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HONORS EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING PROJECT PROPOSAL FORM

Basic Information
Full Name: Tan N. Do
UC Email: doto@mail.uc.edu
College: Lindner College of Business
Major: Operations Management
Title of Project: Guitar, the journey to artistic development
Thematic Area (choose only one): Community Engagement, Creative Arts, Global Studies,
Leadership, OR Research
Expected Project Start Date: August 24th, 2015
Expected Project End Date: March 31st, 2016
Project Information
1. Provide a detailed abstract of your proposed honors experiential learning project.
Being a Business students, I do not have a lot of exposure to creative works or develop my
creative skills. However, the experience throughout my childhood and high school highlights the
contrary. I played piano for more than 7 years. I was in school choir in grade 11-12 and actively
participating in several Spring and Winter Concert. Furthermore, I formed my own band in high
school. I was the co-lead singer of the Last Second Band and we competed in the school yearly
Battle of the Bands Competition 2013. The activities I have mentioned here leave a strong
memories and skill set that I highly valued. Therefore, with the honor experience, I hope to
further develop my artistic skills with Guitar. I truly believe that learning a new instrument will
help me to develop new skill and my knowledge about the music history and its development
through time.
There are many other ways to express myself creatively. However, music in general is
utterly crucial in my life. I do believe that music create a connections between each individuals
and eliminates any barriers of communication. I really want to enable to perform a solo
performance that reflects my artistic side of mine and further showing that I am self-sufficient
individual where I can achieve something for myself. Moreover, the performance could be
displayed through YouTube, one of the popular medium that allow talent people to further share
their experiences. I believe that would be a great experience that further showcase my ability
artistically but at the same time satisfied my interest during college.
With guitar, I hope to develop a new skill that would complements on my existing singing
talent. In details, I have created a plan that truly helping me to fully develop my guitar skills and
incorporates my singing skill in which creating a completed performance that can be broadcast
on social media site, e.g. YouTube. The plan is detailed in 5 phases with timeline specified.

09/01/2015- 09/12/2015. Do research on my favorite, and/or successful performers and

study on how they have strongly excel on particular performance. This will help me
better to understand of the style of performing that I want to emulate or create for myself.
Moreover, a brief research on guitar and how it is a significant piece of instrument in the

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music industry and how it has made some of the most famous artist becoming who they
are. Formulate clear style of performance that further helps me to better perform at the
end of the experience.

08/24/2015-12/12/2015. Take a two credit hours guitar class at CCM in Fall 2015. This
will facilitates my guitar skills at a much faster pace whilst also personally practice
playing guitar on my own time. The guitar skills will also be monitored and supported by
the guitar class instructor.

08/24/2015-03/31/2015. Continuously practice and improve the guitar skills

throughout the guitar class and along the honor experience. This would require a 4-6
hours of practice every week over a period of 27 weeks. This will ensure to maintain my
progress of improvement on my skills and fully familiarize with a new instrument.

12/13/2015- 02/15/2016. Learn to play 3 songs that is best fit to my vocal as well as my
guitar ability. Choosing songs can be very difficult and it is best to have support from
advisor, my guitar instructor. These songs are prepared for the YouTube. Change and
adjust to the singing ability and style that I want to pursue. Keep in touch with advisor is
very crucial at this point as he will provide specific guidance on techniques that each of
the songs required.

01/15/2016-02/15/2016. Incorporate singing into the songs that I have practiced with
guitar. This can be challenging because it requires high concentration and multitasking.
Further advice maybe needed from guitar advisor and vocal advisor. The advisor will
ensure the progress and the quality of my work is at a high standard.

02/16/2016-03/31/2016. Film and upload the work onto YouTube. Learn and adopt
software that enables to edit the recorded video. This will ensure that the quality of the
clip is at a high standard. Moreover, repetition on recording maybe needed in order to
achieve an ideal material that can be matched with to the benchmark of the clips on
YouTube.

Clearly and thoroughly address how each of the following elements will be exhibited in
your work:
2. Connection to Learning Outcomes within the Honors Thematic Area (identified above)
Acquires or further develops competencies within a particular creative domain.
Possess a well-developed awareness of theories and methods in the field.
There are two Learning Outcomes within the Honors Thematic Area I do believe that I will
acquire. These developments are closely related to each other where it is quite difficult to distinct
them from each other. However, these learning outcomes encompasses 3 goals that are closely
relates towards the learning outcomes.

Acquire a new guitar skills: This is the main goal that I want to achieve with this honors
experience. The experience is elaborate with a combination of class enrollment and

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personal practice in order to achieve the goal. Playing guitar is an artistic development
what also contribute to my existing musical development of vocal and piano.

Incorporating existing skills: There is an element of integrating of at least one musical

skill of vocal within the experience. By incorporating existing vocal skill into the
experience, it truly allows me to further develop myself as an artist, rather than just
obtaining a new skills or being an instrument player. It allows me to understand a process
of a start-up guitar player/ singing musicians develop their skills and help me to better
develop my artistic skills.

Implementing personality/new ideas to cover music: It is crucial with this experience

to further express myself through the medium of music, specifically with guitar and vocal
skills.

3. Connection to Goals and Academic Theories (include reference list, as appropriate)

A. Personal & General Education Goals: There are 5 main goals that I would this
honor experience will allow me to fulfill. The goals consists of:
1. Fulfilling artistic passions
2. Expressing self freely
3. Working and thinking artistically
4. Obtaining new skills
5. Being independent.
With this experience, I would enable to fulfill my artistic passions with music where I
would enable to escape from daily routine and emerge myself in a musical world. I would enable
to sing and play guitar to enhance my quality of life and making it the progress a joyful
experience. Moreover, as I mentioned earlier, expressing my personality freely through music is
also something that I truly believe in. The process will bring me out of my comfort zone but at
the same time push me to a limit where I would truly feel comfortable because I would have
express myself. This can be paradoxical but I believe that you would not know yourself until you
have escape your comfort zone and do something that you love.
The main goal of this experience is to learn a new musical skill and incorporates the new
skills with vocals to create a professional piece of artwork that could be upload on YouTube.
Throughout the experience, I would enable to learn and think artistically. This is very important
because it enables me to have a different perspective of an artist and how music is something that
I cannot live without. Moreover, by having an artistic state of mind will help me to think
creatively and this would significantly benefit me in daily life by taking a more creative
approach to problems.
This will be the first self-proposal honor experience that I would like to achieve. By
completing this honor experience will enable to show my independent. It shows that I can
develop a new skill over a period of time through a plan that I formulate by myself. The
experience will require self-commitment and self-investment in order to gain the best out of this
experience. Therefore, I do believe the experience will allow me to realize my full potential and
that discipline will help me to be successful with this experience.

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B. Academic Theories and Readings

I plan on researching into a couple different guides, blogs, and articles to better my
understanding through the process.
Specific books I feel will be useful are:
Guitar zero: the new musician and the science of learning by Gary Marcus
This is a great book discussing on how any individual, despite of his/her age, can become a
musicians. This is an inspiring book that will give the motivation for any beginner musician who
want to be committed to playing an instrument. The book discusses on how the author, Marcus,
makes himself an experiment Guinea pig where I want to master in playing an instrument. The
book empowers the determination of achieving a particular goal and highlights ways to train the
correct state of mind learning an instrument. Marcus also raises the question of whether talent
exists for it is hard work all you need. However, he emphasizes on it is crucial to be happy in
what youre doing and develop a new skill artistically is one way to do it. This is truly an
inspiring book that will help me to have a new perspective on my musical pursuit.
Pop-culture pedagogy in the music classroom: teaching tools from American idol to
YouTube by Nicole Biamonte
The book is a helpful guidance on how to take advantage of modern technology and social
media of YouTube to support a musical pathway. The book will provide detailed techniques of
choosing popular songs. Biamonte also discuss the history of music and its transformation
through time. She also demonstrate music theory topics that enables newbies to easily create a
great piece of music. The book also mentions different contexts and situations that musicians
might face and provides the solution to those contexts. This is a very helpful book that will help
me at the later stages of this honor experience where I would face difficulties on incorporating 2
different skillset together and using technologies to enhance the quality of my work.
4. Initiative, Independence, and/or Creativity
First of all, I believe that I contribution to this project is my vocal skills. As I constantly
mentioned throughout my proposal. I would incorporate my new learning skill with my vocal
ability to create a great performance that could be upload to YouTube. Moreover, my vocal
ability is not judged by my personal perspective, but it is acknowledged by the activities that I
have done in the pass, for example: Chorus in Highschool and competing at the battle of the
bands as a lead singer of my own band. Furthermore, I am currently taking a voice class at CCM
and with the recognition of Tyler Alessi, class instructor, I am more confident that my vocal
ability will significantly benefits me with this project.

5. Reflection

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With reflection, I would take different approach of creating an online blog where I can
document my progress of work. Online blog enables everyone to see my progress and I feel
that it is necessary to share my experience to people who wants to learn a new instrument and
start a musical focus YouTube page. However, the main focus is on me, with the online blog,
I am enable to access it anywhere in the world and the data are online so I would not have to
worry about losing documents but rather focusing on the honor experience. I will update the
online blog twice a week since I plan to have this experience over a significant period of
time.
Details that I would address on my blog:
The progress that I made
My personal perspective on music
Ways that I could improve upon my skill
Plans for the next few weeks and ways I could monitor my progress
I believe that these questions will help me to think critically and provide a steady
guidelines which enables me be more involved with this honor experience.
6. Dissemination
As mentioned before, my creative work would be uploaded on YouTube, the most popular
sites sharing videos. I would showcase my complete work on YouTube and share it over some
other social media sites such as: Facebook and Twitter, where it will enables to show my work to
a larger audience.
Since I am an International Ambassador at the University of Cincinnati. It would be very
helpful for incoming students to have a glimpse of one of the honors experience and how I have
manage to balance my honor project and school work. I would create a blog post sharing my
honor experience at ucinternationalambassador.weebly.com.
7. Project Advisor(s)
Tyler Alessi
-Vocal Instructor at CCM
alessitt@mail.uc.edu
-Guitar Instructor at CCM. Yet to be determined.
8. Budget (if applicable)
Guitar: $150
Microphone: $80
Sony Acid Music Software: $60
Total: $290