Consolidation/Reflection
Activity 5: Do Your Song's Characteristics Meet the Requirements? (20 minutes)
Your song might be awesome, but we need to make sure that it is competition-ready. Read on to understand the entry requirements to ensure your submission is eligible:
Complete this checklist in your Student Notebook.
Make Beats:
- Your song is a minimum of 30 seconds (16 measures) and a maximum of 3 minutes. Your song has at least 5 unique sounds.
- Your song includes at least one sound clip (stem) from an Indigenous artist featured in the program (Dakota Bear, Jayli Wolf, or Samian)
- Play your song — Does the song sound like a remix of one of the artists? Have you changed the style, tempo, order of beats? Have you mixed other sounds with their stems?
- Check your audio clips. Do you have any sounds that are not from the EarSketch library or that were recorded by you in your code? If so, did you attribute the source in the comments? Any copyrighted sound clips must be removed from your song. Information on copyright can be found here.
Learn Code:
- Your song includes the EarSketch API fitMedia function to insert sound clips. Your song uses variables.
- Your song includes custom/user-defined functions to define song sections.
- Your song uses comments to describe the code and document your message in the song.
- Share your code with a peer (if possible). Do they understand the flow of the code? Are there places you can add additional comments? If you can’t share your code, do one last read-through to see if you should add something more.
- EarSketch has a tool to measure student code complexity. It is the Code Indicator menu item you can find when you select the three lines next to your script. The minimum score you should receive for a competition-ready song is 60 (2 functions). If you're a more advanced coder, we challenge you to surpass a score of 100 in code complexity.
Promote Equity:
- Your song includes a Call to Action that promotes equity and justice.
- Your song demonstrates student awareness or analysis of racial injustice.
- Are you able to write a short reflection about your song in the submission form and how you incorporated the 4R themes of Respect, Relevance, Reciprocity, and Responsibility? Do you have any documents that you want to upload with your song?
A quick note on copyright.
All music samples in the sound library are licensed, so you can use them as you wish in your music.
However, this is not true with all music. All music has copyright (in fact two copyrights); rights to a song and rights to a sound recording.
Copyright protects the creator of a piece of original work to have the exclusive right to reproduce and use that work.
If you are using sounds outside of the EarSketch library (for example, uploading stems from your computer), you must check the copyright and look for a Creative Commons license (such as sound clips on Freesound) or a free culture license.
You may record your own instruments and vocals, but you cannot upload samples or covers they do not have the rights to. Click here for more info on Copyright.
Congratulations! You are ready to submit your song!
Follow this link to submit your song.
If you’d like to work on it later and submit it closer to the deadline, you may!
Even if you aren’t sure if your song will win, please submit because YOUR VOICE IS POWER!
We want to collect thousands of students' songs to show the power of this movement.
Congratulations! You did an awesome job implementing Your Voice is Power.