Ideas on Research

I have a couple ideas streaming through my head. The first topic that popped in my head is edm, also known as electric dance music. I wanted to choose this topic because I feel like I have recently been integrated into this community over the past year. For me, I was deeply influenced by my friends and people that were close to me. I love it because we have so much fun listening to it together. Without them, I would not attend any of the events. I would still listen to the music at home or on my iphone, but I would never go to an event by myself. I wonder what draws other people to the music. There are so many people who love it, and on top of that there are so many different styles of edm. Some people only like one type while others like multiple. Even within my group of friends, we argue over which type is the best. I want to find out the similarities and differences that people have within this community. Are there universals that all listeners engage in? Also, what about it brings people so close together? It's exciting because all I know now is that I love being part of the community and I love a lot of the music, but I don't know much else. It'll be rewarding for me to find out more about it.

Another idea I wanted to explore is the jazz community. I've never really enjoyed jazz as a musician, but after I took a Blues class last quarter, I started to be a bit more intrigued. Our teacher required us to attend two blues or jazz performances, and I chose one at a cafe and one at a bar. It was so different than my other music classes where I had to attend concerts and sit in a concert hall listening to Western art music. Also, it was interesting because the two performances I attended had the same vocalist. It was nice because in the first one she was just featured as a guest performer while the main act was on the guitarist. For the second performer, the vocalist was the main act. It intrigued me to want to understand the blues and jazz community within San Diego. The two venues that I went to consisted of very different audiences. The first one had mostly people from an older generations, mostly age fifty and up. The second one was a bar, so many of them were in their twenties or thirties. I also want to understand the culture of jazz in San Diego better because I am a piano teacher and hope to become more well rounded. One of my students asked me to teach her very simple jazz from a book she had. I think it would be very rewarding to help her with understanding what she is playing and understanding it myself.

What do you think is a better topic?