I always enjoyed having my students create ringtones and discuss the musical ideas they came up with and decisions they made. One of the aspects of the process I focused on was how to compose music for such a short amount of time. Robert Voisey wrote about this topic in an interesting article at New Music Box in 2004 asking, “How short can a composition get?” He mentions composers ranging from Chopin to John Zorn. For those of you who… Read More »Creating Ringtones
While looking online for information on MAX/MSP patches I came across an online electronic music community. We don’t often hear about computers being used as instruments to perform in public schools and when it comes to electronic instruments we are usually referring to electric guitars, basses and keyboards. One of the topics I find myself returning to in this blog is the use of technology to go beyond what we have traditionally done in public school music programs. When I… Read More »An electronic music community in your school?
Have you ever seen some of the interesting projects students work on in their technology (once known as “shop” ) classes and wished you could collaborate with those teachers to come up with a project that would combine music, technology and a little electrical engineering? Some students who like to work with electronics might want to try a little circuit bending. Other students might want to make their own electric guitar out of say, an IKEA table or construct high… Read More »Building instruments & music technology…..
I don’t own a Wii and it is likely that the average music educator doesn’t either, however some of our students probably do. I have a feeling students would enjoy merging their video game finger dexterity with music mixing skills. Is this a look at a new possibility for integrating technology in the music classroom? Yann Seznec aka The Amazing Rolo has made the software available on his blog. You can insert your own audio files to replace his. Students… Read More »Video Game Controller Instrument?
Pre-Mixing Rjd2 I’m a big fan of musicians allowing people to remix their music. Hip Hop musician Rjd2 is currently allowing people to pre-mix his music. Unlike a remix in which one works on a piece of music already created, Rjd2 has provided people with samples from a track yet to be released and inviting people to create their own music from the samples. Rather than providing loops he has provided samples as hits. It will be interesting to see… Read More »Pre-mixing Rjd2