Welcome to a post. Today’s post is about the most recent project I have completed: The Sounds of Poetry. The driving question of this project was how might we use music to represent ourselves and text? This project went past pretty quickly because we only had seven classes to get through it. I liked and disliked this because I wasn’t super interested in this particular project but it went by pretty fast.
In order for us to look at music through a literary lens, we had to start out with what some might think of as music’s little brother; poetry. In essence, we would read a poem, talk about it, annotate it, and identify the literary terms. I really liked how this practice flowed. I think I did a good job in communicating my ideas when we worked as a group by sharing and taking feedback.
After we attempted to practice some poetry analysis, we went straight into trying to do the same thing, but this time, with a song of our choice. I chose the song “Parklife” by Blur. It’s got good memories attached to it and a pretty clever meaning behind it.
Trying to do a song analysis was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated. I started out with something I wasn’t really proud of but I was happy I finished it on time. After we did a peer critique session and I got feedback on my work I was much more happy with how it turned out. I think I did a good job finding the literary devices but It was my first time doing something like this. It was difficult trying to get my words to flow how I wanted them.
How did I make this playlist? How did I choose five songs that resonated with me? The first one I already decided upon. Choosing the other four wasn’t as huge of a challenge than I though it would be. I definitely should have thought more about which songs I chose, because when I was trying to do the song analysis there was nothing for me to work with. I looked through my playlist and chose some songs with a message I connected with or with good memories attached to them. Here’s my playlist:
Once I had chose my songs, I had to repeat what I did with “Parklife”. The song analysis was tedious and challenging. Take a look at my final song analysis and see if you can see some of that in my writing. I tried really hard.
My presentation went pretty well if I do say so myself. We presented to a total of four people in two rounds. My second go at presenting went much better than my first try. On the first go ‘round I didn’t quite fill the seven minutes and I didn’t spark any kind of conversation which I was hoping to do. On the second time I tried to use what I learned in the first presentation to make the second one better. I managed to spark an interesting conversation about how we decide we like a song and I was pretty happy with that.
How does language shape ideas and influence others? This is really the core of the project. I think language shapes ideas through the way we express them. Using repetitive words or other literary devices we can put on display what is important to us.
Overall, I feel like this project went well, but not as well as it could have. I tried my hardest but learning new skills is more difficult than I anticipated.