IA Design Team Prepares to Finish Album
April 24, 2025 2025-11-24 0:34IA Design Team Prepares to Finish Album
By: Zayden Orenstein
Just over a month ago, a previous IA Beacon article featured the Innovation Academy Album Design Team. Since that time, the Design Team has continued its work in preparation for the IA Showcase event on Thursday, May 1st.
For those who did not read the previous article, in the words of Mr. Proctor, Music Tech and Research teacher and sponsor of the Design Team: “[The Design Team’s] goal is to create an original album – a full-length album – that’s available for streaming by Showcase.” The Design Team met nearly every Flex Friday until March 21st, when they moved onto the next phase of the project. From that point on, a group of dedicated students has been preparing the songs for release. “We’re ironing out the last little bits,” Mr. Proctor continues, “but it’s looking really good.”
“A couple weeks ago, we had to say: at [this] point, no new tracks,” Mr. Proctor says. “Anything that’s just a little idea, or just the start of a song, we probably don’t have time to turn into a full track and make it sound good along with all the other tracks. We finished the writing process, and our goal was to have finished the recording process a few weeks ago; we didn’t quite get there. We have still been doing recording – even this week, we’re doing some last-minute recordings to add in, or rerecording some things we think need to be better.”
“The primary process we’re in right now would be called the Mixing and Mastering Stage. Mixing is the art of balancing and using tools that are in the software or hardware to create a balanced mix where you can hear all the instruments, [and] the most prominent instruments get their place in the song. You might experiment with moving things to the left or the right channel to make a good stereo mix for someone to listen to with headphones. Mastering is writ large the art of taking a final mix that’s already balanced and pushing it to a volume level that will be exciting and engaging enough to compete with the volume levels that we would hear in traditional music, and also making sure that, to the best of our ability, the song will sound good regardless of the way you listen to it, optimizing listening on a phone, listening with good headphones, listening on a car speaker, [and] listening through a boombox or something like that. We don’t know how people are going to be listening to the music, but we would like them to get the best experience as possible regardless of how they choose to listen.”
With 20-25 students actively participating in the Design Team, there is a large variety of styles covered. “[For] a lot of the genres,” Mr. Proctor explains, “we decided to strive towards genres where it doesn’t necessarily have to be perfect, pristine recordings, [where] little mistakes or changes in tempo in times are more accepted than in other genres. We do have a big mix of [genres], but a lot of the styles we went to were either personal interest or things that were easier to make with primarily the computer, due to our limited access to being able to perform all the different pieces on different instruments. The nice thing about it is [that] we’re going to have a wide variety of tastes represented by [the album].”
When asked about his favorite tracks on the album, Mr. Proctor had this to say: “We have one track that we have coming out that a student is just actually finishing up, and it’s the only track, I think, that we wrote with lyrics in mind specifically for a school album; it’s a letter to his ninth-grade self just entering IA, and so, right now, that one’s my favorite lyrically just because I feel like it is doing a really good job of capturing what it would be like to be an IA student. This student’s a senior, and so he’s about to leave IA and no longer be an IA student, but he’s clearly thinking about how his track and his music could impact people. It also happens to be one of the catchiest songs that we have on the album, so I think that one might be one that I would show to a general person as an intro into the album as a good way to get somebody invested in the project.”
Where will interested individuals be able to find the album once it is complete? “We are going to be uploading to Bandcamp and Soundcloud,” Mr. Proctor said. “Bandcamp and Soundcloud are free hosting sites where, within reason, you can post your music and have it professionally streamed at good level to anybody, so they’re linkable, they’re shareable, [and] there’s even apps where you can listen to [them] on mobile if you’d like to.”
“As far as Showcase, we’re going to have a listening station with Bandcamp set up.” Mr. Proctor is also hoping to play some songs from the album as background music in the hangar. “We’d love for people to be able to hear it as they’re walking around Showcase, and we’re working on getting that set up.”
This year, the Innovation Academy Showcase will take place on May 1st. From 1:00 to 4:00 PM, students and staff will be able to view the vast variety of impressive Innovation Academy student projects, and, from 5:00 to 8:00 PM, parents and guests will be able to do the same. The Design Team album will be located in the new Art Showcase section.
“The biggest thing I’d say about this [Design Team] is that this, along with many other things that we do at our school, just [proves] that the arts are alive and well at Innovation Academy. We are not an art school, and I recognize that, but I do not feel like we need to keep the arts in a corner or anything like that, and I don’t think we do. We have the Art Showcase this year, where we’re predominantly displaying student artwork and artistic projects. We have a lot of creativity at the school; we may not have a ton of students who want to go on and be professional musicians, but this is an opportunity that I would have loved in high school. All the people who have worked on this will be able to say that they made an album in high school.”
“And then, also, very importantly, this has been a huge success, and the design team model of Flex Fridays, in my opinion, has been a huge success and can be even more successful in the future, so I have every intention of continuing the design team next year, either with some of the same students a completely new batch of students that are interested.” Mr. Proctor continued, hoping that the design team will continue next year and encouraging students to join it then, regardless of their musical ability.
More information will be made available about the Design Team album release at a later date.
