Sound trap: creating music together during Covid-19 isolation. An experience with university teacher education students

Proceedings of The 4th World Conference on Research in Teaching and Education

Year: 2022

DOI:

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Sound trap: creating music together during Covid-19 isolation. An experience with university teacher education students

Ana Martínez Hernández

ABSTRACT: 

Soundtrap is a collaborative cloud-based music software designed to create music and podcasts. It is aimed at artists and educational institutions and is specially designed to be easy and intuitive to use. Users can share content in real-time with other members and communicate via a built-in video or chat. During the world Covid-19 pandemic, all education was forced to turn digital without previous notice or preparation. Thus, all teachers were confronted with the challenge of adapting their lessons. The change was especially difficult for practical subjects like music, physical education or arts. This paper describes the experience of using Soundtrap with 153 university primary education students in the course of music education during Covid-19 lockdown in CES Don Bosco university in Madrid, Spain. The objective was to acquire practical music knowledge from their homes. The students were asked to create a 2-3 minutes long song to be used for teaching children themed in one of the United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals; the project was carried out in groups of five to six students. Other requisites were related to rhythm, melody, harmony, intonation, structure and lyrics. The duration of the project was one month with students working synchronously from their homes and the teacher tutoring once a week. At the close of the project, students filled a self-assessment questionnaire and presented their song. Results showed that the project was beneficial to gain practical abilities that could not have been taught otherwise during Covid-19 pandemic.

keywords: music education; composition; teacher training; pandemic; e-learning.