I taught thirteen elementary school students how to use GarageBand

And some of the music they made slaps.

So much so that I was compelled to spend some time sifting through all their projects this summer and putting together a mix of the moments that grabbed me the most. Apart from one moment where I got a bit excited and made a few moves with a couple loops that Pietro, Yrrah and Aoi made, I did little to no manipulation of the audio (no tempo warping, no pitch shifting) and added no effects other than a little compression, light saturation and a bit of reverb or echo for transitions and mixing. For the first four minutes or so, each new piece of music you hear is from single productions made by individual students. After that, I started layering their ideas.

Most of this is just dragged and dropped from audio files that the kids sent me from January through June as we worked on different creative prompts and tried out different elements of GarageBand. What I love is the diversity of the music. Some of these students turned out music that wouldn't sound out of place on a Oneohtrix Point Never or Arca album, artists that most of them hadn't heard of until I said "wow, this sounds like..." Some of them created chord progressions that would make the heads of my most dissonance-loving friends from jazz school spin. Others turned in simple, clean beats that show an acute sense of groove, style and the most powerful of all creative capacities, "knowing where to stop."

The resulting mix is a walking tour of thirteen vibrant, bright beginners' minds.

Aoi, Elia, Erkhes, Gabriel, Hina, Léonie, Mariana, Noah, Pietro, Rainbow, Rayna, Talia, and Yrrah: whenever you find this, wherever else these sounds are now, let me remind you how much fun you had making them, and let you know that listening through them again to put this together delighted me. I'm proud of you.

That's all for now.