June 30

What an awesome day.
Jordan and I spend basically the entire day working on creating a karaoke track to Rebecca Black's "Friday". We've created the basic backtrack for the intro, verses, and chorus, but have yet to install the vocal background. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u9-AdPAOy0
I also have polished off chapter 7, and am looking forward to presenting our work tomorrow. The other groups are hard at work getting their projects started. This was a really fun project to work on because it let me practice my listening skills, and Jordan was able to help me put what I heard into the software. What I found interesting was that while I was able to hear the basic chord progression and would get something "close enough", Jordan was much better able to hear the details of each and every note and whether they were correct. I don't know if that means that his listening is better than mine or if it means that I am more able to "fill in" what I need to hear based on a chord progression.
I did find sometimes that my vocabulary for music wasn't always totally appropriate for working with someone who wasn't classically trained. When I talk about hearing a "pedal tone" or start counting rhythms numerically or talking about the chord progression, I find myself needing to explain what I mean in a different way. I thought that was a good skill to learn, because it means I have to not only understand what I want to hear, but be able to express it in more than one way.