May | 2010 | ~ Mark's Musings ~ blog.markwcarbone.ca

I recently had an invitation to visit the music classroom of @tgianno to assist them with the preparation for a music competition. The string ensemble was very successful at the local music festival competition, scoring excellent results which entitled them to compete at the next level of the music festival.

In today’s terms, participating in the second level of the competition means preparing a recording of two contrasting pieces under supervision of a festival officer. My role in the process was to be the recording engineer. The recording was completed on a laptop running Sonar Software and equipped with a Pocket VX digital interface which connects to a mixer, in this case with 2 Shure microphones.

After a warm up session and the traditional round of tuning, we recorded each selection twice. Following the session, we listened to the recordings as a group. The students collectively decided which recordings were the best, and should therefore be submitted to the festival evaluators. The selected files were burned to a CD and mailed to the festival office in the a date stamped envelope. I used Audacity, a free audio recorder/editor for Windows and OSX computers to convert the files to mp3 format.

Enjoy listening to the student recordings: March and Tango

Picture Gallery

I appreciated the opportunity to participate in @tgianno’s music project.

~ Mark

From the NY Times: ” … it seems safe to say that many hundreds — if not thousands — of shutters will be released simultaneously on Sunday, May 2, as photographers around the world help Lens create “A Moment in Time”; one single moment in the life of the planet.” Read the full article about the project. The ‘moment’ occurred at 15:00 hours in Coordinated Universal Time or U.T.C., the modern day equivalent of Greenwich Mean Time.

I think this is a great global project to bring people together, a project possible due to connections made possible by the existence of the Internet, digital photography, online writing and social media tools. Doing something like this is almost impossible without these powerful tools.

A copy of the picture I submitted is posted below. At the U.T.C. time, my daughter was busy packing for her school exchange trip to Vancouver B.C.. The trip begins bright and early tomorrow. I wanted to highlight this event for my submission because of the focus on people, culture and connections. Students participating in the exchange have been corresponding through opportunities provided by their teacher as well as via Facebook. I am sure this will be a wonderful learning opportunity.