Using Technology to Empower Students’ Musical Creativity

As part of the curriculum in Music Class, students learn all about reading, writing and transcribing music. These skills help students to become well rounded musicians with a true appreciation for all faucets of music. Mr. Aquino, Calais’s Music Teacher, teaches his students the critical foundations necessary for becoming musicians in lots of fun and innovative ways.

In a recent lesson on transcribing music, Mr. Aquino took an interactive approach with the students from Mrs. Davies class. Using an online tool called Beepbox he empowered the students to closely examine pieces of music and to create their own. BeepBox is an online tool for sketching and sharing chiptune melodies or synthesized electronic music. Tools like Beepbox can be super helpful for tuning your ear and transcribing music. The students used it to slow down and pick apart music samples in order to more easily hear the detail and compose unique sounds of their own.

Aside from the hands-on lesson in musical self-expression and exposure to audio technology learning to transcribe music has a lot of benefits for music students and full fledged musicians. These benefits include helping musicians to:

remember a piece they may be writing
confirm that they are actually hearing what they think they may be hearing in a composition
share musical ideas with other musicians
practice expressing your music through writing and explore how it relates to your instrument and musical imagination

You can listen to the musical styling of Mrs. Davies’s class below: