Antarctic Beatboxing!

Today was an interesting day, as we had the local news channel come in to observe how the students and I were making use of the Antarctic expedition. They had been in before I left, and were now doing a follow-up, which was great to be able to feature the students!

For today’s lesson, the students were going to take full-length recordings I had made on my expedition, trim them to isolate one sound and then create a beatbox-type composition from a collection of isolated sounds. Older students did this using an online-based platform found at audiomass.co, and worked individually. Younger students participated in this by composing the groove as a full class – each student picking out which sound they want to add next. I pre-isolated those sounds for them, and then we slid them in place using my iPad with GarageBand. This allowed us to drag and drop the sounds into our timeline until every student had gotten to pick out a song.

We talked a lot about repetition, and watched Pentatonix for a sample of real beatboxing in action. We also watched a video on YouTube called “Animal Beatbox,” where a collection of animal names are repeated to solidify the groove.

Students had a lot of fun with this, and surprisingly, the youngest students were actually the best at making the grooves, as they enjoyed the repetition of picking the same sound as their friend did earlier!