Final Project

Genre and Artist Research Presentation — 50% of grade, built across four checkpoints

This is the largest piece of work you will do in this course. It runs in parallel with the modules across the entire term. The work is scaffolded into four graded checkpoints, so you build the project in stages with feedback at each stage rather than scrambling at the end.

The project asks you to research one genre and one artist or group of personal significance to you, and to present that research as a slide deck with recorded video commentary. By the end, you will have a piece of public-facing creative-critical work that you could send to a friend, post online, or include in a portfolio. That is the bar.

What you will make

Two files, submitted together at the end of the term:

A slide deck of 18 to 20 slides, made in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides. The slide count includes a title slide at the start and a sources slide at the end. Up to three of the 18 to 20 slides can carry embedded audio or video media of your artist (a song, a music video, a live performance clip, an interview clip). The remaining 15 to 17 slides should be substantive content slides: text, images, analysis, argument. The deck is the spine of your project. Make it work as a standalone document, in case anyone ever sees the slides without your voiceover.

A recorded video commentary in which you walk through the deck and present your argument. This is a screen recording of your slides advancing while you talk. There is no minimum or maximum length; the video is as long as it takes to walk through your deck at a reasonable pace. Be mindful: there are 60 students across both sections of this course, and your instructor will watch every single one. Pace yourself for clarity rather than padding for length. On-camera footage of you is optional. A clean voiceover over slides is the default.

What "personal significance" means

The genre and artist you choose should mean something to you. The course will not tell you what should mean something to you. Some angles students have taken in past iterations of similar projects:

Music you grew up with. The radio in the car, the songs at family parties, what your parents or grandparents played at home. Researching what shaped you is one legitimate version of the project.

Music you discovered that changed you. The album you found at fifteen that rewired what you thought music could do, the artist you encountered in college, the genre you fell into during a hard year.

Music your community made. If you come from a community whose musical traditions are part of the course (or that the course should be including but does not), researching that tradition and a key artist within it is welcome and valuable work.

Music outside your tradition that you have come to care about. Falling in love with a music made by people whose lives are unlike your own is also a real form of significance, and writing about that crossing carefully and honestly is a worthwhile project.

What the deck has to do

Three things, in some combination across the deck and video:

Introduce the genre with cultural and historical context. Where did it come from? What communities made it? What was happening in the world around it? You learned how to do this in the framing reading; now you do it on a genre of your choosing. Be specific about communities, places, and historical conditions. Avoid vague gestures at "the times."

Focus on a single artist or group within the genre. Who are they, where did they come from, what shaped their work? Use the kind of artist-and-context writing modeled in the four Module 1 listening guides: not a Wikipedia summary, but a piece of writing that connects biographical and cultural context to specific musical work.

Build an argument about why this artist matters. This is the heart of the project, and the part that takes the most thinking. An argument is not a summary; it is a claim you defend. Why does this artist matter, and how do their specific musical choices support that claim? Use the description-pattern-claim-evidence move from the methodology reading. Point at specific moments in specific recordings as evidence.

Suggested deck organization

This is a scaffold, not a script. You can rearrange or rename sections as long as the substantive work is there.

slide 01 — Title slide. Project title, your name, course and term.

slides 02–04 — Introducing the genre. Where it came from, who made it, what historical conditions shaped it. Specific names, places, and dates.

slides 05–07 — Introducing the artist or group. Biographical and musical context, what tradition they came up in, what communities they were part of.

slides 08–13 — Musical analysis. Two or three specific recordings, treated in the same kind of detail the listening guides treated their anchor tracks. Use timbre, texture, form, and gesture as available frames. This is where the audio or video media slides usually go, alongside slides that walk through what is happening musically.

slides 14–17 — Your argument. What does this artist's work mean, why does it matter, what claim are you making about them and why? Bring the evidence from the analysis section forward to defend the claim.

slides 18–19 — Legacy and connections. Who has this artist influenced, what is their place in the larger history, what threads of the course do they connect to?

slide 20 — Sources. Five or more sources used in the project, in a consistent citation style of your choosing.

The four deadlines

Four graded checkpoints across the term, each with its own Canvas assignment. Each builds on the one before it. You will receive feedback at each checkpoint that you can use in the next.

Tools & manuals

The tools below cover every stage of making the project. Pick what you already know; this is not the assignment to learn new software. Every tool here is free for students. Each card links to the official vendor manual for the specific task you need to do.

Most students don't need a video editor. A clean single-take screen recording is plenty. Pick one of these only if you want to trim mistakes, splice multiple takes, or add titles.

Captions make your work accessible to viewers with hearing differences and to viewers in environments where they cannot use audio. Worth the time.

File expectations

For the final submission, export your deck to PDF in addition to the native file format (.pptx, .key, .gslides), so your instructor can grade either way and any embedded media is preserved in the original file. Submit both the native file and the PDF.

Submit the video as MP4 if possible. If your recording tool produces a different format (.mov from QuickTime, .webm from some browser recorders), that is acceptable; confirm the file plays before submitting.

For audio: a built-in laptop microphone is fine. Record in a quiet room. If you have wired earbuds or wireless earbuds with a built-in mic, the headphone mic is usually better than the laptop's built-in mic.

Sources

This section assumes you have never done research before. If you have, skim what you know and slow down where it gets new. The first deadline page also covers some of this in checkpoint-specific detail; this section is the from-scratch version.

What a source is

A source is anything you cite as evidence for something you say in your project. If you write "Sam Cooke recorded 'A Change Is Gonna Come' in December 1963," you did not invent that fact; you read it somewhere, and the somewhere is your source. Your own listening and your own analysis are not sources, they are your work. Everything you bring in to back up your work needs to be attributed to where it came from.

You are aiming for the kind of writing you saw in the four Module 1 listening guides. Look at how each guide names a person and then a claim: "Mark Burford argues that...", "biographer Peter Guralnick describes...", "Sadie Bell, writing in Marie Claire, observes...". That naming is not decoration. Every named person there is a source, and naming them in the prose is the citation made visible. Aim for that level of integration in your own deck and commentary.

A balance to strike: sometimes students hear "cite everything" and swing all the way the other way, attaching a citation to every sentence including basic facts that nobody disputes. That is not what you are after either. The rule of thumb is this. When you directly quote someone, or when you make a specific claim that you got from a specific place, name the source right there in the prose. When you have read something and absorbed it into how you understand the topic, you do not need to cite it on every sentence; you list it on your sources slide at the end, and that listing means exactly what it says: you read this, you engaged with it, and it shaped what you wrote. The sources slide is not a decorative list. Everything on it should be something that genuinely informed your thinking.

Types of sources you can use

For a music research project, sources come in several flavors. The list below includes a music example for each so you know what you are actually looking for. All of these are legitimate; you do not need one of each.

Books. Full-length scholarly or biographical books about an artist, a genre, or a moment. Peter Guralnick's Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke is a book. Books are usually the deepest source you will use, and a chapter is plenty; you do not need to read the whole book.

Peer-reviewed journal articles. Articles by scholars published in academic journals, vetted by other scholars before publication. Mark Burford's writing on Sam Cooke and the gospel highway lives in this category. These are often the most rigorous sources and live behind library databases (more on that below).

In-depth journalism. Long-form articles in serious publications: The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, NPR Music, Marie Claire's ten-year Mitski retrospective. Not a 300-word listicle; a piece that does actual reporting or makes an argument.

Documentaries and films. Documentary films and series count. Summer of Soul, Selena (Gregory Nava 1997), the PBS American Experience episodes on the incarceration of Japanese Americans. Cite the director and year, the same way you would cite a book's author.

Serious podcasts and radio. Podcasts that do genuine reporting or analysis, not chat shows. NPR's Throughline, Switched on Pop, the 33 1/3 podcast. Episodes count as individual sources.

Liner notes and reissue essays. The essays inside CD or LP packaging, often written by critics or scholars. The Smithsonian Folkways catalog is built on these. They count.

Archives, museums, and reference encyclopedias. Materials and articles on museum or archive websites, written and curated by professionals. The Densho Encyclopedia (densho.org) for Japanese American history, the Smithsonian Folkways magazine, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame's artist pages, the Grove Music Online entries inside Oxford Music Online. These are reference works with editorial oversight.

Interviews. Recorded conversations with the artist, in print, on video, or on radio. The artist's own words about their work count as evidence, with one caveat: artists are not always reliable narrators of their own lives. Cite the interview but do not treat it as the final word.

Where to find them

You have a real research library and you should use it. Every link below works from off-campus when you sign in with your CSUEB NetID.

Start at the CSU East Bay Music LibGuide: library.csueastbay.edu/MUS. This page is built specifically for music research at our library. It has a sub-page called "How to find Books, Articles, & Scores" and another called "How to cite music." Read both before you start hunting.

The most useful databases on that page, for this project:

JSTOR. Full-text scholarly journals across the humanities, including music journals going back decades. Search "Sam Cooke" or "corridos border" or "punk feminism 1990s" and skim what comes back. This is where peer-reviewed articles live.

Oxford Music Online. The portal that includes Grove Music Online, which is the standard scholarly music encyclopedia in English. Long signed articles on artists, genres, and styles, written by music scholars. Treat Grove the way other fields treat Britannica: authoritative and citable.

Academic Search Complete. A broader database covering both peer-reviewed journals and general-readership magazines. Useful when JSTOR comes up dry, because it catches journalism and trade publications too.

Music Online: American Song and African American Music Reference. Subject-specific collections for American vernacular music and African American musical traditions; relevant for several of the genres students choose.

Beyond CSUEB's library:

Google Scholar (scholar.google.com) — searches the open scholarly web. Useful for finding what scholars have written about an artist, even if you cannot read the full article without a library login. If you find an article you want, paste the title into our library search to see if we have access.

WorldCat (worldcat.org) — a catalog of what books exist on a topic at libraries worldwide. Great for figuring out what the major books on your artist are, even before you decide where to get them.

Specific archive sites when your topic has one — the Densho Encyclopedia for Japanese American history, the Smithsonian Folkways magazine for folk and roots music, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Bronx Music Heritage Center, and so on. If your artist's community has a dedicated archive, it is often the richest source you will find.

How to tell a good source from a weak one

Three questions to ask of anything you are thinking of citing.

Who wrote it and what makes them qualified? A named author with a track record (a scholar, a working music critic at a real publication, an archivist) is stronger than an anonymous blog post. If you cannot find the author's name, that is a flag.

Where was it published? A university press, a peer-reviewed journal, or a major newspaper or magazine has editors and fact-checkers. A random Medium post or content farm does not. The same claim is more trustworthy in The Atlantic than on a SEO-optimized "best songs of all time" list.

Does it cite its own sources? Good writing about music points outward: it names the books, articles, and interviews it builds on. Writing that makes claims with no apparent source for them is doing what you are trying to avoid.

Wikipedia is a starting point, not a destination. Wikipedia is fine for orientation, for getting the basic timeline of an artist, for figuring out what questions to ask. It is not a source you cite. What you do instead: read the Wikipedia article, then scroll to the footnotes at the bottom, and click through to the books and articles those footnotes point to. Those are your sources. This is how the listening guides on this site were built.

What does not count as a source

To make this explicit:

AI-generated text does not count. Do not cite ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or any other generative AI as a source. AI tools synthesize and paraphrase other people's writing without attribution; what you would be citing is a confident-sounding text with no traceable origin. Whatever the AI told you, find a real source that says the same thing and cite that instead.

Anonymous internet posts do not count. Comments on Reddit, YouTube, or social media without verifiable authorship. Fan wikis (Fandom.com, etc.) without footnotes. Random results from "[artist] biography" SEO sites.

The artist's official website is a citable source for facts the artist puts on the record (discography, tour history, official statements), but treat it like any source written by an interested party: useful, but not neutral.

How many you need

Three to four sources for the proposal and preliminary bibliography (first checkpoint). At least five sources integrated into the final project. The first-deadline page covers exactly what counts at the proposal stage and what your bibliography should look like; check there for the checkpoint-specific version.

Five is a minimum, not a target. A strong project usually uses seven to ten. Quality matters more than count: one well-chosen scholarly book chapter you actually read and engage with is worth more than five vague website citations.

How to cite them

Pick one citation style and use it consistently throughout. MLA, Chicago, and APA are all fine. So is the citation style modeled in the Module 1 listening guides on this site, which is a lightly modified Chicago. Whichever you pick, the same style has to appear on every entry in your sources slide.

A book citation in Chicago style looks like this:

Guralnick, Peter. Dream Boogie: The Triumph of Sam Cooke. New York: Little, Brown, 2005.

A journal article looks like this:

Burford, Mark. "Sam Cooke as Pop Album Artist: A Reinvention in Three Songs." Journal of the American Musicological Society 65, no. 1 (2012): 113–178.

An online article looks like this:

Bell, Sadie. "Mitski at the End of the World." Marie Claire, April 13, 2026. https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/mitski-laurel-hell-retrospective/.

For citation formatting help, the CSUEB Library's "How to cite music" sub-page (inside the Music LibGuide linked above) walks through citation styles for recordings, scores, and performances, which the standard MLA and Chicago manuals do not always cover well. Citation generators like Zotero or the citation builders inside library databases can produce these for you, but always check the output: they get italicization, dates, and capitalization wrong about a third of the time.

Finally: integrate your sources into the prose, do not just list them at the end. When you make a claim in your video commentary or on a slide, name the person you got it from: "biographer Peter Guralnick describes," "the Densho Encyclopedia notes," "Mark Burford has argued." Visible integration is what separates a research project from a Wikipedia recitation.

When in doubt about whether something counts as a source or how to handle a particular case, email me before the proposal deadline.

Outcomes addressed

This project is the culminating assessment of the course. It addresses every Student Learning Outcome in the syllabus, with particular weight on the following:

Course SLO 1, 2, and 3 — expressing informed opinions about popular music, communicating critical thoughts about specific artists, and connecting music to its cultural and historical contexts.

Course SLO 5 — identifying and discussing forms and influences of diverse cultures in American popular music.

Course SLO 6 — researching and presenting a genre and a single artist or group of personal significance to the student.

GE-UD-3 outcomes 1 and 2 — applying the principles and methodologies of the arts and humanities, and analyzing cultural production as expression of, or reflection upon, what it means to be human.

Diversity overlay outcome 1 — describing the histories, experiences, or views of one or more cultural groups.

Each checkpoint rubric on Canvas names the specific outcomes addressed at that stage.

A note on AI use

How to reach me

Email is the best way: ines.thiebaut@csueastbay.edu. The project is the place where students most often get stuck (an artist whose materials are hard to find, a technical question about embedding audio, an argument that feels thin) and the place where early outreach pays off most. If you are uncertain about your topic, write to me before the proposal deadline. If you are uncertain about your argument, write to me before the draft deadline. I would rather hear from you early than read a draft that took a wrong turn three weeks ago.

Office hours are Mondays and Thursdays 10 am to noon, by Zoom at https://csueb.zoom.us/j/5108853126. The project is a great use of office hours, especially in the weeks before the proposal and before the draft.