2nd) Composition

Composition 

It is common sense that students who learn and perform music need to be able to read and annotate notes on a score. It is also a given fact these composition students are expected to learn the theories of good composing skills and the structural formulation of music. This will be obviously a challenge to a beginner in composing a well-structured composition without sufficient efficient and practice. The introduction of ICT in the composition classroom will be able to aid beginners in learning and increasing the efficiency in their music composition. As Katerine S. Cennamo, John D. Ross and Peggy A. Ertmer (2010) stated, “Multimedia software – both stand-alone and online – is available to support this early music development, with some designed specifically to address the national music standards." There are numerous websites available to provide musical games and activities for young children and beginners, e.g. Morton Subotnick’s Creating Music, Kids Music Stage, and Music Games. Students can enhance their musical knowledge such as musical instruments, forms, structure, and repertoire by playing such games. 

“GarageBand””, a software easily accessible by many, can also help students in developing their composing skills. GarageBand is a popular software provided by Mac OS X and iOS and is well known to many music students. This application provides an opportunity for users to create music irregardless of their musical backgrounds. The description of this software by Dan Schmit (2011)– GarageBand software turns your Mac into a recording studio. It includes hundreds of instruments and thousands of pre-recorded sound loops that can be adjusted and enhanced to create original songs. The musically inclined can add their own guitar, keyboard, and vocal tracks.

Another example of well-accepted software in music education is “Sibelius”, which has helped many students in developing their composition skill. As Katerine S. Cennamo, John D. Ross and Peggy A. Ertmer (2010) stated, “For a complete lesson resource, packages from Sibelius (e.g., Groovy Music, Starclass) contain lesson plans, recordings, and related resources for helping young students learn about music notation and complete developmentally appropriate compositions and arrangements.” Sibelius has helped many students in composing more efficiently and enables students to listen to their composition while composing concurrently. 

I have asked my mentor’s opinion regarding the differences between GarageBand and Sibelius and according to her, GarageBand is suitable and appeals more to young beginners. This is because students only need to choose the instruments and different genre of music that has already been provided by GarageBand, rearrange the order of the instruments and the staff notation will appear at the bottom of the page. On the other hand, Sibelius is more suitable for advance learners because students need to apply notes on the staff notation and arrange the desired form, structure, and tempo of their music on Sibelius.

References:

1.       Cennamo K. S., Ross J. D. and Ertmer P.A. (2010), Technology Integration for Meaningful Classroom Use: A Standards – Based Approach, Wadsworth Cengage Learning, USA. Pg 473- 486.

2.       Dan Schmit (2011), Atomic Learning: GarageBand, http://www.atomiclearning.com/garageband