Recent innovations in the technologies of music composition, production, and consumption have changed the possibilities for both creating and listening to popular music.
Zachary James Bresler
PhD Candidate
Zachary James Bresler of the Faculty of Fine Arts the University of Agder has submitted his thesis entitled «Immersed in Pop! Excursions into Compositional Design» and will defend the thesis for the PhD-degree Wednesday 9 March 2022.
He has followed the PhD-programme at the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Agder, with specialisation in Popular Music Performance.
Recent innovations in the technologies of music composition, production, and consumption have changed the possibilities for both creating and listening to popular music.
For example, in autumn 2021, Apple introduced the Spatial Audio technology to their music streaming service Apple Music, allowing for immersive 3D music experiences for listeners with Apple and Beats branded headphones or home theaters capable of reproducing Dolby Atmos 3D sound. In this, they join the streaming services Tidal and Amazon Prime Music, who have had Dolby Atmos on their platforms since 2020.
The rising popularity and availability of so-called immersive media experiences, including music streaming and other technologies like virtual reality (VR) and 360° videos on Facebook and YouTube, raise new and interesting questions for musicology and media studies.
These questions are addressed through a dissertation that includes a framing chapter and 4 articles/chapters, which are being published in international scholarly journals and anthologies.
The candidate uses a primarily hermeneutic methodology, which combines new approaches to music analysis with multimodal and intertextual models to demonstrate how both the artist and the listener/viewer are staged in pioneering ways within immersive media.
The trial lecture and the public defence will take place at Auditorium B2 003, Campus Kristiansand and online via the Zoom conferencing app, on this link:
https://uiano.zoom.us/j/67928898951?pwd=b1lyTXZqVEZpblF1Mi9Dd1VnKzNvZz09&from=addon
Dean Marit Wergeland, Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Agder, will chair the disputation.
Given topic for trial lecture: «The trial lecture should address two main areas:
Thesis Title: «Immersed in Pop! Excursions into Compositional Design»
Search for the thesis in AURA - Agder University Research Archive, a digital archive of scientific papers, theses and dissertations from the academic staff and students at the University of Agder.
The Candidate: Zachary James Bresler: (Killeen, Texas, USA 1989 - grew up in Pierce, Nebraska, USA) Bachelor of Arts in Music Performance (minor in Music Technology) University of Nebraska in Lincoln (2012) Master of Music Performance, University of Nebraska in Omaha (2014). Present position: Assistant Professor in music production and recording, University of Stavanger.
First opponent: Professor Emeritus Derek B. Scott, School of Music, University of Leeds, UK
Second opponent: Professor Philip Auslander, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts, School of Literature, Media and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Professor Nina Sun Eidsheim, University of Agder /The Herb Alpert School of Music, University of California Los Angeles, USA, is appointed as the administrator for the assessment committee.
Supervisors in the doctoral work were Professor Stan Hawkins (main supervisor) and Jon Marius Aareskjold-Drecker (co-supervisor in the first part of the doctoral work)
The disputation is open to the public. Follow the trial lecture and the public defence on this link:
https://uiano.zoom.us/j/67928898951?pwd=b1lyTXZqVEZpblF1Mi9Dd1VnKzNvZz09&from=addon
A Zoom-link will be returned to you. (Here are introductions for how to use Zoom: support.zoom.us if you cannot join by clicking on the link.)
We ask audience members to join the virtual trial lecture at 15:20 at the earliest and the public defense at 17:05 at the earliest. After these times, you can leave and rejoin the meeting at any time. Further, we ask audience members to turn off their microphone and camera and keep them turned off throughout the event. You do this at the bottom left of the image when in Zoom. We recommend you use ‘Speaker view’. You select that at the top right corner of the video window when in Zoom.
The chair invites members of the public to pose questions ex auditorio in the introduction to the public defense, with deadlines. It is a prerequisite that the opponent has read the thesis. Questions can be submitted to the chair Marit Wergeland on e-mail marit.wergeland@uia.no