On the 18th of January, 2024. SCIE held the first academic communication activity with the students who graduated from SCIE as well in 2022. This activity is mainly focused on music composing majors. The topic is about sharing composed projects and introducing the diversity area in the music field.
The sharer is Jason, who is currently studying computer music major at Johns Hopkins University Peabody Conservatory. It is because the features of a computer music major are special it requires cross-subject knowledge and creative skill, and the topics were quite different from conventional classical music. Instead, he talked about lots of electronic music including avant-garde and experimental music.
As a listener during the lesson, this lesson gave me many impressive thoughts and inspirations. With Ms. Molly who is the head of music, Jason wore plain grey and it was quite suitable to have a huge guitar box on his back, as he is very tall. He walked in quietly and quickly, put down his guitar confidently, turned on the computer, smiled and greeted each one of our classmates.
The first topic concerns music elements, which can be divided into melody, chord progression and rhythm. Then, Jason talked about DAWs files. For the students who practice classical music more, these brand-new electronic files are exactly a brand-new world. During that time, Jason couldn’t wait to show us one of the projects he had done already. This project is quite simple, that only contains a group of notes changing the pitch to a higher one gradually. On the screen, those wave diagrams that look like cardiograms are exactly the new faces of notes after altering their pitch, velocity, timbre and duration properties of them. This is also the part that made me the most impressive. Every single note which was carefully defined before is now getting rid of the original chain of the old definition. This makes an entire revolution. It is probably the unique charm of computer music. It is an innovation that could not be replaced by classical music. This short project refreshed my old cognition of electronic music, which is extremely precious.
At the end of the lesson, Jason improvised lyrics and a song played by himself with his guitar. He recorded this on Garage Band. Despite that the process may seem not that difficult, I felt a strong, pure passion and enthusiasm when he wrote his song. It was obvious to see the excitement when he was composing. It was obvious to see his happiness when he completed every part of the melody. There was one remarkable moment. When he took out his guitar, which is wonderful in both wood and shapes, he said without thinking: “It is my favourite guitar, you know, and I really love it!” He was carefully taking care of what he loved. Such pure passion remains valuable for us to learn, after all, it is the source of power that promotes us forward in the future, with study and no giving up.
Finally, thanks a lot to Jason for sharing such “secret” ideas with classmates. In spite of the short time, we only had during the lesson, the things discussed were memorable. Jason led us to a completely new aspect of music successfully, and we have to explore it further by ourselves.
In these four years, many elder students talked to me and answered my questions on my way up to the university. They gave me lots of help. When I shared the method of composing music, I could feel the desire of students to know the new knowledge, as well as the passion and confusion for university application. I get to know what types of pieces the universities like and other requirements more directly. I think I just did a successful job of passing the ‘secret’ idea to the younger classmates:)
