Project by: Gus Green (11th Grade), Dominic DiGesu (11th Grade)
Project Advisor: Joy Piedmont
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): Peter Heinz, Arturo Acevedo

Reflection:

Music Discovery Podcast

We did a series of three podcasts exploring different genres of music. The format for the podcast is presenting three songs to each other and discussing them. Our ideal audience is someone who is interested in music and wants to be exposed to artists and songs that they may not be familiar with.

Our first podcast is about psychedelic rock. We chose psychedelic rock because both of us enjoy this music and wanted to discover artists we were previously unaware of that played this type of music. We invited our friend Foster Hudson to join us on the first episode so we would have a more diverse range of music compositions and opinions. We had so much material from our first episode, that we decided to split it into two separate episodes for maximum engagement with our audience.

Our third podcast is about 1970s rock. Again, both of us regularly listen to this era of music and wanted to share our favorite tracks with each other and our audience. This episode did not have a guest because we thought our friends that we would bring on as guests likely shared our musical tastes, making the episode longer than it should be.

We thought making these podcasts would be easy because we love music and love talking about it. However, we found a couple of aspects very challenging. First, it is important to keep every speaker on topic. There were times where the speaker had too much passion on the topic and came across as ranting. This brings us to the second challenge, editing. Selecting the parts to share and the order to share them is time-consuming. The goal was to retain the speakers’ voices as they provided their points of view and keep the story entertaining, while moving it forward.

Our conclusion is that the podcast edits were successful because our personalities came through with solid content making the final podcast interesting and amusing. We are looking forward to creating more podcasts because we have only scratched the surface of the various styles of music we enjoy.

Here’s the SoundCloud with the episodes:

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PROJECT PROPOSAL

Please write a description of the project you are proposing. Why do you want to take this on, and what do you hope to learn?

The project would be like Music Discovery the X-block but as a podcast, in that we’d curate collections of songs based around a certain theme for each episode and then play them/give info on them and such. We’d also want to get guests on the show to help curate/give info on the music.

Critical thinking, creativity, citizenship and courage are essential LREI learning values. Explain how you’ll draw on at least one of these values to complete your proposed project?

I think that this project will be a good way to draw on our creativity to be able to curate a playlist that’ll appeal to everyone, as well as creating a piece of entertaining art for people to enjoy.

What is your proposed outcome? How will you be able to demonstrate successful completion of this Project? How do you plan to share your learnings with the larger LREI community (e.g., exhibit of work, poster of learnings, performance, etc.)?

We’d like to put together three episodes and broaden our knowledge of music as well as the listener’s knowledge.

Please provide a general outline that indicates your work plan for the trimester? What are some of the key project benchmarks (i.e., goals that will help to ensure that you finish the project)?

We’ll try to work on a schedule of one podcast per month, with two in a month (we’ve got a head start).

When do you plan on meeting?
Lunch