I Have a Voice
This music video production was created at the Sarah McLachlan School of Music (SoM) in the spring of 2015. Using an emergent curriculum, this learner-centred, interest-driven approach to multimodal music making engaged this group of elementary school students in digital music production and critical reflection. Using topics of importance to each student, free-writes were created by each student to explore how it feels to be a kid in today's world. These free-writes were refined, becoming lyrics of the song. Each student then created a hip hop style music sketch in Garage Band to accompany their lyrics. These individual music sketches were combined together to create the final music track for the song, and each student recorded their lyrics as either a rap sequence or as a vocal hook. Dr. Cobb created the final mix of the song, and then the class worked together to decide on filming locations, themes, and choreography. The video was filmed over two classes, and each student created their own version of the music video over a duration of four classes. Below we see the music video created by Elise, a nine year old student in the class. This was her first attempt to create a music video and a very successful one indeed.