Music Bridges & Learning Experience

Slaven's Music Analysis Project

Here is my music project.  I tried to upload it to youtube to post on fb, but they wouldnt allow the audio even though i had bought the mp3.  Anyway.  Here it is.  If you have problems let me know. Ill try to fix it.

Learning Experience & Bridges

As a child I took lots of different music lessons, among them piano, trumpet, voice, & French Horn. I was part of choirs, band, and concert band.  Its like anything else, if you slack off practicing then you start to forget what you learned.  This unit brought back memories of voice and piano lessons where my teacher would use terms like credenza, mezzo forte, mezzo piano, crescendo, etc.  I remember those days vividly because if I did it wrong she would go into a tizzy in Italian.  I never knew what she said, but I knew I had made her mad.

So to talk about the learning experience with this module.  It reinforced the terms that I had learned along ago, and taught me a few new ones.  I learned how to listen for analysis rather than just listen for pitch, tone, and tempo.  I liked that I could listen to the music and discuss how it made me feel rather than the mechanics of the piece.

Music is supposed to be something that moves people, its a form of art, therefore it is something that people feel strongly about and are moved by it.  So in this unit we spent time learning how to listen to the moving part of the songs, the hook, the rhythm, the dynamics.  All of these things are just as important as the pitch, tone, and tempo.

When it comes to making bridges between this unit and what I do in school.  I think that I could use this idea in a garageband project.  I think that I could ask them to choose a song that is personal to them and put together a movie that represents the music and then record themselves at the end explaining why it is important to them.  This would combine a couple of units and cross curriculum with the music department a bit.  I like the idea of it being personal to them because more students are likely to complete the project and do better with it as a result of the personalization. 

Another way to bridge this with education is to allow the students to create a song on their own.  Write their own lyrics and create the harmonies and melodies using something like garageband or audacity.  I like the idea of allowing them the ability to define their own meaning behind a music clip and apply it to a section of their song that will make the song more powerful.  This same idea could be applied to making a score for a movie.

In short, I think that this is something I know that I dont know enough about to teach it properly and would need to co-teach with a music instructor.  I like that it made me look more closely at music and opened up some  memories from long ago.