ELEVATOR PITCHES AND OTHER STUFF (Week 9)

In the Seminar we discussed our elevator pitches!! We went around the class discussing what we will be doing for our projects.

I have decided to do an individual live looping performance using Ableton Live. I will record in samples, and play them on my Novation Launchpad Pro, including playing drum patterns. I have owned a Launchpad for a few years now but never really known where to start and how it works, so it's been sitting in a drawer all this time. I think this is the perfect opportunity to explore it and hopefully I will be skilled enough to perform with it by the end of the semester.

I will also link this up to my Novation Launchkey 49; I am a bit more familiar with this one. I will use the Launchkey to play notes, and can MIDI map effects to the faders and knobs. I will probably use a software plugin for synthesis.

I would like to learn how both devices can work together through looping on Ableton Live and I think this is indeed possible. I would also like to loop my vocals too; I'm not sure completely how it would work yet, but this is the perfect time to begin experimenting!

Once we had discussed our elevator pitches, we talked a little about the HSC Music syllabus in schools. Music 2 makes up 0.9% of the whole HSC cohort and the majority of music students do Music 1.

James told us two ideas to try and fight for keeping Music 2 in schools:

School of thought #1)

• HSC syllabus is nearly 20 years old, and it's time to update it.

• Creating more diversity (not all about dead white males)

• For example, a HSC major work could be creating electroacoustic work without scores

School of thought #2)

• Because Music 1 includes popular music and cultures (being simplistic) and Music 2 focusses on ‘art music’ which is complex - therefore better for brains

• James then told us that Music 1 scales down, and Music 2 doesn’t scale down = so NESA agrees that Music 1 is simplistic. A mark of 85 could scale down to a mark of 62 in Music 1.

Looking forward to see what next week brings!