PLN Week 3: Music Creativity Outside the Music Room.

As this week’s readings and lecture continue with creativity through music technology, I look at compositional strategies that can be used to help spark interest in students outside of the music classroom.  Though the music teacher may not see every student in their classroom, music is a strong component in many of the student’s daily activities.  Thanks to today’s digital age, music is accessible at the touch of a button through the use of portable digital music players such as iPods and their sound accessories like wireless speakers and Beat headphones by Dr. Dre.  Digital music found in video games become a part of the student’s exposure to music as well as the creation of music-based games such as Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and Just Dance.  There are movies such as Pitch Perfect that tells the subplot of the main character’s aspirations to become a music producer using digital audio workstation software.  Because of these things and many more, there is in some way a vested interest in music from students that music teachers may not have in their traditional musical classroom. 

            I have seen many of these types of students who have an interest in music yet not enroll into a traditional ensemble because they feel they are too musical illiterate to be in that ensemble.  Many times, I have wondered how I can still help interest that student in another way.  Out of the two compositional strategies Bauer (2014) listed, the use of non-notational (sound-based) composition may be one answer to foster music creativity outside the classroom.   Bauer writes, “Advocates for allowing students to compose without notation often speak to the large percentage of students who have an interest in music but are not involved in school music programs, particularly in the secondary level”  (Bauer, p. 73, 2014).  When I read this statement, I thought of the students in my high school and their interest in the Smart technology that the school has available.  In my school district, our high school has a 21^st Century Smart Lab where the teacher uses technology to challenge student creativity through engineering and design tasks such as robotics, graphic design, and video production.  While there is limited audio production software available, this is where myself as the music teacher can step in to team-teach with the Smart Lab teacher to introduce students to sound-based composition through specific digital audio workstations such as GarageBand, Soundation, and Mixcraft. So it may be used to study sound engineering or for use with video production projects.  Each of these DAWs is fairly easy to navigate through, where the student can add loops, digital audio, and MIDI into their project.  The use of loops is a tool I feel students would love to use, as there are many styles of loops to fit the student’s favorite musical genre. 

The use of DAWs to compose music is intriguing to me as I have always be a traditional music learner leaning toward notation software.  Though I have rarely worked with DAWs in my own music classroom, it was not until I started taking this course that I have viewed them as a compositional tool.  I think it is important for the music teacher to explore ways in bringing music into other classrooms outside the traditional music room.  Non-notational composition can be one of those ways to bring in music to other students whether it is advocating for a new music class to be taught or working within other classrooms.

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. [E-reader version] New York, NY: Oxford University Press.