Travis here. I’ve been having a blast working with the girls at Girls Inc. in Rapid City, South Dakota. We’ve been working with a super neat app called Madpad that is helping us think about our everyday world as a musical place. What Madpad, developed by Smule, allows us to do is take video recordings of cool sounds we find (a three-hole punch, a faucet turning on, voices, dice rolling around in Tupperware… you dream it!) and make music from them.
Music is made with instruments, and instruments are just different ways of accessing sounds. Think about it. A guitar has the same notes that a clarinet has but with a different range of pitches as well as a different sound color, or timbre for those privy to music jargon. Still the difference between the two instruments is not insignificant! The way that each instrument sounds changes the way it fits into a song, and the way that each instrument is built alters the technique required to access these notes, all of which radically changes what sorts of parts come naturally to the musician and what musical phrases are more difficult or even impossible to play.
Lets take my viola and keyboard as an example. Both instruments can play this bit of music called a “chromatic scale,” also known as “all the notes” in the Western Scale,
but only a piano could play ten of those notes at once. The reason for this is simple but important: if you’re a pianist with ten fingers you can press ten different keys, while if you’re a violist you might be able to fake a four note “chord” by bowing it really quickly across all four of your strings, but you can’t do any more than that– you’ve got only one bow arm and no more strings. But fear not violists! With a good bow arm you can hold out a note for as long as your arm holds up, whereas a pianist has got to strike the keys again and again to keep up with you. So with these attributes and many more in mind, the musician can choose wisely which instruments would be best suited for each part.
All this to say that the girls and I have been making our own instruments by finding awesome sounds from around Ms. Jess’s science lab. Not just any set of sounds will do though! We have to be smart about it; we have to be musical. The girls need to find a proper mixture of high, low, long, short, quiet, loud, etc… sounds to build their instruments with a diverse enough palette to keep up with the musical ideas in their heads. With Madpad we are able to group these sounds onto one convenient surface (with a super fun visual component might I add!) and trigger the sounds with our two hands rather than coordinate an orchestra of girls tossing, tapping, rolling, pulling, banging, shouting, and scratching things around the room.
On the first day of our three day workshop the girls explored their surroundings together in search of awesome sounds and wrote a song together as a ten piece band called The Smart Strong and Bold band. On the second day, the girls paired off into their own two piece bands and concentrated on the design of their instruments. Next week, I can’t wait to watch them as they make their own songs and music videos using the sounds they found.
I’ll be sure to keep you all updated on what they come up with, but in the meantime, why don’t you check out the song the girls and I made together on day 1.
Happy Listening!
“Girls Inc.” –By The Smart, Strong, and Bold Band
