I have successfully recorded a project that surveys my current influences and creative voice as an artist, instrumentalist and composer. One goal I had for this project was to highlight compositions that I have written on acoustic guitar. Before attending ETSU, I did play some acoustic guitar, though I was primarily a banjo player. Since then, I have developed a passion for the guitar and have worked to advance my skills as a guitarist. My project includes two pieces that I composed on the guitar, and these compositions are examples of my exploration of harmony and rhythm. I feel that these pieces fit into the “New Acoustic” subgenre of bluegrass and bluegrass-adjacent music. I also chose to include two songs that fit more into the “progressive bluegrass” subgenre. On these two selections, one cover and one original, I played five-string banjo. These two pieces highlight my current interests and influences from genres like Jazz, Indie, and Pop music. The last two pieces included are songs that come from the bluegrass genre, and represent my progress as both an instrumentalist and vocalist. Also on this project, I experimented with different audio recording techniques. I have been studying audio production as my concentration within the Bluegrass, Old-Time, and Roots Music Studies major. This project allowed me to be creative as an audio engineer as well as a musician.

This thesis, Choreographic Space, and accompanying exhibit is an arrangement of contemporary work being done in the cross-over between movement, drawing, sound and architecture. The thesis develops a lineage of choreographic thinking through a fissure in the classification of a dance as necessarily the body in motion. Through the link of the “choreographic object,” Choreographic Space asks how an interdisciplinary exploration of the principles of movement can reveal novel ways to think about the body in space.

This paper is about my investigation of early bluegrass recording techniques and the processes they used. After doing some extensive research, and compiling a database of black and white photographs from the time period, I felt I had enough information to assemble a team to try and produce the sounds, tonal qualities, and energy those recordings have. So John Kornhauser, Joshua Gooding, Hunter Berry, Sarah Griffin, along with myself, went to BigTone studios and tracked for two four hour sessions. BigTone studios has all of the vintage microphones, tape recorders, echo chambers, and out board equipment I need to replicate the same signal chain that was used on the early recordings. After the recording process, I mixed and mastered the songs to match the early recordings as closely as possible. We also recorded one song at ETSU’s studio that was all digital with new equipment to show the differences in the sound of analog versus digital recording. I have included both so that you can listen to each and determine for yourself if there is an audible difference, and if that difference is worth pursuing.

Libby in Limbo is a scripted narrative podcast that follows Libby as she moves back to her small hometown, gets a job as a librarian, and learns to navigate life in a small, tight-knit community. This podcast serves two main purposes: to create entertainment media about a library that does not promote harmful stereotypes about libraries and to create awareness and accessibility of scripted podcasts.

We live in a very busy world with a variety of sensory stimulation including the olfactory, visual, tactile, and auditory. The five senses are triggered by our surroundings and help us to form meaning about the world.ⅰ Based on where someone grows up, she or he is introduced to various sites and sounds, affecting how they interpret the world. Sounds relate meaning through the association between hearing, memory and an event. Hearing is one of the learning processes, in which individuals give, receive, and store information. We typically rely on our five senses, which contribute to the process of understanding, communicating, and comprehending information. Moving beyond visual perception requires systematic attention to individual learning modalities.ⅱ Sound is one of the developing areas in the field of perception that moves beyond vision to help people understand nature, objects, narratives and varieties of perception. In order to comprehend how people hear, it is important to understand the role of perception. Sound functions as a signal, but also varies according to the capacity to hear. An individual’s physical ability to hear, and their unique experiences with sound, differ from one person to the next, and can result in a range of emotions and reactions. Certain sounds, like the voice of a loved one, also have the power to trigger emotion and convey meaning due to the association between hearing, memory and specific events from one›s past In short, the three aspects of sound perception–signal, hearing, and emotional reaction–play an integral role in auditory perception and the subjectivity of sound. However, the value of sound is often taken for granted or viewed as secondary to visual perception. This thesis will explore the value of sound perception by investigating two of its primary aspects–hearing and emotional response–in application to memory. Through a series of experiential objects, that trigger the senses. The aim is to utilize design to memorialize precious sounds in order to raise awareness about the emotional value of sound to the human experience.

A transcript of the audio that constitutes the work by the same title, along with an introduction and relevant bibliography.

The artist discusses the work in DollHouse, her Master of Fine Arts exhibition on display at Tipton Gallery, Johnson City, Tennessee from January 25 to February 5, 2016. The exhibition was an installation consisting of five sets, each containing furniture - both 2D and 3D - and a mask with instructions relating to a room found within a dollhouse. The sets and supporting thesis explore the ideas of social norms, feminism, and identity, and how submission to ideologies can create emptiness, while engagement can prompt social change. Topics include the process and evolution of the work and the artists who influenced it, ideas of identity and society, and the impacts of social norms on young women’s lives. Included is a catalogue of the exhibition.

Quotations like the Sharpest Claws describes a multimedia installation composed of paintings and sound that explores the theory of cognitive dissonance, a controversial psychological model that attempts to explain how we deal with inconsistency in incompatible beliefs. Imagination is given primacy as a source for truth-seeking and world-building. The uncanny and surreal are used as entry points into this topic. The title is derived from a description of Eileen Myles’ poetry I once read in an anonymous review. Their writing was described as beyond poetry in a way that it could only be described as such when surrounded by “quotations like the sharpest claws.” This phrase has since stuck with me as a way to describe my own work, dealing with “truth,” “metaphor,” and “cognition”, although in my case these claws are indicative of doubt surrounding the aforementioned subjects.

What is comedy? Can someone learn to be funny? Are there rules or guidelines for the production of laughter, the universal language? This paper, which outlines an investigation of successful comedians and the production of a short film, determines to aggregate as many of the relevant prerequisites of inducing giggles as possible, especially as they relate to the audiovisual medium of cinema.