In this English class, I was encouraged to explore and write multiple genres. This project was very interesting in the fact that this project is website-based, allowing me to explore multimodal content. I learned about the importance of design, since unlike a normal paper or book that is navigated in a proper order, this project allows the audience to navigate to any section of the project that he or she wants. For the review of literature genre, I had to find and use scholarly articles and implement them into my project. My topic, music in universities, is an activity that only a small part of the population participates in. In order to appeal to a wider audience, I kept all my terms and subtopics as general as possible. This would allow me to target not only musicians attending high school or college but also friends and family of the musicians in large universities as well as faculty and staff of these universities. The purpose of the review of lit was to inform the audience about pursuing music in college as well as the benefits of participating in music which would give some context for the rest of my project. Many people know that music programs exists in universities that aren't music-centered, but don't pursue them since lack of motivation or lack of knowledge and experience. I implemented the research from the articles to provide that lack of motivation, knowledge, and experience that the general audience would like to learn about, which shows the exigence of this part of my project. My artifact page goes for an even broader audience. Just about anyone interested about reading what is a musicians' top tool is the audience. Just like in other pages such as my infographic, my artifact page portrays its idea not only through words but also through visuals. On my artifact page, I portray the musicians' tool, a pencil, by showing sheet music being penciled in certain spots. It helps convey the message of my article that a pencil is a priority to a musician since note-taking in the music world is very important.
In order to be able to write about this topic and put together this multimodal composition, I had to be able to critically envision my project. In order to appeal to a larger audience, I knew I had to interview two people on different spectrums of the music scale. I'm satisfied to say that that I found Sai and Kiran who have different music backgrounds and hobbies. On the more casual side, Sai's musical career started in middle school in chorus and he continues to perform in one of Emory's acapella groups. On the other hand, Kiran has been playing different instruments since he was a young child and is currently performing in a couple of Emory's official music groups (Wind ensemble, jazz band, and sax quartet) and is pursing a music bachelor degree. With interviews from musicians of different backgrounds and caliber, readers would be able to see what is music in the eyes (or ears) of different musicians. Readers would be able to relate to both musicians and see where they fit in college in terms of music. As a writer, this portion of my project helped me develop critically since I was able to narrow my options on who to interview and find a broad spectrum on the view of music that I was looking for.
Being a musician for a majority of my life and previously having many music-major friends motivated me to choose this topic as my project. Having previous knowledge in my topic steered me towards this direction towards my autoethnography. It was just the matter of guiding the topic to suit a general audience and doing research for the review of lit. My first thought process was to center this project on music majors. However, I realized that this topic would only appeal to small audience. Thinking critically, I came to the conclusion that going with a broader topic, music in universities, would appeal to an extremely wide audience since it is small enough for me to cover almost every aspect such as different classes of difficulty to music groups to benefits of music, and big enough to appeal to the audiences I stated in my blog post about stakeholders. For the review of lit, I had many options to choose for my subtopics. However I knew I wanted to put information geared towards those pursuing music as a career, so I made one subtopic about music majors. I based my other two subtopics for the general audience so they had analysis on research that they could be interested in as well. The thought process for finding topics and subtopics for this project was difficult, but I believe I went down a thought process that would work and produce a well-written, informative publication.