Introduction

How can music make you feel? What emotion do you feel when you first listen to a song? Happiness? Sadness? Reflection and assurance or anger and self-doubt? These emotions and more are all valid ways to feel when listening to a certain song because of the beat, the lyrics, and sometimes even the visual aid that accompanies the song. While all these emotions are so common, there are often times where there are emotions that aren’t answered in a song or even talked about in society as it is too complicated to explain, so it’s better off not discussing it at all. People every day often feel emotions that are hard to explain and leave individuals wondering what it is they felt and why they feel that way to begin with. If music can help others understand common emotions, how can it understand unanswered and uncommon ones too? To further explore this idea, this capstone project envelops a music video with a self-produced beat and video footage of people all around the videographer to help create the feeling of the theme; sonder: “A neologism that describes the feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers, has a life as full and real as one’s own”.

Literature Review

This capstone project contains a produced beat and music video about an emotion that is not very talked about since it is a complex emotion: sonder. Creating this project, most of the inspiration came from popular music artists such as SZA, Lauryn Hill, and Doechii as their aesthetics that they present themselves is the kind of vibe that would be mimicked in this project. These musicians have a calming, unique, and out-of-the-box style when it comes to their craft, and it is something that has always piqued their fanbases' interests since listening to their music. 

As for scholarly influence, many resources have been a guide into what can make a good product and how to properly cultivate your ideas and visions into reality. To do this, you first need to have a solid idea of what you want so that you can create the steps and process of how to get from start to finish. During the process there is a lot of trial and error, curation/scrapping, brainstorming, and generating your product until you get to your end goal. These influences have helped with this capstone project by giving a clear series of steps that can help easily and efficiently get to the final product and what is envisioned.

Methods

The program used to create the beat is a program called “Soundtrap” where you can create your own music from samples, used songs, and machinery used for making music all on a program that can easily be accessed with a click of a button. Additionally, the program used for making the music video is called Adobe Premiere Pro where you can edit video footage together to create a long-edited video for a podcast, music video, YouTube channel, and more. Both of these programs were a new experience of use since they were never used before this project, so figuring out the mechanics of each program was essential to get the best product possible. For research, not only was there research done about the background of music and how different instruments make different genres, but also watched videos and interviews of producers and artists and how their process of creating music goes, so there can be a general idea of how to create one's own music and the secrets behind producing a beat. 

Audience & Impact

The audience that this project should peer to are all music lovers and people who have or wish to have a diverse music taste. The creator, themselves, love music and has been a big part of their life growing up and always enjoyed finding new artists that have a good tune which enabled them into either find more songs by them or to find other artists similar to them which results in a never-ending cycle of new music discoveries. Part of the purpose for this capstone project is to also have the audience understand the dedication and time that is put into a single song as it is not as easy as many people think and takes a lot of creativity, patience, effort, and love poured into a song. Overall, the impact that this project can have on the audience is to not only understand the emotion that is trying to be conveyed through music but also have the audience appreciate music more as it can be a very difficult task and is often easily criticized by people all the time. 

References

1. Aditi. “How to Make a Music Video — the Only Guide You’ll Ever Need.” InVideo - Online Video Creator for Content and Marketing Videos, InVideo, 14 Nov. 2020, invideo.io/blog/how-to-make-a-music-video/.

2. Honing, Henkjan, editor. The Origins of Musicality. MIT Press, 2018. Accessed 8 Oct. 2023.The Origins of Musicality | Books Gateway | MIT Press (umd.edu)

Lüdemann, Winfried,A. "Perspectives on music and evolution." Hervormde Teologiese Studies, vol. 78, no. 2, 2022. ProQuest, https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/perspectives-on-music-evolution/docview/2725485320/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.4102/hts.v78i2.7747. 

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank everyone who had a hand in helping me make my capstone project come to reality and who were there during the process. I would firstly like to thank the Art Scholars program for taking the time to break down how our project will go, allowing us to create our own schedule in the amount of time it takes for us to create our projects, and reviewing our projects for any feedback so that we can go back and make the changes needed to make the project better. Furthermore, I would like to thank my peers and my support group for critiquing my work and continuing to give me the creativity and motivation to push forward. There were times where I would have a creativity block or would just feel overwhelmed but thanks to them, I was able to keep pursuing the project and helped me make my project go from a vision to a reality.