Initially, when I say I am a musician, I am referring to myself playing and making music on the flute. I love playing in the JMU Wind Symphony and creating music with an ensemble, as well as exploring new repertoire. However, since beginning my time at JMU, I’ve come to realize that my definition of a musician and what musical instruments are is extremely narrow. Now I am not only a musician in the sense that I play the flute, but I have also tinkered with different technologies, like beats and loops, and created music through that outlet. For example, I created a short song based on a picture using different loops (http://davinamiaw.weebly.com/musicianship/daws-and-ostinati) and created music in a way that I would have never imagined doing before coming to JMU. I also combined my talents as a musician, playing the flute and using different technologies, to create a multi-track cover (http://davinamiaw.weebly.com/musicianship/create-a-multi-tracked-cover).
By the time I start my student teaching, I would like to become the best musician I can possibly be for my future students, both as a classically trained flutist and as a master tinkerer. I need to spend more time exploring and improving upon my current skills in order to reach my goals. I want my future students to know that there are so many ways to be a musician, and to teach them how they can use technology to create music. To get to this point, I will talk to my professors and ask questions about different ways to create music and do my own research, and simply create and make music! I will also go to conferences and workshops to explore how I can build upon my previous knowledge and gain new information about implementing different styles of music making in my classroom.
The artist’s name is Brandon Paak Anderson, but his stage name is Anderson .Paak. His is 30 years old and is originally from Oxnard, California. He started dabbling in music as a teenager from his bedroom and in 2011 started working on his debut album. He released his album in 2012 under the pseudonym Breezy Lovejoy. In 2013, he produced and record Cover Art, which was an all-covers EP. Then he released his other two albums Venice and Malibu in 2014 and 2016 respectively. He currently is a recording artist, music producer, and part of NxWorries. He has signed record labels with Stone Throw, Steel Wool, OBE, Young Art Records, EMPIRE, and Aftermath Entertainment. He engages with the musical genres of Hip hop, rap, R&B, soul, and funk.
I learned that music is truly created from an artist’s experiences and feelings towards certain topics. It is a way they express their emotions and reflect on things that have happened to them in the past, as well as things they are looking forward to in the future. Music made from a hip-hop-specific frame is very much like a poetry slam in that you have spoken words that have rhythm, phrasing, and rhyme, except that it is combined with a musical groove or backbeat. The lyrics of music is similar to telling a story, but adding the elements of music and different tonalities, textures, and instrumentation demonstrate a more complex way of expressing feelings through music. It is more hidden and needs to be uncovered by those listening to the music because it could relate to another piece of music that has inspired the artist in some way. I think it is extremely interesting how a person’s experiences shape the kind of music a person creates and how they express themselves. From this knowledge, I would love to see what has shaped my different loves for certain genres of music and different instrumentation. In my future teaching, I can ask a student to list out some of the songs on their playlist and learn more about them through that way. It would be more revealing than simply asking them what they liked. Or I could create an activity where they composed their own lyrics and short melody to tell something about themselves; through that, I could also connect in a more meaningful manner with my students. Through this experience, I learned how to use Acapella to compile multiple videos of myself performing different parts of a song. I decided to use the app instead of Bandhub because it was easier for me to record different angled videos of myself with a phone than a laptop. This assignment was rather frustrating for me because I was working with new technology and had difficulty aligning all the parts together. In my final video, it can be seen that there are timing issues because I had struggled so much with the technology. Also, because it was an app the quality of sound was not very good and the reverb from the flute in the practice room could be heard. I was constrained in my choices of instruments because I can only play the flute and piano and did not want to sing the melody. I wanted to recreate the piece using interesting instruments that you can find around the household to demonstrate that music can be created with anything; in my case, I used a container of pills in one video and a chopstick hitting a book in the other. I generally stuck to the basic structure of the piece regarding the chords and the melody because I am not that creative and cannot harmonize that well, so this experience forced me to think of different ways and instruments to compensate for that lack of creativity in an instrumental and vocal sense. This assignment to create a multi-tracked cover definitely pushed me out of my comfort zone and taught me the importance of trial and error and that to get better at something, in my case cover videos, you just have to keep practicing and experimenting even though it may be awful at first.
This experience informed my future life as a musician by teaching me the importance of solid rhythm, harmonies, and how to not be reactionary regarding entrances when performing a piece and listening to others at the same time. As an educator, I know how frustrating it is to not be good at a certain discipline, but I know that through this experience I can better teach my students the importance of perseverance. In addition to this, I can teach my students how to explore different elements of music and find topics that interest them in order to become more well-rounded musicians. As a musical being-in-the-world, this experience demonstrates how easy it is to collaborate with anyone, in person or online, and create interesting music and covers, even if you simply are shaking a container of vitamins. In class, we were told to make short snippets of interesting sounds with some guidelines being that it should be in A Major and that there should be no harsh rhythmic beat so that the overall piece could be more fluid. My partner and I used snapping and keys to create some sounds, recorded them with an iPhone, and then put them into a Google Drive folder. We then used controllers and Abelton to produce the different sounds other people had also inserted into the Google Drive and tried to make music and improvise with live instruments as someone pointed to the different images within a picture. We were trying to demonstrate through music the ratio of people and their lifetime likelihood of imprisonment. The technologies allowed me to click buttons and produce prerecorded sounds that could be looped or stopped at any point in time. The teachers were giving us plenty of room for our own experimentation and expression; we were allowed to use any sounds and improvise with whatever noises we wanted to. They asked us certain questions that directed us and gave us ideas of how we could convey the relationship through music, whether it be through an increased number of people or more activity. They also provided feedback on what was going well and what needed to be improved upon, such as a slower pace of changing the ratio so that the other students could really settle into a groove of how to convey the certain image through their music. Another way that our experience was facilitated was that they put our prerecorded sounds onto Ableton for us and connected it to the controller so that all we had to do was press the button, instead of figuring out how to connect everything to each other.
This experience mattered so that we would have a basis for how to design our own experience in our other homework assignment for this week. It also gave us an idea of how to incorporate music in the classroom and the different ways of putting together live music with prerecorded sounds to tell a story of a picture using our musical sounds. The public good of this experience was that we learned a new technique of music making through looping and improvisation. Through this experience, I have more of an appreciation for those who can improvise and it makes me want to learn more about how to skillfully do that task so that I can become a better musician. This experience also demonstrated the importance of goals and setting them prior to the experience, as well as providing feedback during the process and making corrections throughout the process to make the experience better. Another meaning for this experience was continual exposure to technology facilitating music learning; we are constantly being shown new ways that technology is being used with music and expanding our brains in the world of music and all of its possibilities. For this experience, I had to draw on the ability to record different sounds and put them in a format that could be sent and used in Google Drive. I also had to be able to play my instrument to improvise during the piece and I had to have the ability to design a musical bit that related to the image provided. I had to know the key signature and what notes were in that key to play a melody that sounded good in relation to all the other instrumentalists. From this experience, I developed the skills of planning, goal setting, and better improvisation skills. The teachers tried to make sure we developed these understandings and skills by first asking us what guidelines we wanted to set up before playing the piece. We were also allowed to push the buttons on the controller based on what we felt fit the music of our newly created piece. We demonstrated our understandings and skill by putting these guidelines into effect and trying to follow them to the best of our ability; we also demonstrated understanding by giving feedback on what went well and what other guidelines we should have added if we were to repeat this experience. The next steps in this project would be to have a more focused goal or to have better organization for planning how we want the music to convey the picture. We could also try improvising a piece with more rhythm and “punch”, instead of it being mellow and slightly disorganized. I think it would be fun to add in more technology from our first class and learn more about using MIDI devices to create music too or how to use a looping device while we are improvising. These devices would add to the different amounts of things we could do simultaneously to create music.
Title: We Wish...
I interpreted this picture as a group of people protesting against the injustice in society for people with disabilities, a type of unfairness that is often overlooked because of racial and gender discrimination. These disabled people are trying to make others aware of the rights they deserve and are fighting to obtain. My hope was to provide a musical representation of the grit and harsh trials that those who are disabled and are protesting have to go through. I wanted the listener to hear and feel sadness for the ongoing fight and the cry of those protesters as they fight for justice. In the end of the piece, I wanted to give pause in the form of silence to show that the problem still remains and has not ended. However, my last three notes are bright in order to present the hope that still exists. The first sounds the listener hears are dark and foreboding, which represent the raw injustice that is present. I tried to keep a type of tension present to maintain the motion of their march and fight against discrimination.
It was difficult to make decisions, but I knew beforehand that I wanted the music behind the picture to represent the action that was not seen and the fact that the issue is still relevant. I used my original piece as a motif for the disabled protestors. They had a sad, demanding cry, which I thought my piece fit well with. At one point, I displace the harmonies so that they sound stacked or like an echo of the previous note to demonstrate that the difficulty to achieve full justice and that their work is completed yet. When the harmonies come together, it represents their full cry in unison. The software I used was Soundtrap; initially I used Abelton, but I did not have the MIDI instruments to plug in so that sound could be produced from my laptop. I spent some time researching why my MIDI files could not produce sound, which led me to searching for an easier software to utilize. Soundtrap was convenient because it was free and directly from an online website, making it convenient to reach. It mediated my experience by making it easier to find loops and sounds that could be easily used in my composition. I didn’t like how sometimes the timbre would not match what I was imagining, which made it difficult to complete my composition to the standards that I wanted. Giving a title to my song was difficult, but I think “We Wish…” gives the protestors combined hopes and the ellipses show that there is still more yet to be accomplished. I wish I had more time because I feel as if there were more things I could perfect and ideas that could be presented more clearly. I also wish I had better software to obtain more loop sounds; I wanted my last three notes to be a triangle sound, but I ended up having to use a piano pitch instead because I could not find any loops that matched what I imagined. From this experience, I learned that music and technology work hand in hand. Technology can easily facilitate music making and composition, but sometimes it can also make it more difficult because of the search for different sounds and software buttons. I did not know what a lot of the terms on the DAW software was, so I ended up not using them because I did not understand their purpose or benefit. However, this has been my easiest music composing experience because I can obtain already made sound loops that fit the style of what I want. If I had more time, I think that the technology would be an excellent way to explore the realm of music and composition. For this assignment, I used a notation based software I had never used before called Noteflight to notate a simple melody. I began choosing the instruments I wanted, which were piano and drums, and then listened to the song, I Know What You Did Last Summer by Shawn Mendes, to determine the melody. I then notated it on Noteflight to the best of my ability. After that I listened some more and tried to add harmony and the rhythmic portion of the drums. Lastly, I added dynamics and articulation to make the piece a little more interesting.
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Davina MiawOn this page, I will present videos of my playing, concerts, and original compositions. Archives
November 2019
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