Soundcloud is cool!

My students have uploaded their arch form compositions onto their own Soundcloud Accounts.  After the students liked their accounts to mine, we spent the class period sharing and evaluating the pieces to develop critical skills.

This was most valuable in helping the students examine what makes a good composition and what might be less successful techniques for expressing their musical intent.  We will jump right back into composition with a piece about cars.  I will cut

down the timeline to about 4 days from start to finish since they have acquired the necessary skills to create the loops from scratch.

I also had the students download the free Soundcloud app for iPhone/iPod and Android.  This wonderful app allows you to record, geotag, and upload recordings from your mobile device onto your Soundcloud account.  This allows almost anyone to use Soundcloud for capturing sounds much like Flickr or Picasa lets you deal with images.  Very exciting!

Some of the best features of Soundcloud include the ability to store any size file online, embed customizable players into wikis and blogs, and the social networking connectivity of the site.  Like many sites, Soundcloud offers their services for free up to two hours of storage.

I think I will have the kids make simple movie versions of their songs to host on our YouTube channel since there is no limit to how much we can put there.