thinkfetti

We’re enjoying our first fire of the season in the fireplace of our new house in Albuquerque. My five-string banjo (don’t get any ideas) is a few feet to the right of the fireplace, so every time the wood pops, it sets off sympathetic vibrations in the banjo strings, giving us a “pop” with a ring in G major.

Two very successful concerts with the Albuquerque Philharmonic Orchestra this weekend. I guest conducted the program of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4.

My dear friend Hao Huang was the soloist, and he played with his characteristic brilliance and superb musicality. The orchestra did an excellent job both performances, and I believe everyone involved deserves a relaxing Sunday evening after the successful weekend!

I was teaching a music appreciation course this morning, and we found ourselves talking about syncopation. Syncopation in music is a delightful, playful rhythmic effect where a note is emphasized by being played “off the beat.” It’s kind of a springboard effect: the diving board went down “on the beat” and now bounds up after the beat. The note that gets its pizzazz launching from the rebounding board is described as “syncopated.”

But just being “off the beat” doesn’t itself make a note syncopated; there has to be some emphasis on the note that is caused by its spring-like relationship to the beat. There are plenty of ways to play notes between beats so that they aren’t syncopated.

One interesting aspect of syncopation is that the effect requires a beat in order to exist, even though the syncopated note is necessarily not sounding together with the beat. No beat, no syncopation. Now the beat can be overt, as with an accompanying drumset, or it can be implied, something constructed real-time in the mind of the listener by imagining what beat could be present, given all the other notes. But if there is only rhythmic mush, with no beat either overt or implied, then there is no possibility for syncopation. There may be emphasis, accent, but it would not be the special kind of emphasis that draws its power from the surrounding structure by being playfully off.

And this brought me to consider adapting these concepts to management, specifically to a couple types of problematic management:

If there is a structure but no room for difference then syncopation will be absent. Having everything happening on the same beat removes the opportunity for the special enhancement of an idea that bounces up off the beat.

But equally stifling is management without a structuring beat, either an overt one with clear and consistent stated policies and procedures, or an implied structure that organizational members can construct and understand themselves by observing all the notes. Without any beat, there is no way to syncopate, to express the positive and playful energy that can be generated by being off the beat.

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.