Disclaimer: This is transcribed using AI. Expect (funny) errors.
Mindy Peterson: [00:00:00] I’m Mindy Peterson, and this is Enhance Life with Music, a holistic look at the power of music in our everyday lives. Today’s episode is a direct result of my college daughter’s visit home over Christmas. Adrienne and her boyfriend Luke were in town from Florida, and I went with them to a concert at Adrienne’s former high school here in town. A friend of hers is a senior this year and participates in a peer mentoring music program there. And it was so fun seeing this concert and just the creative ways that music was performed with the kids with special needs and their peer mentors. And I just happened to mention this concert experience the next week when I was in a work meeting and colleague was like, Oh yeah, there’s this United Sound, it’s this great organization. And I was like, Wait, what? There’s there’s a national organized effort related to this programming? I didn’t know about that. So I looked up United sound and was really excited to see that a former guest of our podcast, Alice Hammel, is listed as their research consultant. So long story short, I contacted Alice and said, Fill me in on United sound and can you introduce me? And I’m thrilled today to have joining me from Arizona, the founder and executive director of United Sound, Julie Duty. Julie has a degree in music education and has a background as a high school and middle school band teacher. Julie founded United Sound Inc in Twenty Fourteen, working with teachers, parents and administrators to bring meaningful participation and inclusivity to the instrumental music classroom. United sound was created with the goal of developing relationships between students with and without disabilities and providing them with the opportunity to build self-esteem, self-confidence, friendships and a sense of belonging through music. Welcome to enhance life with music, Julie. Thank you. Well, Julie, I love hearing stories of how organizations came to be. Can you tell us, first of all, what United sound is in your own words and then tell us the story of how you came to start United sound about eight years ago? Twenty fourteen.
Julie Duty: [00:02:37] Yeah. Well, United Sound is a peer mentoring program designed to, you know, give existing music students like what you saw in the in the concert the opportunity to mentor their peers. Whether we’re talking about adults, you know, at a collegiate or community band level or high school which you saw or middle school always peer to peer, always same age and then being able to allow or or help people with disabilities to get involved in this amazing thing that we get to do. And, you know, enjoy music and be a full participant of music and just be a part of the regular thing as opposed to, you know, we’ve made something special and it’s for you over here, but say, you know, what we’re doing is awesome and we would like you to do it with us and we’re going to give you all the tools and the help that we can to do that. I know from my own experience and then from having, you know, three teenagers that kids need an opportunity to be needed. Roughly, we need to serve and we need to help one another and we need to do it for long term, right? Not not not a one off service opportunity. So being able to put all those things together just just made sense to me.
Julie Duty: [00:03:54] Where did it come from? Here’s the embarrassing part. I was a band director, as you mentioned, and I wanted my classroom to be a place for anybody, everyone. And you know, at the beginning, you don’t notice these things. But after a couple of years, I said to my principal, Hey, you know, we’re missing this entire demographic of people. And she said, Oh, fantastic. I said to her, You know, this is I whatever, but anybody who wants to be a band could be a band. And she said, great. So the next fall I came back and my seventh grade band had ninety two children registered for it, and three of them were kids with autism and a pretty high level of need. All three had their own aid. And I suddenly, you know, after the fact, young teacher recognized that I had no idea what to do. Sure. And there were 90 children in the room, you know, so it was already, you know, a little chaotic. And so, you know, I went to her and I said, I’m. Totally into it, but I’m going to need some help, and I need somebody some things, resources, I don’t know what they are, but we’re going to need some stuff.
Julie Duty: [00:05:07] And she said, Well, there’s no one to help because, you know, the people within the school district that understand special education don’t understand music. You know, she was a wonderful principal, but you know, like my my reviews of whether I was being a good teacher or not were. Everyone seemed on task. The concert sounded great, which is not really a clear understanding of what a music teacher is and does. And then the three aides were, you know, definitely ready to jump in in case of an emergency, but not any more than that. And they were on their phones. So this was way back in the twenty four twenty five school year was was the last last year of this. We did it for a couple of years. And so she said, here’s an open po, you know, go buy whatever you whatever you want. And there’s there’s lots of of research. Alice Hamel, you mentioned, has been doing lots of amazing things. But as a band director, there wasn’t anything that in the scope of my actual life and my actual teaching busyness where I could just pick it up and use it tomorrow.
Mindy Peterson: [00:06:19] So what you were looking for with that open po was curriculum.
Julie Duty: [00:06:24] I don’t. I didn’t know, but there wasn’t any didn’t end up using it because it wasn’t anything to buy.
Mindy Peterson: [00:06:29] There weren’t any resources really available there.
Julie Duty: [00:06:32] There’s lots of research. There’s a fair amount of research. You know, there were things to buy, but it just, you know, then I had to read the book and then I had to create something based on what the book taught me to create. And I just honestly didn’t have the capacity to do that. You know, so they stayed in the band, you know, we put a pad on the drums. We really couldn’t hear what you were doing. And I mean, I did my best, but I felt a lot of guilt that they weren’t having an authentic musical experience, you know? And of course, my principals like in there, in the room, in the room has been blown out of the room, you know? And I didn’t have any of the words, right. I know now that inclusion is not a place include inclusion and authenticity and belonging and participation and, you know, doing the things that we’re all doing together and having meaningful experiences. But that was what I could do at the time. So I stopped teaching in 2005. It was just really my my whole identity to be a teacher, and I had stopped teaching because I had babies enough children that we were spending more in daycare than my salary. So it didn’t make sense to teach anymore. But it was it was hard. That was a hard, tough transition for me. But I stopped teaching. And then that fall of two thousand five, I actually planned all of this out and said, Well, you know, the help didn’t exist.
Julie Duty: [00:07:54] Maybe, maybe we could just make the help. Maybe it. Maybe it wouldn’t be that hard. And then of course, had a moment of clarity that, you know, there’s a reason I wasn’t working. Maybe it wasn’t the right time. So five to 13, eight years later, when my youngest went to preschool in about 2011, I started volunteering at a children’s home and I was like an office assistant, writing grants and doing this paperwork and planning their board meetings. And about four years in, the executive director looked over at me. My desk was literally in his office and he goes, Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be doing? And I said, Well, I’m working on the United Way grant, but I’ll do whatever you want. You know, I’m I’m a volunteer. What do you want? And he goes, No. Isn’t there something you’re supposed to be doing, huh? And I said, Oh, yes. And I told him about it. And he said, Well, I don’t have any idea about any of that makes no sense to me. But here’s all of our legal paperwork or articles of incorporation things you have to pay a lawyer to do, just change the name and get going, huh? And so from, you know, an idea in two thousand five that is on a floppy disk somewhere
Mindy Peterson: [00:09:16] On these floppy disks,
Julie Duty: [00:09:18] Somewhere to, you know, January of 14, I went to a friend of mine in Phoenix and said, Hey, guess what, we’re going to do? And he didn’t say no, which was awesome. So we tried it out that spring and we had the peer mentoring structure in place. But, you know, no curriculum to move forward because we did every instrument for a week or two. Yeah.
Mindy Peterson: [00:09:41] And what what age did you say that was that you started experimenting with this in that was high school?
Julie Duty: [00:09:47] Yeah, that was high school. That was a high school in Phoenix. Yeah.
Mindy Peterson: [00:09:50] So with that start of experimenting that at that point in time, you already had the plan of doing the peer mentoring then?
Julie Duty: [00:09:57] Yeah, yeah. I mean, all of that. Was planned out from 2005. I mean, here’s the thing, and I say this to people all the time about our parameters now is that everybody wants me to like interview these 15, 16 year old kids and get these amazing quotes from them. But they don’t know what’s happening. You know, we’re dropping a tiny pebble in the center of the lake of their life. Mm hmm. And it will ripple and it will hit the shores of there, you know, of their consciousness at different times. And and right now, most of them are like, it’s a good time. It’s really fun. You know, they don’t know. But you know, so from 15 to 16 year old me to, you know, young band director to let’s plan this out in two thousand five to, oh, it’s twenty fourteen, why don’t we finally do something about it? And honestly, like I never had an idea of how big this would become and how quickly it would become big. We’ve had over 10000 kids in our programs in the last eight years.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:02] Wow. So fascinating to hear the stories of how things come together and really interesting that I mean, obviously, this was an idea that really stuck with you and impacted you and over the course of several years like that. I mean, close to 10 years, it really was marinating there somewhere in the back of your minds, enough that it came to fruition. So that’s really inspiring. Now there is a part of your website that it was kind of like a chart that I really liked is said, why is united so needed? And then under that, there’s a sentence. Three point two million U.S. students have no access to instrumental music education, and then the left hand column gives the problem, and the right hand column gives the solution the number one problem item. So secondary music teachers receive little to no training. Also, No. Two, no extra time or staffing to devote to a new population, and three lack of specialized curriculum. Then, over on the right hand column, the solution number one United Sound provides teacher and student training modules. Number two, United Sound utilizes peer mentors to create a student led music club and number three. The United Sound curriculum includes method books, lesson plans, how to videos and more. Talk to us a little bit about what United sound does provide in terms of the training modules and curriculum.
Julie Duty: [00:12:33] Sure, so in the school, a united sound chapter is led by a music teacher and a special education teacher. And if there aren’t both, we don’t start the chapter and then, you know, we meet with them and and it’s a training session, but it’s really more relationship building because when we’re doing it this way, the music teacher doesn’t have to learn how to teach special education students, and we ask them to trade rules so that now the special education teacher is in charge of the peer mentors. Their job is to teach the peer mentors how to teach, and the music teacher is still in charge of music things that they already know how to do. Pick music, wave your arms around, be encouraging, you know, show fingerings, whatever it is. And so we’re, you know, we’re talking about the program. We’re training, but we’re we’re relationship building between the two of them. And we’re saying especially to the special education teachers, if there is a safety issue. All hands on deck, but otherwise don’t even speak to your own students. Because if I’m the peer mentor, the teacher comes over to me and they say, Hey Julie, what you need to do is tell Joseph these things, and Joseph is sitting right there. He can listen to her. Tell me these things, right? But now she’s empowered me every single time going forward to know what to do in this case. And that’s what we see is this incredible skill building and strength, the building and the peer mentors by giving them true responsibility, true leadership.
Julie Duty: [00:14:05] We see over and over and over again, number one, that students will do things for their peers that they won’t do for anybody else. That peer pressure that makes teenagers do really dumb things can work the other way too, right? You know, let’s give the students a lot of training up front so that they feel comfortable. So we we start with this relationship building of the teachers. The the concept of united sound is to make everything as simple as humanly possible so that no matter how busy you are, it feels like you can get to the end of the year and go, Well, gosh, that was easy. Let’s do it again. We would rather have you do something really small for the next 15 years of your teaching career, then do something really huge for one semester. Sure. Because you’ll reach a lot of students on both sides of this relationship by just continuing and keeping it simple. And sustainable. So the next step is after everyone’s chosen and the first two united sound meetings are mentor training meetings, and we provide basically two hours worth of curriculum, but they’re just videos, then the method books are make it super simple, so the plan is to do the next page. The clubs choose to club presidents out of the peer mentors, and after they’re going, they’re in charge of everything they write. The lesson plans for each week they tell the music teacher, What’s going to happen?
Mindy Peterson: [00:15:30] Let’s do this.
Julie Duty: [00:15:31] Yep. Oh. As young as sixth grade they do this. Oh, really little kids that are very successful. You just have to give them the structure and then get out of their way. Wow. Well, they love
Mindy Peterson: [00:15:46] How I love how sustainable this program is in how it’s kept simple so that people will sustain it and that it will be successful. But also the extent that you utilize the the student mentors is really inspiring and brilliant. I mean, other student mentors are going to listen to their peer club leader in a different way. Then they’re going to listen to a teacher who’s in charge and they’re going to pay attention and support them and in a different way. And boy, the leadership skills that that develops in the club leader has got to be really transformational, I would imagine.
Julie Duty: [00:16:29] You know, I feel like it’s and we hear this over and over from our our music teachers is that the kids that they thought would be awesome at United Sound as as mentors are really good. But the kids that they were like, Well, maybe you just need to be needed tend to be the very best ones, really. So it’s this consistent surprise. Everybody’s good at it. Everybody can. Everybody can be a friend. It’s this consistent surprise. And I think that, you know, for the 14th chair flute player probably knows what it’s like to struggle. You know what it’s like to not understand something and maybe has a better grasp of being able to break it down? Sure. You know, yeah.
Mindy Peterson: [00:17:12] So well, we mentioned already that secondary music teachers basically don’t have access to extra help, extra curriculum, things like that. And so being able to utilize students in this way really helps make the program self-sustaining. I’m sure there are funds needed, though, to provide this training and curriculum. How is United sound funded?
Julie Duty: [00:17:35] Well, that’s a good question. We were we were on a trajectory, you know, pre-pandemic to like, finally take off. Like at the end, nearing the end of twenty nineteen, we were like, Oh, we’re going to make it like, we’re going to think everything’s going to be different. And then of course, and then pandemic. So we’re still kind of in recovery mode, but we charge. I’m putting that in quotation marks. There’s a two thousand five hundred dollars startup fee for a new chapter that money cannot come out of your band or orchestra music money. It has to come from somewhere else so it can come from the Special Education Department. It can come from the district, it can come from a company in your community, you know, that wants to see something. It very often comes from our own fundraising, so we’ll we’ll go to a sponsor and say, we want to we want to start, you know, five new chapters in your city. And then, you know, that company will say, Oh yeah, we’ll do that. And so they’ll launch those, those five new chapters. Ok. Some states we have where the entire state is covered by a single funder to start as many chapters as you can start, which is awesome, extremely rare.
Julie Duty: [00:18:50] But you know, California, if you look at the map, the where we are map, there’s a ton of stars in California because we had a couple of visual performing arts coordinators that said, Oh, we know how we can use this title for funding. You know, so so we have to be able to pay the bills, but it’s a one time. So if you do united some for the next 25 years, you still only pay this the one time. Yeah, OK. Sometimes we have a school that’ll say, Oh, I’ve got a funder, they can pay $500 a year, which is great, so you’ll have your ten thousand five hundred dollars paid in five years. But you start today. You know, we’re not going to create a barrier to entry. If somebody can’t find the money, we will go and fundraiser for you. We fundraise about 60 percent of the schools that start. But being able to put an authentic cost on, you know, buying the duct tape to hold the doors open has helped us has helped everybody to like have an understanding of, Oh, this is the thing that we’re doing.
Mindy Peterson: [00:19:47] And you have a ninety six percent school retention rate. Does that mean that schools who start with this initial initial start up fee and start get the club going? Stay with it long.
Julie Duty: [00:19:58] Term. Yeah, and that’s to me, that’s the most important thing, everybody wants us to track retention of students and it’s like, well, I mean, they grow up, they’ve changed school, you know, it’s so difficult. We do, we do, and we can track that. But far more important is to say, you know, it’s like for us, starting a new school is like hiring a new employee. All of your costs are up front. We’re going to spend all of this time with you, teaching you and giving you materials and helping you get going. If we’re able to then keep you. If ninety six percent of our teachers that start keep going, then we know we’ve succeeded, right? We know we can make a difference that lasts for years and years and years and can impact hundreds, thousands of kids over time. Uh-huh. Yeah. So yeah, well,
Mindy Peterson: [00:20:41] One thing I like to that you point out on your website is the benefits that students have when they participate. Students with disabilities, you say the effect of participation is as simple as finding your niche and sometimes as grand as becoming employable. Have you had examples of students who have jobs that stem from their experience in this program?
Julie Duty: [00:21:05] Yes, we have. And these are some of the most fun stories because I mean, United sound is really social inclusion through music, right? Music is this awesome thing that we know benefits us all. But what we’re what we’re trying to do is move some of the social barriers that exist between humans. And one of the things that’s so difficult to teach our social skills right communication skills. And those appear on just about everybody’s individual education plan. But when you’re in a self-contained classroom with kids who are like you, right, and may also struggle with the same things, it’s difficult to learn those things. So we had this young man named Nick, and this was at the very beginning when I was still able to, you know, go to almost every rehearsal everywhere because we only had four school, five schools. It was the end of the, I think, second practice, second rehearsal, and I was standing with his special education teacher and he walked over to her and just deadpan and he was. She’s tiny little like under five feet, and he’s this huge man child, and he walks over and he leans down and he goes, I like this. And she burst into tears and he about face walks away. And I’m like, What? What is this said? She goes, He doesn’t express opinions, ever. And I went, Oh, OK. You know, so we continued through that year. This was twenty fifteen. He signs up again in twenty sixteen, and then we were invited to perform with the bands of America Honor Band in the Twenty Seventeen Rose Parade and his school all banded together the entire community donated to to raise enough money to send him to participate.
Julie Duty: [00:22:48] I mean, in a national honor band, right? As a new musician with his mentor, you know, and could continue to do all of these things and learn and grow. And he progressed a long way in that year, but he goes to the Rose Parade and it was just this eye opening experience for him that not just his little team of three, but that perfect strangers liked him too and cared what he thought. And so we just we had this amazing magical week, the end of the week. The last day is a free day in Disneyland, and he’s in a clump of teenagers, you know, with the mentors and all the other new musicians that we’ve brought. And he’s I’m standing next to his mom and grandma and he’s like, Bye. And they look at me like, Is this safe? And I’m like, Hey, it’s Disneyland. It’s fine. I mean, and the mentors are not going to ditch him, right? We’ve been together for eight days. We know how this is going to work. And so he came back from that trip and they couldn’t shut him up. Just, I mean, he just when he was telling everyone, everything about everything, everything about his trip and everything, about everything, and they changed his that immediately marked off all the things that were remaining on his AP. They moved his graduation date back by a year and a half. Oh my word. He graduated and he works for the school district now in the maintenance department, which is, you know, he he always had the physical skills to do that.
Julie Duty: [00:24:17] But if you can’t communicate with your employer and it’s so often not a can’t, but you know, it doesn’t feel safe to me. Hmm. We have parents all the time that tell us that their speech pathologists are going, What’s happening? You know, I’ve been working with your kid for three, five, seven years, and all of a sudden something’s changing. Well, she’s using her tongue, learning how to how to tongue on the clarinet. You know where you use learning to breathe and chat and have fun and feel safe and do things that we’re never done before. We just participated again in the twenty two Rose Parade with bands of America again and. Darling, little girl, her name is Caitlin, and she plays baritone, which is like a very small tuba. But, you know, that’s a heavy instrument, and Caitlin is tiny, tiny, tiny, like about the size that my daughter was when she was seven. The Caitlin’s in high school and the Rose Parade is a five and a half mile parade up and downhill, a whole bunch and from bus to bus, it’s almost seven miles. It’s a very, very arduous thing. We always lose some kids out of the band, you know, for one, you know, sprained couldn’t make it or whatever. And Caitlin was just, you know, bound and determined to do this. And we get to, you know, I can see that. Like she’s fatiguing. I marched alongside a staff member, you know, and I’d run into the block and said, Do you need me to carry your instrument? She just looked at me and said, No, I said, All right, so we keep going.
Julie Duty: [00:25:55] She played every song. She marched in step. She made it all the way to the end. You know, we cross that finish line and she’s sobbing, and I run over and I’m like, Are you OK? And she’s like, I did it. I’m so proud of myself, and we all need all of us, right? We need something to do. We need somebody to do it with. But we also need to do hard. Things need to prove to ourselves, you and I, we need that, that we could do something we never thought was possible. And that’s that thing, right? For Caitlin now, like there’s a whole new world opened up to her that she can do hard physical things that nobody else thinks she’s capable of, including herself, you know? Yeah. Like, yeah, she can believe in herself in a whole different way and making music together. You can’t, you cannot replicate it. People always try to like reference it back to sports because sports has such a long and wonderful history of being inclusive. We are late to the game. You know, the Kennedys and Special Olympics, they beat us by about 60 years. Special Olympics predates Idea, which is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. So and it’s similar in that it’s something to do in something, someone to do it with. But making music together is not like anything you can replicate in any other way. It’s magical, and it just changes who we are as people, I believe. Wow.
Mindy Peterson: [00:27:22] Well, I just have had chills like the last ten minutes as you’ve been talking and telling those stories, it’s wonderful. And I just want to point out real quick, too, that the student mentors, obviously, they have huge benefits from participation, too. You point out on your website they will have the lifelong effect of creating a huge body of people who will work better together and protect each other from discrimination and harm creating societies of inclusion and compassion. So, I mean, we don’t have time to go into that, but I mean, we could talk, I’m sure, for hours about all of the benefits that are part of this. But as we wrap things up, what do you recommend for listeners who want to learn more? Whether the listener is an educator, educator, administrator, they’re interested in being a peer mentor or maybe they’re a parent or donor. What do you recommend for them if they want to dig into this and learn more?
Julie Duty: [00:28:13] Our website is, as you know, a good place to start if you want to learn about the program itself. The page that you’ve mentioned a bunch of times is United sounds about, and that’s really the like. Here’s what we’re doing and how it works and why. Kind of there’s a million pages on a lot of pages on our website, but that one is is very specific to here’s how it works and are some, some cute videos there that, you know, will kind of give you the idea and the understanding of how it works between the kids. So starting on our website, I mean, if you’re an administrator or a teacher, you know, or a musician of any kind, we want you in our team. We want to build more opportunities for more people to be involved on both sides of the relationship. As adults, we still have a need to be needed and a lot of us like myself, we play in community bands. We we we still make music past school age. So we want we want anybody who’s involved to be in music and wants to see more people involved. I promise it’s easy and we want to help and make it as easy as possible. You know, if you’re a donor, if you if you feel moved and want to donate, obviously we would love to have more help and we’re extremely open about how we spend our money. All of our donors have total access to all of our financials because I figure if if you want to know how many you know how much money we spend on paper clips this year, we should be able to be honest about that, right? That if you’re being a good financial steward, then there’s nothing to hide. Sure. And that’s, you know, that’s how we operate. Our nonprofit is just complete clarity at all times for anybody who wants to know. As a peer mentor, I mean, if you’re if you’re a student, especially if a lot of college chapters, I think we’re about to start our 11th or 12th collegiate chapter.
Mindy Peterson: [00:30:07] Oh, I guess I didn’t realize you were in colleges too.
Julie Duty: [00:30:10] Yeah. So if you’re a college student, almost all of those chapters are the result of a student saying to a faculty member, Let’s do this. And then I mean, then think about what we’re talking about. We talked about this lack of training, right? But then we’re giving a whole body of pre-service music education teachers an opportunity to actually do it before they enter a classroom. Hmm. Mm hmm. And then we have some of our most amazing peer mentors at the collegiate level. Don’t do united sound in their classrooms when they become real teachers because they don’t need it. You know, they’ll they’ll say, Oh, well, but you taught me like, I already know the doors open every hour of the day. That’s that’s the real goal, right? My goal is to put United sound out of business because every child is included every hour of the day and that as teachers, we understand how to delegate. The work involves peer mentors modify right. We understand that it’s not that hard and how to do it and we can go, Oh yes, you are welcome here. I’ll make this work and that it isn’t so overwhelming, but we have to start in a place of let’s make this really super simple. And then you can grow it from there
Mindy Peterson: [00:31:33] So that wow, this conversation, Julie, is so full of sound bites. Like there’s so many things that you’ve said that I’m like, Oh, I love that. Oh, I love that. And this last piece about your your participants getting to the point where they don’t even need the Organization of United Sound because it’s become intuitive to them to include everyone in their musical education. And I just love that concept. Yeah, that’s awesome. Well, we will wrap this up here. I want to respect your time. I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical, ending a coda by sharing a song or story about a moment that music enhanced your life. I love one of the videos that you sent to me, and we’re going to be playing the audio from that. I will have the link to the actual video in the show notes as well so people can see the video. The visual of it as well. But tell us what listeners are going to be hearing next.
Julie Duty: [00:32:30] This is our our authentic contribution. So a lot of our musicians play one or two notes at just the right time. If your authentic contribution is to just I know these two notes so far, we can write you a part where you can play and be an authentic part of this music making with just your one or two notes. There’s a lot of that note in this song. You know the flutes not playing the tuba part either, right? We’ve got we’ve got modified parts in the entire ensemble, so why can’t we further modify and meet you where you are so that you can feel good about your contribution and be confident in your contribution? We see often that change in behavior, no matter what your cognitive functioning or understanding is, understanding that your part matters and playing at exactly the right time, you can see a difference in the countenance of the person who is doing it. So what you’ll hear is Megan. She’s a new musician, and she’s with her two peer mentors. I just love it because they are. What what I know about Megan is that it took her about two months to make a sound at all on the trumpet. She didn’t want to try any other instrument. She was committed. She wanted to play the trumpet only. So she she’s going to tell her new musician or her mentors what they’re going to do, and then they’re going to play a song. You’ll hear her and one of the mentors playing the two note part and then the other mentor playing the melody and kind of an understanding of how the modified part and the previously written part can go together and sound awesome.
Transcribed by Sonix.ai