Activities

Throughout the course of this class, students will complete several exercises and larger scale assignments tailored to jumpstart their creative process and help them develop their own portfolio of original work. Students will be expected to complete their assignments by the given deadline (in-class / weekly deadlines). In addition to these assignments, students are encouraged and expected to spearhead their own independent projects, the scope and scale of which are to be agreed upon by the teacher and students on an individual basis. By the end of this class, students will leave with enough of their own original content to publish a SoundCloud, create a reel, make a mix tape, or even an album.

Classroom activities intentionally focus on students' social-emotional development in addition to academic skills. Any liberal arts education ought to embed opportunities in the curriculum for students to practice the skills and understandings necessary to communicate, collaborate, and otherwise interact with their peers. Students will sometimes work in pairs and groups to accomplish a shared goal; for instance, during a lesson on audio sampling, students will record original performances by their classmates which will be engineered by one student into a loop. The loop will in turn be given to another student who will remix the loop into an entirely new musical composition. The resulting musical composition will be presented to the class in a round table discussion where students are encouraged to share feedback on the work of their peers. All topics that students confront with great depth and complexity will render possibilities to develop values, social-emotional awareness, and understandings; this course both creates and capitalizes on teachable moments.