There’s a great Tumblr called Hip-Hop Transcriptions. It consists solely meticulous transcriptions of classic beats and rhymes by Charlie Hely. The mere fact of these transcriptions is fairly wonderful, but even better is the way that Hely lays out his charts. He uses graph paper, with each box representing a sixteenth note. This makes the …
Category Archives: Music Teaching
Constructivist learning and Scratch
Brennan, K. (2013). Best of Both Worlds: Issues of Structure and Agency in Computational Creation, In and Out of School. Doctoral Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had the very good fortune to attend a fancy elementary school run on solid constructivist principles. In sixth grade I got to experience the “hard fun” of Sprite …
Against Music Theory – some commentary
My fellow music tech student Laura Dickens had some thoughts about my recent music theory rant. This is a lightly edited version of our Facebook conversation. Laura: Have you ever read any Susan McClary? I feel like you could probably get into that… Me: Yes! Susan McClary is the best! She shares my belief in …
Experience designers design experiences
Hassenzahl, M. (2010). Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons. Morgan & Claypool. For this week’s reading on experience design for music education, we moved up a level to think about experience design generally. A lot of design theory tends to boil down to “Design things better!” Marc Hassenzahl’s book falls into that trap …
Drum Loop programming lesson concept images
Nearly getting scooped by Loopseque lit a fire under me to get some more concept images for my thesis app together. So here are some examples of the beat programming lessons that form the intellectual heart of my project. The general idea is that you’re given an existing drum pattern, a famous breakbeat or something …
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Music students and maker culture
For Alex Ruthmann’s class, we’re reading Music, Meaning and Transformation: Meaningful Music Making for Life by the late Steve Dillon. If you can get past the academic verbiage, there’s some valuable technomusicology here, and some tremendous advocacy resources too.
Radial drum machine update
I’m planning to be done with my thesis by (gulp) December. My collaborator Chris and I got a basic prototype of the radial drum machine together over the summer using Max and Javascript. What we learned is that you don’t want to do an audio app in Max and Javascript, since it will be single-threaded …
Designing music learning experiences with technology
This semester I’m working as a research assistant to Alex Ruthmann at NYU. The job includes helping him with a new joint music education and music technology class, Designing Technologies & Experiences for Music Making, Learning and Engagement. Here’s the bibliography. The central class project is to create a music education technology experience — a lesson …
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Hi people in Alex’s class
Rather than starting a new blog from scratch, I’m going to use my existing blog. My posts related to this class will have the tag “music ed tech.” I also use the blog for a lot of other stuff. If you need blog or web help and Alex is busy, I can help you too.
Making it easier to be musical
Alex Ruthmann, in a blog post discussing music-making with the educational multimedia programming environment Scratch, has this to say: What’s NOT easy in Scratch for most kids is making meaningful music with a series of “play note”, “rest for”, and “play drum” blocks. These blocks provide access to music at the phoneme rather than morpheme …