First Advisor
Caroline Miller
Date of Award
Spring 6-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Sonic Arts and Music Production and University Honors
Department
Music & Theater
Language
English
Subjects
Music, Production, Engineering
DOI
10.15760/honors.1862
Abstract
This craft essay traces the making of "Holding Pattern," a three-song EP representing the culmination of five years of development in composition, production, lyric writing, and sound engineering. Each song addresses its own distinct emotional territory: the tension between confidence and self-doubt, resistance to creative conformity, and the experience of emotional dissociation. Together they form a single arc: reaching out, holding your ground, and surviving it. This essay moves through each song, examining how production decisions, lyrical construction, and the recording process each served the content of the work. Working intuitively across composition, sampling, collaboration, and recording, what only became clear in retrospect is that the decisions made in service of each song kept finding the themes being written about. The EP takes its name from the suspended state each song inhabits: purposeful, unresolved, and circling waiting for the conditions to land. This essay traces that process across all three songs and attempts to articulate how, in each case, the form became the content.
Persistent Identifier
https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/44796
Recommended Citation
Larson Phillips, Oscar, "Holding Pattern: The Making of an Ep, on Intuition, and Form Becoming the Content" (2026). University Honors Theses. Paper 1825.
https://doi.org/10.15760/honors.1862
LarsonPhillips_HoldingPattern_02_LevelUp.wav (88086 kB)
LarsonPhillips_HoldingPattern_03_SittingInSilence.wav (106369 kB)