Early 2018 was a time of great excitement in my home town of Newcastle. Throughout the summer it hosted the Great Exhibition of The North, a nationwide celebration of the north of England, featuring a series of arts, technology and cultural events. The exhibition was a great success in terms of drawing attention to the region and bringing in much-needed tourism. It also had the knock-on effect of offering me the chance to develop my music tech skills for the classroom.
The ambitious plan of the exhibition's organisers was that every child across the country should be able to take part. Clearly not every school would be able to visit Newcastle, so alongside the events of the main exhibition a series of educational resources were commissioned to be featured on the exhibition's website, allowing schools to celebrate the exhibition regardless of their location. In December 2017 I was asked to produce some resources for Key Stage 3 music lessons with the brief that they should celebrate all that is great about the north of England and tie into the exhibition's ‘Create the North’ focus.
Given the forward-looking tech focus of much of the exhibition, I was keen from the outset to feature music tech. This was an area I had some experience of but not necessarily one I considered a strength, so I was hopeful that I would be able to develop my skills while producing the resources. I was strongly influenced by a lesson I'd seen from an Australian music technology teacher, Katie Wardrobe, whose Midnight Music website (https://midnightmusic.com.au) and Music Tech Teacher Podcast are a constant source of inspiration.
The lesson in question saw students manipulating free samples released on NASA's Soundcloud page (https://soundcloud.com/nasa) using digital audio workspaces (DAWs) to work towards a ‘musique concráte’ style piece. I had tried a similar lesson with one of my Year 5 classes as part of a ‘music of space’ project we had completed the year prior, and I had been impressed with the level of detail the pupils had been able to go into. (The school I work in is all-through, meaning I teach Key Stages 1 to 5.) I was confident that the essence of the lesson would apply well to my brief and, with a careful selection of samples, could also celebrate the best of the North of England.
Sampling the North
I compiled a bank of non-musical samples designed to represent the North and asked students to adapt them using music technology, initially to form drumkit-like loops, and from there to develop a full piece of music. The samples we used, among others, included a football crowd, audio taken by a participant in the Great North Run, the Tyne and Wear Metro buzzer, a Bentley V8 engine (built in Cheshire) and an extract from a speech given by Martin Luther King following the presentation of his honorary degree at Newcastle University in 1967.
My lesson took pupils through a body percussion warm-up, exploring low-and high-pitched percussive sounds, before exploring the different elements of a drumkit, focusing specifically on the kick, snare and hats. I then asked pupils to use a DAW to crop the samples to create short percussive sounds to be used in place of conventional kick, snare and hat sounds. Extension tasks offered pupils the ability to explore other editing processes such as pitch-shifting to create melodic lines and develop a full piece. My hope was that as well as developing important sound-editing skills, pupils would be exposed to elements of the North of England which might run contrary to some of the usual stereotypes.
As well as tying in to some of the broad themes of the exhibition, I felt this approach had a strong link to some of its specific events and artworks. The Sage Gateshead (TSG) commissioned a captivating sound installation that weaved throughout the building, transforming the public spaces. Created by the Rotherham-based artist Mark Fell, Protomusic #1 filled the impressive interior of TSG with sonic structures based on real-world sounds of the North. The work drew on Fell's passion for exploring relationships between popular music styles and algorithmic and mathematical systems. In this installation, he asked how the sonic, rather than the visual, is at the heart of who we are. While my pupils were removed from the physical setting of Fell's piece, I hoped they would be able to draw inspiration from his work when producing their own, given the similar approach.
The plan had always been to offer a lesson that could be accessible to all music departments, regardless of their access to equipment and software, or level of experience in music tech. Music tech can be daunting to teachers who've not had much experience and, without the necessary software, it is largely impossible. To my shame, pupils’ interactions with music technology in our school were mostly limited to Key Stage 4 and 5 composition work with Sibelius, save for a few dabbles with GarageBand. While I knew this was an area I wanted to develop significantly, school budget constraints made it difficult to invest in decent software or hardware without the justification of a discrete music tech subject option.
Investigating software options
I had spent a great deal of time prior to being asked to produce the Great Exhibition resources investigating online solutions, partly for budget reasons, but also to try and find ways for students to complete music tech work from home without families investing in expensive software. I found that Soundation was good for standalone lessons on looping, but it didn't have the functionality I needed for the Great Exhibition project. Noteflight is a well thought through notation software, but my students found it rather difficult to navigate (though I understand it has undergone several changes in the two or three years since I last used it with pupils).
The two standout platforms I found were Flat, an online notation software, and Soundtrap, a simple DAW owned by Spotify, which is similar to GarageBand. I was particularly pleased with both platforms' Google Classroom integration (I make extensive use of Google Classroom for Key Stages 4 and 5) and, as mentioned, their ability to allow students to work from home on compatible devices on projects they have started in school. It was also pleasing that both platforms offered a great deal of cross-compatibility with Flat, offering the ability to export directly to Soundtrap and vice versa. Flat was popular with my pupils for its collaborative functions, allowing several pupils to work on the same project simultaneously. This allowed group composition tasks to be entirely computer-based – an exciting addition to my teaching.
However, Soundtrap seemed the obvious solution for the Great Exhibition of the North project. It had all the functionality required for manipulating the samples in an easy-to-understand interface, making it simple for anyone new to music tech – both students and teachers. Soundtrap also offers the ability for music departments with little or no music tech provision to sign up for a free trial educational membership for their pupils. I was grateful to the team at Soundtrap, who went as far as to help me organise an extended trial membership (from their standard 30 days to a generous three months – plenty of time to explore the project to its fullest) for Great Exhibition participants.
I hope this article has given you a flavour of my experience creating Key Stage 3 ‘Create the North’ music tech resources. The resources are fully downloadable online for no charge, including the full range of sound samples mentioned earlier. Enjoy using the materials.
▾ The Sage Gateshead
To download the lesson plan with details on how to access Soundtrap, visit https://getnorth2018.com/get-involved/schools/schools-resources/
