Initial Assessment Evaluation:
The song that I performed was an original song that I had composed myself. I chose this piece to perform because I wanted to pick a song that explicitly emphasised my own interpretation on music and I thought there was no better way to highlight that than to perform a song I had composed myself. In the performance, I tried to totally submerge the viewer into a sole focus of the song by the angle being that you could only see my hands on the piano and the slow-moving galaxy lights in the background. This has been effective on submerging them into the song but didn’t really express my confidence in performing. The songs composure, I’d say, sets across a lot of emotion due to the minor tone that slightly goes higher for the bridge but then lowers again, it’s a calm piece but I think it could be interpreted to express a lot of different emotions.
My successes in my initial assessment are that I performed an original song that I wrote, like I wanted to, so I could express my full self. The galaxy lights in the background set the perfect vibe and atmosphere that I was attempting to convey through my song. My chosen angle was to show my hands playing the piano and I think this was effective in putting the sole focus of the song and in a way it mesmerises you into listening because of the slow moving lights and hands that fit well with the song.as it’s quite a low tone and moving song too.
Although it was a good performance, I could have improved on audio quality. Background noises towards the end and a few staccato sounding notes sometimes threw the atmosphere that had been set and wasn’t intended to be included. In future, I’ll retake the video until there are no wrong sounds and I’ll eliminate all background noise by working in a quieter area. Towards the end of the video, it started to sound a lot more messy which was a result of a lot of unsmoothed dynamics and background noise which I will fix, in future, by staying more focussed, even if I slip up on a few notes, and retake until they’re smoothed out. I also didn’t really give myself a chance to express confidence in this performance, which can help with engaging the audience, so I will need to improve on finding an angle that will express confidence but also submerge them in the music.
In the future, I think it would be very effective to add lyrics along side the composed piece to ensure a specific emotion for them to feel when listening to the piece, instead of leaving it open to interpretation. I’d also like a little more complex video for them to look at whilst listening instead of just slow lights, maybe a variation in different angles. Lastly, I need to completely eliminate background noise as it throws off the whole atmosphere and focus of the song and video.
My research for this was quite minimal but, I looked at a lot of different chords to play around with so I could find a chord sequence to fit my melody. In future, I’d do much more research such as different piano techniques I could use to get different sounds instead of just using the block chords method. The practical skills here were me playing piano in the correct key.
Initially, I was hoping to convey a relaxed atmosphere whilst I played a soothing song for them to focus on, which I think I did moderately well with. However, there are many improvements to be made by next time. This has given me confidence to broadcast my work because I did meet a lot of my expectations and hopes but It also gave me a chance to reflect on things such as, how can I engage the audience more and is the sound up to standard. This really allowed me to find improvements in my work and look at how to better myself for the next performance.
In conclusion, I met a lot of my targets that I set but if I was to attempt this again, I’d retake until my audio had no background noise in, as it can be very off putting.