The objective of your journal to get you thinking in writing about what you hear (in the case of sound and music) and what you see (in the case of movement and dance)—no more no less. A diary like this can make a valuable contribution to your skill as a writer—one learns to write by writing—and offers a forum for you to engage with music and movement. Your journal entry should be 2 pages typed (about 500 words) using the following format.

1. Date, Time, Place of the your observation
2. Music or sonic event heard; dance or movement event seen. Pease describe it to the best of your ability.
3. Was it your choice to hear or see this? Explain why or why not. How did it affect your impression of what was happening?
4. And most importantly—what did you learn from paying attention to this music/sonic event or dance/movement?

Short Examples

These are actual students examples, but they have been shortened for use as examples here.

Example 1

1. My VW beetle on the freeway
2. February 13, around 6 pm
3. Driving home alone always comes with familiar sounds. After the radio crackles and fades at certain points on the road and when the voices of Stevie Wonder and Beck tire themselves out, I turn off my stereo for a little quiet. At times, it’s troublesome. The wind rolls over my car like the crash of an ocean wave as it charges along at 80mph, and from time to time a tiny stream of wind finds its way in through a crack to whistle at me. The sheer speed of the vehicle causes the seats to rattle like a fast rock beat, and I find myself nodding to the beat. Punctuated by the ridges in the pavement, the hum of the tires against the road stress and release. I try to imagine that I am listening to just another rock band—this, when all I wanted was silence. I desperately turn my stereo back on to rescue me from the chaotic sounds of speed.
4. It was my choice to hear this when I turned off the music, but it was also my choice to turn the music back on when the road sounds became overwhelming.
5. I knew that my car has its own range of noises as a side effect of driving it, but I did not realize how unhinged the combination of these noises could make me feel when driving alone. It makes the machine I’m driving (and me) seem frail.

Example 2

1. Sept. 7, 9:30 PM, my dorm room
2. The sonic event that I heard was the thumping of music on my walls—all of my walls with different music from each wall. My dorm is right next to all the frat houses and yesterday they were playing music at all their houses all at once. From my dorm room I could not distinguish the songs or the type of songs that were being played. All I could hear was the bass and the beat of them all coming at me from four directions, or maybe it was more. As I focused on a single direction I began to enjoy the music, but as I listened to all of the beats combined from the different walls I felt myself troubled by hearing them that way. It was an unpleasant experience that unfortunately I have gone through several times during the term already. Hopefully I will begin to enjoy it before I really get disturbed.
3. It was not my choice to have all these different loud music (I like loud music) at once, but I could sort of control the experience by focusing on one, which was hard.
4. What I learned about this was that by combining several songs together you take away the quality of each and turn “music” into something disturbing—noise. I also learned that I could tune some of it out. Maybe I could do this better if the different music pieces were soft?