![\"IMG_5032\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/files\/2015\/11\/IMG_5032-300x200.jpg\")
Honors College students in Strini’s Soundscaping colloquium.<\/p><\/div>\n
“Soundscaping” encourages a deeper and more analytical way of perceiving music and a thoughtful way to compose it, even for those unfamiliar with music study. \u201cSoundscaping is music composition for people who don\u2019t know much about music,\u201d Strini, an instructor in the School of Writing, Literature, and Film, says. \u201cIt\u2019s thinking in structures and developing a sonic imagination. Music has architecture, it has bones, it has repetition. Students come out of this class hearing music in a more sophisticated way and in much more detail.\u201d<\/p>\n
Strini developed the class when he taught for the honors college at University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee. Encompassing a much larger scale, the UW class included music history, dance history, criticism, and musical analysis. Soundscaping was a fun project for the end of the semester, when students were in the midst of papers and finals for other classes. \u201cI would go to Walgreens or Walmart and buy all these little trinket instruments and just about anything that would make some kind of noise. I would compose a piece of music with a graphic notation, and they would play it. Then it would be their turn to do the same.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Honors College colloquium took this soundscaping element and extended it across the first five weeks of fall term. The class began with a graphical analysis of musical works, training students to think about music in terms of a sequence of visual symbols. \u201cIt taught them to map how the structure [of the music] unfolds and to think more about what they\u2019re listening to,\u201d says Strini.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a really steep learning curve,\u201d he says. \u201cStudents come in completely shy and don\u2019t know how they could even pull this off, and some of them even seem freaked out. But after a while, they see how it\u2019s going to happen. Their sonic imaginations improve, and by the second time they try, they\u2019re usually saying \u2018Oh, I\u2019ve got this!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"IMG_5039\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.oregonstate.edu\/honorslink\/files\/2015\/11\/IMG_5039-200x300.jpg\")
Honors College student Sheridan Long instructs students to play instruments in Tom Strini’s Soundscaping colloquium.<\/p><\/div>\n
After getting the hang of the analysis, it was the students’ turn to compose their own pieces of music using the same techniques. They spent five weeks creating graphical scores of their compositions, and they then had to come up with a creative way of conducting, employing a combination of graphic images and body language. \u201cThere was only one rule,\u201d Strini says: \u201cThey had to write their pieces so that everyone in the class had a part to play.\u201d<\/p>\n