Hello again!
Whilst my blogging has had a brief hiatus, my involvement in all things music ed and technology has not. So strap yourselves in, it might be a long one.
First of all, I thought I might describe some ways in which technology in Music Ed is being used in life at the moment. Philharmonia choirs has been doing wonderful things. There is constant email correspondence, keeping everyone in the loop and updated. In these emails, they are sending links to videos by the conductors called "Weekly Warm Ups". The Weekly Warm Ups include vocal exercises, ear training, sight singing and repertoire learning. They are also engaging and fun. We are also in the process of sending in videos to create our own virtual choir for Philharmonia Choirs 100th year. (And of course there is a weekly wine and zoom meeting for all of those keen to keep social).
There is also Australian Girls Choir (and ASPA), who I was training with to be a tutor there before the lockdown. They have created a wonderful Padlet page with videos of vocal warm ups, repertoire, theory, dances and more for the girls to go through at home. It's really inspiring seeing so many teachers taking on the challenge of online learning and being so creative with it. So far, the feedback from the students has been overwhelmingly positive, and some parents are getting involved. They are also in the beginning of running a few classes over zoom.
I also put out a question onto twitter, asking for anyone's opinions on the website 8notes.com . This was for the intention of creating online resources for my bassoon students, while experimenting with iBooks Author. Unfortunately I have not been able to do this yet. I think I was a little over ambitious with the amount of assessments I have to do. Nevertheless, I do intend to create these materials (perhaps in special projects week or in the winter holidays - even if SCMTME is over by then :( ). I did though, get a response on my twitter! Yay! Thanks to the help of James and his plethora of followers :P
Ed's inputs were great, and I can't wait to use it in the future!
So I have been busily working on other assessments over the last couple of weeks, but one assessment has allowed me to practice my skills at SoundTrap. First of all, the Soundtrap for Music Ed group on Facebook has been popping off recently, seems like everyone is taking up the wonderful possibilities on Soundtrap. In my course, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music, we had to make a choral arrangement of one of Gurrumul's songs suitable for a school or community choir (the class was given permission to do this by Gurrumul's record label Skinnyfish). I worked in a group with Emily and Larissa (who also do SCMTME), and we jumped at the opportunity to use Soundtrap. I have for ages wanted to learn how to turn my electric piano into a midi keyboard. So, I went out and bought myself a midi-to-USB cable. It took a lot of trial and error to get the connection going between my keyboard and my computer, but eventually it worked! I have never been more frustrated and relieved at the same time. This cable meant I could record directly into Soundtrap, while also keeping some of the expression I would have done if I was to play live. This did not quite go to plan. The piano was the only accompaniment, and I recorded it first for everything to be sung overtop. Therefore, it needed to be very accurately in time, so I ended up quantising out a lot of tempo expression. Also, my keyboard is a bit broken at the moment, which means dynamics is very hard to do. Hopefully this will be fixed soon. The song we chose to arrange was Wiyathul. Wiyathul has a lot of repeated bars, so I ended up recording only a few bars, adding them to my loop library and creating the song that way. Which was a huge timesaver and super fun. Emily, Larissa and I then recorded our vocal parts, and Larissa recorded the violin last. And I am super happy with the results, and here they are!
Wiyathul by Gurrumul (SAB arrangement score)
Wiyathul by Gurrumul (SAB arrangement recording)
This was my setup to record Wiyathul Arrangement:
This was my setup with the midi-to-USB cable. Really very simple!
This is what was under my piano which the cable connected to:
This is my loops library!
My setup for recording vocals:
This is what the final song looked like:
I have been thinking about what I could do for the project coming up. I have two main ideas. Idea 1 is creating online resources and a discussion page for community choirs. I sing in a community choir with my mum, not for its incredible vocal abilities, but for the passion the members bring to choir. It is amazing to see the impact choir and music has on people's lives, and most of these people have never had music eduction. I thought some online materials, specific for those learning in choirs, for members to do at home would be really worthwhile. It can go over basic score reading, music theory, vocal techniques and safety and so much more. It could enrich the musical understanding of so many people in the choir (especially because we don't always have the time to go over everyone's questions), and I know they would love it. A discussion page could also be provided for them to ask questions, for each other or the conductor to answer.
Idea 2 is creating a podcast in a similar vain of musical education for community choirs, but in the style of Strong Songs by Kirk Hamilton. I haven't really thought this one through yet, but it could be really exciting.
Synths
This week we learnt about synthesisers. We started off by recapping the physics and biology of sound from earlier in the semester, and linked this to how synthesisers work in a similar way. Then we compared the shape and sound of different synthesiser waves.
(James' powerpoint)
For my own learning, I think a sine wave sounds a little like a flute, a square wave like a clarinet, a triangle like the buttons on an old Nokia phone, and saw sounds like a saxophone. The coarse options increases or decreased the pitch by a semitone and fine does small tuning adjustments.
We then learnt about Attack, Decay, Sustain and Release through this wonderful website:
ADSR can be used to make the synth sound like different kinds of instruments, you can also mix synths to achieve this.
James mentioned that you can learn about synths in much more detail through inLearning. I really hope I find time to get to these in the future (either in special project week or in the mid year holidays). https://www.linkedin.com/learning/learning-synth-programming/the-universal-language-of-synthesis
James also added a page with a bunch of places were you can continue experimenting more with synths. These look super fun and I can't wait to try one or two of them out. This might change my mind on synthesiser music, because I have been one to enjoy acoustic music much more, but this might change my mind.
Coding
Coding was interesting. We had Rowena Stewart come and talk to us about women in coding and Sonic Pi, which is a downloadable application were you can code music. I really want to like coding, I just really don't. It seems so cool and like something I should want to do, but... I have tried coding many times over the years. I have found that most of the time it is not engaging and generally leads to mediocre results. I also believe that a big impact has also been that coding is usual taught by people who are good at code and not people who are particularly good at teaching it, which has had an impact on my own engagement. I struggled with staying motivated in class, and I hit a lot of road blocks when coding. I also struggled with motivation because I could not understand why we were learning this program, what benefit it had or why we would use it in our own classrooms. I was a bit sad because I really do want to like coding, but yet again I do not.
I asked James in a later class why I would want to use Sonic Pi or something similar in my own teaching, and his answer was very valuable. He explained that it is an alternative way of teaching concepts such as duration and pitch to students who may not have a background in notated music. It might not be beneficial to someone who can already read music, but it is an accessible way for a student who can't read music to access and create music without having to worry about notation (something that MuseScore and Sibelius and so on do not have). I had never thought about it in that way before, and made coding in music seem more valuable. There is also the advantage that it is cross-curricular.
Social media has been extremely active at the moment! I have joined many teaching groups on Facebook who are all sharing resources, lesson plans and ideas during this time of online teaching and it's been amazing to see the community! Engaging with people professionally via social media is something I had never considered before, and its kind of awesome. I have not shared any advice on there yet, because I am not teaching yet, but I have been sharing my blog on twitter. Perhaps I will be able to share my major project on one of these pages where people may find it useful.
Here are some of the pages and ideas being shared on them!
