thinkfetti

In evaluating the music program at my (science and engineering-focus) university and thinking about possible future directions, I have drafted a “re-envisioning” of myself, which I will describe in later entries. Here is a sketch of the constellation of problems I am trying to address:

• There is a paucity of students and community participants who read conventional music notation fluently. This impacts both what material can be covered in music courses and how (and if) ensembles learn their music.
• The university, with no degree offerings in the arts and located in a small, rural, underserved community, is not well-positioned to facilitate conventional instrumental ensembles such as an orchestra or big band jazz ensemble. Conventional instrumental ensembles such as these are harder to sustain than choral ensembles, because 1) beginning adult singers can advance more rapidly than beginning adult instrumentalists, particularly in the absence of private instrumental instruction, and 2) most choral music has only a handful of independent parts, making it easier to perform with limited numbers of performers.
• Community members enjoy performing on stage in large, musical theatre performances, but productions of this type use time, money, and personnel resources without facilitating sustainable growth of music program ensembles in terms of numbers of participants or performance ability.

I am the university’s sole performing arts professor. To justify my salary, the university is most interested in the quantity of people enrolled in music ensembles and courses (the more, the better), but as for my own vitality as an artist, I am sustained by quality (the better, the better). My job is to teach, but I would have more personal resources to bring to the classroom and the rehearsal hall if my work were set up to reliably provide me with some experiences of high quality artistic interaction and creation.

There are some things that are worth putting a lot of time and effort into. Design is one. Now, it’s not possible to focus on everything worthy of design all at once - there’s just too much. For example, I seem to have spent the last three hours tweaking, fiddling, replacing… all just working to put the right image on to the top of this website. Thank you to [Andrew Davidhazy->http://www.rit.edu/~andpph/] for allowing me to use one of his outstanding splash images on this site. All of the things I have not (yet?) focussed on, such as fonts, widgets, even good copy - maybe they benefit slightly by having something designed nearby.

I’m interested in thinking about the places design can operate. For example, I work alongside engineers at my university, and one of them recently remarked in a meeting that he thinks engineers should devote more time to studying ethics. In his design labs, he instructs the students to consider ethics as a design constraint. I would go further - to my way of thinking, ethics is a design problem. Questions that don’t have pat answers include: “What to do?” “Why?” “Why do I find this particular ‘why’ reason appropriate in this context?” In other words, an ethical person isn’t someone who somehow just “knows the right thing to do.” Rather, a person acts ethically when he or she takes the time that’s available to evaluate alternatives and unearth the assumptions that point toward possible choices.

With this view, it seems insufficient to me for students to study and discuss “case studies,” narratives that usually describe projects that went very poorly. Case studies are good for people who study ethics, but to learn how to act ethically, students need to think about designing their decisions.

Part of my job is teaching music to undergraduate science and engineering majors - both teaching about music and teaching music. Yesterday’s music appreciation class did not work. Now, there are many ways a class can fail to work. The class crashed on a technological problem that resulted from my efforts to make the class work better…

The problem I’m trying to solve:

One of the chief difficulties in teaching music appreciation is that music comes at you linearly in time ([not always->http://infosthetics.com/archives/2006/09/giant_steps_music_animation.html]); after hearing a piece through, there’s no way to physically point at part of it (music notation is a topic for another day). The listener has to rely on memory to analyze, compare, describe. (Similar to Edward Tufte’s rants about PowerPoint [here->http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html] or [here->http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint] - layering of information in time, instead of space.) And for a piece of music that is unfamiliar — and one that is word-free, no text to hold on to — this is extremely difficult. Most untrained listeners can only manage comments such as “I liked it,” or “that one sounded happier than the other one.” That’s not deep enough. So, how to get around the memory issue? Sure, memory can develop, especially when it is given a framework of concepts to work with, to enable some realtime analysis/processing. But in the meantime, before the listener’s ability to use memory has evolved — can we discuss music in some substantial way?

What I tried:

For yesterday’s class, I spent an extra couple of hours ahead of time chopping up the pieces we were going to discuss into small soundbites. Just got started in class, and the iPod froze, at the end of the first clip. A student helped me reset it, and we went on. But then the iPod froze again. And again. I was trying to stop the clip near the end, so it wouldn’t go on precipitously to the next clip, but the iPod did not like it, and threw in the towel.

Meta:

The soundbite approach is worth me spending more time to figure out, but I was very frustrated. I know the class will be better for this, and I’m all for experimentation. But to add some self-observation — I just wanted it to work, and it didn’t, and I got very unhappy. Welcome to innovation - fail as rapidly as possible - I wonder if I can re-tune myself to enjoy that part.

P.S.:

I was able to get something to work by converting the music into audiobook format and adding chapters, using a [tool->http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050628120738853&query=chapters] from Apple and a [GUI add-on->http://www.oldjewelsoftware.com/products/podcastav/]. Thanks to student Jim Slutz for showing me chapters.

So much to be explored. This is a humble beginning … I’ve installed Movable Type (after only a couple hours of fiddling), which I’m going to try out as a substrate. (edit: now we’re trying out WordPress - less fiddling on this install…)

This is just a placeholder until I get going in earnest…

In the meantime, please visit some interesting alternatives, such as David Weinberger’s well-trodden blog (he is the author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined), an interactive guide to Bartok’s string quartets (an effort to lift us to a level of familiarity with these complex artworks), and, if you are inclined to think about how the web should be heading as far as collaborative tools (and aren’t scared by the open source learning curve), the access grid homepage.

Soon, I’ll explain what these pages and this one have to do with one another.