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CAPE After School 2020-2021:
Teacher Name + Teaching Artist Name: Michelle Livas and Nick Meryhew
Big Idea: Repetition
Inquiry Question: How does repetition function in our lives? How can repetition be used to create new musical possibilities?
Pictured Left: A collaborative tune in progress. Created in bandlab, this piece became the final track on our album Golden Vibes.
Tell us the story of your project.
I’ll mention at the outset a practice that encompasses and frames much of our club over the last year: as students joined the call at or around 3 PM, we simply talked for about twenty minutes. At 3:20, we would ask students to choose some music they’d like to listen to, and we would dance to these tunes as a warm up. This was the routine for the vast majority of our year, and one that demonstrates our attempt to recreate some of the social space lost in a virtual program. This opening 30 minutes created a space for students to exhale after the school day, and helped make possible a fun and supportive group vibe over the course of the year. Given the context of the year, this seems no doubt as important as (and, in fact, constitutive of) our artistic process.
Our artistic work began in the fall with specific investigations into repetition. Students created individual artistic goals which were broken down into parts (e.g., getting better at an instrument, learning how to create beats, listening to more music). Our group time in the fall was split between individual check-ins on our goals on Mondays and group activities exploring repetition on Wednesdays. Group activities involved analyzing musical forms (repetition as a tool), listening to musics that rely heavily on repetition (repetition in the body), and journaling about cycles/patterns that we enact or take part in (repetition in our practices).
This format worked well for the first couple of months, but as students got more comfortable with one another we began to search for more collaborative processes. In November, we began to work with Bandlab, a free online platform in which students could record, edit, and transform audio collaboratively in real time. In the fall, some of our time in Bandlab was focused on skill building: how to record audio, trim media items, change volumes, or move items in the timeline. Most of the remaining time was spent on free play in Bandlab (either individually or in small groups), with an emphasis on open ended experimentation. These explorations culminated in our December 2020 album, Pog Through The Pain.
The work leading up to Pog Through The Pain marked a structural change in our program: in lieu of activities about repetition, we began to perform repetition in the development of a social and creative routine. Practicing Bandlab became a medium through which we as a group could grow through repetitive practice and foster more open ended musical exploration/experimentation.
Beginning in the winter of 2021, we started a series of short term, collaborative projects in Bandlab. Some were focused on skill-building (e.g., students received a piece of audio and would be asked to transform it in some specific way) and others were more creatively open (e.g., choose an emotion or idea, and create 1 minute of audio that expresses it). Projects included scoring video, creating theme songs, creating podcasts, working with loops, and experimenting with harmony. When each of these projects concluded, we would listen as a group and give feedback. As such, this period of time was focused on expanding our vocabulary in Bandlab, as well as practicing artistic critique and collaboration.
After several months of working in this vein, we returned to a more open, exploratory approach and pivoted towards our final project. Synthesizing everything we had done in Bandlab, students were encouraged to freely create tracks for a final album. Most students elected to work individually, but the final track on our album was created collaboratively by the entire group. Upon finishing and listening to this album, titled Golden Vibes, students remarked that it felt more cohesive than Pog Through The Pain. The consensus was that our time spent collaborating, listening, socializing, and experimenting together had created a strong group dynamic audible in our work. While the format of this project was a direct repetition of our work in December 2020, the musical outcome revealed a creative/social transformation brought about through practice.
Golden Vibes, to be released on Bandcamp in late June 2021, serves as a document of the tremendous creativity and resilience of the students of the NGHS Music Club, as well as a culmination of our explorations in repetition and music.
Album art for our final project, Golden Vibes.
A piece created during our soundtracking project.
What was your approach to online teaching?
A challenge in our program was the cultivation of an exploratory and experimental approach to music making, one in which students had the ability to work at different paces, with different interests, and from different starting points. In years past, NGHS Music Club has had a music laboratory feel: instruments were set up around the room and students were encouraged to free play, experiment, and follow their (often quite variable) creative impulses.
In order to foster this culture, we utilized a variety of digital music making resources. We primarily worked in Bandlab, as mentioned above, which afforded students an opportunity to record, edit, and transform audio, as well as collaborate in real time with their peers. Students also utilized tools that they had at home (one student practiced guitar, another wrote spoken word) or other digital tools (Concentric, Chromelab, Beepbox, Groovepad, and FL Studio all made appearances). In order to embrace this diversity of tools, students learned how to record and export audio from different sources and import it into Bandlab. Thus, students were able to deeply explore their individual musical interests and synthesize them in a shared context.
Additionally, we wanted to ensure that our students cultivated social relationships with one another, despite the alienating nature of virtual learning. Emphasis was given to check-ins and casual conversations at the beginning and end of each class. Our warm up everyday was a dance party in which different students would select music for the group to move to; this became an opportunity for us to gradually explore the musical lives of the group. Students were also encouraged to collaborate, share works in progress, and give feedback to their peers. While these were initially difficult for some students, continued practice helped foster a deeper level of trust and vulnerability over the course of the year.
Above: Our December 2020 album, Pog Through the Pain.
Tell us about how cultural capital played a part in your class.
Together, we began the year with reflections about repetition. That theme carried on throughout the year as we explored our daily practices as well as the sounds we enjoy, the sounds we create, and the sounds we are discovering. Our collective story might be about the shared rituals of our repetitive meetings, and the comfort and challenges that those sessions brought to us.
Tell us about your cross-classroom exchanges, if you participated in one.
Our club was fortunate enough to participate in the Youth Music Exchange (YME) Project. Our North-Grand club and students that participate in two different programs through Intonation in Englewood met on two occasions for a remote exchange. Prior to the first meeting, we set up a "pen pal" scenario in which our group sent a series of totally random questions to the Intonation folks as a way to get to know them and about their musical interests. During the two exchanges, students introduced themselves, and shared their experiences making music during the pandemic. They got to talk about what kinds of instruments they play, the kinds of apps they use, and what their creative processes are like.
Teachers and teaching artists also jumped in supplying a steady stream of sound pieces created by students. The collaboration was valuable because students provided praise and feedback to one another and got to see others' faces as they heard their musical creations for the first time!
Tell us about how family learning played a part in your class.
Our club did not involve students' family members directly. However, because we were all participating from our homes, home and community were ever-present. Being in our personal spaces, we learned about each other, and, in a way, it enabled some of us to be more open than we would have been in a traditional school classroom environment.
With regards to family involvement in our creative process - while engaging in reflection of, exploration of, and creation of repetition, we tapped into different sorts of emotions and creativity and resources from what we had done in the past. Students' home identities were certainly strong factors in these reflections and creative endeavors.
Tell us how you used Academic Standards/SEL Standards.
In working towards developing a creative process in music club, students developed self-awareness and self-management skills which can guide them to achieve school and life success.
Secondly, students strengthened their social-awareness and interpersonal skills as they navigated remote learning for the first time, met new people, began high school (for the freshmen), and learned how to use new technology and to reach out for guidance from teachers and peers.
Students also established and maintained positive relationships this year in our club. We held regular sessions during which students provided constructive feedback on sound pieces. They learned to offer praise, to make suggestions, to collaborate, and to ask important and helpful questions.
Lastly, students worked on decision-making skills. Much of our work focused on self-reflection, revising our work, and collaborating with peers. This helped to foster responsible behaviors in personal, school, and community contexts.
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