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Day 4 - Live Recording

The fourth day of Music Alive always ends up being a bit frantic because I ask the students to start working on a final project that they would like to share in our final presentation on Friday. As a result, students often end up working on a variety of different types of activities (recording, video, live performance). It's always great to see the ideas they come up with and this year is no exception. One of the new things we learned how to do is to record a live performance. Most of our projects aren't done yet, but here's a sample of a couple that are in progress. Hopefully you'll get a chance to hear the final versions at our presentations on Friday.

Day 3 - Soundtracks

Our time during Day 3 of our Music Alive program was spent on a variety of projects. We started with activities based on the Question and Answer format and added some instruments to the songs we've been working with. After that we learned how to add music to some movie samples we had. Here are some of the movies we created... Apparently YouTube didn't like some of the movies that we used as samples and wouldn't include the music we wrote in class. Sorry about that. There are a number of great movies that students did that aren't represented here. We'll play some at our presentation on Friday.

Day 2 - Tension and Release

So, day two of our Music Alive program gave us an opportunity to work with some more songs and look at the Question and Answer format in music. Then we learned how composers and music creators can use tension and release to make their pieces more exciting. Finally, we used GarageBand to make our own pieces that used tension and release. Check out what we did...

Day 1

Today was a busy day for the students in our Music Alive program.  We spent some time learning some melodies and looking at how they're put together.  We learned how to write music in Finale notation software.  We had fun playing drums and making our own rhythm compositions.  And, finally we explored GarageBand and worked on finding some sounds and melodies that we liked.

Here are some of the GarageBand songs that students created today...

Welcome

Welcome to this summer's edition of "Music Alive", a program designed to expand the creativity and musicianship of middle school aged students.  We're excited to get to work and see what students come up with as they explore their ideas using contemporary technology and software.

This blog will serve as a place to post student work and share the results of their musical explorations.  You're welcome to check in here to see what they come up with.

Here we go!!