Have you ever wondered what your musical signature is? What about the musical signatures of your students? Why not pose that question to some students and see what they come up with? After trying out Jason Freeman’s itunes signature maker software you can have discussions leading in many different directions. What do the different musical signatures of your students sound like compared to one another? Why do they sound so similar or different? Does the musical signature reflect the identity of the person? What would an acoustic version of this software be like? Could students compose a piece of music based completely on snippets of their favorite music? Is that even legal?
An entirely different direction to take the conversation could be based on exploring the commonalities between the different songs that make up the signature. Why not have students repeat the process that members of the Pandora company did in the Musical Genome project. Discussing whether or not someone can recommend a song someone else would like based on its individual parts matching similar parts of other songs that person likes could lead into some interesting debate. Students might be interested to find out that there are entire music recommendation models based on this idea. Some recommendations are even run by music analysis software! Of course there are other models of finding new music based on social networking models such as FOAFING music and of course the phenomenon of MySpace.
Students are passionate about the music they listen to, why not have some discussion to look deeper into some of these issues? The ability of students to articulate their thoughts about the music they listen to surely has a place in the music curriculum doesn’t it?
