Using my own instruments, I was able to simulate the three layers of a Javanese piece. The Balungun, or core melody, was played by a set of toy bells and doubled with an acoustic guitar. The kembangan, an improvisational layer on the core melody, was double-tracked by a mandolin. The colotomic structure was created by a western tom drum and a snare drum with the snares turned off. Additionally, cymbal bells were used to flesh out the colotomic structure, with the hi-hat, crash, and ride cymbal bells simulating the ketuk, kempul, and kenong sounds, respectively.

I chose this project as I believed it would be a practical application of my skills as a songwriter and engineer. I found the simple melody and odd scale of gamelan music particularly attractive, and thought writing a piece in that style would be an interesting challenge.

While writing the piece itself was fairly easy, playing it all the way through proved to be a challenge. It's very easy to get lost in the repetition and forget the structure, especially because there's really only two different parts. There aren't any clues along the way to remind you where you are, you simply need to keep a close count in your head. Keeping everything together and on time was also difficult, as the rhythm is simple and fairly slow.

If could I do the project over, I would like to record even more layers, so as to make the piece sound really big, like a real gamelan ensemble was playing it in front of the listener. 

We decided to do this idea since we are both sport-related majors: Gina is Kinesiology and Alexa is Sports Management. We also play on Temple’s Club Field Hockey team together, so we share a common love for sports. We tried to find an interesting way that would appeal to not only us, but our classmates (maybe even our professor), in a way that involved both of our fields of study. Working out and participating in sports is something that we both enjoy and wanted to incorporate when browsing ideas for the project.

Challenges that we encountered include finding clean (non-explicit) songs that we believe help us get motivated. Most hyped-up songs that are reliable for setting an energizing mood involve foul language. Also, it was challenging to not be repetitive while describing why we believe the songs should be used to warm up to. Most of the songs had similar characteristics to one another. 

If we were to do this again, something we would do differently is work harder to find cleaner songs, as well as songs that apply to everyone’s musical preferences. It is difficult to make a playlist for the common person if everyone enjoys different types of music. 

For Professor N. :Gina did numbers 1-5 and Alexa did numbers 6-10 on the playlist. 

Since I am a Neuroscience major for this project I wanted to shift the focus on our brain/mind and music. And how the power of music affects memory and learning also our health especially Mozart's music and baroque music, with a 60 beats per minute beat pattern, activates the left and right brain.The simultaneous left and right brain action maximizes learning and retention of information as well as heals the mind and body. I did this project because I wanted everyone to know the power classical music has on the brain. Lucky, I did not encounter many difficulties doing this project other than learn more interesting studies on our brain with Mozart's music. If I could do this again I would conduct an experiment with college students to find out if listening to classical music while studying for finals can help recalling the materials during finals. Hope you will find my post useful to you someday :) 

The project I created is an Adobe Spark blog post explaining how music is used for government propaganda in North Korea. I was interested in this topic because I wanted to analyze North Korea’s strong censorship through the lens of music. I have always been interested in North Korea and was excited to be able to apply ideas and concepts learned this semester in “World Musics”. I thought I would be able to find several uses for music in North Korea. After doing research, I realized that through the public eye, music is only able to be used if it does not speak out against North Korea’s Communist government. To combat this challenge, I focused my research on the several ways North Korea uses music to promote its Communist beliefs. If I were to do the project again, I would try analyze individual propaganda songs more in depth. Thank you for reading my work and I hope you can learn something new!