This creative project includes a self-reflection, four original compositions by Drew Hensley, and supplementary song commentaries. The self-reflection section of the project contains an extensive look into how Hensley's musical experiences and upbringing influenced his song writing process and compositional voice. Specifically, the piece analyzes how Hensley's gravitation to jazz music and musical styles of various cultures influenced the chord structures, rhythms, and melodies in his pop compositions. The track list for the project includes "Do It Anyway," "Puppeteer," "You Really Kind of Suck at Love," and "Drag You Down." Each piece includes lyrics and composed sheet music for vocals and instruments including guitar, piano, bass, and violin. The pieces were supplemented with commentaries describing specific inspirations for both the lyrics and music. "Do It Anyway" discusses Hensley's decision to pursue music and takes inspiration from classic American jazz melodies and Latin jazz rhythms. "Puppeteer" addresses the complexities of control through the metaphor strings. The piece pulls inspiration from the double harmonic scale often associated with Arabic music. "You Really Kind Of Suck At Love" addresses a break up through expertly placed humor and sarcasm. The piece is a new take on the standard 12 bar blues song form. "Drag You Down" tells of Hensley's personal struggles in music using thoroughly developed metaphors and chord progressions native to American rock music of the 1990's and 2000's. Together, the work will be recorded as an Extended Play entitled Do It Anyway. Hensley plans move to Los Angeles, California and use the recordings to pursue a career in pop music performance.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the stereotypes surrounding four wind instruments (flutes, oboes, clarinets, and saxophones), and the ways in which those stereotypes propagate through various levels of musical professionalism in Western culture. In order to determine what these stereotypes might entail, several thousand social media and blog posts were analyzed, and direct quotations detailing the perceived stereotypical personality profiles for each of the four instruments were collected. From these, the three most commonly mentioned characteristics were isolated for each of the instrument groups as follows: female gender, femininity, and giggliness for flutists, intelligence, studiousness, and demographics (specifically being an Asian male) for clarinetists, quirkiness, eccentricity, and being seen as a misfit for oboists, and overconfidence, attention-seeking behavior, and coolness for saxophonists. From these traits, a survey was drafted which asked participating college-aged musicians various multiple choice, opinion scale, and short-answer questions that gathered how much they agree or disagree with each trait describing the instrument from which it was derived. Their responses were then analyzed to determine how much correlation existed between the researched characteristics and the opinions of modern musicians. From these results, it was determined that 75% of the traits that were isolated for a particular instrument were, in fact, recognized as being true in the survey data, demonstrating that the stereotypes do exist and seem to be widely recognizable across many age groups, locations, and levels of musical skill. Further, 89% of participants admitted that the instrument they play has a certain stereotype associated with it, but only 38% of people identify with that profile. Overall, it was concluded that stereotypes, which are overwhelmingly negative and gendered by nature, are indeed propagated, but musicians do not appear to want to identify with them, and they reflect a more archaic and immature sense that does not correlate to the trends observed in modern, professional music.

Involvement in ultra-endurance mountain bike racing (UEMBR) is an expensive, time-consuming and risky endeavor. These factors are potentially problematic for athletes who are also in a committed relationship or are parents; it is not unreasonable to assume that the reallocation of time and financial resources from the household to the sport is likely to cause a significant amount of role conflict for an athlete and may impact his or her personal relationships in profound ways. However, a study of competitors who have participated in the Tour Divide, a 2,745 mile mountain bike race from Banff, Alberta to Antelope Wells, NM, reveals that these endurance athletes experience relatively low levels of role conflict and overwhelmingly perceive their involvement in this sport to have a more positive than negative impact on their personal relationships. This unexpected response is in line with recent research regarding the cross-role relationships of work and family, where models such as Greenhaus and Powell's (2006:79) work-family enrichment (WFE) model are used to study the ways in which individuals benefit from involvement in more than one role. As with most research regarding the cross-role relationships of work and family, that of sports-family relationships primarily focuses on role conflict. In an effort to understand the processes by which involvement in UEMBR can benefit an individual's role as a significant other and/or parent, Greenhaus and Powell's WFE model is used to study sports-family enrichment. Survey and interview data are analyzed to identify specific resources that racers gain from participating in UEMBR and subsequently apply to familial roles in a manner that results in role enrichment. The suitability of the WFE model for studying cross-role relationships in this context is assessed and suggestions are made for future research regarding the relationships between athletic and familial roles as well as other aspects of UEMBR.

The creation of a global community, international relationship building, and identity construction through travel has existed for almost every audience in the form of reports from travelers to their native audience. In this paper, I discuss the resolution of how an individual self is formed not solely from self-knowledge and reflection, but instead from a dialectic of themselves as singular beings within communities encountered by traveling. The dialectic model I use is that of "the dialectic of solitude" (Paz, 1985, p. 195) - it is the dialectic needed and enacted when a traveler learns of themselves through communion with all that travel entails - new environments, culture shock, and encounters with novel experiences and people - that all solitary individuals inherently search for. It culminates in the production of a written product, and the need to share their self-development with an audience. Ultimately, travel writing, as the product of the traveler's experience, is the manifestation of, and represents, the dialectic of solitude among individual and cultural identity formation.

This paper will explore the themes of performing race in hip-hop music. Through the genesis of the hip-hop industry in the Bronx in the 1970s, rap music has become aligned with afrocentric themes. The music spoke to inner cities and often held themes of economic abandonment, racism, and poverty. Today, non-black hip-hop artists are entering the rap scene. However, the mainstream hip-hop industry is still dominated by black artists. We explore the idea of performing race, specifically performing blackness. Non-black artists do this by dressing a certain way, speaking a certain way, and moving a certain way. We have chosen to identify three case studies to help us explore these ideas and understand how race is still important in the hip-hop industry today. Our case studies include Mellow Man Ace, Jin, and Brother Ali. While success is a complex term, we have discovered that race still follows a predictive outcome in monetary success and fame. The hip-hop industry is always in dynamic change. Our paper attempts to open the dialogue for talking about race and hip-hop music.

The business models of the music industry are currently experiencing rapid changes. Services such as Spotify, SoundCloud, and Pandora offer methods of consuming music unlike any the industry has seen before. Consumers have shifted from wanting products (digital music and CDs) to using streaming services (Spotify, Pandora, etc.). This study analyzes the motivation for these changes and considers why people choose the avenues by which they experience music.