Abstract
Interdisciplinary arts education in music has often included connective lines toward drama, dance, and visual arts. This article will suggest five different projects that could be used to link music to video in order to develop media arts and music interdisciplinary connections.
Whenever I need to rejuvenate my educational soul, I will often turn to Elliot Eisner. He reminds me of the purpose of arts in education in this turbulent political education landscape. Recently, I ran across this quote: The arts inform as well as stimulate, they challenge as well as satisfy. Their location is not limited to galleries, concert halls and theatres. Their home can be found wherever humans chose to have attentive and vita intercourse with life itself. This is, perhaps, the largest lesson that the arts in education can teach, the lesson that life itself can be led as a work of art. In so doing the maker himself or herself is remade. The remaking, this re-creation is at the heart of the process of education. (Eisner, 1998, p. 56)
Eisner (1998) reminds us of the ever-fluid nature of art. Art is constantly finding new venues and spaces to exist within. Eisner, himself a visual art educator, often wrote about various arts as having more in common than different. In his work Arts and the Creation of the Mind, Eisner spoke about similar desired outcomes among all art forms: The arts, as vehicles through which such inscriptions occur, enable us to inspect more carefully our own ideas, whether those ideas emerge in the form of language, music, or vision. The works we create speak back to us, and we become in their presence a part of a conversation that enables us to “see what we have said. (Eisner, 2002, p. 11)
Beginning with the 1994 National Standards in Music and continuing with the 2014 National Art Standards, the expectation is that all music educators make connections between music and the other arts (MENC Task Force for National Standards in the Arts, & Music Educators National Conference, 1994; National Association for Music Education, 2014). I have done collaboration projects with other music teachers, art teachers, dance teachers, and drama teachers. However, there is another art form that music teachers might consider for interdisciplinary connections: media arts. This can include photography, video, as well as video games. Art, drama, and dance seem like natural connection points for the music curriculum. However, media arts, specifically video, can also be a powerful discipline to connect to music.
“But I Teach Music, Not Media Arts!”
There are ways to do projects with video and music without concerning yourself with the video-making process. The first option would be to align music lesson plans with the media arts class. Media arts teachers usually create music or import music for their assignments as it is necessary for a complete video project. Suggesting a project that intersects music and media arts to the media arts teacher might be well received. In this scenario, the media arts class creates the video and the music class creates the sound.
However, this may not be an option in all settings. Depending on schedule and teacher interest, media arts interdisciplinary work might not be an available option. In addition, these kinds of classes are not universally offered in every school. If you are not yet comfortable or do not feel you can dedicate the time with students for them to create their own video in addition to a composed soundtrack, there is another option. In this scenario, the teacher creates the video and the students create the sound. Similar to the previous situation, the students’ responsibility does not include video creation but is only to sync sound to video. To minimize teacher workload, you can create a single video, and all students can create music to the same visual. This in itself is an interesting exploration for students. Students are often fascinated by different music creations despite the initial stimulus being the same. Our brains are wonderfully creative, and different brains rarely follow the same creative line of thought.
But you might be surprised how interesting and musical it can be for music students to also create a video project along with the soundscape. While students might have the same trepidation as the teacher for creating video, when students work in teams or at least with a partner, given the current state of technology with video recording and video editing, the experience of creating and editing video is remarkably accessible. At the end of this article I will explore some technical considerations, but first I will share five potential projects for video and music intersections.
Project 1: Remade Movie Trailer
In this kind of music exploration, the video is traditionally already available. The objective is to create music that is of the opposite mood of the original trailer. One of the most famous versions of this kind of video is Scary Mary Poppins (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T5_0AGdFic). In this remade trailer, the music from the original movie is rearranged to make the movie appear to be a horror story rather than a beloved children’s tale. I suggest that music teachers either use small samples from other’s music works (10 seconds or less) and credit the work or, to avoid copyright issues all together, encourage students to create original music works. The creators may choose to reedit the original trailer video to appease the intention of the new trailer.
Project 2: Stop Animation
In stop animation, an object or series of objects are moved very slightly over time. Rather than video recording the image, a photo of the scene is taken and then placed together and sped up to give the illusion that the objects are moving on their own. To be most effective, the camera does not move in stop animation. The objects move around the camera. Music is then created to accompany the created video. An example of stop animation can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpWM0FNPZSs. This prevalent art form is very accessible for students. To be the most successful, students should first plan their ideas in a storyboard. In a storyboard, the students plan their “story” with a clear beginning, middle, and end. This production phase should detail what objects they will need and consider both how the objects will move through space and where the camera will be placed to be most effective. Once a storyboard is created, the students can create their video and then finish the process by adding accompanying music that best suits the nature of their video.
Project 3: Silent Film
One of my favorite video projects I have ever done with students was silent films. The idea was that a fable by Aesop would be told only through body actions, facial expressions, and props. No dialogue would be present in the final production, like the original silent films. Once the idea was storyboarded, recorded, and edited, then the students would create music to accompany and help the viewer better understand the story. There should be music to relate to the plot. During the exposition, the music should set the introductory tone. Once the rising action begins, the music should have some intensity. The peak of the story and the music should intersect for a climactic moment. There is also an opportunity to collaborate with the language arts teacher as well as media arts as you discuss dramatic plot lines (exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and dénouement) as part of this process.
Project 4: “Draw My Life”
This is a popular kind of video done with YouTubers (active creators in the YouTube community) in which a creator narrates a script that articulates a part of his or her life that the creator would like to share. In this project, the script is created first. Once the script is articulated, the video creator plans how each idea will be illustrated and then shoots video accordingly. For the drawing, it does not matter how long the drawing takes as the video will later be sped up to match with the recorded audio of the script. Record the audio and sync the audio with the video by adjusting the video speed in a video-editing program. Finally, music can be created that appropriately accompanies the story. Examples of “draw my life” videos can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSWlpkp3rE, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqspxvJB9LI. I have also created a video in this style. Rather than articulating my entire life, I chose to illustrate a typical path I have seen in undergraduate music education students: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Y3cVblRgg.
Project 5: Music Video
The last and perhaps most obvious way to combine video music would be to create a music video, such as is created for popular music artists for MTV, VH1, or more commonly in today’s world, YouTube. Unlike the other projects previously cited, with a music video the music would come first. Students should create a work of music and record it. It can be instrumental or include words; either is appropriate. Once the recorded audio is established, students should brainstorm possible video ideas to accompany the music. They can be an explicit story that is derived from the lyrics or it can be more abstract. View various music videos online to gather ideas. Some videos have absolutely nothing to do with the music! This is all part of creative license. The most important thing is to have a storyboard that is well planned. Once the storyboard is established, the video shoot should begin. One thing the video creators should consider is if they wish to lip-sync with the recorded audio. This is common in videos, but it takes extra savvy to get synced up in postproduction. No matter what you decide to do with your video story, you should collect more video than you think you will use in the end. Lots of footage, with much of it going unused, will be important for the final product. Finally combine the video and make creative decisions to pair the video with the music. Have fun! This is the exciting part!
Technical Considerations
No matter what kind of devices your school owns, there are some software options for every system. Macs, PCs, Chromebooks, iPads, or other tablet devices—these kinds of projects can be done on any platform. Depending on the number of students in your class and size of your groups, you will need to consider the number of devices you would need and the amount of days. When I have engaged in these projects, I would use around 5 to 6 devices with a class of 25 to 30 students. The project itself would last anywhere from 3 to 14 days depending on the intricacy level of the project and if we were balancing other projects at the same time.
In the past, using cameras and manipulating video has been difficult to understand, difficult to import, difficult to edit, and just generally difficult. Around the innovation of Flip cameras and phones with high-definition video, this began to change and has since been a much more accessible process (Pogue, 2011). More important, retrieving the video and importing it to editing software have also been simplified. If purchasing another device is not possible, most tablets and computers offer ways to record video. It is also becoming increasingly likely that students carry around a device (phone) that would have a high-quality video-recording feature.
When wishing to record live audio there are good, better, and best options available. While certainly not sophisticated, most computers and mobile devices have an option to record audio with an external microphone. The recording quality is not high, but it gives students an initial exploration of how to record audio. USB microphones are an easy upgrade from external microphones on computers or mobile devices. Best of all would be high-quality recording microphones with an XLR cable input plugged into a preamp device that is then connected to the computer. While the quality is improved moving to a USB microphone or an XLR microphone with preamp, the levels of complication to set up the equipment into the computer and the software is also increased.
Final technical considerations would be editing software for both audio and video. Table 1 shows some of the various programs available for both forms of media editing. After creating comes sharing. YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/) and Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/) are the top sites for streaming digital video; however, there are also more school-friendly sites available, such as SchoolTube (http://www.schooltube.com/) and TeacherTube (http://www.teachertube.com/).
Audio and Video Editing Software Programs.
You can have the fanciest of the fanciest equipment, but most of the time these projects are not about creating a perfect technical experience. It is about a creative exploration that uses some tech in the process. If you do not have the best equipment when you first explore some of these projects, it is fine. Start with simple equipment, see how it works, and then look for ways to get more sophisticated equipment if you find that both you and your students value this kind of music making.
Final Thoughts
When I first attempted music and video creativity projects with students, I had no idea that the Internet was on the cusp of exploding with homemade projects shared via YouTube, Vimeo, and other user-uploaded video-streaming sites. All I knew is that the world where students were experiencing music often had a visual connected as well. By sharing this experience inside the music classroom, I have validated what they have already noticed about music and storytelling, given them an opportunity to grow their ideas about music, and stretched their creativity chops as a musician. In addition, we explored the idea that there is no single way or medium to express an artistic idea. As Elliot Eisner (2002) put it: The arts teach children that their personal signature is important and that answers to questions and solutions to problems need not be identical. There is, in the arts, more than one interpretation to a musical score, more than one way to describe a painting or a sculpture, more than one appropriate form for a dance performance, more than one meaning for a poetic rendering of a person or a situation. In the arts diversity and variability are made central. This is one lesson that education can learn from the arts. (p. 97)
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.