IA Design Team Makes an Album!
March 20, 2025 2025-11-21 7:18IA Design Team Makes an Album!
By: Zayden Orenstein
On each Flex Friday thus far this semester, a Design Team of students sponsored by Mr. Proctor, Research and Music Technology teacher, have been working on constructing an album.
“The Design Team,” explains Mr. Proctor, “is one large group that’s meeting on Flex Fridays. The goal of Design Teams as an alternative to the traditional Flex Fridays is to allow the same group of students and teacher (or teachers) to work consistently on a project that’s going to take longer than just two hours to do.” Design Teams replace certain session slots on Flex Fridays; for instance, this Design Team replaces student members’ afternoon slots. While there are other Design Teams, Mr. Proctor’s focus is on music. “Our goal,” he says, “is to create a completely original student-made album, starting in January and ending in May… created by students but to be listened to by everybody in the IA community. We’re working with whatever interests, instruments, abilities, [and] skills that we have within the Design Team, which varies… we have a lot of skilled members… We have student leaders in the Design Team.”
Students have been creating their songs using a variety of different software, including GarageBand, Logic Pro, Ableton, and more. Most students assigned themselves to song-creating duty, though a few instead committed themselves to lyrical work.
“All in all,” Mr. Proctor says, “about 25 students [are Design Team members]. We had about 30 in the beginning; a few decided it wasn’t for them, or that they wanted to go back to the more traditional Flex Fridays, but the vast majority have stayed and are coming every week that we have our meetings… Ideally, I want [this] to be something that is an expression of what creative aims our students are working on, what we already have, and what we have built up through music classes or private music instruction.”
“We have six official sessions, although it is looking like I’m going to be asking the student leads to come in for a few sessions after that as well. So, we’re about two-thirds of the way through our scheduled meetings, which means we’ve completed about eight hours of work altogether in the room. Where we’re at right now, we have a tracklist, we have roughly twelve songs that are in some form of being completed. We have several songs that have been recorded virtually the entire way, either because they are instrumentals and we’ve got all of the instruments recorded or the virtual instruments programed properly. We do have several songs that have vocals already recorded on them, and several more that have at least the beginning ideas.”
“We are not where we need to be to get an album done by May, but we are exactly where I expected to be,” Mr. Proctor says. “I had a feeling that it would be slower going than we might’ve all expected, so that’s why I’m planning to have some student leads working more closely with me, especially when it comes to the ending parts of the project. We’ve not gotten into mixing and mastering yet, much less creating an album cover or titling the album or deciding on a tracklist, so there’s a lot of decisions that need to be made, but right now, I’m just happy that every week we’re meeting we are getting good work done getting things laid down and organized.”
Mr. Proctor believes that this album could have numerous applications for Innovation Academy in general. “As far as what we could use it for within the school, we might have tracks that could work as background tracks, [and] we might have tracks we could present at Showcase or incorporate into Music Club performances, depending on the nature of the track. We could have it as just a general advertisement of the variety of things you can do during Flex Fridays, so it might help form some more excitement for Flex Fridays. I’m envisioning hopefully a time where maybe we would be able to play it as a rotation playlist in the Hangar, during all-group sessions, or when people are touring the school. Basically, we’ve got a lot of things at the school to brag on and to show off to people when they come in or show off to potential students and parents – it’d be really nice to just have something musical to add to that as well.”
“This could serve as an entry point into a lot of different things at IA,” he continues, “but I just want to make it open and obvious that the arts and creative endeavors are alive and well at IA, even though we are not an arts-focused school. I’m hoping this album serves as proof of how far we can come, even without traditional arts classes, and so I want to keep pushing that and getting it out there to students that we have these opportunities and that a lot of people are taking advantage of them… I do hope that it contributes to more people taking advantage of these opportunities or being inspired to do this while they’re at IA.”
The Design Team met on March 21st for their fifth session, and will meet again at least once this semester. On that date, one could say they will be making waves… sound waves, that is!
