Music Is Not for Insects

Many of you know that I am a big fan of Indaba Music and have been creating some some real meaningful projects for my students using their engaging on-line contests with real-world musicians. They are hosting another contest in conjunction with a new PBS documentary set to air this June about the science and culture of music. The following is a letter to the parents of my students explaining this contest and how I will incorporate this project in my classroom. I hope you will consider this unique opportunity for your music students. I will follow up with some resources in future posts…

Dear Parents of Piano Students with Mr. Pendergrass in Periods 2 & 7:

THE POWER OF COMPUTERS AND MAKING MUSIC-

We have been using Garageband and the Mac Mini computers in my classroom to create some wonderful music projects. Up until a few years ago, you needed access to a recording studio with thousands of dollars of expensive equipment to even start the kinds of multi-track recordings your students are creating.

THE POWER OF THE INTERNET-

Because of the vast connectivity of the internet, we are able to create and share music with others on a global scale. Up until just a few years ago, you needed a vast network of producers, insiders, managers and other people to get music heard by a global, let alone a national audience. Thanks to Indaba Music (www.indabamusic.com) we are able to share our music with others using their on-line music service.

INDABA MUSIC COMMUNITY- IN THEIR OWN WORDS-

“Indaba Music is an international community of musicians, music professionals, and fans exploring the creative possibilities of making music with people in different places. It makes finding other people, and working on recording, mixing, or mastering projects easier. For fans, Indaba provides unprecedented access to artists and to the creative process.”

A CONTEST AND COLLABORATION WITH PBS & INDABA MUSIC

AND

As a class, we are entering a contest hosted by PBS in partnership with Indaba Music. The Music Instinct: Science & Song is a new PBS program (airing June 24, 2009) that offers a new understanding of the power of music. In preparation for this ground breaking documentary, PBS has invited anyone to record an original composition using sound effects found in different natural and urban environments from around the world.

Students will be able choose from over 207 sound clips that they can access on the computer from Indaba’s web-site.

In accordance with contest rules, each student will combine a minimum of four sound clips from the PBS sound clip library using Garageband to create original contest entries. We will then upload these entries to the Indaba Music web-site as entries in this unique sound contest.

The winner will receive an iPod loaded with 200 additional sound effects, and a free online music course through Berklee College of Music vauled at $1,000. The top five will be featured on a Music Instinct album to be distributed on PBS.org and eMusic.com. The top ten, as voted by the Indaba community and the public, will receive a data DVD with 200 additional sound samples.

PARENT PERMISSION TO ENTER THE CONTEST

With your permission I want to upload your student’s entry to the Indaba Music web-site. Each student will have an account created using a special Gmail email-account I have created for this project:

• Only the student’s first name and first initial of their last name will be displayed on the Indaba Music website.

• No other personal information will be shared.

• All emails will be handled via the Gmail account I have set up and come directly to me (no spam for you or your student…)

• Once their entry is on-line, other students from my class, members of the Indaba Music community, and YOU will be able to listen to each project and vote for their favorite submission.

The deadline to enter the contest is May 4th, 2009, but I would like to upload our entries by May 1st.

You can find all the details about this contest on-line at http://www.indabamusic.com/contests/show/pbs_musicinstinct

Feel free to email me if you have any questions. This is a great opportunity for our student’s to share their projects in a 21^st century learning environment.

-Ken Pendergrass

More Information from Indaba below-

Indaba Music contest: http://www.indabamusic.com/contests/show/pbs_musicinstinct
PBS  press release: http://www.thirteen.org/pressroom/release.php?get=3264

About the documentary:
Music Instinct: Science and Song provides a ground-breaking exploration into how and why the human organism—and the whole ebb and flow of the cosmos—is moved by the undeniable effect of music.

This three-part series follows visionary researchers and accomplished musicians to the crossroads of science and culture in search of answers to music’s deep mysteries.

Indaba Music Contest
The Music Instinct: Science and Song, premiering Wednesday, June 24 at 9:00pm (check local listings), is a ground-breaking program that offers viewers a new understanding of the power of music. Music is found all over the natural world and in everyday life experiences. The documentary follows visionary researchers and accomplished musicians, such as Bobby McFerrin, Yo-Yo Ma, Jarvis Cocker, Evelyn Glennie, and Daniel Barenboim, to the crossroads of science and culture in search of answers to music’s deep and abiding mysteries.
This is a rare opportunity to interact with an exceptionally creative and well-produced program from a respected organization months before its launch. PBS, Thirteen, and the producers of The Music Instinct invite you to interact with this yet-to-be-released program and create your own dynamic musical language from sound effects found in different natural and urban environments around the world.

To help you explore this world of sound, PBS and Thirteen are providing you with 207 sounds from their own library, each recorded in pristine quality. To qualify for the contest, you must use a minimum of four of the sounds provided (although we encourage you to use more). While original recorded melodies or other material can be used in generating a composition for the contest, all compositions will be judged on the originality and expressiveness of the rhythmic and harmonic use of the sound clips provided.

After reading this post at MacWorld, I ordered my copy of Garageband ‘09 and the entire iLife ‘09 suite.

I hope that my previous posts about using Garageband in the classroom won’t be obsolete with this latest version of Garageband.

I am currently teaching a piano lab class with 7th and 8th grade students and we are starting to create Garageband projects using some of the songs we are learning out of our piano method. I am hoping to collaborate with another school using Garageband by posting finished projects on-line. This could be as simple as commenting on each others projects in an on-line gallery or providing tracks to exchange…I’m open to ideas and would welcome your feedback.

This could be for any age group. I’m just interested in sharing some web 2.0 goodness with some other music educators. Please contact me.

Thanks to Matthew Needleman and his latest posts about differentiation for the inspiration behind today’s post. This combined with my use of Garageband in the music curriculum made for a great part 2 to my post about enhanced podcasts.

*NOTE: my apologies to those of you reading my blog in a feed reader. I have noticed that when I post podcasts and other media into an edublogs post, it doesn’t show up in Google Reader and you may need to follow a link to my blog to see the posted item.

INTRODUCTION-

As a music specialist, the challenge to create differentiated lessons for grades K-5 can be daunting. On some days I have seven preps and using technology with a seventeen year old general music curriculum is a trick.

Here is a general music lesson from the popular “World of Music” curriculum published by Silver Burdett & Ginn that I differentiated across several grade levels (citations are at the end of the post). Using Garageband, you can easily enhance and update a music listening lesson with an audio-visual component for today’s digital learners.

THE LESSON-

We start with a second grade listening lesson that uses a chart with pictures to help students follow along with a wild Shostakovich “Polka”:

Using a digital camera, I imported the pictures from the textbook into Garageband along with an mp3 of the music to create an enhanced podcast with pictures that would appear as the music was being played:

LET’S DIFFERENTIATE-

Here is where the differentiation comes in: for Grade 1, I play the Garageband project with the pictures and a “call” track I created announcing the instruments as they appear:

Click the “audio mp3″ box below to hear how this sounds:
Polka with call track

For Grade 2, we use the student text to follow along with the music; and then we play the Garageband project that looks and sounds like this below:

grade2polkalesson.m4v

For Grades 3-5, we can start having kids choose pictures as they listen to the music and drag them into a podcast track with markers:

Or differentiate even further by giving students a podcast track with no markers:

Another lesson using the same “Polka” appears in a Grade 3 listening chart with more sections and different pictures to represent the music:

Here is what that lesson looks and sounds like using more detailed descriptions:

grade3polkapodcastwmarkers.m4v

FINAL THOUGHTS-

I hope you can see how it is possible to take a typical listening lesson and use Garageband to create a visual and audio experience for general music students. Most of our kids find it hard to listen to extended periods of music. A visual component may provide the interest needed for an extended piece of music. Differentiating the lesson with various levels of participation from grade level to grade level is also achieved. My fifth graders actually create a listening lesson for my younger students using this process by choosing their own music and pictures.

Citations for textbooks:
World of Music Grade 3- (green book)
Listening Guide #4
“Pizzicato Polka” from Ballet Suite No. 1
Palmer, Mary. World of Music. Morristown: Silver Burdett & Ginn, 1991.

World of Music Grade 2- (red book)
Polka page 102 Listening Chart
Palmer, Mary. World of Music. Morristown: Silver Burdett & Ginn, 1991.

Citation for muisc:
“Polka” from the ballet The Golden Age by Dimitri Shostakovich

Related Posts:

Enhanced podcasts with Garageband: part 1

Getting your Garageband podcasts to work with Edublogs and other video hosting sites

Garageband Tip01 of several: Burn to CD without using share to iTunes

“Not that loop again, and again…”: Using Garageband responsibly to create music for your digital projects.

Garageband Tip: Musical Typing

Enhanced Podcasts with Garageband are a powerful way for you or your students to create some projects that are rich with content. Here is a quote from the Apple web-site:

Enhancing Your Podcast Episode with Artwork and Chapters

Podcasts are about more than just audio. You can also include artwork and links to websites to enrich the meaning of your content. And you can create chapters so your audience can move between the sections of your episode.

Below is an example of an Enhanced Podcast I created. Watch it one time straight through (it’s less than 30 seconds);

then watch it again and pause along the way to access links or move between chapters and see how an Enhanced Podcast described above looks and feels.

enhanced-podcast.m4v

Since Garageband podcasts are optimized for viewing in iTunes, Enhanced Podcasts with links to websites and chapters will look different when uploaded as m4v files (see my post on how to do this). Here are some screen shots comparing an Enhanced Podcast in iTunes and the one above embedded into Edublogs.

First, a screen shot from iTunes.

And here is what the links look like when uploaded and embedded as an m4v file:

Either way, when you click on the link in iTunes or an m4V file, if you are connected to the internet, your browser will open and take you to the web-site you have designated.

Here’s how chapters look in an Enhanced Podcast in iTunes:

Chapters in m4v files look different:

Chapters allow you to go to a specific sections in your podcast. Very handy for a long podcast that needs some indexing.

A final note about appearance: with Garageband, any artwork you have loaded into your podcast track will look “normal” when played back or “shared” out to iTunes. For some reason, when you upload a podcast as an m4v file here in Edublogs, the pictures are a bit “distorted” or may look slightly pixelated.

I have been able to upload Garageband podcasts to Ourmedia.org without this problem. See my Enhanced Podcast here without distortion:
Enhanced Garageband Podcast

More about video sharing sites and podcasts in Part 2…

Related Posts:
Getting your Garageband podcasts to work with Edublogs and other video hosting sites

Garageband Tip01 of several: Burn to CD without using share to iTunes

“Not that loop again, and again…”: Using Garageband responsibly to create music for your digital projects.

Garageband Tip: Musical Typing

Sue Waters has an excellent post about embedding videos directly to your blog posts here at Edublogs. For those of you using Garageband to create podcasts, you may have found that things don’t work quite right when you try to embed your Garageband created podcasts directly into a post on Edublogs.

Well thanks to the excellent forums here at Edublogs, I found the answer to my problem. For those of you having trouble uploading podcast created in Garageband to other video sharing sites, this may solve your problem as well.

THE PROBLEM: When you create a podcast in Garageband-and then Share it to iTunes, the file is saved as an AAC audio file in your iTunes library. When you upload this file to Edublogs or any other site that will host your digital content, the actual extension for your newly created podcast is .m4a. For some reason, .m4a files work fine on Macs using iTunes or Quicktime, but don’t translate well or are not supported by many video sharing sites such as Teacher Tube. You can convert the file to an mp3 format, but you will lose any pictures from your podcast track. You can convert it to a .mov file, but I found that the pictures and the audio do not line up right.

SOLUTION: Change the file extension from .m4a to .m4v. Here is how I do it.

1. Create my podcast with pictures and audio in Garageband-

2. Share the file to iTunes

3. Drag the file from iTunes to the desktop so it is easy to find.

4. Change the file extension from .m4a to m4v by

a. cntrl click or right click on the file- get info-change .m4a to .m4v

b. click on “use .m4v”

5. You are done.

Now you can upload it to Edublogs or another digital content hosting site and it should work. Below is a podcast I uploading directly to Edublogs (see Sue Waters post here on how to embed video into your blog posts) and I was able to host the same .m4v file at ourmedia.org with no issues.

Handel Podcast test changing m4a to m4v

Related Posts:
Garageband Tip01 of several: Burn to CD without using share to iTunes

“Not that loop again, and again…”: Using Garageband responsibly to create music for your digital projects.

Garageband Tip: Musical Typing

I have been using GarageBand on a regular basis in my general music classroom with 4th and 5th grade students for several months now and have found it to be more than just a “fun” program for creating clever songs using loops and jingles.
This will be the first of several posts devoted to my use of GarageBand in the classroom. Some may be in the form of tips where I pose a problem and solution. Others may be more detailed lessons.
This first post is a tip: How to Burn a CD direct from GarageBand without using share to iTunes

PROBLEM: You have some extended audio you want to quickly burn to CD. You use GarageBand to record your project to a single audio track. You can easily share your project to iTunes using share>send to iTunes>create a playlist in iTunes>burn playlist to disc. But you want to break up your lengthy GarageBand track into several tracks on a CD for easy indexing and location by the listener later on with their CD player…you can’t do this when you share your tracks direct to iTunes.

SOLUTION: In the latest version of GarageBand 08, you can use a Podcast track to create markers that will act as tracks when you choose “Burn Song to CD” from the share menu. From the GarageBand help menu: “If a project contains chapter markers and the podcast or movie track is visible when you burn the project to a CD, the chapter markers are used to define the tracks on the CD.” Check out my screencast below: (NOTE: I was not inhaling helium when I created the screencast even though my voice sounds like Alvin…this is a wonky feature of the free screencast-o-matic online software I was using to create this tutorial.)

Related Posts:

“Not that loop again, and again…”: Using Garageband responsibly to create music for your digital projects.

Garageband Tip: Musical Typing

Garageband is a great tool many of you are using to create license free music for your podcasts, slideshare presentations, and videos. Access to hundreds of loops allows easy creation of original soundtracks by literally dragging and dropping a guitar riff, bass line and back beat onto a track.

While the ease of using Garageband loops is appealing, it can also create tracks that are predictable and uninspired to listeners. Even if your aim is to create a transparent background track, careless use of loops can distract your audience or cause them to dismiss your project entirely.

Many of the loops in Garageband are so popular, they are immediately recognizable. With a bit of planing, even familiar loops can be used to create music that sounds original, not “canned”. Here are some tips on using loops in Garageband responsibly:

1) Use basic musical forms such as ABA and Rondo (A,B,A,C,A)
This will give your musical project a basic structure on which to build your ideas. One loop extended in endless repetition gets old quick. Check out Pete Whitfield’s wiki on structure and intensity for some great examples from pop music.

2) Vary a basic loop with a single percussion loop.
Does the phrase Needs more cowbell ring a bell? Adding a shaker or tambourine loop on top of a more substantial loop is like a dash of spice for your musical composition.

3) Change the original tempo of a loop.
The standard tempo for many of the most popular loops in Garageband is 120 bpm. By shifting the tempo at least 10 bpm more or less, you can breathe new life into some of the more redundant loops.

4) Combine loops to create new ideas.
It drives me crazy when I hear a single loop used exclusively for a single track. Maybe it’s because I use Garageband every week with my students and familiarity breeds contempt…
Don’t be lazy. Combine loops to create new ideas. Your fellow listeners will be grateful.

5) Watch your levels between transitions and listen before you post.
This last tip is not necessarily about creativity or structure. Many loops in Garageband have different volume levels. Be sure that the overall volume of all the parts of your project is an acceptable level for the listener. Be careful when you transition between musical vs. spoken sections. Nothing says delete me faster than a poorly mixed project where the volume between spoken and musical sections drastically changes, forcing the listener to madly scramble for their volume control. You’ve worked hard on your presentation; make sure it gets heard in its entirety with audio levels that are consistent throughout.

We all take time to plan our content before posting ideas on-line- take some time to plan the music that will be a part of your projects as well. Music teachers will thank you for the extra effort.

Thanks to Hans Feldmeier and his post at etwinning e-digiskills blog for turning me onto Screencast-O-Matic so I could show you this cool tip in Garageband. The audio makes me sound like I have a lisp, and the video is a little wonky, but it’s a decent on-line screencast tool in a pinch: