Since 2013, New York-based Building Beats has been cultivating the next generation of passionate leaders though digital music production. Founded by DJ and music enthusiast Phi Pham, the nonprofit introduces low-income students in grades 3 and up to digital music production using free cloud-based software.
The goal of Building Beats is two-fold. On one hand, it aims to fill the music education gap that affects many New York City schools. At the same time, the class doesn’t just teach young people hip-hop in a vacuum; Pham sees these workshops as an opportunity to inspire in students universal skills like problem-solving and collaboration.
“We want to empower young people with the technology they have available around them,” Pham says. “The 21st century is all about remixing different tools, different products together, and we think music is a good starting point to teach students those fundamentals.”
In the five years since it began, Building Beats has partnered with over 50 schools in the New York area to serve upward of 3,000 students. Watch the video above to see some of Building Beats’ young producers at work.
Tag: music education
For Struggling Veterans, Strumming Guitars Can Help with the Healing Process
In Texas, a group of veterans at the San Antonio Military Medical Center is making beautiful music, thanks to volunteers with the Warrior Cry Music Project.
The nonprofit gives instruments — guitars, drums, trumpets and more — to injured service members, then provides them with music lessons.
Robert Henne started the organization five years ago because he believes playing instruments helped him recover from injuries he sustained in a car accident. At the time, his wife was working as an Air Force doctor at the Walter Reed Medical Center, and he wondered if the same process could help wounded veterans recover.
As the veterans work through the inevitable squawks and stumbles that come along with playing an instrument, they also learn to overcome other challenges. “It’s not just learning to play music,” Henne tells the San Antonio News-Express. “It helps reprogram what’s going on in the head.”
The former soldiers agree. Army veteran Ricardo Cesar suffers nerve damage in his fingers, but plucking the guitar is helping with his recovery. “Just parking here and knowing I’m coming in here lowers my blood pressure,” Cesar says. “This is my time. This is my therapy. Now when I’m starting to transition (to civilian life), at home, I can shut the world out and start playing my guitar, rather than, you know, drinking or doing all types of other nonsense that I don’t need to be doing.”
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Is Music Education the Key to Closing the Achievement Gap?
A number of low-income public schools across the country have been putting arts educations on the chopping block due to spending cuts, but this new study proves why schools should be encouraging students to bust out those records.
In a new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers found that music lessons help trigger the brain development of at-risk youngsters, possibly enough to bridge the academic gap between low-income and affluent students, the Huffington Post reports.
The study, which came from the minds at Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, was conducted at Camp Harmony, an after-school program for underprivileged youth in Los Angeles, over two summers.
After receiving a music lesson, the students (ages 6 to 9) were hooked up to a neural probe to test how they could “distinguished similar speech sounds.” The researchers found that these students could interpret speech sounds more quickly and precisely, which could ultimately lead to improved language and reading skills. It takes two years of music lessons for this improvement to occur — one year isn’t enough, the study says.
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Low-income students really do have a larger mountain to climb when it comes to language skills. Today.com pointed out a study in which children with parents on welfare heard 30 million fewer words by the time they were 3, compared to their wealthier counterparts with professional parents. This means that a poor child’s brain will have work harder in school to pick up new words compared to a rich child whose brain has already been exposed to millions more words at home. Music, it appears, can help these disadvantaged children get up to speed.
“This research demonstrates that community music programs can literally ‘remodel’ children’s brains in a way that improves sound processing, which could lead to better learning and language skills,” Dr. Nina Kraus, director of Northwestern’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory, says in a press release.
The study is the first to specifically focus on the effects of an after-school music program for at-risk students. It also adds to the growing list of research that shows how the arts encourage students to stay and succeed in school.
“These findings are a testament that it’s a mistake to think of music education as a quick fix, but that if it’s an ongoing part of children’s education, making music can have a profound and lifelong impact on listening and learning,” Kraus concludes.
That’s literally music to our ears.
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Music Can Change a Troubled Kid’s Life. Here’s the Proof
More than a decade ago, Margaret Martin was at a farmers’ market in Los Angeles when she saw a group of swaggering gang members with shaved heads give money to a little boy playing Brahms on his violin. “Those gang members were teaching me that they would rather be doing what the child was doing than what they were doing, but they never had the chance,” Martin told Josh Aronson of the PBS NewsHour. So in 2001, Martin established the Harmony Project, a non-profit providing low-income Los Angeles youths with instruments and at least five hours of instruction per week. The program now helps more than 2,000 students with stunning results.
In the neighborhoods the Harmony Project serves, on average 50 percent of students do not graduate from high school, and 80 percent of black and Latino students do not read at grade level. This year, students in the Harmony Project graduated at a rate of 93 percent.
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Dr. Nina Kraus of Northwestern University conducted a study that demonstrates even more clearly the profound effect music education is having on these kids. She selected a group of 80 youths from a gang-ridden L.A. neighborhood, and assigned half of them to the Harmony Project, while the others waited a year before enrolling. The group taking music lessons showed a marked increase in language comprehension, gains the second group didn’t begin to make until they also started music lessons. It’s possible, Kraus thinks, that music education may enhance a child’s neurological development enough to help those who perform below grade level catch up. “Early sustained music learning is actually the frame upon which education itself can be built for low-income kids,” Martin said. That’s music to our ears.
Why These Fourth Graders Are Singing the Blues
The Mississippi Delta is famous for its blues musicians, but the fourth graders at Tunica Elementary School are learning about rhythm, rhyme and chord progressions in a whole new way. By incorporating the blues into science, math, social studies and English, the school is helping students to retain more information through song while teaching them about their state’s musical history. In teacher Chevonne Dixon’s class, students follow the Mississippi Blues Trail Curriculum to write blues songs about the weather and about being a kid. And they study classic blues lyrics to learn about the challenges of growing cotton, the civil rights movement, media and transportation. The school’s principal, Eva McCool-O’Neil, says she wants to see other classes happily singing the blues next year. “I see student engagement really, really, really high,” she told the Associated Press. “Students love to do things other than just the traditional.”
How an Internet Connection Revolutionized Music Class for Students in Rural Minnesota
An online project is connecting rural Minnesota schools’ bands and orchestras with the state’s oldest music education institution. Professional musicians from the nonprofit MacPhail Center for Music teach low-income students via video instruction. Through the partnership, small-town students get access to amazing learning opportunities that their schools don’t have other ways to offer. The project started in 2011 with one school, and has now expanded to 17 districts and 1,500 students. Teachers at the rural schools feel more supported, and say that the project gives student access to professionals who would normally only be able to provide lessons and instruction to students living in a city.