Today, I read an article posted on Ars Technica written by Timothy Lee detailing a recent “fair use” Copyright decision by Judge Sidney Stein of the U.S. District Court - Southern District of New York.

From the article:

Judge Stein’s task wasn’t to critique the dubious logic of this segment, but to evaluate the narrower question of whether the film’s use of “Imagine” is fair under copyright law. He noted that the film was focused on a subject of public interest, and that the film was commenting on Lennon’s anti-religious message. The excerpting of copyrighted works for purpose of “comment and criticism” is explicitly protected by the Copyright Act, and Judge Stein ruled that this provision applied in this case.

The decision quotes extensively from Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley, a 2006 decision that allowed the reprinting of reduced-size versions of several historical posters used in a coffee-table book about the Grateful Dead. In that case, as in this one, the alleged infringers had used the works in a commercial product, but the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that “courts are more willing to find a secondary use fair when it produces a value that benefits the broader public interest.” Whatever the merits of its argument, Expelled is clearly commentary on an issue of public concern, and the use of “Imagine” was central to its argument. Those facts weighed heavily in favor of a finding of fair use.

Stein and company were defended by lawyers from Stanford’s Fair Use Project. In a blog post announcing their decision to take the case, executive director Anthony Falzone wrote that “The right to quote from copyrighted works in order to criticize them and discuss the views they represent lies at the heart of the fair use doctrine,” and argued that Ono’s actions threaten free speech.

This decision and the 2006 decision referenced above cause me to ask a few questions regarding the implications for music education:

In the 2006 decision, the use of reduced sized Grateful Dead posters was upheld as “fair use” within a commercial product because “courts are more willing to find a secondary use fair when it produces a value that benefits the broader public interest.”

In the Sidney Stein decision, the use of an excerpt from John Lennon’s Imagine used in a commercial film for the purpose of criticizing and commenting on issues that “benefit the broader public interest.”

So, what are the implications of using copyrighted samples or excerpts of commercial music or videos as part of our students’ educational pursuits? Is careful musical and educational use of commercial music and video in school projects of “benefit to the broader public interest?” If our students are utilizing these materials (including YouTube videos) for the purpose of artistic, musical “comment and criticism,” would that not also be considered “fair use” in light of these decisions?

What is particularly interesting to me is that both of the approved uses described above - using a copyrighted image in reduced resolution and using an excerpt of a copyrighted and performance-righted musical recording - were found to be “fair use” in two commerical settings. Also, both uses of copyrighted material seem to have been interpreted b the Judges as a “transformative” use (see Wikipedia entry on Fair Use). It would seem to me (again I am NO lawyer) that similar uses and creation of original multimedia using music and popular commercial and non-commercial video for “comment and criticism” of “benefit to the broader public interest” where the work has been “transformed” and not wholly-duplicated within an non-profit educational setting of a school would now be permissible as documented by the above case law.

Let’s take a look at the “fair use” section of the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107:

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections § 106 and § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:

1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
4. and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

Since the above uses were found to be “fair use” within commercial settings, factor #1 in the Copyright Act of 1976 would seem to provide students and teachers working in an educational context even more protection under “fair use.” I find the Sidney Stein ruling of particular importance to music educators because it provides case law that extends the “fair use” of images to copyrighted and performance-righted musical recordings.

In light of the cases described here, I feel more comfortable letting my students use copyrighted images and musical excerpts in the creative and educational work they do in my K-College music and music ed courses, with the following caveats:

1. The use of the works is in part, and not in whole (e.g., reduced resolution or size)
2. The use of the works for the purpose of “criticism and commentary”
3. The use and creation of the works results in a “value that benefits the public interest”
4. The use of the works is “transformative” such as in a parody or for “criticism and commentary”
5. The use of the works do not devalue or negatively impact the market of the original copyrighted works

And, I might even be inclined to allow them to put together a compilation CD or DVD and sell them as a fundraiser….

What do you think?

Beginning September 1, I will join the faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. I am so excited to join my good friend and colleague, Dr. Gena Greher, at UMass Lowell. Over the past 6 years, she has helped to build a phenomenal music teacher preparation program. One of the most impressive aspects of the program is the depth and breadth of the partnerships among the music department and local schools. In each music education course, students have extensive experiences in the local schools applying what they learn on campus to real-life situations with real students. During one of my campus visits, I was impressed by the number of local K-12 students on campus after school. Almost every night of the week there are local students participating in after school honor ensembles, creative sound play classes and the UML String Project. Many schools have similar programs, but none that I know of are infused so extensively in the local community. And, very few music education programs truly integrate hands-on field experiences as extensively as UML.

Also of note are the innovative general education courses that bring together the arts, sciences and local community. Students can take interdisciplinary courses like Performamatics, ArtBotics, and Radical Design. Each of these courses have major service learning components interfacing UML students with the local community. One project I hope to become involved with is their Assistive Technology Program. It would be great to work with the engineering students on developing music specific assistive technologies for special needs students. I wish I had these kinds of courses in my undergrad!

UML Music Education and GUI Programming students working together to create
original graphic notation software in the Spring 2008 Performamatics course.

This Fall I will be teaching courses in music education research and technology in music education. I get a little bit of relief in my teaching load so that I can spend some time in the local schools getting to know the program and area. My Technology in Music Education students will be working closely with music technology classes at Lowell High School exploring innovative ways of using technology in their own teaching through working with real students and teachers in real classrooms. I’ll be updating this blog much more regularly as a part of that course in particular.

Dr. Greher and I are already starting to brainstorm new professional development and Masters-level courses in composing and technology for Summer 2009. Dr. Greher brings extensive experience in technology and creative musicianship as a former music producer for the advertising industry and from her work with the Teachers College Creative Arts Lab in New York City. Stay tuned for more information in the coming months!

With the change in job comes a change in contact information. My new email address is Alex_Ruthmann @ uml.edu. I will continue to check my ISU email through the end of the summer, however.

See you online!

This site was launched as part of a pilot project using the Ning social networking platform to bring together music educators in advance of the 2008 ISME World Conference this July in Bologna, Italy. Even if you can’t attend the conference in Italy, please stop by and join.

To start, we have a number of projects integrated into the website:

1. Research Mentoring - This group is for you to post questions and abstracts and to discuss anything related to your research or research in general. As the conference approaches, we will post the exact times and presentation schedule for our research sessions.
2. Social Lounge - Use this space to talk about anything and to get to know each other. Post your itineraries, places to stay in Bologna, and anything else you’d like.
3. Sharing Practice - This project will be formally launched in a month or so. We are looking to gather stories and examples of what music learning and teaching are like across the World from the perspective of ISME young professionals.

Stop by http://ismeypfg.ning.com/ to meet other music educators from around the World!

Come on out to beautiful New Britain, Connecticut. Tuition, including 2 graduate credits, is only $500!

Here’s the official blurb:

Podcasts, Wikis & Blogs—Oh My!
In this hands-on class music teachers will develop strategies to support and extend student learning with online collaborative tools such as social networks, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. These tools provide easy ways to get your music classes online integrating text, video, and audio. Strategies for using these tools to facilitate assessment, writing across the curriculum, and reflective journaling, as well as to support performing, rehearsing, practicing, and composing will be explored. Applications of these tools in settings from elementary through college will be shared and developed. Prerequisite: None. Examples of tools for both Macs and PCs will be shared. Targeted for elementary, middle, high school and college levels, general music or ensembles.

50096 MUS 536, Sec 04, 2 credits, $500
July 7-11, 1:15–5:45 pm & Thurs 7-9:30 pm

More information and registration available at http://www.ccsusmi.com/

Ning has been a great platform for setting up private social networks for my college classes. I use it as the online presence for all the classes I teach, rather than courseware tools like Moodle or Blackboard, because of its ease of use, clean design and integrated audio and video players and storage. What before took a lot of third party tools and time to code and program a website is simplified with Ning. My students and I log in to one site and set up our own personalized profiles to share, discuss, collaborate, and reflect on our compositions, teaching, or readings for class. Anecdotally, my students spend more time on class material responding to posts, sharing their music and providing feedback to each other on their peer teaching videos… most of it outside of class time.

I recently shared how I have been using these social networking technologies with faculty and students at Shenandoah Conservatory and at the University of Illinois. When speaking with music education majors and local teachers, many saw the potential of sites like Ning to support learning in K-12 schools, but rightly expressed reservations about the advertising and some of the design features of Ning. (Thanks to Steve Hargadon at http://education.ning.com/ for sharing that Ning now will eliminate the ads for K-12 Ning sites!!!) These concerns may now be set aside with a new private social network platform designed specifically for K-12 at http://www.imbee.com/.

Imbee has many of the same features of Ning, including blogs with integrated audio and video players/storage, but without advertising. Imbee also has intriguing and extensive parental and teacher controls. Each student account is connected to a “parent sponsor” who has ultimate administrative control over the content for his or her student or child. The design of the site is also kid friendly with bright colors and a clean layout. Take a spin over to Imbee.com and take their tour!

This multimedia project was created by Northwest High School Multimedia Artists

• Sarah Beaty
• Chet Patterson
• Jeremy Pierson
• Tiarress Stokes

Under the expert supervision of Jacquie Dennis, Director of Choral Music at NWHS, with assistance from Kenneth Sallaz, ISU Music Business Major.

IMEA Technology Chair/Indiana State University:

• Dr. Alex Ruthmann

Butler University:

• Dr. Tim Brimmer, Andrew Cunningham

Special Thanks to Apple, Inc:

• Joseph Lee & Dick Hamstra

This project was created, edited and produced with four MacBooks using Apple’s iMovie, published on the internet using Apple’s iWeb.

For a while now, I have been looking for a Web 2.0 tool that would enable my students, after reading a post or article on one of my course blogs, to be able to easily post their own questions and/or comments to be shared with the whole class. The architecture of blogs inherently supports readers adding comments to posts. However, when you have a lot of posts to read from a large number of students in a course, it takes a long time for the instructor to read and synthesize the themes and issues that emerge in students’ responses. As a teacher, I often base my class discussions on the topics raised by students in their blog post responses. Since I began facilitating my classes through blogs and social networks, I’ve wanted an easy tool where students could centrally post their questions and comments and vote the most important questions/comments (to them) higher and lower (similar to Digg.com). Amazon’s UnSpun now gives me that functionality.

Check out an embedded UnSpun list in this blog post:

Now, UnSpun looks to be quite nice for what I’d like it to do. However, as with many third-party social networking and Web 2.0 tools, there are pros and cons:

Pros: Readers can easily add their own questions and comments, these are placed in a central box which can easily be placed anywhere on a blog through the widget/embed code functions, readers can vote questions and comments they view to be more relevant to them higher on the list. Voting up or down an existing comment or question does not require signing in.

Cons: Readers have to have an Amazon.com account, they have to sign in to that account when adding a question.

Middle Ground: If you click to add another question or comment, you are taken to your list on Amazon’s UnSpun website. Once on this site, you can edit your questions, merge duplicates (a good function for the teacher), and add comments. It might get a little complicated and confusing if students decide to add comments on this page… there seems to be no indication on the embeddable widget that comments exist on the UnSpun website.

So, UnSpun looks to be a promising tool at least worth trying with my students this coming semester. If anyone knows of other Web 2.0 tools with similar functionality, please let me know.

ISU Music in Special Education
ISU Technology for Musicians
ISU Elementary General Music Methods

Using Social Networks to Facilitate College Courses - 2007-2008

ISU Secondary General Music Methods
ISU Technology for Musicians

Other Examples of Online Collaborative Tools in Music and Music Education

Wiki - Cranbrook Composers’ Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing
Online Collaborative Composing Communities - Funkdammen, dBass, Acid Planet & UNESCO Sounds of our Water.

Blogging Resources

Blogger
Wordpress

Social Network Resources

Ning
KickApps
Facebook

Online Multimedia Storage and Sharing Resources

Audio - Odeo
Video - YouTube
Video - Google Video
Multimedia Annotation - Mojiti

New Book

Music Education with Digital Technology - J. Finney & P. Burnard (Eds.). Continuum Press. ISBN: 0826494145. Ruthmann, A. Chapter 11: Strategies for supporting music learning through online collaborative technologies.

The product of these interviews was an article on their website sharing a number of cool ways to integrate wikis into classes of all sorts. Though this article was written in 2005, it still provides a good overview of the possibilities of using wikis in your classroom. Since 2005, there have been many innovations in Wiki technology, most notably that many sites such as PBWiki.com and Wikispaces.com easily allow you and your students to create and manage wiki entries without having to know the special “markup” language many wiki interfaces required back in 2005. As with any technology, innovation continues and many become easier to use. Such has been the case with wikis over the past three years.

Back when I originally created the Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing for my middle school students, I browsed around and tested a number of free wiki sites and finally settled on PBWiki.com. I still use PBWiki today for my college classes because of its ease of use and multimedia features.

Since installing their new “point and click” interface back in January, users can now easily upload and post photos and streaming videos from YouTube, streaming audio from YackPack.com, add a chat room, install Google Gadgets, among other things.

As I have continued to experiment with wikis in music-related classes, the ability for students to create entries embedded with video and audio has become important. Though most wikis are optimized for textual and, to an extent, photographic-based collaboration, my students are moving toward conveying their ideas in audio and video form. Earlier this week Mojiti.com, previously featured on my blog here, released a new set of features that my students are already beginning to take advantage of.

The latest updates to Mojiti include:

• Multimedia annotations. Users can overlay/embed their own audio or video into a video.
• Freehand drawing support. Users can add their own Madden-style writing overlays.
• Mojiti-to-go Bookmarklet. This feature enables you to add a plug-in to your web browser which allows you to add Mojiti features to any streaming video hosted on the web.

Watch below or click here to see the new features in action.

Here is her abstract:

I undertook this project as a 12-year-old student while studying research methods at the
Children’s Research Centre at the Open University. It has already been shown that doing
music improves children’s Mathematics and English scores. The aim of this study was to
find out if it also raises the aspirations of the children taking part. A questionnaire was
given out to 80 Year 7 children at two schools in Milton Keynes. Questions investigated
the children’s musical participation and future aspirations as well as their parents’ attitudes
and education.

The most important findings are that the musical participation of the children is
positively correlated with their future aspirations. Musical participation is most closely
linked with parental enthusiasm for it. Parental pressure and education were found to
have no link with musical participation, but families with low incomes may find affording
musical activities hard to maintain.

It is recommended that more money be put into music education so children of low
socio-economic backgrounds can have more of a chance to play musical instruments.

You can download and read the full research article here. Dr. John Finney from the University of Cambridge wrote a wonderful response to her article here.

Implications for music education

Why don’t we involve our students more in our research? Is the traditional “top-down” approach the best way to affect change in music education? I love John Finney’s idea that we should involve our students as “co-enquirers” in our research. All too often, we place ourselves as teachers and researchers in the role of “most knowledgeable” when, perhaps, our students should be seen in that role.

It is a great day in music education when one of the world’s leading music education research journals publishes a research study conducted and written by a 12-year old. Congratulations Eleanor!

Mojiti.com is a useful tool for those of us who need to annotate video clips. You can either upload your own video to Mojiti or link to another video online (perhaps stored over at youtube.com or video.google.com) and add your own text and graphics as a layer on top of the video. As your video plays back, your subtitles, or comments, or graphics appear and disappear. Here are some ideas for the music classroom:

• Post a video of your rehearsal and invite your students to create their own overlay/spot organizer adding comments about the rehearsal
• In music education methods courses and student teaching supervision, videos of student teaching could be uploaded to Mojiti and both the student and the teacher could provide embedded comments right at the spot in the video where the comment was relevant. I have started having my student teachers upload their video and add their comments before I watch and give my own.
• In a technology-infused music class, you could ask your students who were creating original soundtracks to video clips or creating multimedia projects involving video to add their own directors/composers commentary layer describing the processes they used as well as their expressive intent.

Click here to see Mojiti in action.

Ning.com (special thanks to Steve Bizub for showing me this site) is a free social networking site that you can set up for your music classes. It enables you to create a collaborative web site for your classroom similar to myspace.com or facebook.com while keeping everything private. Students can create their own profiles and blogs, as well as upload photos and videos. One feature they plan on announcing soon is the ability to upload streaming audio files which would be perfect for a music class. Not only will you as teacher be able to upload audio files, but the students will as well… all within a private, password-protected space.

An approach I have found useful in my own teaching has been to read Katie’s chapter, but instead substitute the word “listening” when she writes “reading,” substitute “piece of music” when she writes “text,” and substitute “composing” when she writes “writing.” The pedagogical models used in process writing classrooms and approaches to “listening” by Katie Wood Ray can have tremendous results when adapted for use to support student composing in music classes. Give it a try!

Download their Powerpoint presentation here.

The first featured newsletter is written by Dr. Susan Mills from Appalachian State University. Be sure to check out her ideas for arranging and composing in the classroom

I currently serve as Web Editor for MusicalCreativity.com. So, if you have any feedback or suggestions for content, please feel free to email me and let us know. Also, if you have something to contribute, please email our Creativity SRIG Chair Michele Kaschub.

In my middle school classes, my students often began composing after analyzing an existing piece of music to serve as a model or example to get their own compositional ideas. Because my students were working with loop-based software, I tried to find intriguing pieces of music that were based around loops or extended ostinati. When I was listening to the CDs that accompany the new Silver Burdett Making Music series, I ran across a track in Grade 2 entitled Fish Food by electric cellist Gideon Freudmann.

I tracked Gideon down on the web through his website and asked him about his process for creating Fish Food:

I recorded Fish Food with my electric cello and a Lexicon JamMan - a nice rack-mounted looper that has not been on the market for several years. Lately I have been using a foot peddle looper - the Boss Loop Station (RC-20). It’s not stereo, but very easy to use and has some other nice features.

Fish Food is from my CD, Hologram Crackers which is an entire album of loop based electric cello instrumental tunes (all original. It’s available, along with my other CDs at http://www.cellobop.com. Fish Food is an unusual tune in that the “verse” has three measures in 7 and one in 6.

The tune was recorded mostly in one pass with the looper - playing the the strum phrase first and then building the layers of the loop on top of it. Once it was all there I improvised some leads over the top - again, all in the one pass. When I mixed it down, I started the piece at a point where the loop with all the layers were established (as opposed to some other tunes where left in each layer as they get added) and at the very end I overdubbed a few of the weird atonal sounds. The big chord that begins and ends the tune came from another tune and those were the last sounds to be added.” (personal communication)

Not only were my students informed by analyzing the recording of Fish Food, but they also were informed by Gideon’s personal process of working with a stand-alone loop-pedal and production process in his studio.

I wish as teachers we had access to more stories of the actual production and composing processes musicians use to create music today. I did find a few older sources, such as writings by Igor Stravinsky (Poetics of Music) and Aaron Copland (What to listen for in music.) but what about more contemporary music and musicians?

In the bargain bin at a Tuesday Morning, I found a great book entitled: Off the record: Songwriters on songwriting by Graham Nash. This book and set of audio CDs includes interviews with Randy Bachman, David Crosby, John Lee Hooker, and others.

Another interesting book is Talking Music: Conversations With John Cage, Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Five Generations of American Experimental Composers by William Duckworth. This book shares interviews and conversations with the above mentioned composers and others. I have found great quotes and descriptions of process in this book to share with my students.

For the most up-to-date examples of process, I have found Jon Savage’s Sound2Picture resources to be most intriguing. In this resource and in his own personal blog, Jon shares detailed notes and videos of sound designer Andrew Diey. In these notes, Andrew talks about his composing process for each of the films and computer games he composed for in the Sound2Picture and Sound2Game projects.

Lastly, Sam Reese pointed me in the direction of a great article by University of Illinois composer Stephen Taylor entitled: Translating unapproachable light: How composers write music. This article describes his own process composing a piece entitled: Unapproachable Light. Lots of great insight here that should be shared with student composers.

If you are interested in listening to Fish Food or using it with your students, check out the following information:
Fish Food (click to listen to and/or purchase from iTunes)
Gideon Freudmann - http://www.cellobop.com
2005 album Hologram Crackers

Through new online technologies such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, and social networking sites, as well as online audio and video sharing sites like YouTube, Google Video, and Odeo, anyone can easily post and share rich content to the web. These new online collaborative tools offer great possibilities for enhancing music learning and teaching experiences.

• What are their conceptions and misconceptions about music and musical process?
  
• What are their challenges in the composing process?
• What are their musical intentions?
  

I have found the following three techniques to provide many insights that have helped me be a better teacher and more importantly, my students to be better peer-teachers.

Composers’ Commentaries

When I watch a DVD, I have the option at the end of the movie (or even at the beginning) to watch the move with overdubbed commentaries by the director and often the actors who made the movie. These commentaries provide additional information and insight into the processes of creating the film. Because I wanted to learn more about what my students were thinking as they composed their pieces and what they thought was important to share with the listeners of their compositions, I ask my students to record an additional commentary track on each of their compositions.

When students are finished with their compositions, they save one version with the commentary, and another without it. Here is an example of a composition entitled Rock to the Beat by one of my 6th grade students, Jessica Walton:

powered by ODEO

What insights do you have into her compositional process and musical understanding after listening to her composition?

Here is her piece with her recorded commentary:

powered by ODEO

What insights do you have into her compositional process and musical understanding after listening to her composition with recorded commentary?

Emergent Encyclopedia of Composing

When I first discovered the Wikipedia website, I was intrigued by its underlying concept - a website where anyone could easily contribute and collaborate to create an online encyclopedia. One of the first ideas I had a music teacher was to adapt this concept for use to support my students classroom composing experiences. Wouldn’t it be cool to have my students create an online encyclopedia of composing that contained their suggestions for what made a good piece of music and their own successful strategies for composing and working with our composing tools?

Click here to see what they created

Composition Logs

After reading a great online article by writing researcher and educator Katie Wood Ray entitled Read Like a Teacher of Writing, I decided to have my students create composition logs of each etude and composition they created throughout our middle school general music classes. When students start a composition, they begin to fill out their composition log. They revisit this log again when they decide to either abandon or finish their compositions. Here’s a link to the composition log we use:

Our Composition Log

Similar challenges exist for the music educator in knowing how students listen to music and what they perceive during that process.

In my classes I have used Frank Jonas’ Geoscape 6 as a way to better understand how my students see a work of art. A common conception that my students often have is that a work of art is static in that it does not change over time, unlike music which is almost always in motion through time. One way to challenge this conception is to challenge students to compose a piece of music that expresses their visual pathway through a work of art.

I have had students compose to Geoscapes 6 with both acoustic and computer-based instruments. When I present the painting to the students, I often ask them?

• What do you see?
• What did you notice first? Second? Third?
• How might you represent what you see through sound?
• What does this artwork sound like to you?

Whether students work together in small groups with classroom instruments or work alone or in small groups with loop software, I have found my students’ pathways through this artwork to be very different from each other. Some students see the background squares first, then additional layers of “chaos” on top. Some view it holistically noticing “chaos” first, then moving “downward” through the artwork to the order of the squares. Others focus on the shapes or colors and try to represent those aspects of the artwork through their music.

Perhaps the most interesting has been our class discussions when sharing our compositions. My students always came away with a better understanding that not everyone sees an artwork in the same way. Also, they come to better understand how an entire class of students can create totally different pieces of music from the same visual artwork and the different techniques composers can use to express through sound.

Drawing on the sculpting process, students used Acid Music Studio to create their own “sound mass” similar to a block of clay, wood, or stone. Students were asked to create an Acid file comprised of 10 to 15 layers of different sound loops that lasted for a total of two minutes. The result was a screen painted solid with a variety of different sound loops, creating a cacophonous “sound mass.”

After students had created their sound masses, they traded them with their classmates. The task for the classmates was to use a subtractive process of removing or altering portions of the sound mass (parallel to the sculpting process) to create a music composition. Students could not add anything to the sound masses, however, they could use the erase tool to make changes to the the texture and form of the compositions. Students also transform the musical layers through the use of filter, key change, and tempo tools to create their composition.