Top 5 assignments in music school
- amoghdwivedi
- Sep 12, 2024
- 11 min read
Updated: Jan 4
You are probably aware of the fact that I went to a modest music school called Berklee College of Music, named after the founder's son: Berk, Lee. I had a good time, and there were plenty of moments of inspiration. Here are my favorite assignments, which were at the very least fun, but also enriching in one way or another.
no 5. Foley Project, Digital Audio and Production
excerpt was till 2:00. Hmm… virtual AI companions… I wonder…
Foley refers to the act of recording and inserting sounds for film/media after all the footage has been shot. For instance, you will be unable to setup a microphone to capture footstep sounds in a chase scene, since you need to get a microphone somewhat close to the footsteps, and having a literal microphone next to someone's shoes is no doubt going to ruin many shots. So, these types of sounds are added after recording, in the studio. Foley artists will often look at footage that is already shot and proceed to sync sounds to picture by performing the relevant actions you see on screen. In addition to footsteps, they may reproduce running steps, jumping sounds, falling to the floor sounds, among less exotic sounds such as the gentle "thud" of a mug being placed on a table.
My project partner and I did the foley sounds for a scene from Blade Runner 2049. This involved making a note of every required sound – called an asset list - we saw in the muted video file. These included sounds from walking, the kitchen, running water, and so on. Once we had organized said list of sounds and figured out what objects we needed to accomplish the task, we booked a studio session and went to work. In addition to the studio session, we additionally recorded the sounds of boiling water and other such things at my project partner's apartment since it would have been awkward/impermissible to setup a kitchen/bathroom at the Berklee studios.
The assignment was fun because for once in my academic career I was moving (besides that one dance class I took, but let’s not discuss that). Physical activity is just kind of fun and it felt good even to mimic footstep sounds accurately to film. Additionally, it forced me to get really organized, since studio time is basically limited, and you cannot afford to waste time preparing things you should have done before your session. I like to think I even make asset lists for my compositions now, it’s a great way to stay organized. Foley artists probably have the most fun job in the world.
no 4. Lennie Tristano Interview, Contrapuntal Jazz Improv
🕺 🕺 🕺
Contrapuntal Jazz Improv was a course where I developed a lot of pianistic confidence. I entered the course as a meek piano principal and left it in a position where I could start calling myself a humble but aspiring jazz pianist. We usually worked on abstract technical concepts, but there was an assignment in which we had to listen to a Lennie Tristano interview. Tristano is now somewhat of an obscure jazz pianist, but in his heyday in the 1940’s he played alongside people like Charlie Parker (aka. Bird, because his favorite animal was indeed an octopus with seven limbs), the key innovator associated with bebop, a jazz idiom which was seminal to many musical offshoots in the genre. Tristano himself was a key educator to many players, and he was particularly relevant to the course as he was one of the relatively few jazz pianists in history who played a walking bassline- think the dum-dum-dum-dum plucks of the double bass in jazz being mimicked by a pianist’s left hand.
The interview itself conducted over a telephone call in the '70s, and was this mostly corrupted audio recording which was probably uncut and felt like a voice memo. In the interview, Tristano spoke of many figures in jazz during the 1940’s, but mostly of Bird and his genius. He viewed him as an underappreciated figure who was disproportionately acknowledged for his nightclub entertainer status as opposed to his true musical genius. In addition, Tristano believed that he himself was an original voice in the movement, unlike many others at the time who merely tried to copy what Bird was doing. The most controversial thing Tristano said in the interview was to call Thelonious Monk the dumbest pianist he ever heard.
As someone who enjoys history and all the questions it can make you ask, the assignment was quite engaging for me. This was one of those rare occurrences where I could view musicians as human beings who had opinions, values, histories, and relationships, as opposed to solely generators of sounds and music alongside the occasional quirky quote immortalized in lore. It made me think harder about what kind of musician I wanted to be, what opinions I had, what kind of personality I had, etc., and it made me get my head out of the theory books enough to try to see the bigger picture.
There was also something special about listening to that corrupted 40-minute audio recording, because I really had to pay attention to it, and all that patience made me hallucinate and feel as if I was in the room with Tristano himself. In today’s world it feels nice to immerse yourself in long-term content.
no 3. My Bildungsroman, EP-491
who's that sexy man?! why is the microphone so close to his mouth?!?!
Every EPD student anticipates the notorious EP-491 project, which is the major’s capstone project. The project is unique in that there are no particular requirements, and the student can determine their own project goals. Even though the student signs up for a section for 491 like other courses and works with a professor, all 491’s are going to be largely self-directed and self-motivated.
Some examples of a 491 project include a 3-song EP in an electronic style, a demo reel that showcases sound-design/game-audio skills, building a digital instrument, etc. Since the 491 can only be taken as your last EPD course, it can be said that there is a certain expectation for the student to be somewhat mature and have gone through enough rigorous E-Music training to a point where they are aware of their strengths/weaknesses, likes/dislikes.
I was motivated enough to commit to working in the coding language Max/MSP for my capstone project- I wanted to make 3 compositions solely in Max. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but basically, it was supposed to be an intersection of computer geekiness and musical composition. There was something about coding music that was flowing well in my veins by that point. In the semesters prior I had taken courses in which I had heard coded music, and it really opened my mind up in many ways. All of a sudden, I was able to control sounds at a very precise level, but I was also able to think of music composition in abstract ways which felt deep and purely conceptual. In a weird way – and I confess I am unable to express this clearly – I felt like I was making music with a psychological/conceptual/abstract vocabulary that transcended music. I hope to talk about it more at some point.
In my final months of high school in 2019, knowing I had been accepted to Berklee and thinking of what my long-term goal was, I only had one major ambition in mind as I braced for my undergraduate experience- to make “thoughtfully composed electronic music”. I had no idea what that meant to me at the time, but I just had a hunch that I would have been good at it, and that I would find it captivating.
Most of my time at Berklee was spent on detours that were not at all related to this long-term goal, and I only got to pursing it to the standard I desired in my very last semester. I feel a deep sense of academic and even life satisfaction when I think of my 491, because I really cared about it and felt satisfied not just with the results but also the daily work I was doing. It was so right.
no 2. Midterm, Advanced Rhythmic Lab
I had saved exactly one elective credit for my piano requirements for my last semester. As a perpetually insecure performer, I told myself I would avoid taking piano courses till I went through some kind of self-learning myself. Since I wasn’t a Performance major and could only take a limited number of piano courses, I couldn’t see the point of being in a piano course doing basic things I could have figured out by myself. And so, I delayed most of my formal piano education and took the time out to figure out many fundamentals by myself in the practice rooms, with the hopes of showing up to more advanced classes with more confidence, even if I showed up later than expected. Advanced Rhythmic Lab was the course that satisfied my last piano requirement.
When musicians think of advanced rhythms, they probably think of weird tuplets in odd time signatures at a fast tempo. This course didn’t deal with odd time signatures till after midterms, and the midterm itself was hardly ‘complex’. Rather, it was a demanding and elaborate exploration and application of quite simple rhythmic language. Imagine two successive quarter notes that start on beat one. Now on the & of one. Now on two, etc. There were many of these rhythms, played with your left hand, and all of them had to be played with a ride cymbal ‘ding ding-a ding ding-a’ pattern with your right hand.
What is worth noting is that we didn’t play these on the piano, but rather with our hands on tables, or drums, etc. I remember recording all 10 exercises on a Sunday morning, I’ve attached only one here. It was hard work even though I had been practicing some of these exercises consistently for weeks. This was the way to acquire improvisational vocabulary: to study small chunks till you internalized them. I felt like an amazing student practicing all of these rhythmic patterns and hits.
Predominantly armchair-musicians such as yours truly often read or listen to something simple and think to ourselves, ‘yeah yeah, I get that’. But do we really? There is a spectrum on which you can convey your understanding of basic musical language. On one end of the spectrum, you are only merely able to recognize musical patterns sitting in comfort. Somewhere down the spectrum you can rehearse the same thing a million times till you have rote memorized it and use muscle memory to play the music. But on the other end of the spectrum, you are able to summon musical ideas with complete ease and fluidity in real time in an improvisational, performance context. Being an armchair-musician is easy in some ways -not always, composing is a different craft, but anyways- because you have plenty of time to realize your musical thoughts. Aspiring to be a fluid, musical improvisor is much harder because you only have the moment in which you are making music to make it work and keep it musically interesting/appropriate. And somewhat paradoxically, it seems that the key to being able to improvise freely is to practice improvisation with constraints and discipline.
The best thing my professor said in that class was, “do it till you own it”. We’ve all heard variations of this theme, that there are no shortcuts, and that nothing is easy. I now try to practice rhythms on a practice pad with drumsticks, which I purchased thanks to my instructor’s recommendation. I have the hunch that I no longer need to try meditation, because I can just practice rhythms instead, because the virtues that come with it, such as developing patience and seeking clarity of thought and execution, will permeate into all aspects of my being. When I practice rhythms, I really feel the depth of music, as if I am acknowledging those easy to experience, but difficult to explain, abstract truisms of the universe we inhabit. Weird.
Honorable Mention: Make a Website, Professional Development Seminar
nice portfolio bruvvv
This universally acclaimed liberal arts course was a bit of an immersion breaker for me. I felt quite comfortable being in school but I was unfortunately reminded that I was basically expected to ‘go out there’ and ‘make it’.
Making a website was a revelatory experience. I made a draft decent enough to turn in sometime in the Fall of ’22, when I hadn’t even made, nor could have imagined making, any of the music I now showcase on my current, completely redesigned website. I also remember turning in an elaborate artist bio and a verbose artist statement. I posted a melancholy comment on the submission, on the now defunct OL- “ironically, I don’t have any work that shows any of this” - believing that my flowery language and self-presentation heavily outweighed my actual work, and I was kind of embarrassed. My professor replied, “don’t worry, the work will come eventually”. That gave me a great deal of comfort at the time, and I am grateful for his kindness in retrospect.
No 1. Idea Box, Private Instruction 4 - Piano
kindly note the lack of arrows and brackets. wait where are the roman numerals?! :(
By the Spring of 2023 I was a sufficiently good academic musician. Nothing I did was quite wrong, and I was doing quite well, I used to think to myself, quietly. But those days I had started pondering on a piece of life advice someone offered me once, which was to never let your passion become your job, lest the passion fades away because of the repetitive, monotonous, quotidian work that comes along with working a job. Indeed, I realized I was acing a lot of music assignments on paper, and that I was working hard, but that's where the story ended. I started thinking about whether I enjoyed music more as a directionless silly kid or as a very, very serious and extremely prodigiously mature young adult. A lot of that changed in my last private instruction course for piano in the form of the “Idea Box” exercise.
The Idea Box had me pick different examples for different musical elements from any genre- 2 chords, 2 melodies, 2 rhythms, etc. I started picking only trite jazz piano examples for all of these and felt boring- I realized how long I been steeped in my own self-imposed this-is-proper-academic-music bubble. But I started to appreciate that the assignment granted me the freedom to pick and choose these examples from literally any kind of music, and I subsequently found the courage to pick a deadmau5 chord progression. deadmau5?!?! I hadn't heard deadmau5 in years! The second part of the assignment had to do with mixing and matching these various elements. The coolest thing I did was to take that deadmau5 progression and play it with a ‘rhythm’ I perceived in a computer music piece by Jean Claude Risset. And as someone who had mildly misguided ideas about jazz and had questionable reasons for studying it, I couldn’t believe I wasn’t even doing jazz anymore- but now the nominal categorization of the music I was making didn’t matter to me, because I felt like I was exercising my basic creativity, and that was far more important.
The assignment – but really, my absolutely amazing professor - provoked me to acknowledge the innate musical preferences within me that had become inert because of school. The idea that students’ aesthetics are subdued at school isn’t necessarily a reflection of all music education, but it was certainly a reflection of the manner in which I had approached it. I thought it was necessary to ‘get educated’, and work on ‘proper’ music things, an attitude which is worth questioning. It's true that being disciplined and being receptive to things that are new and challenging to you can show you perspectives that you would have never found otherwise, but what I didn’t realize in addition to this was that I didn’t have to try to suppress any of my ‘unacademic’ past.
With the assignment, I was forced to think hard about my own network of influences, and I felt reinvigorated with my own creative work. With everything I had learnt with my education, I could also start to break down the things I liked as a youngster and see them in a new light. In my later work, across all my areas of interest, I no longer felt compelled to label my music in a category, or even seek propriety, but decided to have fun instead. It brightened my musical world, which is a big part of my life, forever, and happily ever after. The end.
Riveting read!
excellent