My name is Martin Said and I am Head of Music at Cramlington Learning Village. In this last term we have embarked on a project in Year 7 called Frozen Moments. Students have looked at particularly tense moments from their favourite books. They have then animated a still frame with the illusion of ‘bullet-time’ using Adobe After Effects. To accompany their videos, in music they composed sound-scapes using a combination of found sound, samples, live instrument and VST synthesisers.

The specific Roland technology used during the project were the R-05 digital hand recorders to capture found sound, such as scraping on whiteboards, closing a creaking door etc. We also use the Roland Duo Capture devices as external sound cards and audio interfaces for our networked PCs.

Students found using the R-05 recorders very intuitive, they are used regularly by the older students to record performances in practice rooms, but the immediacy of the devices coupled with their excellent mics and sensitivity and high def audio recording capability meant that the sounds we heard when we brought them back to PCs were excellent representations of the sound that the students first created (this is not always the case with mobile devices such as tablets or phones in my experience).

The Duo capture devices are very easy to set up and operate. We have fairly old PCs in our room so we use ASIO4ALL (free audio software) to deal with any latency issues and help with VST performance. The devices are very straightforward in terms of their interface and students were easily able to plug in microphones to record glockenspiels, or similarly plug in guitars directly.

This combined with the onboard VST instruments meant that students had a wide palette of sounds from which they could draw, to help build tension. We looked at Jaws in some detail to pick apart music devices that could be used to build tension, as well as listening to music from the Japanese movie ‘Kwaidan’ which ha some particularly interesting uses of ‘musique concrete.

We provided a template in the sequencer software (Cubase 6.5 elements) as a starting point to all students, and this was very successful in helping them to cut straight to making music. However on reflection in future I will give students the option of setting up their synths etc. for themselves. Partly, that it is a useful skill to have, and also the use of a template led to some of the compositions sounding very similar as students tended to stick with the default sounds on each synth rather than experimenting.

That said we are very proud of the results and the students really enjoyed the project and using the technology. We had a lot of fun together making the music and parents were very impressed on the exhibition evening, in particular when they had watched the final movies and had a chance to peer behind the scenes as it were. Students took their parents to the music room and showed them how they had created the music using the technology. Some parents were amazed at the apparent complexity, and what our students had achieved in a short space of time.

The full plan for the Frozen Moments project can be downloaded here.

You can see examples of the students’ work in the videos below: