The advancement of musical instruction with technology is an ever-changing process. New technologies are constantly arising, enhancing traditional musical paradigms. This trend is evident in all facets of music technology, from the transformation of musical composition with the advent of MIDI to the move from analog tape-based recording in studios to the virtually boundless and accessible nature of digital sampling on personal computers.

In these times of unprecedented financial instability, it’s more important than ever to have strong, visibly active, and well-organized music education advocacy groups that will support and defend the arts in our schools. Parents, teachers, and administrators need to be armed with resources and information that will help bolster commitment to a well-rounded curriculum that provides all students with the opportunity to unleash their creativity as well as develop their intellect.

In 1955, Hugh Le Caine recorded the unique piece, Dripsody, a very early example of sampling.  The piece takes the sound of water dripping, and through the use of tape splicing and speed adjustments, makes a sort of “song” out of the audio.   This project demonstrates how you can bring Le Caine’s idea into the 21st century using Ableton Live.

Preparation: Listening, brainstorming and recording

Melodies, chords, bass lines, and drum parts – these are the musical elements that students most often work with to create song arrangements in a lab. Variations in both pitch and time, however, can be used as creative tools for enhancing songs and producing dynamic arrangements. In this article I want to describe how to create different effects by changing the tempo as well as by transposing beat-sliced loops found in software programs such as Acid (Sony), Reason (Propellerhead), GarageBand (Apple), and Mixcraft (Acoustica).

The Art of Live-Looping (A.L.L.) has been taking off in recent years. You may have seen artists like K.T. Tunstall, Andrew Bird or Keller Williams using this digital technology to enhance their solo performances to create their own virtual one-man band.  Art of Live-Looping is the art of recording, layering and mixing instruments and sounds in a live performance using an electronic looping device that plays them back in continuously repeating loops. Click here to see a video of A.L.L. in action - http://www.youtube.com/hulooper

A few of years ago, a technology teacher in my district introduced me to a new composition program called Hyperscore.  A parent at the school she taught at worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and had been instrumental in developing this program and had demonstrated it for her.  It was rather simple, but offered a new way to compose music, where students would draw where they wanted the music to happen.

This Creativity Cache Starter focuses on composing a medley. Students work individually to choose several songs or melodies that fit some theme. They then enter the melody lines, and consider techniques demonstrated in the sample or other techniques they may have heard to connect the songs (with or without lyrics) into a satisfying composition, arranging them for piano.

In “Fiddle Dee Dee” students work in small groups to choose three types of insect that they think they can represent musically. They then choose instruments and improvise to find ways of playing the instruments to represent various actions that the different insects might do. This could include flying, scurrying, biting, eating, etc. They use their discoveries to make a composition, which may or may not tell a story in which the insects interact, come into conflict, or work on a joint project.

From Sight to Sound on finding inspiration for a composition in the visual world. Students work individually to explore images—either those provided or ones they find or create themselves—as material that can inspire sound in various ways. They then use an image as a jumping off point in order to create a satisfying composition.

The inception of something is its starting point. A musical composition can have many different starting points, and to begin this series, we’re going to explore the score of the 2010 movie Inception by Hans Zimmer as the starting point for a composition.

Music as the inspiration for other music is a time-honored tradition. The inspiration can be stylistic, as in Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 1 (Classical Symphony), or particular musical content can be the inspiration. For example, Chopin and Paganini both wrote Variations on a theme by Rossini.