Soundation assignment

https://soundation.com/user/scosta7/track/soundation-original-composition

Writing this composition was interesting because it is essentially the same first assignment my Electronic music students do with Mixcraft. My goal for this assignment is the as the goal for my students which is to explore, experience, and become familiar with the new program. My other goals were to compare how this program worked in relationship to Mixcraft, and how I could use this program in my curriculum. The musical considerations that I had when developing this song was to write something with a definate form, hence the AABA form. As I listened through the loops, there were no loops with a good melody. I then used the loops as an accompaniment and used my MIDI track as the melody track. As I was working on this composition I never considered this song representative of anything. However, “Love Me Tender” by Elvis Presley was the model in my mind when composing this song.

One aspect of Soundation that helped my creativity was the ability to search similar style loops. The ability to develop a foundation accompaniment using loops, in the same style, allowed more time for creativity with my melody. This was also a tool that allowed my workflow to go quicker. However, being able to use the virtual keyboard from my computer keyboard was the tool that helped my workflow more so than the loops. I have a MIDI keyboard that I could not get to work with this program. Although the Virtual Keyboard was mentioned in the tutorials, it was the tool that best helped my workflow. The alternative was to enter the notes individually using the piano roll which I found to be time consuming. Working with Mixcraft for many years I was challenged with the limitations of Soundation. Soundation was intuitive but the free version was limiting with the options of available loops. I was able to work around these limitations for this assignment and with more time and getting the premium version I will become better adapted to this program.

Soundation offers many things for students of all ages including the option of developing their compositional and aural skills. One of the guiding beliefs of Music-COMP is to “Begin composition with structured guidelines” (Bauer, 2014, p. 60). A lesson I could use Soundation with is by developing an accompaniment within Soundation that would be the foundation of student melodies. Once I develop the accompaniment for this assignment the students would copy and paste the accompaniment from my account to their student account. Then the assignment would be to compose two four measure melodies. One for the A section and one for the B section. The goal for this assignment would be to teach students about basic song form and how to compose a melody. I am unsure whether students would take positively to Soundation. GarageBand being free on all Apple computers and Mixcraft being relatively cheap for PCs, I do not think students would find many benefits to this program.

References

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today: Digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and

responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.