During the Spring 2009 term, two music performamatics projects will be underway at UMass Lowell. As part of a National Science Foundation CPATH grant several of my faculty colleagues from the Music, Art, English and Computer Science departments are allied in collaborative interdisciplinary projects designed to attract more students to computer science majors through arts-focused experiences.
This semester, I am collaborating with computer science professor Jesse Heines as part of a synchronized course. My General Music Methods II students will be working together with students from Prof. Heines’ GUI Programming II course on a project to collaboratively develop online music composing software with middle school students at the Bartlett Community Partnership School in Lowell. Currently, the middle school students are coming up with ideas for music software they would like to have. They are sharing these with my General Methods Students, who have been working with them one day a week since September 2008. Once public beta versions of the software are up and running, I’ll post them here for you to try out and use with your students.
An additional structure for this project involves a social music component. Following the model of projects such as the UNESCO Sounds of our Water Project and CCMixter.org, the project will involve creating an online social music/sound repository where the middle school students can upload sounds and musical samples. These sounds and samples will serve as the source materials for the software the computer science students will design.
This semester my music education colleague Gena Greher and computer science professor Jesse Heines are also collaborating on a general education course entitled Sound Thinking:
Course Description:
What is sound? How do we capture it, manipulate it, and harness it in the digital world? The field for multimedia applications is expanding, creating new challenges for artists, technologists, and educators as well as consumers. This course will explore the intersection of the arts with technology, where students majoring in the arts will interact with those in computer science to explore the art and science of digital audio from the perspective of basic end-user applications. The specific applications to be examined will be chosen based on their abilities to promote creative expression and exploration. We will also consider the underlying code that allows these programs to run and function. This course will use a learner-centered approach that emphasizes project-based experiences. It will provide students with multiple opportunities to explore, create, and solve problems with music technology. The concept of collaboration is integral to this course. As the workforce moves to a more collaborative structure, it is important that students learn to work in groups with others who may not share their skill sets and levels of expertise, and that they gain experience in problem-solving the myriad issues that arise when using technology.
Examples of class projects and student work will be posted here throughout the course.
Earlier this month Evan Tobias posted about Noteflight, a new online flash-based notation application available at http://www.noteflight.com/. Over the past few weeks I have been exploring this software with college students in my Technology in Music Education course and with high school students enrolled in a beginning piano class at Lowell High School (LHS). Those of you who know me know how apprehensive I am when it comes to using notation software with students in general music or other technology classes in K-12 schools. Most of my concern centers around the common conflation of “notation software” with “composing software.” All too often I see teachers using notation software as a technological endpoint rather than as a means to the musical end of live performance. However, Noteflight is not your ordinary notation software.
What interests me about Noteflight is not the notation component. Instead, it is in the social tools that surround the notation engine. When you sign up at Noteflight.com (currently free) you create personal profile, just like you would at a social networking site like Facebook, MySpace or custom sites created at Ning.com. Once signed in, you can create a new score, view existing scores, or scores created by other users.
Built in to the web application is the ability to share your scores with other users. These scores can be easily embedded just like a YouTube video in a class website. The embedded score can be played back by clicking on the play button and additional interactive functions are being planned which could be helpful in guided listening activities. Coming from a constructivist perspective, this functionality enables teachers to give students the opportunity to share their musical understanding in interactive ways within and beyond class time. For example, a band director could post a Noteflight score without added articulation. Students could then be assigned to add their own articulations to the score. During the next class, the students and director could choose a few scores to play through. This approach gives students the opportunity to make creative articulation decisions as composers, rather than traditionally learning it through listening and performing.
A variation on this assignment could be to post an audio file of a musical line performed with different articulations. Below the audio file, a director could post the notation for that performance, but again without articulation added. As an assessment, students could then open the score and add articulations that in their mind matched the recorded performance.
Right now, there are some limitations to accomplishing this, but I’ve been assured by Joe Berkovitz, CEO of Noteflight, that these functions are currently in development.
This screenshot shows the “version” function for Noteflight. As you work on a score in Noteflight, it periodically saves a snapshot of your piece and gives you access to it as a different “Version.” If you open your score up to be added to by others, their versions show up in this box as well. At any point you can go back (revert) to a prior version. This is a cool function, not only because you can go back, but as a window into your students’ compositional processes. Though not a full account of their process, these snapshots can provide an opportunity to have discussions with your students about the changes they made in their composition and are great starting points for assessment.
Here’s a short piece I notated in Noteflight:
Right now, the interactivity is limited to simple whole piece playback and playback within measures (click above the measure). Soon, functions will be added that will enable the composer to add additional interactivity through scripting. Very cool.
My students and Noteflight
My college students have been using Noteflight with beginning piano students at Lowell High School (LHS) for the past few weeks. Students in my class created incomplete duets to be co-composed and performed with their partner students at LHS. The music teacher at LHS has for the most part have been using Alfred’s Adult Beginner Piano book to structure the curriculum. My college students wanted to add a composing/creativity aspect to the lessons. To do this, they created simple piano scores with either a chord progression in the bass clef or a melody in the treble clef (or some combination of the two) as a compositional frame to help scaffold the LHS students. Because the scores are online and viewable by the LHS students and my college students, both can practice alone and make edits to their duet scores. Tomorrow, they will meet again in person for a final run through and performance for the class. I’ll post some of the pieces and performances here soon.
Because Noteflight is an online application, the potential for collaborative work and learning with other students is high. I’m in the middle of planning a distance composing project with another school later in the term through Noteflight. Facilitated by a custom Ning.com social network, students at LHS will notate compositions in Noteflight and share them with other students at a distance site. Ning will enable them to post their files and provide peer comment and critique. This use is inspired in part by the work at the Vermont MIDI Project, but instead centers on the students as providers of compositional critique and feedback, rather than professional composers.
I’m very excited to see how this technology develops. If you are interested in collaborative projects using Noteflight with your students, drop me an email.
This July, I will be teaching a week-long summer course at Central Connecticut State University entitled Podcasts, Blogs, & Wiki’s… Oh My! This summer’s course will focus on using Web 2.0 tools and Ning social networks to extend and support K-College music classes. These tools provide an easy and collaborative way to get your music program online, to create online communities of practice, and to support student assessment.
Come on out to beautiful New Britain, Connecticut. Tuition, including 2 graduate credits, is only $500!
Here’s the official blurb:
Podcasts, Wikis & Blogs—Oh My!
In this hands-on class music teachers will develop strategies to support and extend student learning with online collaborative tools such as social networks, blogs, podcasts, and wikis. These tools provide easy ways to get your music classes online integrating text, video, and audio. Strategies for using these tools to facilitate assessment, writing across the curriculum, and reflective journaling, as well as to support performing, rehearsing, practicing, and composing will be explored. Applications of these tools in settings from elementary through college will be shared and developed. Prerequisite: None. Examples of tools for both Macs and PCs will be shared. Targeted for elementary, middle, high school and college levels, general music or ensembles.
Today, I came across a new Amazon.com service called UnSpun. UnSpun is a social list creation and sharing site with some unique possibilities for supporting learning in classrooms.
For a while now, I have been looking for a Web 2.0 tool that would enable my students, after reading a post or article on one of my course blogs, to be able to easily post their own questions and/or comments to be shared with the whole class. The architecture of blogs inherently supports readers adding comments to posts. However, when you have a lot of posts to read from a large number of students in a course, it takes a long time for the instructor to read and synthesize the themes and issues that emerge in students’ responses. As a teacher, I often base my class discussions on the topics raised by students in their blog post responses. Since I began facilitating my classes through blogs and social networks, I’ve wanted an easy tool where students could centrally post their questions and comments and vote the most important questions/comments (to them) higher and lower (similar to Digg.com). Amazon’s UnSpun now gives me that functionality.
Check out an embedded UnSpun list in this blog post:
Now, UnSpun looks to be quite nice for what I’d like it to do. However, as with many third-party social networking and Web 2.0 tools, there are pros and cons:
Pros: Readers can easily add their own questions and comments, these are placed in a central box which can easily be placed anywhere on a blog through the widget/embed code functions, readers can vote questions and comments they view to be more relevant to them higher on the list. Voting up or down an existing comment or question does not require signing in.
Cons: Readers have to have an Amazon.com account, they have to sign in to that account when adding a question.
Middle Ground: If you click to add another question or comment, you are taken to your list on Amazon’s UnSpun website. Once on this site, you can edit your questions, merge duplicates (a good function for the teacher), and add comments. It might get a little complicated and confusing if students decide to add comments on this page… there seems to be no indication on the embeddable widget that comments exist on the UnSpun website.
So, UnSpun looks to be a promising tool at least worth trying with my students this coming semester. If anyone knows of other Web 2.0 tools with similar functionality, please let me know.
During the Spring 2009 term, two music performamatics projects will be underway at UMass Lowell. As part of a National Science Foundation CPATH grant several of my faculty colleagues from the Music, Art, English and Computer Science departments are allied in collaborative interdisciplinary projects designed to attract more students to computer science majors through arts-focused experiences.
Today, I came across a new Amazon.com service called 