• Sharell Bryant’s Project Proposal for Thesis ITP ‘25
• Thesis Advisor: Sarah Ibrahim

Thesis Information

Working Title: Real Thoughts: A Folk Album for the Future

Categories: Narrative/Storytelling, Music, Tech & Society

Keywords: Concert film, Concept Album, Afrofuturism

• Music Concert Film

Project description

Real Thoughts will be a self-recorded and produced “future folk” album that will be released an interactive web experience as well as a live musical performance that will be recorded as a short concert film.

Inspired by the experimental approaches to music release and performance in the last few years by popular musicians that utilize emerging technology for interaction and connection, I’d like to create my own version of what that might look like for an independent musician. If I could create the live performance of my dreams, what would it look and sound like?

Central questions

These are the central questions I want to address with the different parts of my thesis plan

• Performance: What does the DIY, independent musician version of a multimedia concert look like?
  • The act of producing my own performance will allow me to put ideas into practice and learn from the experience for future iterations of playing the album live, or working with others interested in creating alternatives to the current music industry
• Release: What if healing looked like creation versus consumption?
  • A part of ITP has also been a journey for me to replace much of my use of social media or time spent looking at computer or mobile screens to creation.
  • As we have a world with more apps, or medicine, or content to consume, I want to experiment with the idea of music creation as medicine (a concept I started exploring in the class BioArt as BioPolitics)
• Process: How can I use technology like machine learning and data visualization software to collaborate with my past self?
  • My most successful and enjoyable projects to myself were ones where I took a “seed” or past idea, vision or dream from myself and brought it to life using the knowledge I have now and the technology that’s available
  • I want to continue to experiment with the idea of collaborating with my past self by creating my own AI model trained using my data, remixing and editing old photographs, and finishing songs from voice memos I’ve recorded over the years with hooks or musical ideas (I’m currently working on this as my final in Medium of Memory)
  • Is there a way I can mix my past studies and work experience in neuroscience research and software engineering into my songwriting process more directly?

Motivation

• I want to know what comes next in music technology after streaming and have an opinion on what that future might look like.
  • How can I experiment with making music without having to focus on promotion through social media, building a brand, being controlled by another app’s algorithm, and the other concerns that made releasing music for me unenjoyable when I last went through the process in 2021?
• Thanks to ITP, I feel ready to release some of the 61 songs I’ve recorded during the pandemic with the virtual songwriting school, School of Song, and follow up from my first self-released EP an album that feels defining of who I am as a folk artist mixing genre and using emerging technology.
  • Full archive of my song demos exist here and I’ve been able to find homes for these songs in almost each class at ITP through creative projects