When I had developed my solo piece, I had looked at several opportunities to look at pieces to develop to suit my taste of music or ways to challenge myself.

I looked at Pachelbel's Canon in D. It was the piano version of the track. I wanted to adapt this piece to give it more of a hip hop flavour. I thought that I could experiment with beat boxing and other objects that would fit with the sampled music. At first I felt that it would only really work with beat boxing. Then I discovered that the song could be enhanced to suit the hip hop remix of the song if I added more everyday objects in. I decided to put rice into a plastic bottle and experiment with the beats and see where it would fit.

The rice in the plastic added extra percussion to the music and it contributed to the feeling of the music.

When developing the group piece, we looked trying to add a bit of comedy by adding songs in that were more up to date.

Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus and Friday by Rebecca Black were two immediate songs that came to mind. We thought that because these both received widespread media attention for the nature of both the songs. We'd be able to play with the idea of parodying the songs to make the audience laugh.

In Wrecking Ball, it was thought that if we were to be melodramatic when singing it, it would give that comical effect. This was my role to make it funnier. When rehearsing this piece, the other people in my group would start to sing in harmony with me and then look very confusing at the way I was portraying the song. Also, the context of the lyrics of Wrecking Ball played a big part in being able to act the song out.

Friday was a song that didn't feature in the original 4 chord song by Axis of Awesome but we wanted to include this song because we felt it would change the mood of the piece. We sang Wake Me Up by Avicii before this song came in. We used it because we thought it would be comical for the audience giving how much this song was ridiculed for it's very basic lyrics.

We carried on with the development of the 4 chord song. We decided to add harmonies to the songs in our piece and tighten them up. We developed the harmonies by ear on the piano for and created the harmonies for the songs "Don't Matter" by Akon and "I'm Yours" by Jason Mraz.

Also, we looked at changing the way we would present the piece. At first, we were very keen on performing the piece accompanied to a piano. However, we felt that we would be copying the original performance by Axis of Awesome. We made the performance fully acapella by including stamps and clicks instead of the piano. However, I struggled on a lot of occasions to cope with the timing and pitch of the notes I was trying to hit. I felt that I relied heavily on the piano to help me pitch my notes. Once we took the piano out, I couldn't pitch my notes when singing or when trying to sing harmonies.

Further development for the group piece. As a group, we decided to make the piece purely acapella and bring the piece up to day by adding newer songs in. This included songs like Let It Go from Frozen and Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus. We would look at harmonies at a later date.

When looking for ideas for my individual piece, I wanted to create pieces that involved everyday objects. I felt like I could use other pieces of objects around the house to create music. The video above helped to inspire me to create a piece. I realised that I had already created a short piece involving the sounds of mobile phones and how I could develop the piece more to involve beat boxing and other everyday objects to create a piece about objects around the house more than just about telephones.

This song was the first song I used when I was thinking about doing a solo acapella piece. I wanted to layer the backing track with sounds of everyday objects. I would beatbox to the beat and find everyday objects to make the remaining sounds.

This is where we draw our inspiration from for the group activity. This piece highlights the use of the 4 chords G, D, Em (E minor) and C. They can fit into in the majority of pop songs. At first we had the idea of using the piano for an accompaniment. But then we only used the piano to work out the structure of the piece.