Reflections on the MOOC

This week marks the conclusion of the first iteration of Play With Your Music, the music production MOOC I’ve been contributing to this past semester.

Play With Your Music

Creating and running the MOOC has been a learning experience for everybody involved. It certainly has been for me. I do most of my music teaching one on one, and it’s been weird creating materials for a couple of thousand students I never see at all. (Though I guess that’s sort of what I’m doing on this blog.) My colleagues have been keeping close tabs on the community of participants, but my personal interaction has been limited by the course’s coinciding with crunch time for my thesis. So this post will be less about the students, and more about the teachers.

Play With Your Music is spearheaded by my advisor Alex Ruthmann and the learning lead at Peer-to-Peer University, Vanessa Genarelli. It’s Vanessa who set the GIF-heavy tone.

This course goes to eleven

You can see all of the course content here — it’s in reverse chronological order, so start at the bottom. You can also see all of the class videos on the PWYM YouTube channel. The bulk of these videos are live interviews with musicians, songwriters, engineers and producers.

Best interview of all time

Here’s the interview archive:

Interviewees include Alex Case of the Recordingology blog, and various NYU people: Phil Galdston, Tae-Hong Park, Paul Geluso and Amar Lal. Several class assignments involved analyzing, mixing and remixing the song “Air Traffic Control” by Clara Berry, so there are interviews with Clara, her sideman Joe O’Neill, and her producer Brad Swanson. Brad also created some instructional videos, and is the source of this amazingly thorough online microphone comparison.

I myself created three of the videos. The first is an in-depth analysis of “Sledgehammer” by Peter Gabriel, to go with this blog post. Because I hadn’t yet figured out how to record my voice and system audio at the same time, I just shot myself talking through the song off a loose script, and then went back and edited in parts of the song to match. That limitation turned out to be a blessing, because I could exactly match moments in the track to my off-the-cuff narration for a nifty DJ effect.

Next, I made a couple of electronic music tutorials using the nifty in-browser audio production software Soundation. The first demonstrates how to build a hip-hop track using audio loops. I didn’t really plan this video or rehearse it a whole lot, so the viewer is getting to see the actual creative process unfold in real time. (But I did edit out some of my stumbles afterwards to make it more watchable.) I apologize for the low resolution, I’m still getting this video thing figured out.

The second shows the same thing, but this time using MIDI-controlled synths and drum machines:

I haven’t really produced YouTube videos before, and while I enjoyed the process creatively, it turned out to be quite a headache from the technical standpoint. It’s easy to record activity on your Mac screen using Quicktime. However, there are headaches with the audio. In addition, my laptop is not really the platform for editing and rendering big video files. And most of all, it’s hard to be both the subject of the video and its producer. It would be a lot easier to have someone else operate the gear so I could concentrate on demonstrating and narrating coherently. I just learned that the NYU library has a pretty sweet video production setup, so for future videos, we’ll be using that instead. I expect much slicker-looking results with much less hassle on our part.

I really did enjoy the creative side of my three videos. Once I got over feeling self-conscious about being on camera, the whole thing flowed smoothly. It felt more like talking to one person than two thousand. I could just presume that whoever is listening is like me — they want the material delivered in a friendly, informal way. I can talk fast, because the viewer can always rewind and rewatch. And I know that whatever I say will be backed up in print that the students can pore over at their leisure, which helps with my spontaneity. I’m really looking forward to shooting some more of these things.

The second round of Play With Your Music begins in January and will feature the music of A Huge Pop Celebrity of the Eighties whose identity will be revealed once all the lawyers are happy. Sign up now!