Community Project - Session Planner

Project Name: Digital Creative Sounds

Facilitator (your name): Stewart McLean
Date: 14/03/16
Times of Session: 16:00-18:00
Session no: 5
Project Supervisor/Gatekeeper: Lesley Crawford
Your main objective for this session:
Participants will listen to a wide range of digital based music
Participants will be given the opportunity create a lead melody
on the synthesiser over a looped bass line we created in our
previous lesson.
Planned Activities for this session:

Participants will listen to a wide variety of digital music from

different genres, including: trance, drum n bass, and trip hop.
Participants will be able to openly discuss what they
liked/disliked about various sounds within the demonstrated
music.
Participants will work with Lesley and I, creating melody lines
over the synthesiser bass loops.
Participants will get a chance to collaborate and present the
melodies they created.

How did it go reflecting on this?

This session went fairly well, including a mixture of social
interaction, participation and practical creativity. I felt it beneficial to
spend a bit of time listening to various styles of digital based music
at the beginning of the lesson. The activity enabled a good level of
group collaboration among participants, and a fantastic level of
enthusiasm and inspiration when listening to such pieces. We also
felt it necessary to extend the workshop to two hours per session,
which enabled the workshop to feel less rushed and gave

participants more time to experiment with various sounds. I do feel

there could have been a bit more group collaboration within the
melody creation section of the workshop, however this will become
a greater feature when we start bringing all the created loop pieces
together.

The level of engagement and/or achievement by participants:

There was a good level of engagement among participants within
this session. Participants were able to freely discuss what they
liked/disliked about the song examples played at the beginning of
the lessons, which helped them bond with each other, as many of
them discovered their similar interest in music. At the end
participants were able to talk about how they created their melody
by presenting it to the rest of the class.

Feedback/observations and any pointers to enhance or improve the

next session:
Although the session was a success, I'd like to involve more group
activities during the creation process of the melodies. It is difficult to
do this, due to the synthesisers being plugged in with headphones,
however if we had a break during the middle of this activity just to
collaborate more as a group, or even if we included an improvisation
section where each participant got a few minutes to freely play over
a looped track in turns.