How Music Technology Helped My Students Tap Into Their Creativity
Jade’s face peered out at me by means of the Zoom window, one in every of 25 faces in an elementary music class that lately went totally distant throughout the pandemic. Although Jade was solely within the fifth grade, she had determined, like many others her age, that she was not into music. Trying to inspire college students to be taught music throughout the pandemic was powerful, and for a younger, new music trainer like myself who wished all of his college students to be engaged in school, Jade offered a problem.
At the ripe previous age of 12 years previous, she was already satisfied that she wasn’t musically gifted. Although Jade was respectful and well mannered, she made it clear: the one factor she wished to play was the video games on her cellphone.
I assume I’m not the one one which has struggled to succeed in sure college students in my class, and as college students grow old, it turns into a tough endeavor. Once they fall behind, they begin to really feel like they aren’t good at music and it’s not for them, not to mention trying to be taught music composition – that’s worse than writing a novel. But what I observed early in my instructing profession is that when children are enthusiastic about telling a narrative, they determine a method. They draw comedian books. They write phonetically. They inform tales out loud.
That will not be at all times the case with music. Somehow, with music, the limitations appear to stand up too shortly; children really feel like they should be taught a thousand issues earlier than they make a sound. The tragedy is that nice musical composition could be tales, too – they’re simply advised otherwise.
Music Technology to the Rescue
Before most individuals compose music, they have to grasp writing and studying music. Unfortunately, there simply wasn’t something I might do to persuade some college students, together with Jade, to be taught the distinction between “E-flat” and “F#”.
I questioned how I might decrease the barrier to entry for college students to create a narrative with restricted musical writing abilities, very similar to a child studying a comic book guide for the primary time. Over the previous few years, just a few applications have emerged that make it attainable for anybody to create musical scores, even earlier than they’re fluent in studying and writing musical notation. Fortunately, I found Hyperscore, a software program program created by a nonprofit group known as New Harmony Line and began by Tod Machover, a musician and music and media on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hyperscore takes the idea of music as a narrative and runs with it. Students use dots and features to create a musical image. In the background, the software program makes use of the principles of Western musical concord to suit a musical scale or key.
While this was an thrilling growth, we had been nonetheless in the course of the pandemic, and simply turning the software program over to my fifth grade college students and telling them to write down music wasn’t sufficient. I wanted a hook.
Initially, I thought of Jade and her classmates’ love for video games, then I remembered another MIT project known as “Scratch,” a program that thousands and thousands of children have used to design their very own pc video games. Most of us have discovered that including a musical rating to a sport enhances our playing experience. In reality, the children who construct essentially the most polished video games on Scratch usually add a pre-recorded monitor. At that time, I believed to myself, what if my college students might compose their very own tracks and add them to Scratch video games?
Before testing my principle with college students, I picked a few widespread Scratch video games, went into the sport’s code and ripped out any current soundtrack. After that, I let my college students experiment with this system to see what they may do. I didn’t simply ask them to compose music – I additionally wished them to consider the sport itself. I wished to see if they may juggle components that they may not have ever thought-about earlier than:
What was the “mood” of the sport?
What ought to the theme of the music be?
What was the story they had been making an attempt to inform with their composition?
How might their music improve the expertise for the participant?
In order to achieve success, they needed to let their ear be their information and use the strains they drew in Hyperscore to create a narrative. Before I knew it, the experiment was underway.
A New Form of Musical Expression
After the scholars had been finished with the sport, I checked the outcomes, and admittedly, I used to be shocked: Hyperscore had eliminated the limitations for college students. Their creativity was now not held again by their command of music notation or capability to carry out on an instrument. They might discover musical concepts and make modifications to the notes in actual time. Students whose musical voices had been silent started to bloom, and having the possibility to write down music to suit a sport thrilled them.
While Jade initially lacked confidence in her musical talents, she felt like a rock star when it got here to enjoying with Scratch and Hyperscore. Almost instantly, she understood the type and temper of the sport and her expertise enjoying video games on her cellphone grew to become a priceless asset. As she labored on a Scratch sport known as Frenetic, a fast-paced platformer with characters leaping over spikes, the music she designed matched that upbeat tempo with simply sufficient pressure to remind you that you’re leaping over spikes. For the primary time that yr, she turned in one of many strongest submissions within the class and acquired to point out off a inventive expertise for music she did not notice – or consider – she had.
This experiment was my first step in rethinking what a music classroom might appear to be and the way it could possibly be related to my college students. Jade and the remainder of my college students helped me notice simply how a lot college students are capable of do if the unreal limitations blocking their creativity are eliminated and their pursuits are thought-about. My college students have loads to say, musically talking, and I’m grateful I might create alternatives for them to say it in a novel, related and accessible format. The area of training can be taught loads from the scholars we train, however provided that we’re prepared to fulfill them the place they’re and take their pursuits critically.
