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 plan or classroom activity, a piece of software or hardware, or something outside those categories.

Everyone in the class has to maintain a blog documenting their design process. (Wouldn’t it be cool if every teacher of everything had their students blog about their class work?) My music education experience design is going to be my thesis, which I’m already blogging about. So instead I’ll use these posts for some public-facing note taking.

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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.

Why isn’t repetitive music boring to listen to?

A Quora user asks why we don’t get bored when listening to repetitive music. This is related to the equally interesting question of why we can play repetitive music without getting bored. Why is there so much joy in repetition?

"Chameleon" by Herbie Hancock

Humans are pattern recognizers. You’d think that once you’d learned the pattern of a repetitive piece of music, it would quickly get boring, and then annoying. Sometimes, that is in fact what happens. I don’t enjoy Philip Glass’ music; it makes me feel like I’m stuck in the mind of someone with severe obsessive-compulsive disorder. But I adore James Brown and Fela Kuti, and my iTunes library is stuffed with loop-based hip-hop and electronica. So what’s going on? Why do I find Philip Glass annoying, but not James Brown?

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Hereditary units in music

Another thought-provoking Quora question: Are there any hereditary units in music? The question details give some context:

In his blog post “The Music Genome Project is no such thing,” David Morrison makes an edifying distinction between a genotype and a phenotype. He also makes the bold statement “there are no hereditary units in music.” Is this true?

Morrison’s post is a valuable read, because it’s so precisely wrong as to be quite useful in clarifying your thinking.

"Nas Is Like" sample map

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My process of composing music

Quora user Jennifer Ha asked me: What is your process of composing music? She goes on:

For me I have to wait for the right inspiration given to me very irregularly. But it seems others can compose with chords deliberately. How do you compose, and do you feel proud of it all the times (i.e. know you couldn’t have done better)?

I have two methods of composition: improvisation and collage. I use the computer for both. At the moment, my software of choice is Ableton Live. Before that I mostly used Pro Tools and Reason. It’s been a long time since I “composed” something on a piece of paper (except for music school assignments.)

Composing with Ableton Live

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Minsky on music

Music, Mind and Meaning by Marvin Minsky is a gold mine of inspired speculation about the origins and functions of music. I’ve assembled some choice quotes below.

Marvin Minsky

If visual art is our way of playing with and studying space, then music is our way of playing with and studying time.

Can one time fit inside another? Can two of them go side by side? In music, we find out!

Minsky is talking mostly about western classical music here, but his insight is equally pertinent to listening to and playing repetitive music from any tradition: hip-hop, dance, what have you.

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Listening like a musician

The jazz educator Marc Sabatella, author of the classic Jazz Improvisation Primer, has a nice philosophical approach: all of us are musicians. Some of us are performing musicians, and some are listening musicians. I support this attitude wholeheartedly. I think that musicality is like walking and talking: almost everyone is born capable of learning how to do it. In Western civilization, we’ve developed this unfortunate idea that music is best left to a few highly specialized professionals, and that everyone else should just consume it passively. This is wrong. If you want to be a listening musician, all you have to do is learn to listen actively and imaginatively. All the technical stuff follows out of that.

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Getting ready for the recording studio

Here’s an interesting Quora thread about what you should know before booking a rock band session. I can’t improve on the excellent post by Bruce Williams, but I have a few things to add.

The challenge of recording is 10% technical and 90% psychological, especially if you’re inexperienced. You may be as cool as a cucumber onstage and then turn into a nervous wreck when the tape rolls. Your band may be great friends until the time pressure of the studio brings out unsuspected conflicts and dysfunction. Fortunately, all of this stuff can be prepared for.

Recording

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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 levels of sound. Or, as Jeanne Bamberger puts it, at the smallest musical representations (individual notes, rests, and rhythms) rather than the simplest musical representations (motives, phrases, sequences) from the perspective of children’s musical cognition. To borrow a metaphor from chemistry, yet another comparison would be the atomic/elemental vs. molecular levels of music.

To work at the individual note, rest, and rhythms levels requires quite a lot of musical understanding and fluency. It can often be hard to “start at the very beginning.” One needs to understand and be able to dictate proportional rhythm, as well as to divine musical metadimensions by ear such as key, scale, and meter. Additionally, one needs to be fluent in chromatic divisions of the octave, and that in MIDI “middle C” = the note value 60. In computer science parlance, one could describe the musical blocks included with Scratch as “low level” requiring a lot of prior knowledge and understanding with which to work.

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What is polyphony?

The word is from Greek, “poly” meaning many and “phony” meaning voice. This is as opposed to monophony — one voice. Originally, polyphony literally meant multiple people singing together. Over the course of musical history, the term has become more abstracted, referring to multiple “voices” played on any instrument. And usually, polyphony means that the different voices are all playing/singing independent lines.

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