Within DePaul’s School of Music lives Sound Recording Technology, a program that prepares students to be sound engineers. It sounds straightforward, but DePaul SRT majors are not just sound engineers. They are a multitalented, collaborative group of singer-songwriters, directors, video editors and musicians.

Ryan Freeland, a six-time Grammy-winning audio engineer and director of SRT, is completing his first year of directing.

“As my first year teaching at DePaul, to have this level of quality and this amazing creativity is beyond my wildest imagination,” Freeland said. “It’s really, really beautiful.”

Freeland has worked with artists like Christina Aguilera on her hit song “Genie In A Bottle” and Bonnie Raitt on her album “Slipstream.”

This year, Electric DePaul, the annual showcase of SRT seniors’ capstone projects, took place on April 17, 2026, in the Gannon Concert Hall at the Holtschneider Performance Center. Being in the audience at Electric DePaul is wild, with the graduating class’ musical tastes spanning from 70s and 80s prog rock to indie folk to punk noise. Every project is a unique listening experience.

The capstone projects produced by the fourteen SRT seniors are graded by Freeland.

“I like the diversity and all too. That’s what I was seeing when I listened to them for grading,” he said. “I just started and I went on. I couldn’t stop. I just kept listening. So I was just blown away by the emotions of it.”

From the first listen, it is evident that the students put heart into their capstone pieces. Kyle Moore, an SRT senior, wrote the lyrics for his capstone project about the transitory period of being a young adult in college to leaving and figuring out life after school.

“There’s no guidelines to it,” Moore said, adding that in his project he tried “to put into words and into music the feelings of not knowing where you’re going but trusting in God and trusting in those around you that it’s going to work out.”

Maryclaire Sullivan, another SRT student, produced a ten-minute visualizer for the band Spanish Moss. She said she wanted to elicit an unnamable feeling from her visual interpretation of the music.

“It’s like that ooey gooey feeling that you can’t really put into words, but when you think about it, it sort of makes your chest hurt.” she said. “I really love trying my best to bring that feeling out.”

Other students discussed challenges in the recording studio. Maeve Riley said she had to brainstorm a new song when the band she booked never arrived at the recording studio.

“I showed up to the studio with Ellie, who is the singer, and we were like, ‘What are we going to do?’” Riley said. “So she just wrote the song on the spot. It was really, really amazing, and we just kind of riffed from there and did everything in the room which was super cool.”

Many pieces incorporated visual elements to accompany the music, with some students producing music videos.

Zachary Fitzgerald, another SRT senior, co-directed a 13-minute movement and sound piece  with the contributions of eight other dancers and musicians. He says that every artist brought a new style of dance or music to the project, which explores the theme of duality in identity. Improvisation and collaboration with the artists was his favorite part of the process.

“They had great ideas, and I let them expand upon them and got to put them into the final piece,” Fitzgerald said.

SRT is a collaborative program, with each capstone project encompassing the effort of multiple individuals, either on-screen or behind the scenes.

“Engineers are behind the scenes,” Freeland said. “We do all the stuff to make other people look good.”

Senior John Curry collaborated with Chicago-based country rock band Riplock and solo artist Makena Mitchell from Los Angeles for his capstone project. He says “being able to hang out” is a necessary quality to have in the audio industry.

“It’s long nights and long hours in this job, but if you’ve got a smile on your face the whole time and you can keep things light and fun and at the end of the day you know you deliver a good product, that’ll get you really far,” Curry said.

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