Create songs on a topic

Suno AI is a fun tool which will generate a song for you if you provide a simple prompt, such as a genre and topic. Sign in with your Google account and you can create a number of songs for free, and they are easily sharable by link. 

I first played around with Suno by musicalizing a funny story (at least funny to me and my friends). Last year when having a gathering to watch Eurovision, I had a full fridge of things for the party. My friends discovered that I had put (briefly) a defrosting ham for Mother’s Day the next day in a pan on a shelf below a table in the kitchen. So I’ve been teased since then about “floor ham.” I told Suno to “make a pop song about ham left on the floor.” That was the entire prompt, I didn't need to write any lyrics, but Suno has a custom mode where you can have more control over what ends up in the song.

Suno created this song. Seriously, it's a bop. I do apologize to any vegetarian readers.

Suno also created a fun song about nouns for me which I used with a student. The web or mobile version (just go to the website in your browser) will also display the lyrics to the song. Suno is a fun way to add engagement to any curriculum topic or to play with narrative language. 

Music LM

Proceeding from some ideas about the role of music in speech-language therapy (and social coaching), back in the spring I did some activities with MusicLM. This tool is available from Google's AI Test Kitchen, which is free, though you currently have to sign in with a personal Google account and may have to wait a short while to be approved. With Music LM you "Describe a musical idea and hear it come to life." More specifically, type an activity, setting, situation, style, mood, or specific musical instruments, and it will create several examples for you.

The language and/or social interaction can come in through providing schema with the above italicized connections to music, using this as a conversational "add a thought" type activity, and allowing flexibility- as maybe your clients will think of possibilities that fall out of these categories. You can also be more structured and gear a lesson around, say, emotional vocabulary.

Sing!

The title of this post is both an encouragement and some specific features I wanted to let you know about!

You first of all probably know singing is a hobby for me and a self-regulation strategy. My husband and I have been back on our BS and adding to our playlist monthly.

There are good resources and research for using music in speech and language therapy, and we of course know that for many of our students it is supported by the client values prong of EBP (a natural motivator and therapeutic avenue for those of you working with older clients as well). I've written before about using music for figurative language and narrative. 

If you are an Apple Music subscriber, they have recently added features they call Sing, including synced displayed lyrics (think literacy as well) and volume control for the vocals within lyrics. Meaning you can have the student(s) sing along with the artist, or be the artist on their own. 

This video shows how:

For the karaoke singers like me or those working in professional voice, did you know it is also pretty easy to change the key of a song? Why would you do this? Let The Honest Voice Co demonstrate:

@thehonestvoiceco Replying to @willow ♬ original sound - The Honest Voice Co.

As to how, however, that's easy. I currently use the app Anytune to do this. If you have the song purchased from iTunes and downloaded to your phone, you can simply import the song to the app and change the pitch or tempo (which may help with processing or speech production):

Below the soundwave on the left are tempo controls and on right is pitch

 

More on using music in therapy

Music is motivating, self-regulating and full of language. Recently I have used songs with individuals and groups in a couple of specific ways.

For an individual client I see, I have been working to incorporate many of his interests as part of a neurodiversity-affirming approach. When he mentioned liking the Beatles, I instantly knew this could be a great path to engagement. We started with "Here Comes the Sun" and using Wikipedia to look up some details about the song brought some great conversation. In addition, the famous album cover of "Abbey Road" brought some Visualizing and Verbalizing-style picture description into the session. Songs with lyrics are available on YouTube and through this we discussed figurative language with this song and "Yesterday."

Simple sketches helped with some back and forth- "Wait, 'Here Comes the Sun' is about the sun coming right at us and crashing into us, right?" "Is 'Yesterday' literally about yesterday?"

For a group activity focusing on different kinds of conversations, I was inspired by this TikTok, in which a teacher polled her students for opinions on the #1 song when she was their age. This made a good executive function activity- what would this look like if we did this? What do you need to know? What objects do we need? See Ward/Jacobsen's Get Ready, Do, Done model. All comments were welcome and I was pleased to learn some new slang when one of the kids reported that Heart's "Alone" (showing the music video in this case provided some extra visual engagement- such big hair!) was "mid," meaning "just OK." 

Do you have other ways you like to incorporate music? Let us know in the comments!

Radio Garden

Flowing a bit from my last post (context is your friend), Google Experiment Radio Garden is worth a therapeutic visit. Your students will think it's just a chill moment, but secretly it can be a great way to practice having them call out:

-Continents and then countries
-Responses (conversation/comments) to what they hear
-Characterization of the language (nonverbal aspects such as tone etc) and type of music you may hear. Music genres are a category and can connect us with peers!

Why not pair this with looking up a current event from the country you "visit" for narrative/expository comprehension? 

Now more than ever, it's important to foster global awareness.

Oh, and Happy St. Patrick's Day, here's my homeland:

Appy-Picking Month: Weekend Music

Do you use music in your therapy? Especially as kids get older, music can provide a great conversation starter and really be part of kids' identity, making it a good context for an activity with a social-pragmatics or other group. Having kids introduce a song can be a great motivating guessing game (who liked it?) or fit into a discussion, analysis of a song (for story structure, vocabulary, etc) or "people file" activity (what aspects of the song go with the person?).

You can of course download songs using your iTunes app, but this becomes very quickly.  Two free apps, Pandora and Slacker (both for iPhone or iPad) allow you to create stations by genre (another good language piece, the category of genre) or artist.  With your free account, you cannot look up or play a specific song, but it will play related songs, and maybe eventually that song (you have a limited number of skips).

I will also mention Songza, also free, but BE REALLY CAREFUL.  The great thing about Songza is that you can play music for different times of day and activities/sensory needs (e.g. songs for "An Energy Boost"), but in the evening/late night categories these activities get "interesting."  It is worth checking out but I would not allow young kids to control or even perhaps see/know what the app is.

I myself am a huge fan of Spotify, and find it worth the $9.99/month fee for my own personal use.  Spotify is like Star Trek to me: "Computer, play [insert just about ANY song here]."  And it happens.  So if you are a music fan, it is worth looking into, and then bringing into a therapy session.  Spotify has wonderful iPhone and iPad apps, and also allows you to create playlists, which would be another great group cooperative activity for older students.

Spotify for iPad

Note that all these apps are rated 12+, which can be a reminder to let kids use them only with supervision and a degree of control. I should also add that if you feel you know little about today's music, this is probably an activity to avoid as you won't be able to screen very well. :-)

Common Core Connection:

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.8.1c Pose questions that connect the ideas of several speakers and respond to others’ questions and comments with relevant evidence, observations, and ideas.

New York Philharmonic Kidzone

Cultural and educational institutions often produce websites that are wonderful language-eliciting experiences for kids.  Explore the New York Philharmonic Kidzone website and see if you can design some lessons about music and language. The Instrument Storage Room and Music Match Instruments (in games section) are good explorations of subcategories and specific instruments (aligning with the music curriculum). Musical Mingles is a good place to explore complex cause-effect and spatial relationships.  The Composers Gallery has biographies and musical samples of famous composers from different periods. MusicQuest is a more extensive activity in which the student chooses an instrument and mentor, and works through solving some backstage problems, exposing them to the schema of a life in the Philharmonic.  All of this is packaged in an interface that would be very appealing visually to kids.

For a greater context, you could try exploring this site after reading The Remarkable Farkle McBride by John Lithgow, which is itself a good context to explore story grammar and the Unthinkable Glass Man character from Michelle Garcia Winner and Stephanie Madrigal's Superflex for Social Thinking book.