A real-world music-making project

• HL builds on SL by challenging you to work like real-world music-makers.
• You plan and collaboratively create a project inspired by authentic music-making practices.
• It draws on the competencies, skills and processes of all the musical roles.
• It is evidenced as a multimedia presentation.

Practices you can model

Contemporary music-making takes many forms you can model:

• The band or ensemble writing and gigging together.
• The producer or beatmaker building tracks in a DAW.
• The DJ curating and remixing for an audience.
• The singer-songwriter; the film or game composer working to a brief; the community or cross-arts project.

Your project imitates a genuine practice, not an artificial exercise.

What is the project?

Planning like professionals

• Collaboration is central: sharing roles, negotiating ideas, dividing tasks and meeting deadlines.
• Plan like professionals: define the concept and audience, set milestones and assign roles.
• Document your decisions and how the group solved problems.

Which role does the task serve?

Tap a project task, then the role it mostly belongs to.

Bringing the roles together

The project integrates all three musical roles:

• Researcher: investigate the practice, its context and its conventions.
• Creator: compose, arrange, produce or remix original material.
• Performer: rehearse and realise the music for presentation.

Strong projects show all three feeding each other.

Why collaborate?

Entrepreneurship in music

The course values musical entrepreneurship: understanding how music reaches audiences today — releasing, promoting, performing and collaborating across arts and media.

Your project should engage with a real, current way that music is made and shared.

Presenting the project

• The outcome is a multimedia presentation combining audio, video, images, notation and commentary to evidence the process and product.
• Show the journey: concept, research, experimentation, creation, rehearsal, performance and reflection — not just the final result.

What must it show?

Match the contribution to the role

Tap a description on the left, then its matching term on the right.

Process matters

Because it models real practice, reflection is vital: what worked, what you changed, how the group made decisions, and how research shaped the creative and performing choices.

Assessors reward thoughtful process, not just polish.

How is it submitted?

Making the HL project succeed

• Choose an authentic, current practice you can genuinely explore.
• Plan, collaborate and document from the start.
• Integrate all three roles.
• Present the whole journey clearly in your multimedia submission.

The big ideas to know

You have covered The contemporary music-maker. Press Finish to see your score.