Supercharge Student Songwriting

Teaching students to listen to music like a songwriter can help them connect songwriting techniques to how songs make them feel.

We can teach students to listen in three different ways to help students develop the musical and emotional vocabulary to supercharge their songwriting. 

Listening as a Mirror| Listening as a Magnifying Glass | Listening as a Microscope. 

Listening as a mirror asks students to think about their own experiences of listening to a song. To hold up a “mirror” and notice how they’re reacting, feeling, and imagining in response to the song. It starts with their preferences but moves past their likes and dislikes to try and bring deeper insights to the surface. This helps students to connect to the way that songs are affecting them, and asks them to develop a personal vocabulary of that experience. 

Listening as a magnifying glass casts the students as a musical detective and asks them to notice the broad strokes of the song. This approach to listening is interested in the song on it’s own terms. What is the song about? What is it for? What is it trying to do? Is it successful? How do the lyrics and melody go together? How does the music support what the song is about?

Listening as a Microscope is where we take our mirror and magnifying glass insights and start to analyze them technically. What kind of harmony is present? How is the melody structured? What is the form of the song? Microscope listening is where our analytical skills come out and where we connect what we’ve noticed in how we heard the song to how the songwriter constructed it for that effect.