At the beginning of the session we all wrote down something that we could remember from last weeks class. I wrote down that 'music can mean lots of different thing to different people'. What I mean by that is for example; someone could consider heavy metal as 'proper' music and an other may think music to be how birds sing. I appreciate lots of types of musics and I like to listen to various genres.
Further to this, in small groups we discussed our opinions ad understandings of the Levitin text which was set to read and understand as a NCT. Finding out others thoughts on the text was really interesting as not all of us agreed on the same points, for example; one member of our group agreed with the statement 'anything made before 1940 or after 1960 isn't really music at all.' I do not agree with this as I believe music to be many sounds and not in particular one kind of style. (I have attached a full copy of my notes from this reading and the highlighted text itself.)
The next task was more tricky than what it came across at first. Referring back to the text, we looked at the fundamentals of music; harmony/dynamics, key, rhythm/meter, structure/themes, lyrics/melody, tempo, instrumentation/motif.
Then we associated what these elements can portray.
Key: happy/sad
Harmony/dynamics: emotion
Rhythm/meter: style
Structure/themes: story
Lyrics/melody: meaning
Tempo: fast/slow
Instrumentation/motif: character
Regarding this we listened to three tracks; the first was Summertime from Porgy and Bess (1935) by Gershwin, the second was Royals by Lorde (2013), and the third was A Day in the Life by The Beatles (1967). All of these tracks were completely different from one another and we could pick out some of the fundamental elements and begin to understand what the song is trying to tell us. The hardest song to work out was The Beatles song because it had loads of abstract sounds and the voice was often distorted.
After our break we began having a look at protools. I have never used recording software apart from audacity which is very basic. I found it so confusing to work my around the programme never mind begin to record something. We done this in pairs and were asked to make a song of our own based on a quote or a poem. We didn't have enough time to complete this during session time so this was set as a task to complete before next session.
Before my next session my partner and I met up to complete this task. At first we thought we would never get anything done. We managed to get a little bit of keyboard recorded but I didn't know how to alter the pitch! We also added a drum beat in. Hopefully it will sound okay for the session on Wednesday 7th October!
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