Music for small drama groups

[NegativeKillDeath]

Our drama dept want the students to be able to have access to music as a background to their performance. They want the students to be able to break in to smaller groups and each have access to music, as many as 10 groups in a given drama lesson. This was achieved in the past by students using their own phones but thats not possible now. 

 

Are any of your drama departments doing something similar and what method are you using? 

[dhicks]

21 hours ago, NegativeKillDeath said:

They want the students to be able to break in to smaller groups and each have access to music, as many as 10 groups in a given drama lesson.

 

Not sure if this is a hardware or software question. If it's a simple question of what hardware do we provide, then in our case each group of pupils could use a Chromebook to play music from whatever source was appropriate. Software-wise, you could simply put a bunch of tracks in a shared folder (Google Drive / Classroom, OneDrive, etc) and have the pupils play them from there. I find that a rather clunky system for sound effects and so on if you want things to play exactly on cue, so I have a script that generates a one-page sound effects playback webpage, giving you a handy "play" button for each audio item.

 

Licensing is, of course, a separate issue - ripping tracks from Youtube and storing them in a Google Drive folder and distributing to a class probably doesn't meet whatever licensing requirements you have in place. If you need general background music to fit certain scenes / moods / etc you could probably get an AI system to generate a selection for you that you then store. You could, of course, give each group of pupils a microphone and a looper / vocoder and have them beatbox their own background accompniment.

[Rob_D]

Our Drama department is going to get a set of 5-10 tablets for this (if the ones they want ever come back in stock).

We looked at laptops/chromebooks, but they're too big and unwieldy for how they want to use them.