Investigating
Did you know that over 3.2 million students are victims of bullying every year? Did you know that 160,000 teens skip school everyday because of it? And did you know that 1 over 4 teachers sees nothing wrong about bullying and will only intervene 4% of the time? Bullying is a major issue in our society ("Types of Bullying").It has been shown by many psychological researches and reports that bullying is and remains a huge issue addressed in school. It is impossible to change the entire world and make everyone better. We have seen many people trying to solve different problems. Sometimes there is a change, at times it doesn't change that much. According to scientific american, there are some ways to emphasize issues and make people sensible to it, and one of them is music. As explained and proved scientifically, the choice of chords, musical enrichments, melodies and others have the power of getting to people’s emotions and causing them to suite to the type of mood felt and open their points of view in order to think in depth about the concept shared (Yudkin and Trope). As an example, during the Cold war in the 1960s, the Beatles came out with their first album. There music was heard until the Iron Curtain and The Soviet Union ("How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin"). This caused many young Russians to disagree with the society’s ideology and therefore caused them to rebel and think in different ways. It has been proven that the Beatles did contributed to the Soviet Union’s fall just by singing their songs. This two points led me to decide to compose a song related to bullying. I am a singer and a music player that has been suffering of bullying a lot of times in my life. I have been bullied in different ways, especially verbally and physically. Since I was a small girl, singing was a passion. I would sing during exams, in the shower, while skiing, while working out, while cooking, while walking the stairs and more especially when I was depressed due to the type of harassment I was a victim of. Because music can make a change in people, and bullying is a major issues in every school in the world, I decided to compose this song in order to sensibilize grade 7th through 12th in my school, IICS. I want people to realize how bullying is a major issue and how it affects us. Being bullied is an everyday war against the impossible. You get depressed, you start to doubt about yourself. Being able to share my feelings with others, helping people to talk to someone when they are suffering of bullying and bullies to realize the impact of their words is my goal for this project (PJ1.)
To be more specific, my goal is to create a high quality song, using a high quality equipement, to share my feelings with people that are suffering because of bullying and to make bullies understand the strength and impact of their actions towards other people. Being bullied can cause a lot of damage in someone’s life. The most important part is that bullies do not bully for no reasons. Most of the time, bullies suffer of a lack of attention from a family member. Bullies can also start to bully because they have been targets. Bullying is a deep and hard subject to master, and to solve. I will ask people to leave a comment on a notecard in a blue box and answer mainly the question: “How did my song impact you” and “what can you do prevent these situations”. I have some familiar background with music as I play the guitar and sing. However, it will be my first time to write a song in which I refer to my personal experience and get critique from other people. Composing a song in only 5 months is challenging and hard. My goal is not easy, but to make it understandable, I want people to question themselves and acknowledge the fact that they might have bullied and understand how bad a person feels like when being bullied.
My goal is creating a high quality song about bullying in order to make people realise the impact words, actions while bullying someone as well as helping people that are bullied so they can refer to a story and feel comfortable talking about it to an adult. This fits unto the Global context “What is the nature and purpose of creative expression?” which consists of the way we express ourselves, ideas and values and the way we reflect on, enjoy our creativity ("Global Contexts"). Writing a high quality song is a way of expressing your own feelings, thoughts about values. Music is a way of telling everyone who you really are. It is a way of communicating with each other. Being able to express myself, talk about values and share a personal experience is an important skill I want to learn.
This goal is highly challenging for me as it will expand my knowledge on music. I already have a musical background but I will have the opportunity to sing play my own composition. I will finally be able to write my own song which is something totally new for me. I will be able to learn specific music terms and techniques that I will be able to use in my song in order to make it sound professional. I will learn and experiment new ways of using my voice as an instrument, and I will be able to learn tricks on guitar in order to create riffs and other musical features. I will have to research the basic start format of a song and then what I need to add in order to make my song sound more interesting. This project is highly challenging as it is something musician do in years and I will have to do it in 6 months. Furthermore, this project necesites critique from other people which is hard to understand and agree. Therefore, I will have to share my song with many people and perform it life before in order to get comments which is going to be hard. My skills and the quality of my project will be assessed by two experts. They will give me feedback and a grade that will allow me to know if it is considered as high quality.
Song making:
To be more specific, my goal is to create a high quality song, using a high quality equipement, to share my feelings with people that are suffering because of bullying and to make bullies understand the strength and impact of their actions towards other people. Being bullied can cause a lot of damage in someone’s life. The most important part is that bullies do not bully for no reasons. Most of the time, bullies suffer of a lack of attention from a family member. Bullies can also start to bully because they have been targets. Bullying is a deep and hard subject to master, and to solve. I will ask people to leave a comment on a notecard in a blue box and answer mainly the question: “How did my song impact you” and “what can you do prevent these situations”. I have some familiar background with music as I play the guitar and sing. However, it will be my first time to write a song in which I refer to my personal experience and get critique from other people. Composing a song in only 5 months is challenging and hard. My goal is not easy, but to make it understandable, I want people to question themselves and acknowledge the fact that they might have bullied and understand how bad a person feels like when being bullied.
My goal is creating a high quality song about bullying in order to make people realise the impact words, actions while bullying someone as well as helping people that are bullied so they can refer to a story and feel comfortable talking about it to an adult. This fits unto the Global context “What is the nature and purpose of creative expression?” which consists of the way we express ourselves, ideas and values and the way we reflect on, enjoy our creativity ("Global Contexts"). Writing a high quality song is a way of expressing your own feelings, thoughts about values. Music is a way of telling everyone who you really are. It is a way of communicating with each other. Being able to express myself, talk about values and share a personal experience is an important skill I want to learn.
This goal is highly challenging for me as it will expand my knowledge on music. I already have a musical background but I will have the opportunity to sing play my own composition. I will finally be able to write my own song which is something totally new for me. I will be able to learn specific music terms and techniques that I will be able to use in my song in order to make it sound professional. I will learn and experiment new ways of using my voice as an instrument, and I will be able to learn tricks on guitar in order to create riffs and other musical features. I will have to research the basic start format of a song and then what I need to add in order to make my song sound more interesting. This project is highly challenging as it is something musician do in years and I will have to do it in 6 months. Furthermore, this project necesites critique from other people which is hard to understand and agree. Therefore, I will have to share my song with many people and perform it life before in order to get comments which is going to be hard. My skills and the quality of my project will be assessed by two experts. They will give me feedback and a grade that will allow me to know if it is considered as high quality.
Song making:
- Who is my audience?
- How will I record the song?
- Can music really make a change in people?
- How will I compose the music?
- Instruments used?
- How will I plan my song knowing that composing a song is not a planned task?
- Who will be my expert regarding the song’s composition, and who can I ask to help me record the song in a studio?
- How will I be able to reflect on my goal?
- How will I present my final project?
- How will I know I am being successful?
- How will I know my song is high quality?
Before starting this project, I was used to research information using Google, Ebook and EBSCO to be able to good and and valuable sources. I then used MLA format to cite my sources. The main question that has to be answered was if Music can make a change and impact people. This question is the base of my project because if music cannot make a change in people why would I compose a song about bullying? As my process journals 3 and 4 show, music does have an impact in people. The biggest example is the Beatles impact in Russia that helped to lead to the soviet union’s fall ("How the Beatles Rocked the Kremlin"). This research that I made helped me understand the impact that music can have. I made a all research and created a podcast about it. I had to research a lot in order to get to the conclusion. This helped strengthen my research skills and helped me finally know that music CAN make a change in people and CAN change the World, as it has been proven by the Beatles’ music. (See PJ 4)