Relevance to Kuhn and Hein (2021)

What is music for teachers and what is music for students?

Kuhn and Hein strongly advocate educators to listen to contemporary music—which is what most young students would be listening to—and to utilise the abundance of contemporary music as a basis for music education. It helps both the teacher and student to connect musically when both parties listen to the same music. If the shared familiarity is not present, Kuhn and Hein argue that this “divide between music teachers’ definition of music and students’ definition of music” is a primary cause of why 80% of students in the US drop music as an elective (2021, pp. 3, 8-9). 

We decided on a genre to work with based on what was trending at the time which was: pop female artists. Similarly, Scott Watson identified as his first teaching principle in the book Using Technology to Unlock Musical Creativity, is to “allow students to share themselves. ... Allowing students to share their passion for music, or a certain kind of music, can be a great motivator. For many students, the music they listen to contributes to their sense of identity, how they view themselves and want to be viewed by others” (Watson, 2011, eBook p. 40). Our music project and composing on a DAW in general allows tremendous room for creativity. By allowing students to choose how they want to remix the tracks and what to sample, students will be able to create music that they like.

There are so many things to teach, where do we start?

Kuhn and Hein acknowledge that fitting music theory, sound design, style, and technical aspects of DAW-composition all in one unit is difficult if not impossible. Therefore, it is better to narrow down the scope of the musical repertoire and then work our way back up to what musical concepts are relevant and useful from that repertoire (Kuhn & Hein, 2021, p. 117). Certain genres naturally lean towards an identifiable musical soundscape and structure which is a suitable way of designing musical projects from the educator’s perspective. So at the start of our music project, we followed Kuhn and Hein’s exemplar of identifying key characteristics of the musical genre we wanted to compose in. 

When designing music projects as educators, Kuhn and Hein suggests to “reverse-engineer” iconic tracks and genres to figure out what exactly is happening in the music from a DAW-based composer approach (2021, p. 59). Furthermore, they highlight that it is important to demonstrate this kind of thinking to the students and act out these thoughts by using the DAW so as to embody the musical thinking into real practice. For example, inquiries of reverse-engineering might be phrased as such: 

Is the flute sampled from a live performance, or is it a software instrument performed via MIDI? Are the backbeats played on a snare or a clap? Are the hi-hats hand-programmed, or are they performed with a repeater/arpeggiator? Is the bass a sampled 808 kick or another kind of instrument? (2021, p. 59)

Contextualising our steps for a DAW and the importance of sampling

When starting out to create in a DAW, students might be daunted but we recreated some of Kuhn and Hein’s suggested scaffolds that would work for any kind of genre (2021, pp. 59-60). We created: default tracks and presets, eight-bar phrases, and song structure ideas. In addition, the concept of sampling is prevalent in our music project and is ingrained in contemporary music culture including genres such as pop, hip-hop, lo-fi, and more. One aspect of our project is to encourage students to sample sounds they like. Kuhn and Hein do elaborate on the ethical ambiguities and copyright restraints on sampling but ultimately, “On a practical basis, however, copyright holders don’t care what amateurs and students do. It may be technically illegal for amateurs to sample copyrighted songs without permission, but it is more like jaywalking than grand larceny” (2021, p. 71). Therefore, we see it as important to introduce students to such a common practice in today’s technology-based musical creation.

Putting it all together

Part of the complexity of our music project is the end goal of a finished and coherent song. Scaffolding the composition by dividing a track into its individual music stem clarifies the composition process but there is also an art to putting everything together. Barbara Freedman’s approach to putting together the musical components in a composition is a western art-, keyboard-, and theory-centric one (2013, chapter 21) but it is valuable to note the order of the musical stems/elements she instructs students to compose in. Reflecting back on Kuhn and Hein’s constructivist philosophy to music teaching i.e. “the idea that music education will be most engaging and meaningful when the teaching strategies support students’ agency in their own learning” (Brennan, 2013 paraphrased in Kuhn & Hein, 2021, p. 4), our group is more inclined to let students decide what musical stem they want to focus on first. This way, it allows students to ‘play around’ with the DAW and composition process to find what works best for them.

References

Brennan, K. (2013). Best of both worlds: Issues of structure and agency in computational creation, in and out of school (Doctoral dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology). 

Freedman, B. (2013). Teaching Music Through Composition: A Curriculum Using Technology. Oxford University Press. 

Kuhn, W. & Hein, E. (2021). Electronic Music School: A Contemporary Approach to Teaching Musical Creativity. Oxford University Press. 

Watson, S. (2011). Using Technology to Unlock Musical Creativity. Oxford University Press.

ChatGPT was used to refine our scaffolded steps.