SoundCloud in Music Education

With the advent of podcasting, audio files and scripts are turning out to be an essential teaching tool in music education. This is the main premise of SoundCloud, a music facility that enables sharable audio tracks in a “playlist” fashion. This type of teaching mechanism becomes necessary, after a private study (“iTunes University and the Classroom: Can podcasts replace Professors”) report revealed that students scored higher in examinations after taking notes from an audio lecture. Using this tool in music education may become tricky, so here’s what you need to know about SoundCloud.

…students scored higher in examinations after taking notes from an audio lecture…

What is SoundCloud?

SoundCloud founders Eric Wahlforss and Alexander Ljung created this tool to bring a new level of engagement among its users. Aside from being an audio-sharing platform, educators are able to record and distribute content, wherein students can collaborate via comments, sharing, and likes.

But with SoundCloud’s features such as voice recording, multimedia content sharing, and social media elements, the tool manages to match the services offered by top-notch learning facilities, with the likes of Evernote and O2 Learn. The latter, as stated by O2, is one of the best in combining sound and visuals to make difficult topics easier to digest.

Photo courtesy of See-ming Lee

For Teachers

For starters, you can create a teacher account using your school email address. This allows you to easily distribute and comment on specific content submitted by students. You can mark certain files as private, where you’ll send a secret link to certain listeners, without the need to publish it on the web. Here are some episodic content ideas you can use:
· Recordings of student progress and practice sessions.
· Ensemble practice sessions.
· Collated music composition and student assignments.
· Digital music class presentations.

For Students

The facility serves as a creative outlet for students’ summative assessments, especially when coming up with a unique musical scoring. A good option for you is to give them a Life Soundtrack assignment. When creating presentations, students must find the most appropriate audio, which will accentuate the story’s plot, theme, and characters. For more creative input, you can ask students to come up with their own album art, with a brief explanation that details the symbols they used, and why it’s the perfect embodiment of the entire project.

Learning Apparatus

The new SoundCloud incorporates teaching tools to cater to the diverse ways of how audio scripts are being used in the classroom. Here are some of these tools:
· Reading
Students can use this feature to hear a playback of their voice after reading aloud an entire literary piece.
· Public Speaking
The Public Speaking feature allows you to continue the class discussion via the virtual space.
· Radio Broadcast
This feature comes in handy for classroom verbal activities. During Music class, you can ask students to broadcast a musical presentation, which is a good point of discussion after.

Timed Comments

The audio facility introduces the time-stamped comments feature, which allows you to leave any constructive remarks on a student’s output. In return, they can directly exchange ideas with you, especially in improving the quality of their original composition. Here’s how to post a time-stamped comment:
· Place your cursor over the blue bar in the waveform. A text bubble appears, indicating you the entire process.
· In the duration of the audio file, you can select which spot you would like to post a comment on.
· Click the spot and a text box will appear.
· Write your comment and click the Post button.
The post, which will be visible for four seconds, can be viewed by any student who plays the file. Also, the textbox will automatically convert your comment into hyperlinks, which will direct students to the actual conversation thread.

All of these ideas prove that SoundCloud is good platform to support students in music education, especially with the instructional designs found on audio scripts.

Do you think SoundCloud is a great addition your music class?

Jennifer Birch is a college student with an immense interest in the music industry. Aside from listening to her favorite bands on SoundCloud, she’s also the Music Tech Correspondent of TechieDoodlers. If you share the same passion, Jenni is just a tweet away.