Ornament decorating workshop courtesy of Middletown Parks & Recreation Dept at Green Street Arts Center.
Kids can decorate an ornament for FREE to place on their tree at home or give as a gift.
Saturday, December 13, 2014
10:30am-12:00pm
Wesleyan Faculty and Student Opportunities
Sound Production Class at Green Street
Green Street Sound Production Class “Shaping Sounds”
Instructor: John Bergeron
Location: Green Street Arts Center, 51 Green Street, Middletown CT
Thursdays from 1:30-4:30pm for 10 weeks
Start date: September 25, 2014
Class fee: $550 per student
Registration deadline: September 22, 2014
Class size: 4-6 students, 4 minimum enrollment
Class Description: Learn how to record a song from start to finish at the Green Street Arts Center Sound Studio. Our professional sound engineer, John Bergeron has recorded many albums of his own and has worked as a session player for keyboards, an arranger of strings and horns, a producer, and a recording engineer over the years. He’s recorded in Los Angeles, New York, Nashville, London, and more.
This 10 week class will teach you the techniques of sound production using ProTools software and plug ins. You’ll also learn nuanced parts of the of the process like how to get the best work out of musicians in the studio.
The class will start with learning the tools and etiquette of the studio. Once students are acclimated to the equipment, John will demo the process of recording a song step by step. Students in the class will identify singer songwriters or guitarists at Wesleyan to serve as guest artists for the class. Guest artists will receive a free recording session and a copy of the final song.
Once the demo is complete, the class becomes very hands on. Each student gets to go through the process of recording a guest artist with guidance from John. You’ll get to pick the artist, set up the studio, record, edit, mix, and master the song.
If interested, call today! 860-685-7871 or gsac@wesleyan.edu. Open to all majors.
From the Director – Girls in Science Summer Camp
This summer, I had the pleasure of spending a week with a group of incredible women – 10 young campers, 2 artists, 3 science college students, a biologist, a biochemist, and a physicist. That week was the first ever Green Street Girls in Science Summer Camp and ladies, it was a hit!
Have you ever heard of oobleck? It’s a material that acts like a solid in some situations and a liquid in others (a physics phenomenon known as non-Newtonian liquids). Young girls made oobleck at Green Street last week and got to watch it liquify in their hands, harden to a solid when they dropped it on the table, and dance on a speaker when hit with just the right frequency.
One of them described the experience in her lab notebook – “I noticed that it melted in my hand. When it was in the cup it was hard but then when it was in my hand it melted! I had a great day and I want to be a scientist.”
Green Street education staff, biology professor Ruth Johnson, chemistry professor Erika Taylor, and physics professor Christina Othon designed the program. It was important for us to have the girls do real science and to expose them to a variety of careers in science along the way. We also worked with two of our Green Street teaching artists Lindsay Behrens and Meredith Arcari to use art projects to reinforce science concepts – like the parts of a bacterial cell or the structures of insects.
We learned about insects, life cycles, bacteria, DNA mutations, states of matter, non-Newtonian solids, light, and more. Did you know spiders aren’t technically insects? They have too many legs!
The girls learned how to use scientific tools like lab notebooks, pipets, and microscopes. The girls set up experiments involving fruit fly diets and bacterial transformation of DNA. We spent a day in the science laboratories on the Wesleyan campus and had lunch with visiting scientists and engineers.
We had 10 campers in Grades 4 – 6 join us, totally free of charge thanks to a generous grant from the Petit Family Foundation. Some of them came in already excited about science, others were a bit quiet at first. By the end of the week, all of them were ready to look into science jobs when they grew up.
The science-filled week was inspiring and reminded me of that first “spark” of science for myself as a child. I still remember seeing DNA for the first time. We did an extraction experiment in high school and I remember thinking how amazing it was that our whole blueprint existed in a blob of goop. We saw the science spark in the campers over and over throughout the week and we hope to do the same for more girls in future years.
The Middletown Press ran an article on the camp as well as a photo gallery.
Help bring science to life! You can contact Green Street if you’re interested in sponsoring a young girl for a future camp who may not be able to otherwise afford to attend.