The purpose of this study was to investigate whether students? previous musical knowledge affected the rating achieved in the subject of music. My empirical material consists of interviews with three professional music teachers in local secondary schools. Two of the three teachers felt that they were not able to devote time for the students who had previous musical knowledge. Students from all schools said that teachers addressed more to help those students who found it more difficult to learn.

Hip-hop music has long been an expressive medium used by individuals from marginalized areas in Sweden to address social issues and shape their identities. Through interviews with Swedish hip-hop artists and analysis of lyrics, this bachelor thesis explores the self-expression of the artists and how they express their views of society. It focuses on how social problems are expressed and understood, as well as on how the artists view the depiction of contemporary Swedish hip-hop music in media. Additionally, the study investigates how hip-hop artists themselves perceive the significance of their music lyrics. Furthermore, I explore the impact of music on the identity of hip-hop artists from marginalized areas, as perceived by the artists themselves. To gain a comprehensive understanding, the ethnographic study employs semi-structured interviews and participant observation with four non-ethnically Swedish hiphop artists who live or have grown up in disadvantaged areas in Sweden.

Computer and videogames has increased rapidly over the past few decades and today a majority of the Swedish population enjoys them on a daily basis. When there are many users, it becomes important how the media chooses to portray the medium because it can affect how the society judges and looks at computer- and videogames.The purpose of this essay is to look at how the portrayal of computer- and videogames has changed in Swedish Newspapers during the period 1994-2014. How the player is being portrayed is also relevant. The method was the discourse analysis founded by Laclau andMouffe and the material was chosen from the two biggest newspapers in Sweden, Dagens Nyheter and Aftonbladet. Theories that were used in the analysis were mainly framing, cultural studies, moral panics and theories based on gender.The result shows that there has been different kinds of portrayals of computer- and videogames from the beginning, though it was mostly negative in 1994 and 2004.

The purpose in this Bachelor degree project has been to create a visual identity and to design a compilation cassette for the small music distributor Kyrkvägen Kassett. My way of approaching the task has been to draw parallells between the cassette as an obsolete music format and more or less abandoned or anachronistic formats, materials and printing methods in the graphic design area. The result is a visual identity that is built upon materials and methods of production rather than specific visual elements. The work is to be seen as a tribute to the small non-profit producers of music and graphic design. As often done in the DIY movement, I chose to consider my lack of practical knowledge in these fields not as an encumbrance but as an asset and an incentive.

This was a project of creating an animated music video for Anna vonHausswolffs song Something is missing. By working with animation Iwanted to broaden my expertise in visual communications. This hasbeen an exploratory work in how I could translate my illustrations tomoving images in the program Adobe Aftereffects. I have formed myown narrative by creating a storyboard. I worked with illustrated setdesign, created an atmosphere in the film and experimented with howto tell a subtle story.

This is a study in the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR) concerning classification of musicgenre. The study uses a music listening experiment and machine learning methods to determinewhether or not the drum sounds from different songs contain sufficient information to classifygenre.MIR methods are used to extract data from the audio signals. The data is used together with theclassification results of the listening experiment to train different machine learning algorithms toclassify the songs in different genres.The results indicate that using only drum sounds for genre classifications works well, both forlisteners and for machine learning methods..

Music production software has a strong tradition of two-dimensional graphical user interface (GUI), in which the time line is represented as a flat composition either horizontally (from left to right) or vertically (from top to bottom). In my degree work titled Sequi, I approach music composition from a different angle. Instead of a two-dimensional time line with only two possibly ways of progression (forward or backward) I constructed a three-dimensional GUI with the maximum of four different ways of progression from any given point in a composition. The height axis is used to describe time-intervals (the time between downbeats) and the wide and depth axes are used to describe progression from one sound to another..

The purpose of this thesis is to illustrate the conception of creativity. Observation and interview illustrate teachers´ views of the concept, as well as the use there of. Classes in ensemble and aestethics have been observed. The reason for choosing these two classes is to give the investigator the oppurtunity to observe several students at the same time and it also makes possible for the investigator to observe several instrumentalists´ use of their instruments. Interviews have been conducted with teachers in the observed classes.

The aim of this essay is to investigate the function and development of non-player characters (NPC) in the TV/computer game Dragon Age: Origins. The NPCs are analysed in order to see if their development is affected by the player character?s (PC) background and interactions. The game?s ethics is also investigated by studying how the NPCs treat the PC and what significance they give to his background and actions.The results show that the NPCs are affected by the PC?s interactions, and furthermore, that they are round characters, which is unusual in TV/computer games.

AbstractHåkan Ljung: Förklassik för knäppinstrument. En studie kring en sonat för cittra av Johan Wikmanson. Uppsala universitet: Institutionen för musikvetenskap, C-uppsats för 60 poäng, ht 2005.My main purpose with this thesis is to highlight a piece of music written for a relative of the 18th century cittern. This sonata, composed around 1780, is a well thought composition written in a pre-classical style.  The composer of this music is Johan Wikmanson (1753-1800) who is mostly known for his string quartets, songs and piano pieces. Because of the importance for the music as a whole, one task is to reconstruct the second movement from severe errors. This was carried out by doing an overall analysis of the two movements themes, motives and structures.Since many arrangements for plucked instruments occurred by other composer's works, my second aim is try to tie this Sonate as an original version written by Wikmanson himself. As a part of my main purpose, the reader will also receive a short presentation of the Swedish cittern designed by the Royal instrument maker Johan Öberg the elder (1727?-1779) with a description of its connection with the manuscript. .

The purpose of this study is to investigate in what extension students experience that computer and videogames affect them. I have chosen to focus on the physical, mental and social affect that this activity might bring them. I have also examined how much time the students spends in front of the computer or the videogame and in which social context they play.The method I have chosen to use is a quantitative opinion poll which I used in three classes of the later junior high and I have also conducted five qualitative interviews.The conclusions I have drawn from this investigation are that computer and videogames affects teenagers both physically and mentally. Physically the affects of playing videogames mostly can be derived to the physical inactivity they expose themselves to. The students themselves did not experienced any positive physical affects from their playing.Amongst the mental affects that stood out the most I recognized the social training that online gaming provided and also the intellectual stimulation that certain games offered the player.

In musikklasser (a special musical training which focus on choral singing is offered in the Swedish compulsory school from the age of ten until the age of sixteen) teachers are working in a tradition where conventions relating to singing with children have developed in accordance with the Swedish choral tradition. In these classes, students are trained in large groups, usually around 30 students in one class. Furthermore, one teacher and 60 students is also frequent in schools with two or more parallell grades. In a large choir group, students develop their skill in choral singing, which includes the development of general musical knowledge as well as the development of the individual singing voice of each student in order for the choir to be able to interpret and perform music with a communal musical expression. Thus, the complexity in this teaching and learning setting places high demands on the choir teachers? ability to use appropriate teaching and learning strategies in order to develop the specific musical skill required in a choir.In this study, two choral teachers´ interaction with their choir class were investigated.

With the digital revolution within video games, the need for Digital Rights Management (DRM) has increased significantly, alongside with the increasing problem of copyright pirates. To counter pirates, DRM was created to prevent illegal copying of software, this to ensure that the Distributors received an income for their work. DRM has, since the start of its use, been getting, a lot of bad criticism from the users of the software protected by DRM. The main function of this paper is to describe the creation and development of DRM by analysis of the vision of different groups on this phenomenon. The main questions are as follows, is it possible to define the very reason for why DRM was created and if so, can its development through time be defined too? What differences in opinions are there when it comes to DRM, counting the two major groups of creators, sellers, distributors (referred to as distributors) versus individual users (referred to as consumers)? In what way will the research results suggest that the future DRM will develop?The development has gone from solving puzzles in a handbook to start the game each time the user wants to play, to serial numbers that is needed during the installation of the game.

The purpose of this investigation is to find out how the children?s exercises affect their learning capabilities. With exercise, I mean all kinds of movements, like physics, walks and games.The method I will use in this investigation is interviews, where I choose to interview both teachers and their pupils at a school which uses an exercise-program called röris. Röris is an exercise program which involves moving to music. I also choose to look at Bunkefloprojektet, were scientists has investigated how the power of concentration is affected by exercise.My conclusion from the interviews and the literature is that I can?t prove that the children?s exercises affect their learning capabilities.

Personal branding is a common phenomenon within the Swedish business world, although less applied on the competitive and fast paced music industry. In order to strengthen Swedish artists' personal brands and to ensure congruence between the artists' presented identities and the target audiences' perceived images, we have developed a model, containing of seven essential factors. The seven dimensions authenticity, credibility, certainty, openness, availability, awareness and timeliness help improve strength when communicating brand identity, as well as minimizing potential discrepancy between identity and image. This report examines the brand strategies within the Swedish music industry through a case study of Sweden's largest pop star, Eric Saade, where Team Saade's communicated identity is compared to the targets audience's perceived image of Saade. Overall, Saade's personal brand has a high level of congruence, except from the clarity dimension, where his words are considered differing from his actions.