post #12

 20% time speech

Have you ever wondered how goldilocks felt when she was looking for something and everything she found wasn’t just right? That’s how I felt during my 20 percent time. For my project I created music on my computer. My original goal was to have three songs by the end of the project but that didn’t happen. I didn’t realize how long it actually took to make a song and I didn’t realize that I should have spent extra time working on it to reach my goal.

I should probably explain how to create one of the songs. First, it took me at least a week to find what website I was going to use, I ended up using Soundation. Then, I started messing with all of the sound clips they had, there were all hundreds of short clips of instruments that ranged from a didgeridoo to a violin to a heavy bass sound. Finally, I had to figure out what I wanted my song to sound like and what clips I wanted to put together. This took a lot longer than I thought because not every clip would sound great with another. But all of the different layers of music helped my see that they are in all songs and it helped me find the layers in songs on the radio.

Most of my challenges were from creative blocks. I didn’t think that creating a song from nothing would be that hard. Millions of people could why couldn’t I? Well, along the way I had several times where I started a song, got about thirty seconds of it made then deleted it because I didn’t think it would sound good. Also, listening to hundreds of clips became very time consuming and frustrating when I couldn’t find one that was just right.

My major success was finally feeling that I had mastered the whole project. Half way through this school year I finally figured out how to make an ending portion of the song. I think when I realized that I didn’t have to reach my goal of three songs and that one would be good enough it made me less stressed and more creative. I started enjoying the process and learned that it shouldn’t be about how much I got done if I liked the end result.

This was easily my favorite thing we did in class this whole year and I think every school should start a class where students can work on their own project and present it at the end of the year. My 20 percent time made me understand that not everything is about grades, achieving a goal, or things going with my plan, but it was about enjoying the process. I guess goldilocks would have been a lot better off if she learned that not everything had to be just right.