Week 2

During the week two workshop, my teammate and I had the privilege of joining a couple of different groups throughout the workshop. In the first group we joined, I was blown away by the progress that had already been made. The student we were working with had already written lyrics for her song, and had even edited those lyrics since week one to better fit the structure of a song. She explained to us the beat and melody she was imagining for the song, and we all pitched ideas to her for other elements of the song. And then some magical happened. One person performed the beat using the table, the student performed the melody, and other members of our group made contributing sounds and beats. It was the coolest experience! After recording this sample for several measures, we all broke into sheepish grins and laughed about the experience we just had together. The next step for this student’s project is to further build the song by adding additional sounds, rhythms, and departures from the pattern that has already been created. 

The students in the second group were listening to their favorite songs and sounds when we walked up. What I found fascinating was the incredibly wide range of music they were listening to. It was music from all genres and eras. The only issue is that, because of how exciting the music was, it was difficult to get the students’ attention. We were doing everything we could to create a word cloud with the students so that we could begin constructing lyrics, but to no avail. My teammate noticed some books that the two students had closed in front of them and asked them if they could open a random page and choose the first word they saw. Success! The students were still a bit distracted, but in the end, we were able to get a solid list of words together. Their next step will be knitting these words together into lyrics and finding a melody to house them.

Back in class, we had a discussion about participatory music and ethnography. Participatory music is the concept of music being performed by no one performer, but by a group. Ethnography is the practice of fully immersing oneself in another community with the purpose of learning more about them.  Students commented on how the workshops held similarities and differences to both of these concepts. Personally, I believe that this workshop is the embodiment of participatory music. It feels like there is equal give and pull between the students and us, and both sides are placing bricks to build something bigger. There was also a lively discussion on whether or not our experience at the youth center counts as ethnography, with many great points brought up.

Overall, I am excited by the progress we made in week two of this class, and I could not be more excited to continue working with the students to create art.

James Clark
Stanford University | Class of 2025
B.S. | Mechanical Engineering (’25)
Minor | Sustainable Architecture and Engineering (’25)