I have long felt that investigating how certain musical techniques are used by composers to connect us emotionally to a scene also makes us more likely to spot when someone is attempting to manipulate us emotionally. This sensitivity to the use of artifice makes us more informed witnesses to art, better consumers of advertising and more logical citizens.
This unit was the result of both my desire to mold more demanding consumers of popular art and a music technology teacher who wanted to increase the rigor in his music technology class.
Qualitative judgments about aesthetics are difficult. While I don’t believe we can turn middle school students into connoisseurs of fine art with one unit, I do believe that asking students to evaluate quality and discuss something often viewed as subjective gives teachers and students key insight that do not show up otherwise. Overall I was pleased with the process as much as the final product. Hearing students make deliberate choices where before they might well have believed the artists was simply capricious in nature is enlightening. More than once I heard a student connect a technique in a song, game or movie that they loved to the activity they were engaged in. I would say a huge amount of the credit goes to our music technology teacher whose class I “borrowed”. If I was going to do it again, I would leave off the video creation aspect entirely, as we ended up running out of time anyway, and use the extra time to focus more on the soundtrack. Many students spent too much time on the video and had to be given the pre-made videos to keep them on track which required a change of plans for their group. Of course, I suppose this was a lesson of a sort for them as well.
The main advice I would have for another teacher trying to implement this would be to have a strong passion for the subject or pass entirely. The early success of the project hinged upon their teacher’s enthusiasm and depth of examples. This was not a subject most of the students had an identifiable interest in. The interest only grew out of the application and discovery of how widespread many of these compositional devices are in use. The interesting thing was how many places they began to identify music and sound cues in various media being used to manipulate or communicate.
Please excuse the rough edit where I spliced in a portion of the training video between the introduction and my closing thought.