Q&A: CCM Doctoral student gains accolades for innovative dissertation

CCM congratulates Erin Alcorn (DMA Voice, ‘25) for her first place win at UC’s GradNEXT Competition, a Shark Tank-style event where UC students pitch their ideas for how the university can reshape graduate education. In addition to her first place win, Alcorn took home the Audience Choice Prize, and will receive funding support for her dissertation project: the UC ARIA Initiative, incorporating virtual reality into art song performance.

Earlier in the spring semester, Alcorn placed third in UC’s Three Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition, presenting her dissertation topic to a non-specialist panel. Alcorn was the first CCM student to receive an award at the 3MT competition in its nine-year history, and the only humanities student competing in either competition this year.  

Alcorn’s dissertation, Reimagining Art Song: A New Era of Audience Engagement Through Virtual Reality, was inspired by her work on a VR Opera during the pandemic.  Alcorn saw an opportunity to bring cutting edge technology into another genre of classical singing: the art song. “Despite the growing presence of VR in opera, no one has yet explored art song in this medium — my favorite art form,” she says.

Below, Alcorn discusses her dissertation project and her experience in the two competitions.

I have always had an interest in blending classical music with other art forms in unique ways to appeal to modern audiences — I once worked with the University of Pennsylvania to create an art song recital with 360-degree projection arts and fashion design. In 2020, as the pandemic hit, my resident artist contract with Tri-Cities Opera (TCO) was canceled, but they came back to me and asked if I’d work on MIRANDA: a steampunk VR experience, an adaptation of Kamala Sankaram’s original opera into a 20-minute virtual reality performance.

I covered Miranda and worked behind the scenes with the enhanced reality and projection arts crew. It was an amazing experience that sparked a deep interest in digital performance. The show was performed live twice each evening. TCO has said that for a third to half of what they normally spend, they reached five times the audience. After this, I purchased an Oculus headset and started bringing it to parties to see how my non-musician friends reacted to operatic performance, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. They had never seen an opera singer that close and to see a human body making such immense sound was enthralling to them. 

The Three Minute Dissertation competition focuses on explaining your research in easy-to-understand language for a non-expert audience. I found this challenge fun and used Beyoncé’s concept album and film Lemonade to explain what art song and song cycles are.

Preparation involved a lot of re-writing, editing alongside my advisors, and practicing in front of several friends and family members — mostly my very patient husband who watched me say my speech using an espresso machine handle as my microphone way too many times.

For GradNext, I had to put on my businesswoman hat and learn how to do a Shark Tank pitch in five minutes. Luckily my dad has done many of those pitches, and I can now say I know what Compound Annual Growth Rate is — ha! Training on grant-writing and pitching to stakeholders is not something music students often get in school, and this experience made me realize how important that is. I now feel I have a solid, efficient way to express why my research is important to anyone from any discipline and to create my own opportunities.

For GradNext, I pitched a new partnership between CCM and UC Digital Futures’ Digital Performance Lab, run by Professor of Acting D’Arcy Smith, calling it the "UC ARIA Initiative: Augmented Reality and Immersive Arts." The purpose of the ARIA Initiative is to provide music students with access and training on cutting edge technology like virtual reality (VR) that is transforming the future of the fine arts and bring classical music to broader modern audiences who lack access to or feel alienated by traditional performance spaces.

We know that the metaverse, the AI industry encompassing all immersive technology, is growing rapidly. Meanwhile, Opera America’s 2023 Annual Report showed a 29 percent decline in audiences since pre-pandemic levels. CCM must prepare its students for a rapidly changing entertainment industry. Providing students with digital performance experience will help our students be well-rounded, entrepreneurial artists. 

I cannot say enough thanks to my dissertation and lecture recital advisors Megan Steigerwald-Ille (CCM Musicology), Quinn Patrick Ankrum (CCM Voice), D’Arcy Smith (CCM Acting) and Shelina Brown (CCM Musicology). Professor Mind Tang from Digital Futures XR-Lab has also helped immensely. I’d also like to thank Cincinnati Song Initiative, who provided a pianist, and Lori Laitman, who gave me permission to record her song “Last Night the Rain Spoke to Me.” Quinn Ankrum told me to keep going when I felt like giving up, which I am deeply thankful for.

In addition to top-tier training in vocal performance and the mentorship from nearly all the voice faculty, a pleasant surprise came from the CCM Musicology department. While I initially grumbled about this requirement, the three musicology classes I took with Megan Steigerwald-Ille and Shelina Brown have completely transformed my way of thinking about music and pedagogy. I took Professor Brown’s Voice, Gender, and Embodiment course and Professor Steigerwald-Ille’s Postcolonial Canon and Opera Ecosystems seminars. I feel these courses have helped me become a better singer, teacher and person, and sparked a renewed passion in the industry I’ve dedicated my career to. 

If you have an idea that you’re passionate about but it doesn’t seem possible, keep asking questions and be persistent — and take a step outside of CCM once in a while. UC is a wonderful place with so many people who value the arts and want to collaborate. It took me from 2021 to 2025 to finally make my dissertation project come true and it was not always easy to explain to people unfamiliar with VR what my project would look like. While it has taken me longer to accomplish, my dissertation is directly affecting my career and future job opportunities. 

My dissertation project has been recorded and is in the editing phase. We will publish it on YouTube 360 soon, so people will be able to experience it either in a headset or in 2D. We will then present the work publicly at conferences including Cincinnati Song Initiative’s Fellowship of Song this May and Digital Futures' 2026 VR conference.

We hope to offer some on-campus opportunities for students to experience it for free with headsets. I will continue to study VR’s effect on audience engagement with classical singing. For GradNext, the next step is to work with the Graduate School on how to make a partnership with Digital Futures a reality. We envision offering a course in which students will create an immersive performance — and possibly sell box office tickets to see the performance in VR! 

Featured photo at top: Erin Alcorn performs alongside a person wearing a VR headset. Photo/Erin Alcorn