I have led many “Call & Response” applications in sessions with a variety of populations. While rummaging through some old music, I was re-introduced to the video game “PaRappa the Rapper”. It is a game in which you play as a dog (PaRappa) who raps his way through a series of random events in order to beat the game. An odd concept to be sure, but the game has countless musical merits. The player has to follow sequences of timed button presses in order to move forward, and the difficulty of these sequences increases as the game goes on.
I played the game again to take a trip down memory lane, and found myself having way too much fun being completely engaged in what was essentially another “call & response” activity. I thought to myself, why can’t I take something like this to a session? What made it more appealing to me was the hip hop-esque background track.
In my videos, I’ll give you just a couple of ideas of how you could incorporate background tracks into applications.