The end of a journey! What a time. The making of Traffic Tunes was not a tech-nical learning curve, but challenged me more in terms of presenting content and repertoire. In the end I wasn't able to change some of the things that I felt wasn't ideal because of time restraints, but here are some things I would do in the future of Traffic Tunes:
Pick more diverse repertoire. I definitely limited myself within this project to English-speaking children's music. In future if I were to release a big set of TT's I would like to include a range of repertoire from different countries and cultures. This would require more work on the lyric-learning section but I think this would pay off in the end and remain quite accessible and attractive to teachers as we live in a highly multicultural country.
Pick cooler repertoire. This set of tunes tested the structure of TT's more than its content. In future I can see this working well with Musical Futures style stuff. Learning ostinatos is totally possible in the car in the same way that the partner song set worked.
Consider a modified structure for longer repertoire. The structure would have to change significantly for things with more than one stanza of lyrics - or generally, a structure larger than "A". Possibly could be that lyric-learning is not really the aim of TT's and the work on pitch is more important - we know teachers can read anyway so replacing lyrics isn't so hard. Songs with multiple sections would have to be divided in a different way to accomodate for two levels of learning as chunking through an entire song bar by bar is silly.
Other inclusions in a TT set: I think if I were to release an album or similar, I would intersperse repertoire learning with short tracks about vocal technique, diction, pitch matching etc. and perhaps group my repertoire according to those technique-related tracks. I think without these additions the listener can still develop some musical self-efficacy, but their technical ability to succeed in singing songs other than the carefully controlled versions that I have created many never grow without some helpful hints along the way.
Maybe have a dude? I tried to pick fairly neutral keys but I wonder if TT might benefit from having a male voice feature in some way. I know there are very few male primary teachers in general but it would be nice for those teachers to also feel encouraged by TT.
Accompaniment resources: Generally speaking, I prefer acapella because it removes the barrier of having to find/be the accompanist, and validates the acapella version as a worthy musical experience. Intonation issues become more apparent with an accompanist also so it's probably easier to get the group going and just let them run wild with tonal centres. The partner song ended up having its accompaniment kept in because it made more sense with it (and because I used it to stay steady whilst recording). I'd therefore want to have an accompaniment-only track available for the TT user to bring into the classroom, but I'd also include simple guitar chord-charts and/or charts with piano keys coloured in because I'd really like to give the teacher as many opportunities as possible to try things.