During the second semester of my Freshman year at Wesleyan, taking the advice of my fellow football mates on which classes to get an easy A in, I decided to take the History of Rock & R&B. With this being my first class in a sort of realm in the creative “sciences”–dance, music, visual art–I wasn’t quite sure what to expect; during my first semester of classes, as well as in high school, I had never taken an art classes.
Throughout the semester, the class content and assignments aligned with humanities assignments, consisting of simple quizzes that required standard memorization and writing assignments that broke down the composition of a song. That was until, for our final project, we were given an assignment to either compose a song from scratch or to make a cover of an already existing song that lay within the realm of R&B. At first, the assignment seemed not only simple, but pretty easy to complete; I could not have been more wrong.
For a Government and History Major like me, this ended up being a herculean task. To preface this, the final ended up taking me more than 20 hours to complete, from recording to production. While I did have two other group members, they were of no help with any sort of technical work when recording or editing. From navigating my way through finding a “recording studio”, to experimenting with recording and editing software, finding an actual decent microphone recording device so my other group members’ voices sounded halfway decent, I was a fish out of water. Not only did I severely underestimate how laborious this final would be, but after all the effort and work I put into this project, in all honesty, it was horrible.
My hubris outlook on the music major was flipped upside down once this project was completed. I had thought that producing music was “easy,” and I could not have been more wrong. But time and time again, this school, as well as its unique classes, has plunged me into another degree of understanding and appreciation for all realms of academia.
