PMC Student Work & Research

Between 2007-2020, PMC students produced an impressive collection of quality, original research as well as an array of creative works. Below is the full collection of PMC theses, as well as a selection of PMC creative projects produced by our students.

  • Theses

  • Media


Chow, Maureen. 'Fashionable to be Ethnic': Malka Marom, Yorkville Reimagined, and the CBC's A World Of Music.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, June 2021
Supervisor: Keir Keightley
Braun, Andrew. "Dance like nobody's paying": Spotify and Surveillance as the Soundtrack of Our Lives.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, May 2020
Supervisor: Matt Stahl
Robinson Smith, Emmett. "I Need to Fight the Power, But I Need that New Ferrari": Conspicuous Consumption, New-School Hip-hop and "the New Rock & Roll".
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, August 2019
Supervisors: Keir Keightley and Norma Coates
Wilton, Lydia Claire. The Elements of Production: Myth, Gender, and the "Fundamental Task" of Producing Popular Music.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, August 2019
Supervisor: Norma Coates
Lipson, Matthew. 'Calling Out From Some Old Familiar Shrine': Living Archivism and Age Performativity in Bob Dylan's Late Period.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, April 2019
Supervisor: Norma Coates
Canosa, Sandra. Girls, Rock Your Boys: Female Tribute Acts and the Reclamation of Rock.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, August 2016
Supervisor: Norma Coates
Keron, Catherine. Establishing Female Resistance as Tradition in Country Music: Towards a More Refined Discouse.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, August 2016
Supervisor: Norma Coates
Morley, Briana. Not In "Isolation": Joy Division and Cultural Collaborators in Popular Music.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, August 2016
Supervisor: Keir Keightley
Hawkins, Grant. "Whatever I Want:" Death Grips, Disobedience and the Music Industries.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, April 2016
Supervisor: Matt Stahl
Enns, Mackenzie Abraham. Game Scoring: Towards a Broader Theory.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, April 2015
Supervisor: Jay Hodgson
Dineley, Sean. Covers Uncovered: A History of the "Cover Version," from Bing Crosby to the Flaming Lips.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, June 2014
Supervisor: Keir Keightley
Hamel, Danielle. The Halifax Pop Explosion: Music Scenes, Sloan, And The Case For A Halifax Sound.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, December 2013
Supervisor: Norma Coates
Allen, Samuel Charles. Treasuries of Subcultural Capital: Three Indie Institutions in the London, Ontario Independent-Music Scene.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, August 2013
Supervisor: Keir Keightley
Fowle, Kyle. Scary Monsters and Pervasive Slights: Genre Construction, Mainstreaming, and Processes of Authentication and Gendered Discourse in Dubstep.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, April 2013
Supervisor: Keir Keightley
Mcleish, Claire. "The Future is Medieval": Orality and Musical Borrowing in the Middle Ages and Online Remix Culture.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, April 2013
Supervisor: Norma Coates
White, Christopher. "Rap is easy, career is the hard part:" Analyzing success, longevity and failure within the framework of the hip-hop career.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, October 2012
Supervisor: Keir Keightley
Shelvock, Matt. Audio Mastering as Musical Practice.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, May 2012
Supervisor: Jay Hodgson
Collins, Mark. Delay and Modulation Processing as Musical Technique in Rock.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, April 2011
Supervisor: Robert Toft
Francis, Meghan Ruth. "I'm your biggest fan (I'll follow you until you love me)": social networking sites, fans, and affect.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, April 2011
Supervisor: Norma Coates
Coverdale, Kara-Lis. Sound, rhetoric, and the fallacy of fidelity in recorded popular music: toward a critical approach to timbral analysis.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, April 2010
Supervisor: Norma Coates
Lewis, Amanda. Towards a model for analysis of microphone practice on rock recordings.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, April 2010
Supervisor: Jay Hodgson
Cwynar, Christopher. Making Canadian music, or making music 'Canadian'? : a critique of Canadian popular music culture during the Rock Era.
Master of Arts in Popular Music & Culture, December 2009
Supervisor: Keir Keightley

To: Virginia - Hannah Buckley (2019)

"To: Virginia is Hannah Buckley's most recent collection of songs, which marries her interests in traditional popular song form, field recording, and ambient composition. To: Virginia is not partisan to any genre. To: Virginia was composed with nylon string guitar, voice, field recordings collected in Virginia and Ontario, and analogue synthesizers. Written in between places and recorded in London, Ontario during Hannah's second year of graduate school, To: Virginia is a tangled reflection on home that yearns for a sense of place and purpose, while simultaneously asking for a bigger world than one can imagine for herself. In this collection of songs, Hannah inquires what does it mean to grow, and what happens to us if we stay the same? Hannah's candid and polysemous verse illustrates a narrative of frustrated growth that is earnest and unsure in equal measure and that celebrates love as a grounding force. To: Virginia offers fewer answers than questions but is relentlessly honest and urgently hopeful."





Yelp Dust - Lucas Zielke (2018)

"Yelp Dust explores the boundaries of lo-fi audio recording and production practices. Sonic information was collected through transducing acoustic sound to digital signal in a combination of spontaneous field and studio recording settings. The mixing and mastering processes unified these unlikely sounds and simultaneously emphasized the unrefined sound quality. The result of these processes is a 23 track sound collage."





Caves & Emanations - Jeff Donison (2018)

"Caves & Emanations focuses on both analog and digital recording practices through predominantly post-rock and hip-hop compositions. Each track on disc two contains an original guitar or piano sample from disc one, emphasizing lo-fi and ambient sonic traits tailored towards streaming service instrumental playlists. Simultaneously, despite the music industry's heavy reliance on marketing the single through digital platforms, this project repeats various musical textures characteristic of the traditional concept album that is often neglected in contemporary popular music culture."





The Music Is the Message - Jordan Mandel (2012)

"The Music Is the Message is the commercial release of the creative project I completed under the supervision of Jay Hodgson for my MA. Having focused closely on the work of Marshall McLuhan, I believed he had a number of important things to say about our media landscape, and for some reason he was frequently being ignored. I took it upon myself to bring his ideas to life in another medium - a project I believe he'd have appreciated - to serve as a gateway for an important [Canadian] thinker, for folks who might not have an appetite for any of his cryptic tomes. In the end, the album went on to be played on The Strombo Show, and climbed to #5 on !earshot's national electronic charts. "





Biscuits & Logistics, Vol. 0: The Medulla Oblongata - Dan Shore (2011)

"I viewed this creative project as an opportunity to recognize some of the more "experimental" or "underground" hip hop artists whose work remains largely unrecognized by academics to this day. As such, The Medulla Oblongata: Vol. 0 concerned the creative manipulation of 'advanced dynamic processing' within experimental hip hop popularized by some of the most lauded hip hop producers over the past twenty years, namely J Dilla, Madlib, Flying Lotus, Samiyam, etc. My goal was to showcase how these audio processing techniques are exaggerated by hip hop producers for creative effect where the resulting audio processing acts as a musical and rhythmic component of a given track and not solely as a means to improve the audio signal of an initial recording. "Transparent" dynamics processing has become a conventional musical practice in rock. "Experimental" hip hop, on the other hand, tends to be far more tolerant of extroverted dynamics processing. In fact, experimental hip hop recordists have created a vast musical lexicon focused completely on reshaping the dynamic contour of tracks. Perhaps it is this musical focus which so often seems to elude musicologists and traditional music theorists who fail to locate musical value in this genre."