Week Three!!

This week's focus has taken me out of my comfort zone a bit, which is not a bad thing.  We primarily focused on DAWs or Digital Audio Workstations as well as discussed the importance of technology in the classroom.  More specifically, as far as music classes are concerned, how technology can impact the school population that is not in the traditional music classes.  This group is also dubbed the "other 80%". 

Technology is becoming vital for education, mainly because it is all around us.  If we were to ignore technology, we as educators would be removing ourselves from the reality, thus doing a great disservice to our students.

DAWs are wonderful tools because people (not just students) can compose all kinds of different types of music without having to know how to read and notate music in the traditional sense.  For this class, I used a nice program from Sweden called Soundtrap.  This program has many loops, which are basically chunks of notes or rhythms that repeat as much as the composer would like.  These loops make it very easy to set up "grooves" that the composer can use has "backup" for the song itself (melody).  In addition to loops, composers can use instruments of their own to import sounds.  They can even go as far as recording themselves by using the already-entered loops as accompaniment.  Great stuff!

A big feature of Soundation is that composers can collaborate with each other, without being in the same room.  While our class did not do this, we were made aware of the feature.  

Will DAWs ever replace traditional music making?  Absolutely not.  We can never replace live performers.  DAWs provide the opportunity for anyone to get involved in the music-making process, whether they know who to read notation or not.