Andre FirmeElektronische Musik No. 1
An early study in synthesized timbre, gesture, density, and spatial texture.
Music / Composition / Listening
SOUND AS
A WAY OF THINKING.
Before I was building learning systems or software, I was composing, performing, and listening closely.
Music became my first laboratory for structure, emotion, experimentation, and communication.
The original creative practice
Timing. Dynamics. Restraint. Attention.
My BA in Contemporary Music brought together guitar performance, composition, recording, analysis, and music education. The work ranged from string writing and folk material to electronic music and musique concrète.
That breadth still shapes how I work: establish a system, listen for what it needs, and make every element earn its place.
Selected listening
THREE STUDIES IN
SOUND & PURPOSE.
Musique Concrète No. 1
A compact sound collage that treats recorded material as compositional vocabulary.
Order of Operations
An original hard-rock teaching song: musical performance, composition, and instructional design in one artifact.
Case study / Music + learning design
LEARNING,
COMPOSED.
In 2014, I explored a question that still shapes my work: Can familiar creative language make a difficult idea easier to enter?
The result was more than a paper. I designed a small learning system around original music—research, composition, production, live facilitation, guided practice, assessment, and student feedback.
01Identify
Students needed a memorable way to sequence a multistep mathematical process.
02Compose
I wrote and recorded a hard-rock teaching song structured around PEMDAS.
03Facilitate
The lesson used performance, call-and-response, worked examples, and gradual release.
04Evaluate
I paired classroom observation with a 47-student survey and documented its limitations.
47students surveyed
grades 1–6
grades 1–6
79%preferred lessons
with music
with music
85%felt music helped
them learn
them learn
Small, local study conducted at an elementary after-school program; findings are presented as formative evidence, not universal claims.
01 / Instructional artifact
Original rock recording
A 2:45 hard-rock song that turns the sequence of operations into memorable musical vocabulary.
Listen to the recording ↗02 / Lesson designOrder of Operations lesson
A participatory 30–45 minute lesson for grades 4–6, combining modeling, live performance, call-and-response, guided practice, and assessment.
View the lesson plan ↗03 / Curriculum systemEight-week music sequence
Sixteen short lessons moving from beat and meter through notation, melody, texture, timbre, dynamics, form, movement, and language.
Download the curriculum ↗04 / ResearchIntegrating Rock Music
A senior capstone joining research, student voice, curriculum design, original music, and classroom implementation.
Read the capstone ↗
Music journalism & scholarship
Listening is an
active discipline.
My writing explored John Cage, Luigi Russolo, soundscape, experimental practice, and the boundaries between music and noise. A later capstone connected that critical work to education by examining how rock music could become a meaningful elementary learning medium.
“The piece is essentially quiet and spread out; climax is implied through the density of attacks.”Read the capstone ↗
The through line
MUSIC WAS NEVER
SEPARATE FROM THE WORK.
It taught me how to build an experience in time—and how to notice what people feel before they can explain it.