# Tiny Desk Talks
Tiny desk offers artists a chance to perform in a low stakes, low pressure space distinct from their standard concert venues. How could it alter students' mindset to present their academic work at a "tiny desk?"
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**Watch T-Pain's Tiny Desk, the inspiration for this assignment, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjXUg1s5gc**

### Key Components of Tiny Desk
1. Introduction
- **Minimal and personal**. Everything is acoustic and scaled back.
- **Humor and rapport** with audience and with fellow musicians are a part of building the performance atmosphere.
3. Audience interaction
- The audience cheers and responds to the performer throughout the performance. **Strict social codes of concerts** are **not enforced.**
5. "Performance"
- The performer begins their song, and the transition feels effortless. The performance is intimate, and helps **pull our attention into their work.**
7. Set and Removal of Indimidating Context
- Tiny Desk makes both the performer and the work feel more **accessible and intimate.**

### Academic Potential
Academically, a Tiny Desk Talk could offer students a way to explore, refine, and refresh their ideas while also building classroom community. Simultaneously, filming the talk or presenting it in front of an audience can help students build performance skills throughout the semester.

### Assignment Goals
- Allow students to present their work in a "low pressure" enviroment and in a space distinct from the classroom
- Get Students to remix their ideas "acoustically" and make them fresh again at the end (or in the middle) of a semester
- Allow for immediate feedback from the "audience" of their peers
- Develop performance sklils via scaffolded interaction with cameras.
- Potential to develop video/audio production skills as well depending on scope of project.

### Implementation
- Year-long Scaffolding
- Students film videos 4-5 times that are increasingly structured over the course of the semester to help them become comfortable "performing"
- Also teach students how to be helpful and interactive "audience members"
- Mid-semester
- Students workshop ideas in a format that encourages informal but structured dialogue
- Establish personal stakes for the project's importance
- Final project
- "Remix" final projects after they're already finished
- A group of ~10 students reads each other's final "traditional" paper
- The "Tiny Desk" presentations consider their personal relationship with the paper's contents
- Peers get to see the human behind the academic paper

***Potential for Musical Performers:** In a class with creative practitioners, Tiny Desk could be taken literally and allow students a chance to engage in musical performance.*

# Scaffolding Assignments
## 1. Anlalyze Tiny Desk
- Assign students different Tiny Desk Concerts in different genres.
- Give them the questions below and ask them to analyze their Tiny Desks to learn more about what makes a Tiny Desk Concert feel 'informal'
- What do you notice about the sound of the music? How is it different from the music as you are used to hearing it (if you are familiar)?
- What do you notice about the set? How does the performer interact with their surroundings?
- How are the performers engaging with the audience and with each other? What do you notice about their movements and physical gestures?
- Analyze the mise en scène. How does it contribute to the aesthetic and affect of the video?

**- How do these elements contribute to the the "informal" atmosphere of the performance**
## 2. Peer on-Camera conversation (LL Assignment)
- Students will come to the learning lab with a draft of their paper already complete.
- A LLUF without knowledge of the paper will sit down with them for an interview.
- During the interview, the student will informally explain their paper to the LLUF
- On-camera student receives transcript (to aid their paper writing) and video

## 3. Analyze your video (As in Assignment 1)
- Watch your own video back. What made you read as "informal"? How did you behave on camera?
- What could you improve on?
- How were you able to convey your ideas informally? What language did you use?

## 4. Tiny Desk Performance