Choose your own adventure day!

1. Use the Zoom H2 recorders to collect sound from out in the world (accompanied by Micah).
2. Work with a Ravel piece to create a new piece that evokes a mood, tells a story, or uses musical patterns (or makes use of any of the strategies we talked about during the last class).
3. Listen to music Betsey selected (on a discman in the Listening Nook) and record your thoughts about what you’re hearing in your Media Lab notebook.

Everyone created their own class experience from these options today. Betsey also conferenced individually with everyone about their final projects.

Today we began class in the “listening nook.” Betsey played several different electronic music pieces for us. We discussed the strategies composers used to create these works as a way to start thinking about creating our own new work. We talked about how pieces made us feel and why, and focused in on strategies like harmony, repetition, imperfect looping, tempo, rhythm, motifs, hooks, layering, etc.

Then we moved over to the computers. We reviewed what we learned last week and experimented with some of these strategies.

The first Media Lab class started today with nine CMW students ages 9-17!

Betsey Biggs (standing on the right), an electronic music composer currently in residence at Brown University’s Cogut Humanities Center, started the class by leading us on a “sound walk” into the never-before-seen Media Lab space.  After a discussion about listening (what we heard on our walks/the different ways we respond to sounds/how much we notice when we actively focus on listening, etc), we talked about the ways we might use this new space and work together over the next six weeks. We then got on the computers and, with the help of teaching assistants Henry Kerins (on the left) and Micah Salkind, dove into our first Logic pieces. We did a quick “intro to the Mac” session and then explored Logic’s tools by using pre-made loops to create short projects.

Angie and Alana
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/day1_AngieAlana.mp3|titles=Angie and Alana ]

Christian and Josh
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/day1_ChristianJosh.mp3|titles=Christian and Josh ]

David and Kirby
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/day1_DavidKirby.mp3|titles=David and Kirby ]

Jesse
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/day1_Jesse.mp3|titles=Jesse ]

Paloma
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/day1_Paloma.mp3|titles=Paloma ]

Paul
[audio:http://www.communitymusicworks.org/medialab/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/day1_Paul.mp3|titles=Paul ]