Author: Karen Neal
Music is a powerful portal that lets us explore the meaning of life. It can comfort us in our darkest moments. Music can suspend us in time—capture us in glorious moments with neither a beginning nor an end. As a professional singer, music educator and choral director, I have the awesome task of teaching students at Gulliver Academy in Coral Gables, Florida, how to access the beauty, energy and endless opportunities that are available to them across all generations of music.
In working with grades four through eight, I expose them to great repertoire and help them develop their young voices. They learn to create their own original music, and together we prepare for live performances. But getting elementary- and middle-schoolers excited about classical music is no easy feat. When the music genre we’re studying pre-dates them by hundreds of years and they’re more comfortable with pop music icons Beyoncé and Jay-Z than they are with Bach’s B Minor Mass, my greatest challenge is selling chorus as “cool.”
Composing Music Across Platforms
Students are more amenable to learning when we meet them on their own turf. For this reason and a host of others, technology gives our young people access to centuries-old scores and compositions in a modality that’s as familiar to them as breathing. When I decided earlier this year to teach song writing and song production, I asked our school’s 21st-century learning adviser if there were programs that suited this purpose. Gulliver Academy has a bring-your-own device policy, and our program choices are limited because so many don’t respond across different devices.
The adviser suggested Soundtrap, a cloud-based online music and audio recording studio that lets students make music or audio recordings within an invited and secured group. It’s easier to use, more updated and less expensive than other programs we researched, and it works across iOS, Android, Chromebook, Mac and Windows devices. The kids took to it right away because it resembles the social media sites they navigate constantly. Soundtrap is reasonably priced, and the academy saved a ton of money because it didn’t have to build an entire studio with digital audio workstations. Instead, the kids work from their own personal devices. Our school uses Google Sites, a web-creation tool that allows the students to share their individual websites, and Soundtrap is compatible with the Google Sites platform as well.
The adviser suggested Soundtrap, a cloud-based online music and audio recording studio that lets students make music or audio recordings within an invited and secured group. It’s easier to use, more updated and less expensive than other programs we researched, and it works across iOS, Android, Chromebook, Mac and Windows devices. The kids took to it right away because it resembles the social media sites they navigate constantly. Soundtrap is reasonably priced, and the academy saved a ton of money because it didn’t have to build an entire studio with digital audio workstations. Instead, the kids work from their own personal devices. Our school uses Google Sites, a web-creation tool that allows the students to share their individual websites, and Soundtrap is compatible with the Google Sites platform as well.
When Groans Become Great Music
There is always a time crunch in class because we have so much to cover. The students are very excited to use Soundtrap, and to my delight this motivates them to work on their assignments from home. Freeing up precious class time means we can focus on our stage performances, which draw hundreds of people.
We also used Soundtrap to produce auditions for the American Choral Directors Association’s (ACDA) national honors chorus. This year, we succeeded in placing two students in the honors chorus scheduled to perform at the organization’s 2017 conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Earning an ACDA slot is a huge accomplishment.
ACDA’s audition process required the students to sing along to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus” or Henry Purcell’s “Sound the Trumpet.” The students downloaded the accompaniments into Soundtrap from the ACDA’s website, recorded themselves singing along, saved them as mp3s, and then sent them along to me for ACDA consideration. Their recordings doubled as homework assignments.
What I found so incredible over the course of this particular assignment was the students’ change of attitude. When I passed out the music, it was met with collective groans. But Soundtrap allowed them to break down the music into tracks and see the different parts in isolation, through color-coding. The visuals helped them understand the compositional process more deeply than if they were simply looking at the musical score. The next assignment involves collaborating on duets, an idea I spotted on the Soundtrap for Education website.
We also used Soundtrap to produce auditions for the American Choral Directors Association’s (ACDA) national honors chorus. This year, we succeeded in placing two students in the honors chorus scheduled to perform at the organization’s 2017 conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Earning an ACDA slot is a huge accomplishment.
ACDA’s audition process required the students to sing along to Mozart’s “Ave Verum Corpus” or Henry Purcell’s “Sound the Trumpet.” The students downloaded the accompaniments into Soundtrap from the ACDA’s website, recorded themselves singing along, saved them as mp3s, and then sent them along to me for ACDA consideration. Their recordings doubled as homework assignments.
What I found so incredible over the course of this particular assignment was the students’ change of attitude. When I passed out the music, it was met with collective groans. But Soundtrap allowed them to break down the music into tracks and see the different parts in isolation, through color-coding. The visuals helped them understand the compositional process more deeply than if they were simply looking at the musical score. The next assignment involves collaborating on duets, an idea I spotted on the Soundtrap for Education website.
Thirty Seconds of Coolness
Another of this year’s successful projects, “30 Seconds of Whatever,” involved posting music that the students created to our school’s website. The site has a page devoted to music that is accessible to every student at Gulliver Academy. Middle-schoolers are highly protective of their identities and how they are perceived, and so they were hesitant to use their real names. We decided they would post their material using rap names. That way, their peers wound up listening to V-Bug or Quadro-T. The response has been phenomenal. The students love it!
A big part of my teaching philosophy is fostering creativity in a safe place. Soundtrap lets the students do that. It emboldens them to take risks without fear of reprisal, and attempt things they thought would be too hard for them. Next year, I plan to offer a new class, “Sound, Composition & Technology,” using Soundtrap. We will be creating music and writing songs the whole time. Soundtrap helps me amplify the “cool” factor in chorus.
A big part of my teaching philosophy is fostering creativity in a safe place. Soundtrap lets the students do that. It emboldens them to take risks without fear of reprisal, and attempt things they thought would be too hard for them. Next year, I plan to offer a new class, “Sound, Composition & Technology,” using Soundtrap. We will be creating music and writing songs the whole time. Soundtrap helps me amplify the “cool” factor in chorus.
About the Author:
Karen Neal enjoys a multi-faceted career as a teacher, clinician and performer. She has been Choral Director for Gulliver Schools in Pinecrest, Florida for the past five years, leading students annually to top rated concerts, competitions, and acceptances into honor choirs. Performing with internationally acclaimed ensembles and as soloist in venues across the nation as well as several European countries, she has been a frequent soprano soloist, specializing in early and modern music. Karen Neal holds a Vocal Performance degree from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She was also awarded a Tanglewood fellowship and has studied French repertoire intensively in Nice, Paris and the Abbè Royaumont in Asniéres-sur-Oise, France. She has served as adjunct faculty at University of Miami and Florida International University and has partnered with Miami Light Project to teach poetry and diction to inner-city youth.
In 2015, she became certified in NYU’s Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology (IMPACT) curriculum. Karen is also a guest clinician and has been an artist in residence for the State of Alaska, working with high school choruses and individual voice for high school and middle school. She is now pursuing her Master’s degree in Choral Conducting at Florida International University, holding the teaching assistantship there in 2017-2018.
In 2015, she became certified in NYU’s Interactive Multimedia Performing Arts Collaborative Technology (IMPACT) curriculum. Karen is also a guest clinician and has been an artist in residence for the State of Alaska, working with high school choruses and individual voice for high school and middle school. She is now pursuing her Master’s degree in Choral Conducting at Florida International University, holding the teaching assistantship there in 2017-2018.
