Some students composed music for the assignment. Falat and Cleveland played guitar and recorded it for their group's project. Other groups used prerecorded music and sound effects available on the music technology lab's computers. They layered the sound with vocal recordings of the poems.
Pinto said that combining classes "put two totally different groups of students in the same room." Some teams used rap or rock music, others had a folk style.
English student Leigh Stanislaus, 16, worked with Kehe, Falat and Cleveland.
"I liked how they combined the classes so we got to experience the Music Tech stuff," said Stanislaus. "They had a lot of different programs on the computer. ... The Music Tech people can read notes and do a lot of stuff most people can't do."
With two Music Technology students per group, Perry said, the assignment "forces them to know what they're talking about because they're the tech experts in their group."
She said that audio problems with the voice recordings provided a good lesson for her students. "That's real-life experience," Perry said. "They need to know how to fix those things."
Students gathered in Pinto's classroom last week to present their compositions.
Cleveland explained to her peers, "We don't have a lot going on in our music. It's pretty simple because we wanted to focus" on the lyrics. She said that her group's poem mentions climate change, murder rates and oil. "We are able to overcome all these problems. We're just as capable as anyone," Cleveland said.
"We didn't want to use anything premade because our generation is fresh," Falat added.
Perry was pleased with the positive themes in her students' songs. "I'm encouraged with their attitude and their hope for the future," she said.
Added Kehe: "I like that it wasn't just making music. ... Our song has a message about the problems that we're going to have to face as we get older. There are very real problems that we're going to have to deal with soon."
lshovan@comcast.net
