WEBVTT

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[music]

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My name is Ningsheng Mo. I'm from Nanning, Guangxi, China. I'm a graduate student here in Western Oregon University.

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My career goal is to be a music teacher or a music producer and engineer.

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I choose to study in Western because Western offers a great music program.

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Everything in music education, music history, and music performance,

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music engineering, and the professors here are very nice, too.

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Besides classroom study, I have the chance to work in a work class studio,

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with doing experiments to engineers and musicians.

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Today I am in Dead Aunt Thelma's Studio in Portland. I'm doing my professional project for the graduate class.

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I'm doing the recording, mixing, and mashing for my CD.

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The music I like to compose is pop music.

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Today I'm working on a project combining the rock and roll and the Chinese instruments together.

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FREYMUTH: I just listened to his final projects, and it was all extremely high quality work.

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Actually, I was surprised just at how elaborate the projects were.

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And he's been mixing all that.

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I know he recorded a lot of it. He plays drums on some of it.

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He did the mastering himself, and it's really first-rate.

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I teach the students modern recording techniques

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in a commercial recording studio here in Portland, Oregon.

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The students book studio time here just as if they were a client and arrange for the times to be here,

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and I have a lot of classic analog gear that wouldn't be practical for Western Oregon to have.

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So they get a chance to really get their hands and head around a lot of nice stuff.

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BAXTER: I think having international students at Western is a benefit to us as well as to them.

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And in many ways for us in the music department, it doesn't matter whether our students come from 25 miles away

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or 10,000 miles away. Our goals remain the same.

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The first area is to develop our musicians as scholars in the field.

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The second area is develop them as performers,

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and we do that here by performing with our students often.

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And the third way is to develop their technological skills

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so that they are competent in the contemporary world.

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MOORE: But I also expect students to know how to actually produce music,

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not just from an engineering level, but from pre-production, how do you work with artists, getting arrangements together.

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There's a whole array of things that a producer knows how to do.

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what China needs and what China wants to become modern.

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He has every opportunity to make highly successful records. Sky's the limit.

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I've been at Western for 23 years now, and I stay here because of the students

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and what they bring. Students like Ningsheng Mo are a joy.

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I think music changes the world, and I relish the opportunity

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to work with music and developing musicians every day.

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[music]