Rowan Friesen ( He/Him )

Recent MA Graduate

Rowan is a graduate student currently enrolled in the Master of Arts in Music and Culture program at Carleton University, with a specialization in Digital Humanities. Rowan’s musical history spans nearly his entire lifetime. He began learning the guitar at the age of ten, and continued to play all the way into his undergraduate degree at Grant MacEwan, where he was awarded an honours diploma in Jazz Guitar Performance and a degree in Music minoring in Music Career Management. During his undergraduate degree he also took up playing the lute and was supervised for a specialized project digitally transcribing early handwritten lute music written in French lute tablature from facsimiles in order to restore them and make them legible and playable.

Throughout his recollectable existence, Rowan has always maintained a fascination with digital and social media and how it intersects with the experience of music and music marketing. He is currently exploring this through his master’s thesis. Here, he examines the role of TikTok in shaping the way that users of the application engage with music through short-form audiovisual bursts, and how this in turn puts pressure on musicians to change the ways they write music in order to cater to this new digitized social environment.