My 13-year-old son and I continue to make music together, with him starting songs and inviting me to collaborate. I am enjoying the opportunity to engage him with some creative collaborative practice, and it’s been fun, watching him learn about music creation with technology. It’s become a real passion for him.
This song is the second one we did together, using audio clips as loops for a message of hope.
Peace (sounds like hope),
Kevin
I’m still not all that satisfied with this, as I was searching for a way to bring together six musical pieces I had written as inspired by my neighborhood a few months ago (and this post has been in my draft bin since then). It was part of the CLMOOC mapping month. I used ThingLink with Soundcloud files (with a map created in another program called MapStack.)
While each musical piece evoked (for me) something of my local wandering/mapping, I wanted to layer the pieces on a map (but didn’t want to give away too much of my privacy.)
You can still hear the songs on one surface map, and I added some text for context. My friend, Wendy, and I were over other possibilities at the time (I had this vision of an AR overlay) and I wonder if yet another project Wendy and I and a few others are planning might give me some ideas to revisit this sound map later on.
Peace (on and off the imagination map),
Kevin
We’re more than half-way through a professional development session on learning how to best use Google Classroom. The session is being run by my colleague, Tom Fanning, from the Western Massachusetts Writing Project. I’ve been using Google Classroom since the start of the year, but I asked our district to consider PD for other teachers, since I was getting a lot of inquiry from colleagues about how it works and why use it.
The session has nearly 20 teachers from our entire school district, and Tom has us making pilot Google Classroom spaces, inviting each other in as small groups of “students” to play the role of learner.
My group has three other elementary teachers, and as I was working on their assignments — a cell analogy project, a state history project and a notable African American biography (and mine is a Parts of Speech project) — I decided to keep to a common theme of music across my work.
My cell analogy project used a musical score as the point of comparison. I chose Taj Mahal as the Massachusetts history project, since he is the state Blues Artist. And I researched John Coltrane’s musical legacy for the biography project.
Look. Google Classroom is a fantastic work management tool that my students enjoy using and which has certainly made my work as a teacher a whole lot easier. It’s also clearly another finger reaching out to grab more Google users. We talked about this in our PD session and I talk about it with my students. Google wants to nurture young eyeballs for later in life, when it can target them for advertising, and make money. To think otherwise is to delude ourselves.
For now, I see more positives on our end than negatives with our dive into Google Classroom, but it’s always important to keep the larger perspectives in focus, on what we give up when we use free technology with our students. I’m glad we addressed and debated Google’s mission and motives in our PD. We can all move forward, knowing to some degree what we and our students are getting into.
Peace (in the rooms of music),
Kevin
(This is for the Slice of Life challenge, hosted by Two Writing Teachers. We write on Tuesdays about the small moments in the larger perspective … or is that the larger perspective in the smaller moments? You write, too.)
The other day, my 13-year-old son says, Dad, do you want to make a song with me?
You bet I do, kid.
We used a online music collaboration site that I like, called Soundtrap, and he put down the foundation of the song while I added some of the melodic elements on top. He’s been teaching himself all about loop compositions, and he’s also been mysteriously writing lyrics to hiphop songs at night (for some possible collaborative recording effort with a friend from school, we think. He’s been pretty mum on the whole thing.)
When we were done with the collaboration, I took the audio file and used an online site to create the video, to make the presentation a little more impressive (mostly, for him).
Anytime your 13 year old asks, Do you want to … — the answer should almost always be Yes.
🙂
Peace (in the song),
Kevin
For the last six months or so, I have been writing in and exploring around Mastodon, a federated social networking space that is free from corporate structure. Federated means there is no one central server or space where people are located. Instead, there are “instances” where people connect to and write from (instances are hosted by individuals and most instances have a theme). All instances can share across the larger Mastodon network. I know that will sound confusing. Upshot for me: it’s becoming a neat, creative, connected space that is more than just an alternative to Twitter.
In late September, someone in the Mastodon timeline put out a call for musicians to collaborate together for an album project. They hoped to leverage the connected element of common interests into a music project. I took the plunge, and became part of what is now known as A Whale’s Lantern project — a collaboration of musicians who have made music through the Mastodon network.
While I didn’t know who I would be partnered with, as names were drawn randomly, it turns out I was paired with a friend from other connected spaces: Laura Ritchie. She’s a cellist and music teacher and wide-range thinker.
Yesterday, our “album” was released on Bandcamp. Laura and I worked on a song that I wrote called I Fall Apart (Like Stars in the Night) and the whole group of us, including some of who didn’t get time to finish their collaboration, are in the midst of writing up our reflections. Collaboratively, of course, and hopefully, it will be published in a Mastodon open journal called Kintsugi in the future.
Check out A Whale’s Lantern: Flight into the Nebula.
Peace (listening to the muse),
Kevin
I am immersing myself in making music, and found myself connected to the idea of a musical landscape, a musical map of ideas expressed not in latitude and longitude, but in sound, melody and rhythm. This project connects back to this month’s Pop-Up Make Cycle with the CLMOOC.
I have already shared out Five pieces:
This sixth and last song of the collection, Sunlight Moonlight Starlight, is just the sense of wonder of the sky during a walk at night along our quiet neighborhood streets.
Take a listen to Sunlight Moonlight Starlight.
Thanks for opening up your ears to my sounds. I am thinking how to pull all of these tracks together into more of a map.
Peace (in wonder),
Kevin
I am immersing myself in making music, and found myself connected to the idea of a musical landscape, a musical map of ideas expressed not in latitude and longitude, but in sound, melody and rhythm. This project connects back to this month’s Pop-Up Make Cycle with the CLMOOC.
I have already shared out Four pieces:
This fifth piece, Bird Off Balance, came after watching a bird on the power wires on the street in front of our house, and how it seemed to always be on the verge of wobbling off the wire. It never did, of course. It was always in balance.
Listen to Bird Off Balance.
Thanks for taking time to imagine through listening what I was seeing.
Peace (in balance),
Kevin
I am immersing myself in making music, and found myself connected to the idea of a musical landscape, a musical map of ideas expressed not in latitude and longitude, but in sound, melody and rhythm. This project connects back to this month’s Pop-Up Make Cycle with the CLMOOC.
I have already shared out three pieces:
This fourth piece, entitled Cue the Queue, is inspired by the bird talk I heard while walking our dog, Duke. A flock of somethings were chattering up in the pine trees of the front drive. When we walked close, the entire tree went silent. As we wandered past, the chatter started up again. I imagined one lead bird, with baton, queuing them up. Meanwhile, the beat is that of the dog and I, walking away.
Listen to Cue the Queue
Thanks for taking the time to pay attention.
Peace (in the quiet),
Kevin
I am immersing myself in making music, and found myself connected to the idea of a musical landscape, a musical map of ideas expressed not in latitude and longitude, but in sound, melody and rhythm. This project connects back to this month’s Pop-Up Make Cycle with the CLMOOC.
I have already shared out two pieces:
This third piece, Under Each Leaf, is inspired by what the title says. I was looking under a certain leaf in our yard as I was doing some raking, and found bugs and critters all beginning to settle in for the cold, as if the leaf were a blanket of some kind.
Take a listen to Under Each Leaf.
Thanks for taking the time to lend your ears.
Peace (under us),
Kevin
I am immersing myself in making music, and found myself connected to the idea of a musical landscape, a musical map of ideas expressed not in latitude and longitude, but in sound, melody and rhythm. This project connects back to this month’s Pop-Up Make Cycle with the CLMOOC.
Yesterday, I shared out the first piece, entitled Interlocking Parts.
This one, Busy in the Trees, is inspired by the way the squirrels and other small animals dance and jump and cruise through the trees of our yard. It’s a circus act of sorts. The last note of sustain is the tree branch slowly going back to static mode after the last leap of the squirrels.
Take a listen to Busy in the Trees.
Thanks for taking the time to listen.
Peace (sounds like),
Kevin
