Well it’s finally fully done! Really excited to present this tomorrow at the PoL! I am very proud of the work Veronica and I have put into it! All the time spent composing and editing and the frustration at laggy programs has come to an end. I’ve definitely learnt a lot – especially about video editing. This is something I’d like to experiment with more in the future if I have the chance! It is still very very hard, but if I had the skill it would really open up so many creative possibilities.

Workshop wk 12

Today’s workshop was particularly interesting to me. As someone very into organisation, I was very intrigued by how our lecturer, James Humberstone organises his life.

This is what my life looks like:

My Apple calendar is synced across all my devices (all Apple conveniently). I tend to put every single thing that requires me to get out of the house on my calendar (except for uni – my classes are the same every week and I don’t want to clutter my calendar up more because that overwhelms me). Blue things are things that *spark joy* like going to church, going to concerts and friend’s recitals and meeting up with friends for lunch/dinner. Red things are deadlines e.g. my piano recital on the 21st. Purple things are work related or recurring things. And orange/yellow are appointments or more important to-dos (most of my actual to-dos are in a note synced across my devices). There are some inconsistencies with colour coding (because that isn’t my priority), but this is the system I’ve been using since starting university and it seems to be working!

This workshop mentioned some really interesting things I’m excited to implement/experiment with!

• If you stay on task, you get more done. When changing between tasks, it takes longer every time you go back. If you’re thinking about doing something, you’ve already started on the task. Just do it!
• Manage expectations of others (e.g. to not expect responses to email immediately all the time(
• There is so much to do – easy to feel overwhelmed and feel like you’re letting many people down. But that’s ok – think about past achievements!
• Wisdom is taking your own advice.
• When you’re stressed you’ll cut out the run and the meditation – but at times it is what you need the most!

Workshop wk 11

Groove Pizza

• Visuals are in a circle instead of a line – this would be much easier for a young student to see that the rhythm loops. (When looking at a line, you need to physically shift your eyes back to the beginning of the loop.)
• Very clear outline of the parts in relation to one another.

Dm1 (iOS app)

• I really really enjoy this app. It is so straightforward and so easy to experiment with. I can see this working extremely well in classrooms.
• You can make live changes (adding/taking away while the loop continues to play)
• Customisation of tempo, sounds, patterns
• One line per sound – simple layout
• Possible to connect to same wifi/ableton link, connecting multiple devices

Cool things from wk 9 workshop:

Devices are all over music classroom. It was once a luxury to have a trolley of laptops to share amongst whole schools, but now Bring Your Own Device has become a norm in schools. As a teacher, there are considerations to make:

• At my primary prac, iPads were a thing! If my memory recalls correctly, there were several in every classroom, but more could be booked. At my high school prac (private school), students brought their own device and almost every student would have an Apple product (Mac/iPad). However, Chromebooks could be a consideration! They are a lot cheaper ($2-300) which is great as students don’t take great care of their belongings at times. Also, the issue with iPads is that they often go to mobile versions of websites and the layout can throw lessons off completely (and at times sites aren’t accessible).
• The Google suite is great! Works smoothly across all devices.
• There is a lock function in Google quiz, so that students can’t cheat. This is so practical!
• Google sites are also a really good way to compile information and tasks in a well-structured, easily-accessible and aesthetic way. You can set up whole units of work there if appropriate – especially self-directed tasks. I was inspired by this to create a Google site for my assignment for my Baby Steps for Comp in Music Ed!

After adding the post-drop semiquaver page flips, Screenflow/our Macbooks could not handle it. Video playback became extremely laggy and it was impossible to monitor how the alignment of the audio and video was going without exporting. This affected parts that were already aligned perfectly because during playback they would look off and we would ‘fix’ it – but fix it from right to wrong. This is why there are still some flaws in our video. Before the PoL, we hope to be able to do some final tweaking with the computers at the Con (which can hopefully handle the page flippin semiquavers) and export the full video without the watermark.

Update Sun 24th Nov 11:14pm: We discovered nesting clips! Copied from the Screenflow user guide: ‘At some point in the editing process, you may find that your project—after adding more and more clips—is becoming unmanageable. The solution: create nested clips’. This is perfect and Screenflow is so much less laggy! We have now perfected (in our opinion) the pre-drop. Now, leading up to the PoL, we will do some continue the tweaking of the post-drop.

Stay tuned for final one at our PoL!

The Planning Process

We started off this project indecisive of what we wanted to make! Some of the ideas and inspirations we had were: 

• Compose catchy ringtones using Sonic Pi (inspired by Rebecca’s guest lecture) and build a website guiding students on how to make their own
• Building some sort of interactive music-related website/game e.g. Incredibox, Isle of Tune etc.

Both options would involve a decent amount of knowledge in computer coding, which we were excited to learn but would’ve had no idea where to start!

Upon researching potential ideas for our project, we came across a video of a guy who made music purely out of sounds heard in a dry cleaner and we thought that was pretty cool so decided to make our own!

Here’s our project idea that we decided to lock in! 

Compose a short comp using found objects you would find in a classroom and make a website resource guiding students on creating their own found sound comp. The pedagogy behind our project is to have a hands-on experience with recording equipment, use technology in a creative way while encouraging students to do the same. 

Before beginning the composition process, we first brainstormed a number of classroom found objects that we could record and make music with! (The underlined objects are the ones we ended up using!)

Object	Sound
Chair	thud
textbook	Flip, drop
pen	Click, hitting stands
Water bottle	Swish, bash, neck snap
computer	sibelius/windows startup music
keyboard	Typing sounds
Whiteboard marker	screech
scissors	Snip, snap
clock	Tick, tock
pencilcase	Zipper, rattle
printer	Printing sounds

The Recording Process

Once we sorted all the found objects we were about to record, we plugged the condenser microphone into an audio interface, which was connected to the PC (with Logic Pro X open). Recording sounds did not take long, however a number of sounds ended up being barely audible e.g.  the whiteboard marker, the printer and therefore we used a compressor within Logic to boost the gain. We recorded the rest of the sounds using two pencil mics in xy position. 

The Composing Process

We started the composition with our recorded ‘typing’ sounds looped in the background to “set the scene”. Next, we wanted to introduce a sound that imitated a kick drum – our audio sample of a ‘water bottle hitting a hand’ was most suited for this role. Similarly, we looped the sound across several bars and boosted the lower frequencies using an EQ for more of a ‘punchy’ effect. On top of that, we added in the recording of a zipper as a snare, and a pencil case, imitating an egg shaker. To all of these sounds, we used the fade tool to fade in and out, getting rid of unwanted ‘clicks’ from chopped audio samples. It was a working drum beat, but we were missing some melodic material. We looked at our samples and decided the “twang” from the pen hitting the stand was the source with most melodic potential. Placing the “twang” into a sampler on Logic (EXS24), we improvised on top of our looped  drum beat using a midi keyboard. 

Listening back to our composition a little while later, we decided to make some slight changes. The “bass drum” was introduced too suddenly and quickly. Our solution was to lengthen the typing at the beginning of the comp. Secondly, the constant water bottle bass drum sound became very boring after a while. Our solution was to record a different sound as a bass – we ended up recording a chair thud and changing up the bass rhythm. After fixing these issues, we were unsure of how to finish the comp so we took some material in what we’ve composed so far and reused those sounds in new ways e.g. taking the water bottle bass drum, panning the sound and adding an EQ sweep to it as the music climbs towards the climax. We also introduced new sounds e.g. the “page flip”, putting it through a sampler and playing it as semiquavers. Similar to the stand “twang”, we processed the printer sound through a sampler and used it as a melodic chordal instrument to improvise with. It ended up complementing the composition very well. Lastly, one of the most important lessons we learnt in the composition process was to colour code our tracks and label them as we go as it definitely improved workflow…

Once we finished composing the piece, we planned to move on to working on our website resource. However, listening to the composition over and over, we decided it was more suitable and beneficial if we made a video to go with the composition instead. We had no idea where to begin, but eager to learn new skills, we decided to give it a go!

The Filming Process

A video we had in mind of what we wanted it to look like was Andrew Huang’s Song Challenge ‘Apple Music’ (making music using different tone colours made from an apple). Here, a split-screen effect was used to showcase all the ways the apples were manipulated. So, with our trusty iPhones, we recorded short videos of all the layers we used, intending to edit and loop them to match up with the audio.

The Video Editing Process

The video editing process was very very eye-opening (we are both complete beginners), but also very very frustrating. The first problem we came across was that it was incredibly hard to match video with audio. We didn’t seem to be able to zoom in enough to move the video just that tiny bit to the left/right (like trying to get the shower temperatures just right). All seemed hopeless so we considered doing a one-take recording of each layer and putting it together, but…the solution was simply slowing down the audio! The composition ended up going from 132bmp to 120bmp and it made a massive difference in having the video and audio more accurately aligned.

As for the program we used – we tried using Filmora first (because they have split-screen templates), but couldn’t loop the videos within the split-screen. Also (maybe it was just us) but Filmora took ages to pause during playback and this made editing very inconvenient. Next up was iMovie and all was going great…until we tried to add a 3rd video layer and it was impossible to. So then, we started all over again, using Screenflow and then we regretted not just using Humbo’s suggestion in the first place. I guess we learnt the hard way! It was so smooth, I could copy and paste bits of video easily (in other programs it was a nightmare dragging the pasted video into the specific video layer I wanted) .

In Filmora we had the opportunity to experiment with lots of features e.g. cropping clips to make the split screen effect, speeding up/slowing down clips, creating transitions (that conveniently made some editing flaws less obvious) and highlighted musical elements (e.g. ‘copy machine’ transition for the printer, ‘jaws wipe’ transition to dramatise the ending.) Features we wish we knew earlier were ‘lock clips’ (because it is so easy to accidentally drag something and never realise) and sliding one clip over another (rather than cropping one and lengthening another). A features we wish exists are slow motion playback (to really get down to the itty-gritty details).

However, when the post-drop semiquaver page flips came in…Screenflow/our Macbooks could not handle it. Video playback became extremely laggy and it was impossible to monitor how the alignment of the audio and video was going. Our first step to tackle this was to create 2 Screenflow documents – one pre-drop and one post-drop. It improved dramatically, but it was never really perfect. By the end, we had to export the video to be able to check how the alignment was going…make changes…then export again to check. This is why there are still quite some flaws in our video. Also due to all the exporting, we now know that the fastest possible encoding quality is crucial to getting it to align well – the first time it was exported with the normal encoding quality, the video was disappointingly dreadful. Before the PoL, we hope to be able to do some final tweaking with the computers at the Con (which can hopefully handle the page flippin semiquavers) and export the full video without the watermark.

Teaching with technology. Design and Instructional Design. Aural drilling and music theory.

Cool things from the week 6 workshop:

• (Generally) The attention span has gone from 12 seconds to 7 seconds – 8 seconds is the goldfish!
• Our brains are very scattered
• The view of the use of technology for children is quite divided – puts childhood at risk vs. childhood is empowered

Cognitive Load Theory

• Redundancy effect happens when slides match exactly what teacher is saying. PowerPoints should complement or complete, not double up
• Don’t use a lot of text in resources
• People look at websites in an F formation: people look at the left 69% of the time and the right 30%

Gamification

• Gamification is taking game elements (avatars, points, rewards, collaboration) and putting them into a place that isn’t a game (e.g. shopping) because reality is quite boring (e.g. school), it drives motivation.
• Most gamification is poorly designed – just PLB (points, leaderboard, badges) formula. Gamification is not the answer to everything, but consideration should be made on whether gamification is helpful in a specific context. ‘Are these games skills transferrable to other contexts?’

Skills 4. It’s all about the format.

Cool things from week 4 workshop:

Video editing:

• The steps of ‘rolling’ and ‘take 1’ make it so much easier to edit when it’s actually recorded in the audio/video.
• Name videos ‘1 Panning’, ‘1 Fixed’, ‘1 Handheld (wobbly)’. (Number of take + description.)
• Portrait videos are useless if it is not going to be seen on a phone.

Resource making:

• When instructing, stick with bullet points.
• Back up with what you’re saying with an image – don’t have too much text.
• Elements of resources: text, graphics, audio, video (extra element is making it interactive)!

Copyright:

• Pixabay is basically everything non attribution (don’t have to credit)
• There are exceptions of copyright act in schools and uni (which pay money) for educational purposes e.g. within LMS
• Beyond this, you need resources that are pre-licensed
• In Aus, we don’t have fair use (USA) but fair dealings
• Using embedded links don’t infringe copyright
• If I’m making a resource that involves copyrighted music, I can’t post it here. 😦 I can only put samples of work that don’t include copyright music and submit the assignment through canvas (where it is covered).

Skills 3: Notation software: illustrations, worksheets and quality resources. Copyright.

Cool things from week 3 workshop:

• On Photoscore, you can take a photo of hand written score, turn it into notation and send it straight to Sibelius
• The disadvantage of not hand-writing a score is that you may lose your thought processes because all you see is perfect notation.
• xml is format for music notation. It can be opened on many music notation programs/software and transfers quite smoothly. This is really great for music education because it means students without Sibelius at home can save files as xml and work at home using a free program, like MuseScore.
• On MuseScore, you can always find mediocre arrangements and make them better.
• Flat.io and Noteflight are also free, but have limitations if you don’t upgrade e.g. connecting to midi/record and download individual parts.

Sibelius things that I didn’t know that have now changed my life:

• The keypad matches up with the numberpad on the keyboard!!! I did not know this. In my defence, I did not know this because my keyboard doesn’t have the numberpad.
• To screenshot a sib excerpt without the paper texture, press alt+g
• THERE IS A TEACHING SECTION IN SIBELIUS. I am so mad I did not know this before prac – making worksheets will be such a breeze now.
• Go to note input –> transformation to develop a motif.
• Ideas panel is like a loop library for Sibelius!

Skills 2: Technology in performance and recording + Basic editing and mastering including video

Cool things from week 2 workshop:

• Record from multiple video and audio sources e.g. still camera, panning camera, zoom recorder and even your smartphone
• When you are recording from multiple sources, make sure the clap is in the recording!
• To have a stable hand held camera, hold the elbow of the recording arm with the other arm and keep the elbow close to the body.
• With dual microphones (e.g. zoom recorder), the angles of the microphone are determined by the distance/width of sound source e.g. distance from the left of Isabel to the right of Erin.
• Test the sound before recording by looking at the levels
• Angles matter – we wanted eye level for this particular recording of Adele’s ‘Someone Like You’
• Lighting matters – you’ll get dark circles if the lighting is from above due to the shadows