Chromatik and SmartMusic

Chromatik

          I had a lot of fun exploring Chromatik this week. I even told several of my co-workers to look at the website. Chromatik covers a wide variety of music genres, as well as scales and chords. Often it is difficult to choose music that makes everyone in the ensemble happy. The same can be true of choosing songs for private lessons. Chromatik is a great outlet for students, teachers, or any musician regardless of skill level, to search for songs and play along with the sheet music and a recording of the song if needed. Sometimes I have students suggest a song to play for orchestra class all the time. Many times, I cannot locate an orchestra arrangement of the songs. With Chromatik, the students can go online and play the song for themselves.

When I first tried to look at song, made my selection and picked the instrument and nothing happened. Then I realized there was another tab that had to be clicked to retrieve the song. I thought this was a good feature because of being on a free account. The free account only allows the user to access three songs in 24 hours. If you clicked on a song but they did not have the part you wanted, you could back out without being charged a song. Another feature I liked was the video being posted on the part selection page. This allows the user to listen to the song and decide if it is right skill level before you access the sheet music. Being a pianist, there is one feature that I found invaluable, the page turns on its own. As a pianist, you are responsible for turning your own pages when playing in an ensemble. It can be difficult to find spots to turn the page without losing time. Below is a screen shot from Chromatik (2016) of the page turn.

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          I found Chromatik to be user friendly and easy to navigate. You can use Chromatik on a tablet or mobile device as well as a computer or laptop. This is great because it is much easier to put a tablet on a stand than trying to position yourself in front of a computer. Many companies make stands specifically for tablets so they should not fall over and break.

          Chromatic could be used in the classroom as a way to do warmups or scales before rehearsal starts with the middle school orchestra. The scales section has major, minor, pentatonic, blues, and many more types of scales for all the instruments of the orchestra. Students can also use this at home to practice their scales without having to worry about losing a sheet of music. I could also assign a specific song for students to work on at home to make sure they are practicing.

          Overall, I think Chromatik has a lot of potential within the classroom and at home. It can be used to supplement materials at school and for private lessons. Students can use it as a break from practicing their required materials. This can help a student stay motivated. Some students do not want to practice because they want to play popular music. Using Chromatik, they can practice songs of their choosing in-between practicing what is assigned. This will allow their skills to grow faster than if they were only running through the assigned work and stopping, which is what many students due now.

SmartMusic

          SmartMusic has a lot more uses in the classroom and at home than Chromatik does. The only downside is you have to pay to use SmartMusic. The price for students to use SmartMusic is $40 per year. The school system I work in rents certain instruments to students for $40 per year and sometimes parents have a hard time affording the rental fee. To ask parents to pay a total of $80 per year for their student to play may not be feasible in my district. This is not including the cost of the microphone for the instrument either. This might not seem like a lot of money for most people but when you are in a high poverty area, it is a lot of money.

          SmartMusic has a huge repertoire of music for individual instruments as well as ensemble music. Within that repertoire includes exercises that can be modified, scales and arpeggios, and practice tools like a built-in tuner and metronome, see picture below from SmartMusic (2016). These tools allow students to slow down a section of music they are working on and gradually speed the section back up to the indicated tempo.

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               The assessment tools for educators in SmartMusic keeps track of how each student is doing with their assignments at home. When each student completes an assignment, the student then submits the assignment and it gets recorded into the teacher’s gradebook. Using the information in the gradebook, the teacher can adjust the next assignment for each student. For example, student A has received a perfect score on the first three assignments, Student B has scored an 80, 78, and 75 on the first three assignments. The teacher may increase the difficulty of the next assignment for student A and the teacher may decrease the difficulty of the next assignment for student B. This allows each student to move at a level that is appropriate for them. The teacher can also create custom rubrics for each assignment to focus on a particular skill.

          SmartMusic could be used within the classroom by having student take a playing test in a practice room while the teacher conducts a rehearsal in the main classroom. This way every student is involved in an activity while waiting their turn to take their test. Another example is when you are working on a particular ensemble selection and the students are having trouble with their entrances. The teacher can play a recording of the selection then assign that section of the song for homework using SmartMusic. At home, the student can play along with the accompaniment track to work on where the entrance is. The student can also use the metronome feature and slow down the song and work out their part in a slower tempo then bring it back up.

          Both Chromatik and SmartMusic have great potential within the classroom and at home. They both provide opportunity to practice with an accompaniment track. I think SmartMusic has more to offer than Chromatik but for the price, I am not sure it will be feasible for everyone to use. SmartMusic helps you out by showing fingerings and what notes you are playing correct and what notes are wrong, see picture below from SmartMusic (2016). Chromatik provides the sheet music and a YouTube recording to play with. Because it is a YouTube recording, you cannot remove the melody like that you are playing. Together, I think they can work very well in keeping students motivated and excited to practice.

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1. Chromatik (2016) Retrieved from:

https://www.chromatik.com/presentations/54614841ecc7b83245384188/score_viewer

2. SmartMusic (2016) Retrieved from:

http://www.smartmusic.com/products/educators/features-and-benefits/

3. SmartMusic (2016) Retrieved from: http://www.smartmusic.com/products/students/

PLN W4 Reflection

Thinking about the reading this week shows the importance of building a good foundation and different ways to achieve that. Playing an instrument involves the use of psychomotor skills, that is skills that require both motor skills and perceptual skills. In order to for psychomotor skills to become automatic, the skill must be practiced. Learning how to properly handle the instrument is very important when beginning to pay an instrument. Also, keeping students motivated to practice at home can be difficult for various reasons. Some students live in apartments where the sound bothers the neighbors, or the student is involved in many afterschool activities. Whatever the reason, technology can be a useful tool in keeping students motivated to practice at home.

When first beginning lessons, the focus is on proper handling of the instrument. Modeling is important part of learning how to handle the instrument properly because, “motor learning can take place when people watch and listen without actually engaging in the motor skill” (Bauer, 2014). During the first few lessons, I focus on modeling and teaching the students how to hold their instruments and play them with proper posture. Technology is helpful with this. I show videos of people who display proper playing techniques as well as videos of improper playing techniques. While each video is playing, I ask them several questions about the person playing the instrument. I ask questions like is the performer playing with proper technique? If yes, why? If not, what is the performer doing wrong? How can it be fixed? I am always amazed at how much the students pick out in the videos and the suggestions the students come up with.

Keeping students motivated to practice is always an issue. At first, the students are enthusiastic about playing and practice a bunch. After about a month, the reality sets in and the students realize that playing an instrument requires hard work and dedication. However, there are always a few students who will stay self-motivated and will not need extra encouragement to practice. Technology can help with keeping students motivated to practice at home. Many method books have been coming with CD’s with accompaniment tracks for students to play along with at home. The only down side of playing with a CD is you cannot control the tempo. There are programs like Band-in-a-Box or SmartMusic where you can create an accompaniment track and share it with your students. When the student is at home, they can choose the tempo in order to master the song. Another benefit of these programs is you can create different practice assignment for students. Other programs like Chromatik and SmartMusic have access to various genres of music. Students can search for some of their favorite popular songs and lay them at home.

When working with ensembles, using programs like Audacity can help provide feedback to the entire ensemble. You can record a section of a rehearsal then play it back to the students. They can critique their performance to see what they are doing wrong and what they are doing correct. This can help with show improvement over time as well. I like to record my middle school students at the beginning of a concert cycle. I have the students sight-read a section of a song. I record the same section about halfway through the concert cycle. I then play for the students the first recording followed by the second recording and have the students compare and contrast their performances. I then record them about two weeks before the concert in preparation for the concert. At this point, I only play this recording to fine-tune the details before the concert. There are three concert cycles per year. Each concert is recorded by the school’s TV studio. I receive a copy of the concert about three days after it is recorded and show it to my students. We critique the performance and design a plan to make the next concert even better. Towards the end of the school year, I play back the first recording of the school year so they can see how far they come. I typically have to use my cell phone to record the students due to lack of technology in my classroom. I am hoping in the future I can add more technology to my lessons.

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

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

PLNW3 Music Composition

Teaching music composition is a music standard that is often overlooked because of the difficulty and complexity of the task. When I first started teaching, my position was elementary general music K-12. Written composition did not start until third grade. In the third grade, students would start leaning about written notation and begin playing the recorder. Student would write short compositions based on the notes they were learning on the recording. Ten years later, many of the schools have upgraded their technology where there are now computer labs in every elementary school and some schools have music rooms with computers in them. Now students start composing on the computer using different music composition programs or notation programs.

Music composition is important for all students to learn regardless if they are in general music or in instrumental music. Through the act of composing, students are allowed to be creative and take creative risks. When the students write out their compositions on paper, they would have to audiate or manually reproduce what they had written on their recorder or another instrument. Now when they use the computers, they receive feedback instantly simply by clicking the playback button. In general music, teachers experiment with notation software and Digital Audio Workstations or DAWs. Depending on what the class is focusing on, depends on what type of program the teacher decides to use. I believe you can learn something from using both types of music composition programs. Using notation programs for composition helps to reinforce the names of pitches, the location on the staff, the rhythms of these notes and more. Using sequencing software, you do not have worry about the note placement, you only need to like what you hear, how to format different sections of a song, layering rhythms and much more.

One important advantage with using computers to compose music is that students do not have to stand in front of their class and perform their composition. Not every student likes to perform in front of their classmates. If they are using a computer, the students only have to click play. This makes those students who are uncomfortable with performing at ease knowing they do not have to sing or play in front of their peers. Even though I make my students play their instruments by themselves when we are working on an orchestra selection, they are still afraid to play their own composition by themselves. I give each student an option of playing the composition themselves or using the playback feature. It is also easier for students to comment on each other’s compositions and make changes instantly. When working in a group, it is much easier quickly input one person’s idea into the program, listen to the segment of music, and make whatever changes are necessary all within a few minutes. If students were handwriting their compositions, they would have to physically play or sing the different parts, which can take a long time to complete.

When using computer software or writing out a composition on manuscript paper, it is important for the teacher to set the parameters or constraints on the project so the students do not get overwhelmed. Start with a small project that is appropriate for the students’ knowledge base, and gradually pass more freedom of choice in composing over to the students (Bauer, p. 61). Giving student’s a little bit more control each time by giving them a different set of instructions for the next class or project. This is the same idea as scaffolding any other type of lesson. By scaffolding composition projects, students learn the basics first and spend time working on the basics. After the student gains a good foundation then they can explore more about composing and not be worried about making a mistake with the basics.

Bauer, W. I. (2014). Music learning today digital pedagogy for creating performing

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