Roebke/Saucedo SY21-22

Learning about music through stories

At the beginning of the school year, the students viewed music as a single, indivisible object. This led to very short, static musical ideas. The students needed tools to give musical ideas shape and direction.

The class started by collecting the student's favorite songs. one favorite was the Jonas Brothers "SOS." They had trouble conceptualizing a song as being comprised of components such as an introduction, verse, and chorus. To them, the song was only the chorus. For example, they did not know any of the other lyrics or notice a short guitar and drum introduction. When we started to map the song structure, the dynamic changes, and the instrumental changes, we noticed that patterns emerged. Apart from the language of the lyrics, other elements of the music had peaks and valleys as well. Like stories.

This led us to the idea of framing music-making as a parallel process to storytelling.

We found that students could better conceptualize the music-making process through an already familiar activity of telling stories. We worked toward the goal of making a soundtrack for student-produced movies. Each student began by creating a synopsis of their story using the basic Beginning - Middle - End writing concept. 

Using their synopsis, the students began recording their movies with an iPad and iMovie. Every student was involved in the production as actors or filming with the iPad. The students served as directors of their stories. They decided how the actors moved through the scenes and how the scene was framed on screen.  As each student progressed through their production, the class gained confidence and built upon the knowledge of the previous student's film. The first films were by the youngest students. They were helped by 8th graders who filmed and edited their films while the young students concentrated on the characters and storytelling. Eventually, the 3rd and 4th grade students were able to influence a wider range of elements in their films. As the older students gained skill and confidence, they were asked to make more decisions. They needed to decide where the actors stood, how they moved, and how the camera captured the scenes. 

After filming was completed, the students had the storytelling skills to add music to their films. 

The above clip is an example of 4th grade student Liliana using a free iPad app called Synth One to explore music for her film. The music that she created consists of a sequence of 8 notes that repeat. She operated the "Filter" section of the synthesizer, turning the knob slowly altering the timbre of the sound. The filter, in this case a low pass filter, only allows frequencies lower than the position of the Frequency cut-off knob pass through. This gives an otherwise repetitive phrase dynamic motion and adds to the suspense of the story. Several of the students used this app to make their music (Ruben, Madison), Zanita used a guitar and percussion created by playing the metal railing seen in her film. Other films use music that was cooperatively created and sung by the class (Morgan, Dakota).

After making music for the films the year was almost over! The students had more music left to give! This time, we decided to reverse our process, making songs first, then videos. The students wanted to make songs with lyrics this time. We once again started with collecting the student's favorite songs. We started with the song "Happier" by Marshmello. We went over the basics of rhyming words and using some favorite lines from "Happier," the students created their own song "Goodbye Please Don't Cry." This time, we used GarageBand to make the instrumental track and the students sang and rapped their lyrics. They decided to divide the lyrics among the 4 students and everyone joined at the chorus. For the video, we used a more professional camera than the iPad and each student was given complete control to film scenes around the school. The students were challenged to make decisions about the camera placement and actors' movements. The students created a second song, "Love is Blind." The video for "Love is Blind" was filmed by the students as before but the students also edited the video.

The students learned about stories and music during the year but more so they learned how to build knowledge and understanding of a subject independently. The students allowed their curiosity to lead them though the learning process and take them to unexpected places of study.