For my portfolio, I choose to include my pieces on Crywolf and TesseracT. The Crywolf piece is an annotated playlist of selected songs throughout his catalogue. The songs were chosen chronologically to show his evolution as an artist through-out his career, and each annotation provides further context and elaboration on these evolutions. For revisions, I added links to the sources where I found the quotes, as well as correcting a few typos. The Tesseract piece answers the classic music writing prompt “if you were stranded on a desert island, what album would you bring.” Here I discuss my experience with depression and how TesseracT’s album Polaris played an important role in my life. To revise this piece, I added links to different group’s websites as well, a link to an explanation on the genre of progressive metal, and additional images.
I have a pretty extensive history with music, I was originally a classical guitar major before switching to computer science, and still write and record as a hobby. Because of this, I was able to talk about specific techniques and sounds in my writing. In my piece about Crywolf, for example, I use my experience producing EDM to analyze how he grew musically over his career. I also made sure to include artists that reflect both what I like and the sort of music I want to share with others. On the other hand, I have little experience writing about music to public audiences. While I’ve written a handful of papers about music, none of them were at all geared for this sort of audience. This meant that although I had a lot of ideas for analysis, I had difficulty writing in an engaging, non-academic fashion.
I think I managed to find a comfortable ground mixing different aspects of music writing during this course. In my TesseracT piece, I was able to balance sharing and discussing my personal life and connection to the music with analyzing the music itself. As for approaching other’s music writing, I’ll certainly be interested in more deeply examining the different perspectives and approaches used. It was interesting to read my classmates pieces and see how differently they approach and think about music.
My portfolio definitely shows my perspective as someone who listens to and writes a lot of music as a hobby. In all of my pieces, I go into a lot of detail on why I like what I do, and what I find musically interesting about each group. However, I also tended to neglect discussion of wider popular culture. I generally tend to focus on what I like and what I can learn from more than how music is more broadly received or viewed. While I think this is a completely valid approach and perspective, I also think that it can be rather limiting. My choices in artists lessen the impact of this, as all of them are fairly niche, but there was definitely still room to discuss how their viewed culturally. Personally, that aspect was less interesting to me than sharing my own perspective and ideas.
Writing about music has been a really positive experience for me, and I might continue to do so as a hobby. Music has been a huge part of my life, and for all the time I spend thinking about it, I spend relatively little sharing those thoughts with others. This class provided a really nice outlet for that, as well as good practice in writing for general audiences. I’m extremely proud of the work I did here. Moving forward, I intend to continue writing pieces like this, and exploring and sharing my thoughts and opinions on music.