New Publication! "Playing the Fantastical Gap"

Just in time for Halloween, I have a new article out on sound design in “embedded games” — little games you can play within other games — with a special focus on the framing story of the indie horror game Stories Untold (2017). It’s sort of a standalone article, not directly related to any of my current major projects. But it reflects my long-standing interest in how games use sound in ways that are — and aren’t — analogous to other media. And Stories Untold is really worth checking out, it’s an extraordinary little game!

The article appears in Music and the Moving Image 16/3 (2023): 5 - 23; and the full text is linked here. Special thanks to Kate Galloway for putting this great issue together! As she writes in her introduction, the three essays in the issue are all concerned with very different views of soundscape in games.

New Publication: The Techne of YouTube

A few weeks ago my latest article came out in Music Theory Online. Going from conference talk to published, media-filled article has been a three-year, 20,000 word labor of love (editorial comment from late in the process: “Umm, so MTO has a word limit but apparently we just…missed that?”) that brings together a lot of my thinking on YouTube as a musical platform. It was a hard article to write, as I often felt like I was building a bridge for myself even as I was walking over it. I found in the revision process, though, that the more I addressed YouTube on its own terms, and the less I ‘apologized’ for the subject matter by trying to relate it to existing theories or downplay the fact that this is about a dynamic, sometimes rough, and still-developing new medium, the better the paper worked. I’ve certainly grown as a scholar in putting this together, and I’m excited to see how this project informs my other work on recomposition in music theory, and finding which aspect of music in social media grabs my attention next…

William O’Hara, “The Techne of YouTube: Musical Structure, Extended Techniques, and Custom Instruments in Solo Pop Covers.” Music Theory Online 28/3 (2022).

Resources: Designing an Inclusive Syllabus (January 2023 update!)

Some resources for the session “Designing an Inclusive Syllabus” (presented by William O’Hara, music, and Amy Evrard, anthropology) at the Johnson Center for Creative Teaching and Learning’s “August Pedagogy Institute.” Special thanks to JCCTL director Josef Brandauer for many of these leads!

This guide may evolve as Amy, Josef, and I add more!

• “Syllabi as Tools for Creating Inclusive Classrooms” - a recent article in Advances in Physiology Education (2021) on the information contained by syllabi in the biological sciences, and how different information correlates with student success

• How to systematically review your own syllabus, from the University of Southern California’s Center for Urban Education

• A new resource on how faculty can support student mental health

• Information from a previous year’s JCCTL session on the “Worst Syllabus Ever,” and how attendees at that session fixed it…

• A few resources on Universal Design for Learning:

  • A quick introduction to UDL from Cornell’s teaching & learning center

  • Some more comprehensive UDL Guidelines from CAST

  • Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone, by Thomas J. Tobin and Kirsten T. Behling. Josef has copies of this in the JCCTL office!

• Other resources:

  • A guide to “Backward Design” from Vanderbilt’s CFT

  • “Flexibility with Boundaries” from U of North Carolina

New Publication: Phrase Extension in Haydn Minuets

The proceedings from this past spring’s Future Directions in Music Cognition conference were published just before the holidays. My presentation video is elsewhere on this blog, but the official text of my contribution can now be found at https://kb.osu.edu/handle/1811/93130.

Podcast Appearance: "Note Doctors" with JMTP Collaborators

In early December, I appeared on the music theory podcast “Note Doctors” with several colleagues—my co-authors from the upcoming JMTP colloquy on rethinking the chorale. You can find Note Doctors in any podcast feed, or listen to the entire episode on YouTube: