Jonathan Savage

John Adams has written a great spoof on the whole issue of using laptops and notation software as a compositional tool. I’d highly recommend that you read it. You’ll find it here. As a piece of writing, it’s amusing because it touches on a number of issues that most of us know are true. But, as with any polemic, there is much left out and several of the commentators on his blog are pointing things out. Of course, I’m sure Adams is fully aware of these.

His story reminded me of a lovely exposition on the relationship between user, tool and objective in Wertsch’s book Mind as Action. Whilst Adams suggests that pencil, manuscript and eraser might be a better toolset to learn about musical composition, in Chapter 2 of his book Wertsch points out that processes of long division are often mediated by pencil and paper. Without a calculator, one relies on the tool to carry out the task. For most of us it is almost impossible without reliance on these tools. However, Wertsch’s point is that the tools that we use implicate our thinking in an essential way. Werstch extends this example by considering the use of the slide rule as a design tool in aeronautical design. It is a brilliant exposition and highly recommended.

For us, the question might be, what have we lost in the rush to use laptops and notational software as a composition tool? And in terms of a compositional pedagogy, what might be the advantages in promoting musical thinking and understanding through the use of a range of tools including, perhaps, those from our past (e.g. paper and pencils, analogue four tracks, etc). The rush to composition as a inclusive activity does, in Adam’s view, have many downsides, not least the possibilities of opticians playing you their latest opus and a puppy called Cubase (check the end of his article) – perhaps that should have been Cakewalkies?

Thanks to Scott for this interesting post about the talking piano. Many of our students will be writing on the topic of music/language and education soon and will find this amusing. The link to the AmazingMidi software was helpful too. I haven’t tried it yet (too bad it is for PC only) but making the link between .wav files and MIDI data is something that many people have wished for. There are obviously benefits for those wanting to transcribe music but there will be wider educational benefits too if the software improves (as no doubt it will).

Remember all those musical flashcards that used to be the rage? This tutorial shows you how to make rhythmic and melodic flashcards with Sibelius. I’ve just added a link to this new blog to this site. Some really useful stuff here.

As part of our research group at MMU, we were asked to think about some interesting reading which could form the basis for a reading group. My thoughts returned to a paper by my friend and colleague John Bowers – Improvising Machines. You can download it from here.

This paper explores issues related to the improvisation of electro-acoustic music from musicological, aesthetic, practical and technical design standpoints. It contains three chapters. Chapter 1 is a survey of what it means to be an improvising musician. John traces back into musical history and gives his own take on how the performance practice of electro-acoustic musicians has evolved.

Chapter 2 contains an lively account of various musical performances John has given in Ipswich, Stockholm, London and Norwich. He reflects of these through his ethnographic account and draws some interesting issues together at the end of the chapter. This would also be good reading to understand John’s own artistic practices and how these have informed his design principles.

In Chapter 3 John writes about the human-computer interface within his work as an improvising musician. He argues that principles of ethographically-informed design should inform the development of new instruments (tools) for improvisatory practice. The middle part of the chapter is fairly technical but persevere here. Some of the audio accompanying this can be found at http://www.ariada.uea.ac.uk/ariadatexts/ariada4/index4.html for those that are interested.

I believe that John is one of the most interesting and provocative thinkers in respect of musical practices with new technologies. But his paper raises issues for many of us engaged in education. It informs questions such as:

How can the design of educational tools (in the widest sense) be informed by, and built on, processes of ethonographically informed design? and:

Within artistic practices (and I’d included teaching within this), how can an ethonographic approach to the documentation of human/computer interaction help us produce examples of effective practice and facilitate the building of these skills in our own work and those of our students?

I’ll leave it with you to see what you make of it! Happy reading.

Mike Klinger has just finished an article written for the Music Educators Spring Edition magazine on some of his findings at NAMM 2009 in regards to music technology. You can download the PDF file at
http://76.12.84.2/PDF/Whatsnew.pdf

I had some questions today from students who wanted to use Audacity to record what was going through their computer soundcard. The simple solution is to use a mini-jack to mini-jack cable to connect together the microphone and speaker ports on your PC/Mac. But, there are software solutions out there too.

For PC users, check this page which gives a good explanation of how to do it. It will depend on the configuration of your soundcard and also the control panel settings for Sound. But I’m not an expert at all that. However, many other people are and you’ll find lots of advice online (like here).

The Mac version of Audacity is somewhat limited here. There are other solutions out there (check this), but if you want to use Audacity the answer is to install a system extension called Soundflower. Soundflower is a MacOS system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. It is easy to use and simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Download it. Install it. You’ll need to set system preferences in the ‘Sound’ section as well as through the new ‘soundflower’ icon that will appear at the top right of your screen (next to the volume control).

There is also a helpful video here that documents the process of installing and using Soundflower with Audacity.

We always used to plug Finale Notepad as a free and well-equipped music notation software package. Unfortunately, Make Music have decided to charge for this product (only $9.95 though). So, what are the freeware alternatives that could be used on either Macs or PCs. One good looking alternative is MuseScore. This was mentioned recently on MusTech.net and there is a good review there. There is also a good comparison between Notepad and MuseScore here by David Bolton. So, thankfully, there are still open source solutions for a world dominated by Sibelius and Finale.

Unfortunately, there is no Mac install package, so you’ll have to revert to the Linux version at the moment.

I’ve been having a look around the internet for a glossary of terms for music technology. It’s amazing what you can find. I think that this was my favourite (which even managed to be humorous in places), followed closely by this (not quite so humorous) and there were plenty of other good ones too. I’ve posted the links here for some of our new PGCE student and hope you’ll find them useful. Given the prevalence of sites like this, I’m hoping that I won’t have to write my own glossary of terms related to the use of music technology. That seemed like a mammoth job, especially when there are resources like this already out there.

Found this interesting video on the BBC Technology website about a hands-free musical instrument. It’s a work in progress but the researcher – Mick Grierson of London’s Goldsmiths College – is able to think about notes and trigger them on an instrument through an EGG interface. So far, he’s been able to get 6 notes out of 8 right. Perhaps if he shaved his head and got a better electrode/skin contact he’d have got 100% accuracy?

I thought I would highlight this post from a blog I read. It presents the top 25 web 2.0 sites as discovered by a group of American college students. Plenty of useful stuff here. Perhaps I’ll ask our MMU students to suggest their top 10 sites at some point before their course ends in mid-June.

From the same site, here is a post highlighting 10 online jamming applications for music.