Digital Audio Project #3: Composing & Creating

Nearly every educational theorist lists creativity as one of the most valuable kinds of learning experiences that students experience. In Benjamin Bloom’s pyramid of higher order thinking skills, creativity remains at the top. Likewise, Bruner , Dewey, & Vygotsky dedicated significant portions of their life’s work towards exploring and teaching creativity. The projects within this module build upon previous skills with music notation software in an effort to promote digital fluency and allow learners to create new educational materials or musical compositions.

Project Options & purposeful constraints

The projects below take on two basic forms, both of which are original pieces of music. In both project options specific constraints are introduced. In the first original composition project calls for specific musical events to take place and constrains the learners to create an engaging piece of music with more more than five notes. The second project allows for some more freedom, but giving learners the autonomy to choose a short video that they will create a soundtrack to accompany it before combining, exporting, and sharing. Introducing constraints provides the necessary box for learners to think outside of. This notion has been supported by research demonstrating that adding constraints actually improve creativity (Haught-Tromp, 2016) rather than hinder it. Conversely, too many choices has shown to actually work against creativity in certain settings (Iyengar, 2000).

Five Note Composition Project:

Historically, artists and musicians have imposed constraints on themselves to force them to be more creative. Even more commonly, many of our greatest works of art and innovations in science and technology were derived from navigating some kind of challenging situation, whether self-imposed or not:

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees one’s self. And the arbitrariness of the constraint serves only to obtain precision of execution.”
– Igor Stravinsky

Project Guidlines:

The purpose of this project is to create a 30-second piece of music, using only five notes and meeting the following guidelines:

Be at least 30 seconds in length
Have at least 2 melodic voices, one of which must be a counter-melody
Contain no more than 5 notes, which should be listed in the subtitle of the work
Have a title and the composer’s name (i.e. you)
Exported and submitted as a non-midi sound file

Here is a helpful video demonstrating some compositional techniques that could be useful:

Below is a video on how to create a minimalist composition using a digital audio workstation (LogicPro):

Making the simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.
~Charles Mingus

Extension: Create a soundtrack

Once learners have had an opportunity to create a piece of music with limited musical material, they should have sufficient knowledge of the notation software and compositional techniques to apply elsewhere. One possible avenue is to create a soundtrack for a short film.

The purpose of this project is to leverage the skills gained in music notation softwware and compositional techniques to create a soundtrack to a short film, meeting the following guidelines:

Be at least 60 seconds in length (i.e. the length of the film you select)
Have more than one melodic voice, one of which must be a countermelody
Have at least 4 voices overall
Exported and submitted as a movie file (Youtube, Vimeo, .mov, .mp4, etc) with your soundtrack overlaid.

You are free to choose any movie you would like to create your soundtrack. You may also create your own. A simple google search for “one minute short film” should provide numerous options to choose from. Here are some examples of one-minute films that could work well for this kind of project: