Sonic Signatures (Beginner)

This experiential activity is comprised of a series of exercises with the end goal of creating “sonic signatures”—micro-compositions of just a few seconds that represent the individual as a musical being. Creating a sonic signature is typically associated with marketing, but engaging in this exercise can also serve as a way to: (1) reflect and share on how we experience and make meaning from music in everyday life, (2) consider how these experiences shape our respective personal identities, and (3) create representations of these identities through the visual and sonic arts.

Exploring the Potential of Looped Material in DAW-Based Music Creation (Advanced)

This chapter describes a lesson that gets learners to go beyond the loop paradigm typical to most DAW production environments by encouraging a focus on the musical content of looped materials. Students will develop skills using a DAW’s MIDI editing facilities for “re-calculating” musical content, such as note value augmentation/diminution and pitch transposition. In addition, students will investigate the potential of musical materials for variation, transformation, and re-combination in the context of extended musical structures. One of the key learning outcomes of this exercise is understanding that looped material need not remain a static and unaltered building block in a composition/production.

Making Signs Sound

This activity designed for students in Grade 8 aims to help learners translate visual impressions to sound. Learners are provided a graphical score as visual input first, then they go hunting for associative sounds from their immediate environment, which they record and edit afterwards. Finally, they integrate their samples into an experimental live performance of the graphic score using a dedicated hardware/software sampler. Engaging in this process results in learners improving their DAW fluency. The interdisciplinary nature of this project also reinforces the interconnectedness of various art forms and can help students to use other forms of art as inspiration in their future creative endeavors.

Mixing a DJ Set (Intermediate)

This chapter describes an activity that takes place over a semester, where students learn to mix a DJ set of electronic dance music (EDM). No previous musical experience is necessary, only the ability to recognize the beat in dance music. DJs utilize multiple sound sources in conjunction with a mixer to create continuous dance music. Students create a DJ set by mixing previously recorded music, which is not simply playback. By adjusting track selection in the course of performance, aspiring DJs learn how to make musical decisions and manipulate pre-recorded sound to construct continuous dance music, crafting a musical set.

Podcast Your Story with Music (Intermediate)

This chapter details an activity designed for post-secondary students to produce a three- to five-minute podcast in which they combine personally significant excerpts of music—and/or excerpts that represent personally significant interactions with music—with commentary reflecting on their relationship with music at various points in their lives. Creating a podcast requires students to learn basic DAW skills such as recording and editing audio, and how to record audio with their devices. Students will also explore their interactions with music, which will help them better understand their relationships with music and perhaps also the relationships others (including their future students) might have with music.

Expanding Your DAW

The activity described in this chapter is designed for teenage students and older, using free and open source software called Pure Data (Pd). This activity outlines how to connect a DAW to an open-source object-oriented program, which enables the user to control any function of the external object-oriented program (e.g., Pure Data) with a DAW via MIDI. It must be noted that the method of controlling Pure Data with a DAW outlined in this chapter is but one possible means of achieving this end. With further exploration and study, many alternative and interesting ways to perform a range of exciting and highly imaginative tasks not mentioned here become achievable.

Using Maschine Jam to Set the Groove for Classroom Improvisation (Advanced)

The lesson described in this chapter is useful for all ages. Based on grooves the teacher prepares beforehand, students improvise on the initial groove by adding their own themes when cued by the instructor. Pathways to engaging musical improvisation are essential to music teachers who value encouraging the musical creativity of their students. A Maschine Jam device, used in conjunction with a number of different nonlinear composition software platforms, allows for the use of a wealth of creativity-igniting timbres and grooves. In the hands of artist-teachers, Maschine Jam provides an invaluable starting place for time-misplacing, mind-transforming, and life-reinvigorating improvisation.

The Tracker Producer and Top-Liner Collaborative Music Production Project (Advanced)

This project engages students with the collaborative realities of modern popular music production via an amalgamation of the music programmer, producer, and songwriter roles. Students engage in face-to-face and remote/online communication, composition, and production to manifest an original popular music output that is generated primarily within the DAW. Student learning is encapsulated within the autonomous interaction and workflows associated with the task, and reflected upon within a journal that informs a written assessment item. This activity is designed as a profession-based engagement that bridges student interaction to the realities of the modern music industry. This is intended to promote notions of professional ability within students upon completion.

Field Recording and New Media Composition Basics (Advanced)

Verbalizing the various qualities of a piece of art is a common way to describe the work without directly referencing it. By starting with a single descriptive word, students must begin to imagine the manifestation of the word visually and sonically. This activity challenges middle school to university learners to record a series of thematic sounds inspired by a photograph. Once compiled, the learner edits and arranges the sounds with a DAW to accompany the visual content. As students connect words with sounds and images, they begin to think compositionally and heighten their awareness to timbre. All the while, learners will strengthen their DAW skills.

Name that Synth Patch (Advanced)

When looking through sound presets on keyboards, guitars, synths, or any sound generating device, it is common for the title of the preset to verbally foreshadow the sound. In this game-based activity designed for undergraduate students, learners reverse-engineer sounds determined by patch names created by their peers. Students must play their sounds and have their peers guess which name matches their sound. This activity is a useful exercise because it gets learners to more closely analyze why certain words are used to describe certain sounds. The collaborative naming process also gets students thinking about how others perceive things and how to reconcile differences in interpretation.