In my Technology Trends in Music Education class at NYU, we are asking one main question: how do you know whether a technological tool is helpful for music learning and expression? How do you assess it? To find the answer, you first have to be clear about your pedagogical goals, and that is not easy to do. The first night of class, we got into a discussion of Noteflight, the online music notation editor. The debate we had is not specific to Noteflight; you could have it about any notation software. I use Noteflight a lot to embed music examples in this blog:
Noteflight and programs like it support naive trial-and-error learning by giving you lots of aural feedback. When you enter a note, you hear it. If you change its pitch, you hear the result. You can listen back to everything you write at any time. The software’s playback might sound stiff and awkward, but you will still get a good idea of how your music will sound.
Given how accessible Noteflight is, you would think that every music teacher would leap to adopt it (or something similar). However, not everyone has adopted it, and some people feel strongly opposed to it. For example, the guy who hired me at the New School to teach theory insisted that his students do all of their assignments with pencil and paper. My initial reaction to that was, oh my goodness, why?
I asked the Tech Trends students why they might want students to write notation in pencil rather than using Noteflight. One of them pointed out that physically writing the notes is valuable because it builds muscle memory. You don’t just learn abstract concepts with your eyes and ears; you need to involve the rest of your body too. The slow and laborious process of writing notes on the page isn’t an obstacle to learning; it’s a method of learning. This is the same reason you want little kids to write out their letters with a pencil before they start typing them on a keyboard. Another student pointed out that if your notation editor is giving you constant aural feedback, then there is no need for you to learn how to audiate, to hear the notes in your “mind’s ear.” I hadn’t considered either of these points, but they make perfect sense.
So, is that it? Is Noteflight actually harmful for beginners? Well, not necessarily. It’s good to build muscle memory, and it’s good to learn how to audiate. However, when confronted with notation on paper, a lot of kids simply give up. Notation can be as much a hindrance to music learning as it is a help. It is certainly an obstacle to creativity early on, because your ideas are usually way out in front of your ability to notate those ideas, especially on the rhythm side of things. Any kid who grows up hearing American pop is saturated in Afrodiasporic grooves that are loaded with syncopation. Kids’ own original song ideas tend to be syncopated too. Unfortunately, notating syncopation is really hard. So very often, when you ask kids to notate their ideas, they simply abandon them in favor of simpler ones that can be written in straight quarter notes. Jackie Wiggins talks about this in depth in her book Teaching for Musical Understanding, which I would recommend to any music teacher.
So the question of whether or not Noteflight is good for music learners comes down to goals and user profiles. Who are the students and what is it that you are hoping they will learn? If you want your students to become strong music readers, and if they are already committed to reading and motivated to improve at it, then pencil and paper is probably the way to go. The “obstacles” that Noteflight removes are actually valuable parts of the learning process. However, if you are trying to reach “the other eighty percent,” and you want to foster musical creativity and curiosity in as wide a group of students as possible, then removing friction is the main consideration, and Noteflight is vastly preferable to pencil and paper. Also, a DAW’s piano roll might be preferable to any kind of music notation at all.
Once you get into the frame of mind of asking “good for whom, good for what”, it clarifies all kinds of questions about music tech in education. Consider the virtual choir, a common strategy for ensemble directors during the pandemic. Does it make sense to record students singing or playing their parts individually and then edit them together into a simulated live performance? It seems like an exceptionally poor simulation of the ensemble experience. Nevertheless, I know people feel positively about participating in these things. How can that be? Maybe the virtual choir fails at being a virtual choir, but it succeeds at a different goal: giving students the satisfaction of creating a recording together. A good recording does not require everyone to play together in the same place at the same time – in the pop world it is basically unheard of to work this way. That’s okay! It’s fun to put your part down in isolation and then hear how it fits into the bigger picture later. Some of my music ed friends are going to continue doing virtual choirs even post-pandemic, because collaborating on a recording project is a worthwhile goal unto itself.