TASME Term 3 Newsletter, 2022

James Humberstone's 'Musicking Digitally' Visit

James' sessions took place at The Grange, Campbell Town on 25 June. The three sessions were both entertaining and practical.

• The first session covered some of the basics of how to use for Flip for IOS and how to introduce students to recording sounds/samples. We also played musical games, improvised, and engaged in simple beat making. Sample lesson plans, units of work, improvisation and listening sheets, and assessment models were also provided.

• The second session featured a fabulous, fun, project-based creative activity from Will Kuhn and Ethan Hein’s new book Electronic Music School, using in-browser DAW/sequencer Soundtrap, which can be run on one's own device (Windows/Mac/Android/iOS). We created advertisements for unreliable products, sampled student work and used Kuhn’s rubric for aesthetic and technical learning. Paul Radford's and Peter Stewart's advertisement for 3D-printed lettuce may be found here. 😅 We learnt while enjoying ourselves and the advertisements produced were most entertaining.

• During the final session, James drew on his most recent creative outputs, including his recently-debuted show Αγάπη (Agapi) and other kinds of love, co-authored with Australian slam poetry champion Luka Lesson. We began setting poetry to music focusing just on the sound (again in Soundtrap), and then dealt with the question of how inexperienced students can create a score, using the online collaborative notation editor Flat.io, or our preferred notation app (e.g. Sibelius, Finale, Dorico, Musescore), following the “sound before sight” maxim. Once again, you can hear Paul's and Peter's efforts here. 😬 The text used was Amber Lights by Luka Lesson.

James shared some fabulous additional resources and websites, some of which have been included below. Check out the BYOD in Music Education in particular as it contains a very useful list of online audio and music applications.