Journal of Music, Technology and Education: Volume: 1 | Issue: 1

Volume 1 Number 1 – 2008 3–5

Editorial David Collins Articles

7–21

The discipline that never was: current developments in music technology in higher education in Britain Carola Boehm

23–35

Crossing borders: issues in music technology education Giselle M. d. S. Ferreira

37–55

Reframing creativity and technology: promoting pedagogic change in music education Pamela Burnard

57–67

Problem solving with learning technology in the music studio Andrew King and Paul Vickers

69–81

The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) Leigh Landy

83–96

DubDubDub: Improvisation using the sounds of the World Wide Web Jonathan Savage and Jason Butcher

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1.1 Journal of

Music, Technology and Education

intellect Journals | Theatre & Music

ISSN 1752-7066

ISSN 1752-7066

Volume One Number One


Journal of Music, Technology and Education | Volume One Number One

Journal of

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Journal of Music, Technology and Education Volume 1 Number 1 Aims and Scope

Journal Editor

The Journal of Music, Technology and Education is specifically dedicated to the educational aspects of music technology and the technological aspects of music. Peer-reviewed with an international editorial board, JMTE aims to draw its contributions from a broad community of educators, researchers and practitioners who are working closely with new technologies in the fields of music education and music technology education. We regard such education in its widest sense, with no bias towards any particular genre. Readership will therefore be wide and varied, including those not only working within primary, secondary and higher education, but also researchers, school teachers, student teachers, and other practitioners and professionals who wish to stay updated with the most recent issues and developments surrounding the inter-relationship between music technologies and teaching and learning.

David Collins

Editorial Board

Faculty of Arts University Centre DONCASTER DN5 7SZ [email protected]

Associate Editors Andrew Bates Leeds College of Music [email protected]

Carola Boehm University of Wolverhampton [email protected]

Andrew King University of Hull [email protected]

Editorial Assistant Julie Northmore

Pamela Burnard – University of Cambridge, UK Jay Chapman – Teesside University, UK Robert Davis – Leeds Metropolitan University, UK Giselle Ferreira – Open University, UK Lucy Green – University of London, UK Simon Holland – Open University, UK John Kratus – Michigan State University, USA Samuel Leong – Hong Kong, Inst of Ed, China Gary McPherson – University of Illinois, Urbana- Champaign, USA Adrian Moore – University of Sheffield, UK Fred Rees – Indiana University, USA Alex Ruthmann – Indiana State University, USA Jonathan Savage – Manchester Metropolitan University, UK Peter Webster – Northwestern University, USA Lisa Whistlecroft – University of Lancaster, UK

Faculty of Arts University Centre DONCASTER DN5 7SZ [email protected]

The Journal of Music, Technology and Education is published three times per year by Intellect, The Mill, Parnall Road, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK. The current subscription rates are £33 (personal) and £210 (institutional). Postage is free within the UK, £9 for the rest of Europe and £12 elsewhere. Advertising enquiries should be addressed to: [email protected]

ISSN 1752-7066

© 2007 Intellect Ltd. Authorisation to photocopy items for internal or personal use or the internal or personal use of specific clients is granted by Intellect Ltd for libraries and other users registered with the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) in the UK or the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC) Transactional Reporting Service in the USA provided that the base fee is paid directly to the relevant organisation.

Printed and bound in Great Britain by 4edge, UK.

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Notes for Contributors Submission Details The editorial team are always open to receiving submissions – there are no specific cut-off dates. We aim to have a turn-around time from submission to response from the editor following peerreview within approximately eight weeks. Articles should not normally exceed 6000 words in length, should include full references, bibliography and up to six key-words; they should also include an abstract of no more than 150 words. Illustrated articles are welcomed with separate files for images attached. Short reports may be submitted on related issues, as well as conference reports, book and pedagogically contextualised software/hardware reviews. For more info please contact the editor David Collins [email protected]

We would like to invite contributions in any aspect of the field, such as: Computer-mediated music composition in education Music performance technologies Audiation & aural awareness training systems Music, technology, education & industrial practice Computational musicology in Further and Higher Education Musical creativity and technology Pedagogical aspects of electroacoustic composition Classroom engagement with new technologies Assessing student music technology practice Childrens’ musical learning with technology

• Articles accepted for publication cannot be sent to the publishers (Intellect) until they contain: – Correct Harvard system references [see below for details] – Author name, institutional affiliation and full contact address details – Abstract (max. 150 words) in English – Keywords (max. 6) in English – Author biography (c. 50-100w.) in English – A list of Works Cited containing only works cited in the article • Font should be Times New Roman 14, one-and-a-half-spaces and left-aligned, not justified. Margins should be 1 inch/2.5 cm all round. Pagination should be continuous with numbers applied top right. • Images – tables, photographs, graphs, and graphics – should all be entitled ‘Figure’, be numbered consecutively, and be clearly legible. The source must be indicated below each. Ensure that an indication has been given as to where they should be placed in the text, e.g. Insert Figure 3 here. All images must be sent as separate files, not embedded into the text, and be camera-ready at no less than 300dpi resolution. • Quotations should be used sparingly and be identified by ‘single’ quotation marks if they are embedded in the text. Longer quotations (i.e. longer than 45 words) should be indented on both sides, without quotes. Both should be referenced using the Harvard system (see below). The page number(s) must be included.

(author + year: page), e.g. (Attali 1985: 134) inserted into the text.

Endnotes, References and Citations

If the website is the ‘home site’ of an organization publishing its own material without a by-line, the organization should appear as the author.

All papers should: • Contain original research or scholarship • Not be under consideration by any other publication • Not normally exceed 8000 words • Be written in a clear and concise style • Conform to the instructions outlined below Non-compliance to these requirements may represent grounds for rejection of any article. • Submissions to JMTE should be sent as an attachment to an email message to the Editor. The attached article should be ‘anonymised’, and contain an abstract and up to 6 keywords. Be sure to add your full name & address in the email message to the Editor.

‘Explanatory notes’ should be kept to a minimum: they will appear in the outside left or right margins of the text. They should not contain publication details; -submit all these as references. Please use Word (or equivalent) ‘Footnote’ facility and ensure that they are submitted as Endnotes, not footnotes. Place endnote marks outside the punctuation (after the comma or full-stop). The note mark must be in superscripted Arabic (1, 2, 3), not Roman (i, ii, iii). Bibliographical references should use the ‘Harvard system/style’

All references must identify an author (surname or institution name) for all documents, whether found in archives, newspapers, the internet, etc. Each Harvard-style reference should be fully sourced at the end of the text. Publications not mentioned in the text should not be included in this list, though they may be included under a separate ‘Further Reading’ list.

Format for Citing a Book: Author surname, Initial (year), Title in italics, Place of publication: Publisher. e.g. Attali, J. (1985), Noise: the Political Economy of Music (trans. B Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Citing an Article: Author surname, Initial (year) ‘Title in single quotation marks’, Name of journal in italics, volume number: issue number (and/or month or quarter), page numbers (first and last of entire article). For example, Dixon, S. (2005) ‘Theatre, technology and time’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media 1: 1 (Spring), pp. 11–29.

Citing a web publication or website item: Websites should be referenced as publishers of material: a separate author and the title of the information/document/pdf article should be supplied: e.g. Packer, R (1998) Monsters of immersion, http://www.cyberstage.org/ archive/newstuff/monsters.html

e.g. BBC (2004) Barcelona clubbers get chipped (online), Accessed 1 November 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/ technology/3697940.stm As seen above, authors are advised to include the date they accessed it, to support the authenticity of the source.

Citing personal communications and interviews A formal research interview can be cited in the text (Collins, 12/09/07 interview), and at the end of the Works Cited list under Interviews.

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Journal of Music, Technology and Education Volume 1 Number 1 © 2007 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/jmte.1.1.3/2

Editorial David Collins In 2006, a book dedicated to the system of punctuation – Eats, Shoots and Leaves: A Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation – became a best-seller in the United Kingdom. The title of this unexpected book was predicated upon the usage of that seemingly innocuous element of punctuation in the English language, the comma. The position of the comma in the title impacts upon how we might define a particular animal – the panda – which, correctly, ‘eats shoots and leaves’ or incorrectly, ‘eats, shoots and leaves’. In a similar vein, in the developmental stages of this new journal, my thoughts were preoccupied with the dilemma of whether or not to place a comma between the words ‘music’ and ‘technology’. Certainly, the journal was intended to draw together the strands of ‘music’ ‘technology’ and ‘education’, but is this new journal to be concerned with: music technology and education, or with: music, technology and education? A subtle but significant difference. Such ruminations were perhaps influenced by ubiquitous postmodern phrases such as the ‘blurring of subject boundaries’, the ‘fragmentation of knowledge’, together with the plethora of aspects of interdisciplinarity – trans-, pluri-, inter-, multi-, cross-disciplinarity – which challenge (or beset) our assumptions of what should or not be taught in our schools, colleges and universities. My decision, backed up by the associate editors, was that placing the comma between music and technology gave just enough nuance and weight to explicating the separateness and the interrelationship of these domains of practice. The journal also arose from a fascinating synchronicity of events where people involved at the interface of music, technology and education within differing institutions were separately and simultaneously identifying the need for a journal that would act as a focus for the latest thinking in this area. So, while the academic community currently has access to established and respected journals in both areas of ‘music education’ and ‘music technology’, there are none – up to the inception of this inaugural issue – which announce themselves as the only journal specifically dedicated to the interrelationship of both. Resultingly, the editorial team is seeking articles from those working closely with new technologies in the fields of music education and music technology education; our readership is expected to be wide and varied and the hope is that JMTE will act as a forum for debate and exchange of approaches in the use of new technologies in music teaching and learning. As a peer-reviewed journal, JMTE will maintain academic rigour through a respected and distinguished editorial board; the benchmark and ‘tone’ for this important inaugural issue has been set by including contributions from this board of experts. JMTE 1 (1) 3–5 © Intellect Ltd 2007

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1. I. Schoon (1992), Creative Achievement in Architecture: A Psychological Study, Leiden University: DSWO Press, p. 2.

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Carola Boehm’s article, based upon findings from an HE academy award, provides a succinct commentary and overview of the current issues facing music technology in HE in the United Kingdom and, fittingly for this first issue of the journal, explores what is understood by the term ‘music technology’ in the educational context in which we find it. Boehm’s analysis of some 350 categorized ‘music technology’ courses in the United Kingdom provides food for thought for course developers but such analysis does not only occur at a quantitative level, but Boehm explores the implicit and non-implicit interdisciplinarity in this profusion of currently available undergraduate provision and she reminds us of Barthes’s statement that ‘interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security’. I have intended Giselle Ferreira’s article to follow Boehm’s since it too identifies the ‘conundrum’ facing course developers in music, technology and education who face a multiplicity of courses on offer, and also mirrors the previous article’s discussion on the so-called ‘divide’ between art and science (or technology). Ferreira suggests that the relationship between music and technology has ‘not been extensively explored in its implications, in particular, for educators treading in this complex area’, and in doing so she further highlights the importance of this new journal for the community. From the broad overview provided by Boehm, Ferreira focuses down onto a case study of course development and in doing so, asks us in what sense ‘music technology’ differs from the ‘technology of music’. We have seen the demise of the heated debate surrounding the alliance of technology with creative activity. McLuhan’s comment on the age-old ability of the artist to side-step the bully-blow of new technology was written at a period in the twentieth century prior to the explosion – one cannot find another description – of digital media technologies, and it could be said that of all the art forms, it is music which has led the field in linking new technologies with creative practice. Pamela Burnard interrogates this interrelationship between creativity and technology in school music in her conceptual article, and aims to reframe current pedagogical thinking and practice. Burnard presents her notion of classrooms as ‘creative spaces that hold out the possibilities for, and implementation of, new kinds of relationship between creativity and technology’, and in doing so draws upon post-Vygotskyan activity theory as a tool for implementing change in educational practice, and uncovering the key relationship(s) between young people’s creative behaviour and learning technologies. While a significant body of empirical work has been undertaken in the use of technologies in supporting skills of music analysis, and aural awareness, together with the use of technology to explore musical perception, only a small number of studies examine creative activity – such as music composition, improvisation and performance. Of course, the field of creativity research is vast, and the body of material in the field includes a wide variety of approaches – enabling conditions, environmental conditions, intellectual and personality characteristics, combinatory/associative theories and so on. One author has spoken of the creativity literature as an ‘accumulation of an increasing body of unintegrated theoretical and empirical material’.1 Despite this, one perspective upon musical creativity agreed on by many researchers is that it can be construed as a form of problem-solving activity. It is within this particular frame that Andrew

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King describes a case study set within a recording studio: what he terms a ‘practical activity in a situated environment’ and his article examines how students’ problem-solving activity of music production are supported, or not, by the learning technologies available. This is, as King rightly points out, a neglected area of study. Problem-solving/creative activity in the context of the recording studio is, as King’s study indicates, not simply a matter of surmounting technical issues; there is a pedagogical relevancy. Returning from King’s, Ferreira’s and Boehm’s focus upon music, technology and education in higher education, Leigh Landy explores the pedagogy of electroacoustic music at a pre-university educational level. It is intriguing that, as both Boehm and Ferreira aim to encapsulate what we understand by ‘music technology’, Landy seeks to encourage practitioners to use terminology with consistency, highlighting the grey area between what we understand as ‘electroacoustic music’ or ‘sonic art’, and the diffuse nature of the term ‘computer music’. Indeed, this need for appropriate terminology galvanized his initiation of the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) and in his article Landy outlines the development of EARS from 2001 to the present and the consequent resonances for educational applications – ‘pedagogical EARS’. For those who are convinced of the need for electroacoustic music to be given more profile in our schools, Landy’s article makes essential reading. Finally, there is concern among some educators that children are increasingly mediating the ‘real world’ through screen culture – what Auslander describes as a ‘progressive decorporealisation of the live event’2 – and the article by Jonathan Savage and Jason Butcher which rounds off this inaugural issue of JMTE describes a project which responds to their concern that ‘more and more pupils are huddled, staring at computer screens in their music lessons’. Projects which include the use of internet-based audio with live music pushes forward the implementation of new media technologies in music praxis . The diversity of audience, user and genre described here returns us to Burnard’s concept of music classrooms (for any level of learner) as spaces which galvanize new relationships between creativity and technology. In all these articles we observe practitioners, researchers and educators exploring differing ways of thinking and doing in the field of music, technology and education. JMTE warmly welcomes contributions from authors who wish to join us in this exploration.

Editorial

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2. P. Auslander (2005), ‘At the Listening Post, or, do machines perform?’, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 1: 1, p. 8.

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Journal of Music, Technology and Education Volume 1 Number 1 © 2007 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jmte.1.1.7/1

The discipline that never was: current developments in music technology in higher education in Britain Carola Boehm n-ISM, Glasgow Abstract

Keywords

This article discusses current issues around the provision of music technology in British universities. The discussion is based on the most current results from the project ‘Betweening’, funded by Palatine (Higher Education Academy). The aim of the project was to explore the educational landscape of music technology in HE and to provide an oversight of the different models used. The way a particular discipline – music technology – becomes established and how it evolves has as much to do with institutional and governmental politics, social constructs and pedagogical methodologies, as it does with the discipline itself. As well as an overview of the findings from quantitative studies (published in detail in Boehm 2006), this article discusses the findings from the qualitative information gathered from the Betweening project in order to provide an overview of the educational landscape of music technology in higher education in Britain today.

music technolog education interdisciplinarity higher education

Introduction In the last few years there has been unprecedented increase in Music Technology courses within British universities. The term ‘music technology’ itself represents meaning in the widest sense of the phrase: technology of/around/in/for music, but order to stress the ambiguous nature of term, it also possesses, for this article at least, the ubiquitous post-modern quotation marks. This term, ‘music technology’ has perceptually different and shifting meanings, depending on the context in which it is being used. The multiplicity of what exactly is understood by ‘music technology’ is an indication of the fragmentation of communities at large and their emerging cultural boundaries, be it sound-engineering, electro-acoustic music, music informatics, or music education technology. It also represents a fragmentation of our formerly holistically humanistic concept of knowledge and the delivery of knowledge. We are slowly moving from a modernist concept of university to a postmodern one, or so it may seem. And the postmodern quotation marks indicate that: I have to know that the reader knows that I know that it is not as simple as music technology. And so this journal comes at a good time for us, as practitioners and educators, to reflect explicitly on our educational practices; to discuss the boundaries of this discipline or possibly the fact that it may never have clear boundaries, or that it may never represent a single academic

JMTE 1 (1) 7–21 © Intellect Ltd 2007

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discipline; to investigate how this fits into our current disciplinary structures or our educational institutions; to create a discourse on how and what and in which contexts we teach and facilitate learning; where we have been and where we are going.

The fifth generation This discipline (which never was one discipline) is maturing and we could consider our current students to be in the fifth generation of ‘Music Technologists’; and I deploy this term, despite Mark Thorley having rightly pointed out that ‘there is no such job as a ‘music technologist’, even though the degrees surrounding the domain of music technology are seen as being highly vocational or practice based (Thorley 2005). Oversimplified, the first generation of Music Technologists could be called the ‘Experimenters’ of the 1950s and 1960s, populated with individuals such as Schaeffer, Stockhausen, Eimert, Cage, Moog, Buchla, Mathews, Hiller and many more. For the first time a critical mass of technologists and musicians looked at music and technology and tried to develop their own methods of combining aspects of previously separate disciplines into one. In the danger of continuing this over-simplification, the second generation of the 1970s and 1980s built on the basis of the first generation, and with a fast-developing commercialization as well as academic activities in this area, the speed with which music technology was developed, produced and exploited for works of art accelerated. Technological newcomers were Midi and Kyma, based on high performance DSP processors. Centres, such as IRCAM, CCRMA and at MIT, were created and individuals such as Boulez, Risset, Vercoe, Wishart, Puckett, Koenig, Chowning and Subotnik provided a wide variety of activities within this discipline. The first lecturers of music technology in academic institutions came from the third generation of the 1990s and 2000s. Music technology was slowly becoming an academically viable discipline of education and research. More well-known individuals of this generation, such as Dannenberg, S. T. Pope, Tododorov, Miranda could be named, among many others. For the first time a critical mass of individuals, who had studied more than one discipline and who had a background in more than one field, existed to push this area forward. The fourth generation can be seen as represented by the first student body that was able to study music technology as one degree, such as BMus/BSc in Music technology, Creative music technology or the BEng Electrical engineering + music. And here we are, in the fifth generation, with these young postgraduates and post doctorals moving into our educational establishments as young lecturers in the field of ‘music technology’. The many attempts to provide an overview of possible degree curricula or subject taxonomies indicates that they are perceived as a genuinely interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary area. Already in 1991 Ackermann’s visualisation designated five different top-level disciplines for this subject area: Music, Psychology, Physics, Informatics and Electronics (Ackermann 1991:2). Many such visualizations of taxonomies exist, among them the simplified version by Richard Moore of a triangle labelled ‘Arts’, ‘Science’

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and ‘Technology’, and his more detailed visualization of a music technology pentagram with engineering, computing, music, psychology and physics (Moore 1990). One of the most detailed taxonomies is the one edited by Stephen Travis Pope (1994), with subsequent additions and changes from contributors. This has become the classic taxonomy used in education for music technology, due to its comprehensiveness with no less than seven categories on the highest level and with a maximum of four subcategories has plenty of depth in each of them. But even the most comprehensive of these taxonomies, restricted to 2-dimensional hierarchies, still cannot convey the complex and multidimensional relationships of their inter-, intra-, trans-, cross-, multidisciplinary nature (see Augsburg 2005). And although there is no doubt as to the interdisciplinary nature of degrees around music technology, nevertheless they are often still provided as if they fit seamlessly into our traditional, discipline-based academic structure. Sometimes we, the lecturers, 1. “Music Technology” As in Sound Recording, Tonmeister, Record Production, etc.

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TECHNOLOGY

ART 3. “Music Technology” As in Creative Music Technology, Sonic Arts, Electro-acoustic Composition, Sound Design, Electronic Music

SCIENCE 2. “Music Technology” As in Computational Musicology, Electronic, Audio and Music Technology Engineering, Music Informatics, Music Technology Soft/Hardware Development, Digital Music

Figure 1: The triad of music technology?

The discipline that never was: current developments in music technology

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course developers and degree managers, forget that these are degrees that do not have a long-standing tradition on which practices can be based, and that we are ourselves still in the process of learning how best to facilitate the provision of these new degrees. The challenge exists concerning how best to integrate an interdisciplinary field into a disciplinary framework. This challenge exists on all levels of academic endeavour: from the running of the courses and their administrative frameworks, to the teaching and facilitation of learning, the disciplines’ pedagogies and specific vocabularies, and research with its own particular methodologies. We know, as interdisciplinary academic practitioners, that a substantial complexity is involved in providing a supporting and educationally valuable environment for students and staff in an area that reaches not only across different scientific domains, but also across different working and investigatory methodologies, different approaches for presentation and practice, different underlying – but implicit – justificational hypotheses, different vocabularies and terminologies, as well as different conceptual frameworks – not even to mention often different budgets and administrative units. This area, no matter what perception one has of it, is genuinely interdisciplinary. All the flavours of the subject need a multitude of different disciplines, from acoustics to music performance to composition to engineering to all sorts of other things. The classic taxonomy of Pope (Pope 1994) collated a 4-page list of categories and sub-categories and sub-sub-sub categories. Just as classic, but more minimalist, Moore (Moore 1990) represented it in a simple triangle which included science, music and technology. We could allocate to this triangle (Figure 1) the degree names used in universities in Britain and come up with a triad of music technology degrees that furthermore represent the present communities and cultural boundaries at large.

An educational landscape of music technology in Britain UCAS, the British Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, currently lists 351 degrees in the category of music technology. Of the 351 degrees only 131 actually use the phrase ‘Music technology’ in the title. In all, 63 different names are used with among them: Arts and media informatics/music Audio and music technology Audio and video engineering Computational musicology Computer science with music Computer systems and music technology Computing and music Computing with music Creative music technology Digital music Electronic and audio engineering Electronic music Electronics with music Music composition and technology 10

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Music informatics Music multimedia and electronics Music technology and/with audio systems design Music technology Music technology software development Music with computing Sonic arts Sound design technology Sound engineering Tonmeister etc.

Degree Name Occurence Music Technology 131 Media Technology 36 Electronic Music 31 Sonic Music 22 Creative Music Technology 20 Audio Technology 10 Music Production 5 Recording 4 Sound Engineering 3 Rest 51

41.9% 11.5% 9.9% 7.0% 6.4% 3.2% 1.6% 1.3% 1.0% 16.3%

Figure 2: Degree name occurrences. Looking at what terminology is used by British universities and drawing out from the degree names the most-used categories, the following distribution emerges: music technology (131), media technology (36), electronic music (31), sonic arts (22), creative music technology (20), audio technology (10) (Figure 2). These degrees are provided by 62 different institutions which means that there are some five degrees in the area of ‘music technology’ for each British university (Figure 3). Obviously it is arguable whether or not some of these terms belong in this category (e.g. audio engineering, or media technology). But I believe that so long as there are communities in existence that do include them in this category, it is only right that they should be included in these statistics. Additionally, what tends to push up the average is that a few universities run more than 25 degrees around the subject of music technology. These tend to be degrees (all having ‘music technology’ in the degree name) that work on a joint honours model with a set programme. From BSc in Forensic science and music technology or BSc in Astrophysics and music technology to seemingly more sensible combinations such as BSc in Computing and music technology or BSc in Theatre/TV and music technology. But who is to say what is useful for a society and what is not? Our society might just need those one or two ‘astro-physicist-music-technologists’ The discipline that never was: current developments in music technology

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1. Since 1997, the government has increased its funding in science, engineering and technology, including research and teaching. Its total science budget increased from £1.5bn to just under £3bn in 2006 (Ford 2006).

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0

24 13 8 3 2 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

10

20

30

40

Universities have 1 degree Universities have 2 degrees Universities have 3 degrees Universities have 4 degrees Universities have 15 degrees Universities have 6 degrees Universities has 37 degrees Universities has 34 degrees Universities has 29 degrees Universities has 28 degrees Universities has 25 degrees Universities has 11 degrees Universities has 10 degrees Universities has 9 degrees Universities has 8 degrees Universities has 5 degrees University/ies

Sum of Degree(s)

Figure 3: Degrees in universities in Britain. (consider ‘Contact’ with Jodie Foster) or ‘forensic-science-music-technologists’ (consider CSI and its criminal investigations unit) – and it is certainly popular with students. Participants in the study have confirmed that this notion of providing what a colleague of mine has once called ‘matrix degrees’, is more popular in the post-1992 universities than in the old. New universities can attract more students by providing more degrees, rather than by having fewer degrees with more choices within them. Whether this tactic of attracting a larger number of applicants through a larger number of degrees is generally valid across both new and old universities is hard to say, as the old universities tend to resist the notion of providing a large number of degrees. The other extreme can be seen in the fact that the majority of the ancient (pre-1800) universities provide only degrees in music, in which music technology is taught as an integral or optional part of the course. Whereas it must be satisfying for students to have such a choice and it may also be necessary for employers to have a few, specialized professionals with all sorts of combinations, the downside is that it also calls for a higher amount of administration, with the universities having to cater for a large number of degrees with small numbers of enrolled students. Nevertheless, for universities to create joint programmes, to which more than one department/ school/unit is contributing, is one of the easiest and most cost-efficient ways to almost instantly provide an interdisciplinary degree. Without those few universities that have ‘matrix degrees’, the average number of degrees per institution comes down. The majority of universities (59 percent) have one or two degrees, and the average (without including the so-called ‘matrix degrees’) is 3.8 degrees for each university. The majority of qualifications are BScs (55 percent), followed by BAs at 39 per cent (Figure 4). This number indicates that the governmental drive a few years back to boost scientific degrees with a financial incentive has 12

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3%

2% 1% 0%

Total: 351 BA (137) BSc (195) BEng (10) MEng (6) BMus (2) MA (1)

39%

55%

Figure 4: BSc vs BA.

actually worked.1 Not only are the majority of degrees BScs, also a quite substantial number of BScs are coordinated by arts departments. Some oddities are noteworthy: there are only ten BEng degrees and six MEng degrees. In general, IEE (Institute for Electrical Engineers) accredited degrees have difficulty in fitting all the engineering as well as all the music needed in this interdisciplinary field into their 3-year time span. In 2006/07 only two of the BEng degrees were coordinated across two departments (music and engineering), dropping to only one in 2007/08, located in Scotland. As Scotland has traditionally had a 4-year undergraduate degree, Scottish universities generally find it easier to fit interdisciplinary degrees into a programme that has additional guidelines from accrediting bodies, such as the IEE. For English universities, this means an extra burden if they are planning to acquire accreditation. BMus and MA degrees are also exceptional cases: in England MA degrees tend to be postgraduate courses, in Scotland they can denote undergraduate degrees. Additionally, music departments have generally kept their own BMus degrees, but as the figure above shows, they are generally not used to denote music technology degrees, but rather used for ‘pure music’ degrees, whatever that may entail.

Incorporating different disciplines As mentioned above, it seems that many universities have chosen to provide interdisciplinarity through a joint degree model. In fact, 60 percent of the music technology degrees are taught as a joint model. Contributions come from more than one department, with students choosing two or three programmes for their ‘interdisciplinarity’. It is a model that is well known and established, and therefore easily integrated into existing university administrative processes. It is specifically common in the arts and humanities, and logically the highest number of joint degrees in music technology were initiated with this model in mind. It does not need more or specific additional staff, and often no additional purpose-based spaces. The discipline that never was: current developments in music technology

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In these institutions, music technology or electro-acoustic composition courses tend to have been optional courses for many years before a specific music technology degree is started. The problem of setting up the degree, therefore, tends to be simply a matter of scale. So long as institutions have a financial resource allocation model in place (as most of them do nowadays) where the funding for the student follows the student down to the level of the smallest academic unit (department or school), this model is often chosen to provide an easy way to integrate interdisciplinarity. But many institutions have also acknowledged the limits of this model. It is the responsibility of the student to accumulate the course’s interdisciplinarity. He or she may study pure electrical engineering in one department and pure music in another (or computing science and music). It is left to the students themselves to knowledge from studying two different subject domains in depth- and this often does not happen until the postgraduate level. The questions that have occurred to many degree coordinators is that of a pragmatic balance between deep specialisms and broad interdisciplinarism. The joint degree model stems from the belief that in order to achieve new insights into an interdisciplinary subject, it is not only enough to provide to specialisms, but essential to provide as deep as possible an education in each ‘pure field’. It has been argued, that this notion stems from a still modernist view of university stemming from the 18th century and the age of enlightenment. Already 24 years ago Habermans has claimed that the project of modernity in University education may have failed. ‘The project of modernity’ stems from the 18th century (…), aiming at developing objective science, universal morality and law, and autonomous art according to their inner logic’ (Habermans 1983:9). The notion that a department could have experts in all areas of the degree subject area stems from this notion. Also that we can study a subject in all its forms, that its boundaries are clear and defined. But our knowledge has grown beyond the ability of universities to provide educators in all these fields, or as more recently Sperber postulates, the ‘current disciplinary system may be becoming brittle’ (Sperber, 2005: n.p.). For a new form of interdisciplinarity the question arises whether we are in need of a new post-modern acceptance of fragmented but selforganising areas of knowledge, in which “particular foundations would emerge in the course of the inquiry rather than be predetermined in the form of discipline-bound theories, methods, and schools of thought.” (Mourad 1997:132) Many departments may not explicitly acknowledge, nor welcome what it would mean to introduce fragmented and self-organising concepts of knowledge, but many institutions have tried to address the balance between deep specialisms and broad interdisciplinarism. The most obvious solution taken by may institutions is by cutting some of the pure modules and providing additional ones, which include specifically the interdisciplinary aspects in an interdisciplinary fashion. These modules are often perceived by students to represent the core and most relevant courses of the degree. I have in the past controversially called these “glue courses” (Boehm 2005), but as this term implies that there is a need to glue two pure disciplines via some interdisciplinary modules, it can create confu-

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sion, and specifically in institutions, where there are more flowing boundaries between the disciplines. This model of ‘glue courses’ provides for both deep specialism and broad interdisciplinarity to be balanced by playing with the ratio between them. It also provides a reasonable additional administrative and resource burden, i.e. by adding one or two ‘interdisciplinarians’ to the staff body a heightened involvement with specifically interdisciplinary aspects can be achieved. However, this model is also felt by educators and students to have some drawbacks – besides the obvious administrative question of which educational unit will pay for the additional members of interdisciplinary staff. Additionally, once finances are sorted out, it does tend to be these members of staff who are in danger of falling between the stools, in all sorts of ways: from research assessment exercises and their strategic implications, to promotional chances or even redundancy processes. For the education of students, there is a more immediate drawback (and one that has been mentioned most often by the interviewees): students still feel that a part of one or the other pure discipline of the joint degree is irrelevant to their core interest. It is felt to be a constant process of delicately balancing ‘pure subjects’ (whatever we may mean with this term) with interdisciplinary subjects. A few institutions have addressed this issue to the extent of having every single course in the degree relating to the interdisciplinary subject. That is, whereas in the joint model a student might study a pure C+ + course in Computing science and a pure music history course in Music, in the ‘integrating model’, where every module is designed specifically for the interdisciplinary degree, he/she may study ‘C+ + for music applications’ and ‘history of music technology’. It is these degrees that seem to have the largest amount of perceived relevance by students as every single course seems to be specifically tailor made for their degree. To achieve this , institutions use different resource models: one being that contributions may come from different departments, but these contributions being specific to the interdisciplinary degree. Thus the cost burden of additional staff or resources can be shared (e.g. both the engineering department and the music department having on music technology lecturer). But the difficulties of being dependent upon another department, possibly without one’s own faculty, can also create conflicts. Conflicts of interest regarding a department’s own priorities may clash with the need of a shared degree model. An easy example for this can be seen in class sizes, and quite a few institutions have stopped providing a shared degree between two faculties exactly because of the conflicts surrounding quotas on student intake. Using as an example a typical average pre-1992 university, its hypothetical music department -specifically if concentrating on compositional activities -may have an ideal number around 5 to 15 students, with a maximum of 25. Its science and engineering department, however, may find any courses of under 25 students not acceptable. The conflict increases in the present climate, where the old (pre-1992) universities tend to have increasing difficulty in recruiting engineering and computing students, and the most popular courses tend to be the interdisciplinary degrees. Another model to address this is to simply buy in staff from a discipline that does not seem core to the faculty, e.g. computing science departments


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permanently or temporarily hiring music performance or music composition staff. Departments are increasingly opting for this model, but it is quite telling of our current educational landscape, driven by RAE and QAA, that these courageous examples of interdisciplinarity tend to happen more in the sciences than the humanities and arts, and more in the new universities than the old. It is logical, as this can be seen to be driven by student demand (bottom-up) rather than big institutional politics (top-down).

… but courage we need … But courage we need – to explore new ways of teaching and learning and researching, and most of all administering our knowledge. Obviously, on the other hand, one could ask if there is possibly more merit, certainly less resistance, in absorbing (exclusive) parts of an interdisciplinary domain within a traditional discipline and otherwise leaving everything as is. I feel that we are seeing this in Britain (and possibly other countries) today. In 2001 the communities of music in academia finally managed to convince the traditional educational sector (mainly the Research Assessment Exercise) that composition is a research activity and assessable as such, and therefore on a par with other musical activities, such as editions and scholarly approaches. However, surprisingly and without warning, this seemed to herald the exclusion of the rest of computational musicology or ‘music technology’. In the traditional engineering and computing science departments there often is still the problem of acceptance of research between music and science, priorities most often still lie in the more ‘pure’ and ‘core’ subject areas. And the music departments in Britain generally rather accept electro-acoustic composition than other ‘music technologies’, which tend to have a completely different set of working and research methodologies, such as, for example, being based on collaborative and cumulative working methods. Thus, electro-acoustic composition and sonic arts, which is increasingly being seen by its own community as belonging to music rather than music technology, has been integrated in many music departments across the country, whereas the rest of music technology has often been left standing out in the rain, to be picked up by science or engineering departments, and this more in the new universities than the old. Rather than seeing an emergence of a new discipline, such as the history of computer science has produced, we can see a movement that is tearing the content of this interdisciplinary field into three more and more distinct disciplines with their own methodologies and terminologies. (Figure 5). Because what else is a discipline than a social construction and, according to Fish ‘a grab-bag of disparate elements held together by the conceptual equivalent of chicken-wire’ (Fish 1994: 74)? That part of music technology represented by sound recording, music production, Tonmeister, for example, is more and more predominantly taught by colleges and conservatoriums. That part of music technology represented by computational musicology, music engineering, electronics and music, and audio engineering is predominantly taught in computing science and electrical engineering departments. That part of music technology represented by electro-acoustic composition, sonic arts and electronic music is predominantly taught in music departments.

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Teaching predominatly happens in ... ES EG L L CO

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Figure 5: The disintegration of a discipline. Is what we are seeing in our educational institutions proof for Fish’s thesis, that ‘interdisciplinarity is impossible, as either one gets absorbed into another’? That the ‘blurring of disciplinary boundaries results only in new hierarchies and divisions’ (compare Moran 2002: 112 and Fish 1994: 237). Or is it that what is emerging, is three new distinct disciplines with different working and investigatory methodologies, different approaches for presentation and practice, different underlying – but implicit – justificational hypotheses, different vocabularies and terminologies, as well as different conceptual frameworks?

Can interdisciplinarity remain interdisciplinary indefinitely? ‘Interdisciplinarity is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the old disciplines break down […] in the interests of a new object and a new lan-


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2. Discussion between author, Nick Bailey and Graham Hair, June 2006.

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guage; neither of which has a place in the field of the sciences that were to be brought peacefully together, this unease in classification being precisely the point from which it is possible to diagnose a certain mutation’ (Barthes 1986: 155)

And if we are aware of all this, if we have enough self-awareness and selfcriticism of the aspects mentioned by Barthes above, then should it not be possible and certainly worthwhile to remain in an interdisciplinary state indefinitely? (Moran 2002: 113). Interdisciplinarity has been said to be the modern ‘motherhood and apple pie’ issue. That is to say, everyone, including decision makers in higher education, recognizes that it is a Good Thing.2 It has ‘become a buzzword across many different academic subjects in recent years, but it is rarely interrogated in any great detail’ (Moran 2002: 1). In 1989 Liu pointed out that interdisciplinarity is the most ‘seriously underthought critical, pedagogical and institutional concept in the modern academy’ and in 2006 we still, as Sperber says, ‘do not, normally, discuss among ourselves interdisciplinarity per se. What we do is work on issues that happen to fall across several disciplines, and, for this, we establish collaboration […]’. (Sperber 2005). But we have to admit to ourselves that the separation of ‘music technology’ into its three distinct boundaries has more to do with how we do something, than with what we do; or, in other words, more to do with which methodologies are more similar, and which ones are not. For example, the reason for one sub-discipline, such as electro-acoustic composition, to be more accepted in music departments, is not because it is ‘more musical’, nor because it is ‘less technical’. It is because the methodologies for working, teaching and researching in this sub-discipline are more similar to the ones used in departments of music across the country. The same can be said of music informatics and computer science departments. Music informatics has as much to do with music, as with informatics. But its methodologies just simply do not seem to fit into traditional music departments. It seems we haven’t learned much: the classical divide between the arts and the sciences is still there. Even forty-seven years after C.P.Snow’s classic article on the cultural divide of the arts and sciences (1959), the gap is still there. And although the communities on both sides of the gap might be talking, they certainly are not understanding each other. Even after Kant’s The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), Nietzsche’s We Scholars (1886), Snow’s The Two Cultures (1959), Popper’s The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959), Habermas’ Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (1967), Derrida’s Structure, Sign and Play (1978), Becher’s Academic Tribes and Territories (1989), Apostel’s Interdisciplinarity (1972), Moran’s Interdisciplinarity (2002) and Sperber’s Why Rethink Interdisciplinarity? (2005), we still live in a world where those in the sciences criticize the lack of empirical methods of humanities scholars and their seeming reliance on subjective interpretations. In turn, those in the humanities attack scientists for a misguided faith in the possibility of absolute objectivity, a narrow conception of useful knowledge and an unwillingness to interrogate the broader social, political and cultural implications of their work. ‘Many of these disagreements can be traced not

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only to the different scope and subject matter of the sciences and humanities, but to their contrasting assumptions about how knowledge should actually be accumulated’ (Moran 2002: 150). In addition to this 200-year-old struggle between the sciences and arts, a newcomer into the world of methodologies has entered. It is now valid, so current high education management policy would like us to believe, to create knowledge and learning through practice, through more vocationally related experiences, as demanded by the students. But it is also common knowledge that some practices of creating knowledge are more valid than others, specifically for the purposes of the RAE and, consequently, strategic decision-making processes. In conclusion, it seems that in the degrees of the interdisciplinary subject area of music technology, we see an example of interdisciplinary things to come. We see a collection of academic and professional communities evolving and sometimes clashing in the evolutionary and culturally ingrained tendency in academia to standardize methodology and terminology. We see the movements of sub-disciplines moving apart and regrouping and sometimes creating new single disciplines within new boundaries. And this movement is governed by different outside factors such as government policies, the Research Assessment Exercise, or the Further and Higher Education Act of 1992. We see a movement of disintegration, the splitting of music technology, in the largest sense of the word, into (for the sake of a better terminology) compositional-sound-and-music-technologies, sound-and-music-processingtechnologies and sound-and-music-production-technologies. These three areas are becoming distinct, as their communities are distinct, as well as their different places of learning and with them certain methodologies. But there are also movements to see music technology as one subject area and to allow subject combinations to appear from student demand, industry demand or the subject matter itself. As inquiry and problem based learning theories have matured, they are slowly establishing themselves as a major drive for change in learning as well as an argument for a more self-directed process towards knowledge and skills acquisition. What certainly could help is for universities to leave the experiment in modernism – Habermas’s ‘project of modernity’ – behind and accept what post-modernity can give to the ways we approach teaching, learning, researching and, most of all, administering our knowledge. A postmodern approach would be to accept and accommodate these new concepts of fragmentational knowledge and self-organizing areas of interdisciplinary domains of knowledge; it would present an environment in which learning is driven by a process of inquiry, for foundations of a subject area to be created where needed in the inquiry and out of the inquiry, rather than pre-ordained and culturally engrained in specific disciplines. In order for interdisciplinary subjects such as ‘music technology’ to flourish, without prejudice and discipline-specific cultural constraints, teaching and research have to be allowed to happen at the brink of and in the spaces between disciplines, spaces where new theories emerge out of inquiry and where they are informed but not bound by pre-existing schools of thought.


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Acknowledgement The author wishes to acknowledge the support of Palatine (Higher Education Academy) in carrying out the research. Works cited Ackermann, Philipp (1991), Computer und Music, New York, Vienna: Springer Verlag. Apostel, Leo et al. (1972), Interdisciplinarity: Problems of Teaching and Research in Universities, Paris: OECD. Augsburg, T. (2005), Becoming Interdisciplinary: An Introduction to Interdisciplinary Studies, Kendall Hunt. Barthes, R. (1986), ‘Research: The young’, in The rustle of language (trans. R. Howard), New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 69–75. Becher, T. (1989), Academic Tribes and Territories: Intellectual Enquiry and the Cultures of Disciplines, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Boehm, C. (2005), ‘Music Technology in Higher Education’, The Idea of Education, ed. by Tom Claes. Inter-Disciplinary Press, Vol. 12. 2005. Boehm, C. (2006), ‘The thing about the quotes: “Music Technology” degrees in Britain’, in ICMC Conference Proceedings, New Orleans: ICMA. Derrida, J. (1978 [1966]), Writing and Difference (trans. Alan Bass), London and New York: Routledge. Fish, S. (1994), ‘Being Interdisciplinary is so very hard to do’, in There is no such thing as free speech, and it’s a good thing, too, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 231–42. Ford, L. (2006), ‘Physics still imperilled despite funding boost, says panel’, Guardian Unlimited, 26 January. Available at: http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/ research/story/0,,1695475,00.html Accessed 13 August 2007. Habermas, J. (1967), Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften. Tübingen: Mohr. Habermas, J. (1983), ‘Modernity – An incomplete project’, in The anti-aesthetic: Essays on postmodern culture (ed. H. Foster), Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, pp. 3–15. Kant, I. (1992 [1798]), The Conflict of the Faculties (trans. Mary J. Gregor), Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Liu, Alan (1989), ‘The power of formalism: the new historicism’, English Literature History, 56: 4 (Winter), pp. 721–71, quoted in Moran 2002: 1. Moore, R. (1990), Elements of Computer Music, New Jersey: Prentice Hall. Moran, J. (2002), Interdisciplinarity, London: Routledge. Mourad, R.P., Jr (1997), ‘Postmodern Interdisciplinarity’, The Review of Higher Education, 20: 2, pp. 113–40. Nietzsche, F. (1990 [1886]), ‘We Scholars’, in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (trans. R.J. Hollingdale), Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 129–46. Pope, S.T. (1994), ‘A Taxonomy of Computer Music’, Computer Music Journal 18:1. Foreword. Popper, Karl (1972 [1959]), The Logic of Scientific Discovery, London: Hutchinson. Popper, Karl (1973), Objective Knowledge: An evolutionary Approach, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Snow, C.P. (1993 [1959]), The Two Cultures, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Sperber, D. (2005), ‘Why Rethink Interdisciplinarity?’, Rethinking Interdisciplinarity, interdisciplines 2005. http://www.interdisciplines.org/ Accessed 9 December 2005). Thorley, M. (2005), Music Technology education – who is the customer, the student or the industry? Leeds: LIMTEC 2005. UCAS Directory (2005, 2006), www.ucas.com/search/index.html

Suggested citation Boehm, C. (2007), ‘The discipline that never was: current developments in Music technology in higher education in Britain’ Journal of Music, Technology and Education 1: 2, pp. 7–21, doi: 10.1386/jmte.1.1.7/1

Contributor details Carola Boehm holds degrees in musicology, computer science and electrical engineering. She is currently Head of Music and Principal Lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton. Lecturing and researching in the area of music and music technology for more than 15 years, she has held previous positions at the University of Glasgow, the University of Mainz, the Conservatory of Music in Hannover, and the Royal Conservatory of Music in Den Haag. Since 1999 the Co-Director of the Centre for Music Technology at Glasgow University, she is also one of the founding members of n-ISM (Network for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science, Technology and Music). Her research areas include music technology education, methodologies for designing music systems, performance research and the interplay of interdisciplinarity, creativity and technology. Contact: Carola Boehm, Head of Department, Department of Music, School of Sport, Performing Arts and Leisure University of Wolverhampton, Walsall Campus Gorway Road, WALSALL West Midlands, WS1 3BD. E-mail: [email protected]


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Crossing borders: issues in music technology education Giselle M. d. S. Ferreira The Open University Abstract

Keywords

Music technology can be construed in a variety of ways, ranging from the design to the use of technologies for musical purposes, thus involving skills across the traditional disciplinary divide that polarizes art and technology. This creates a conundrum for curriculum developers who are aiming to create learning opportunities that are relevant and exciting for students with widely varying backgrounds. This paper examines some of the issues that arise in music technology curriculum development, illustrated with examples taken from the experience of the team responsible for the production of the UK Open University course TA225 The Technology of Music and its expanded version TA212. The paper discusses the rationale negotiated by the team to guide course-related decision making, while bearing in mind the fundamental question of how to create an interesting learning context for students with very different educational experiences and reasons for studying.

music technology open education curriculum interdisciplinarity team teaching

Introduction ‘Music technology’ in Britain appears currently as a sub-area within the Music Benchmark Statement (QAA 2002), but training and education provisions include a multitude of courses in further and higher education in which the subject is often offered as the sole or main specialism. A quick search in the UCAS (the Universities and Colleges Admission Service)1 system will return hundreds of courses; indeed, based on data extracted from the system, Boehm (2005a, 2005b) highlights the breadth of ‘music technology’ as construed in the United Kingdom. Course titles often do not include the expression ‘music technology’, but they do suggest tacit purposes in purporting to cater for wider contextual needs: academic or disciplinary housing and, consequently, legitimacy; artistic goals; commercial and industrial job roles. Despite the lack of a Benchmark statement relating exclusively to the area, ‘music technologists graduating from [those] courses emerge both as artists and scientists’, as McGettrick (n.d.) suggests, implying that ‘music technology’ may be viewed as an emerging discipline in its own right. What does seem clear, however, is that in the last two decades music technology has been progressively gaining strength as a sort of umbrella term for a number of academic and professional practices that, nevertheless, have been conventionally considered as an integral part of other, well-established disciplines such as (audio) engineering or (musical) acoustics. Importantly, ‘the finest musical instruments throughout history have both reflected and focused the technical capabilities of their time and culture’, as


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1. Available online at www.ucas.ac.uk


2. A current enterprise in the area is Boehm’s Betweening project; see project description at www.mccarthyboehm.org.uk/ projects/Betweening/ Palatine_Betweening_ V3.pdf

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Orton (1992) puts it. Indeed, music making has traditionally profited from state-of-the-art technologies and contemporary scientific insight, from the Neanderthal flute to the latest software synthesizer controlled by haptic interfaces; from the first music-printing technologies to computer-based musical composition systems. Nevertheless, the crucial relationship between music and technology – albeit contextually located and often tense – is not always clearly acknowledged. This is an issue for the most part strategically overlooked in discourses that polarize the categories ‘art’ and ‘technology’. Indeed, this dichotomy, which supports predominant definitions of the remit and scope of different disciplines and areas of knowledge, has only recently begun to be contested in critical discourses on music (Théberge 1997; Wishart 1992; Taylor 2001), with occasional recourse to the ancient Greek notion of technê (Di Scipio 1998). This fragmentation of knowledge and practice creates a paradoxical situation: despite the multiplicity of ways in which ‘music technology’ can be conceptualized and categorized in disciplinary terms, both the development and the use of technologies for musical applications require, albeit with different levels of expertise, knowledge of core topics traditionally located across disciplinary boundaries. Crucially, the interdependency between music making and technology has not been extensively explored in its implications, in particular, for educators treading in this complex area.2 This article explores some of the implications by examining a particular educational setting, the production of the UK Open University (UK OU) course TA225 The Technology of Music and its expanded version, TA212. The article argues that the multidisciplinary character – with ‘multidisciplinarity’ understood here as a coming together of different disciplines in juxtaposition (Klein 1990: 56) – of this context both compounds and parallels a problem that already confronts educators located in the setting: the issue of creating interesting and, simultaneously, relevant learning opportunities in agreement with an ‘open access’ policy. Also, it is suggested that the general approach of ‘teaching the conflicts’ (a paraphrase of Baynham 2003), the rationale negotiated by the course developers (albeit not articulated, during production, in these terms), capably maps the multiplicity of the subject onto ways in which it could be taught.

Context Teaching at the UK OU is a team effort that consists of two major, interrelated stages referred to as course development and course presentation. Course development is carried out centrally by Course Teams (CTs), groups of (predominantly) campus-based staff that include professionals from various areas clustered around a core of academic authors. CTs exploit the existing institutional structure in that this is arranged to provide expert input into various tasks required for course development (in addition to academic and pedagogical expertise, graphic design, software development and legal advice and support in respect to copyrights issues, for example), which is guided by broader curriculum considerations and, more recently, market intelligence. Course presentation, on the other hand, is monitored and supported by central academic staff, but direct student support is provided primarily by Associate Lecturers (ALs), who offer tailor-made advice

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Giselle M. d. S. Ferreira


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to small groups of learners (typically 15–25 in number).3 The roles of CTs and ALs differ significantly, but the split of functions between different groups of teachers in a broader student-support network has been pivotal to the logistics required for the production and presentation of courses to often substantial numbers of students. As part of a process that supported the eventual institutionalization of the CT, new administrative layers have been progressively introduced to manage the growing concerns with costs and, more recently, the University’s general orientation towards providing complete programmes of study leading to named qualifications (that is, certificates and degrees qualified in respect to an area of knowledge or professional remit). This move, in itself, has implied the need for a significant change of culture within the organization, a process currently under way, as courses now integrate broader programmes which set out specific curricular requirements that courses, grouped together, must meet – as opposed to what had been a course-centred mode of operation. TA225 and TA212 have been, arguably, the last courses to be developed tangentially to a set of programme-specific learning outcomes, and the current status of TA212 is that of an elective course in a number of named qualifications awarded by the University. The institution now appears to be rethinking and redefining itself within a wider, businessoriented context in which it is located on an assumedly equal, competitive footing with more ‘conventional’ universities. The wider adoption of businessoriented thinking and accompanying rhetoric within the institution, however, contributes to bring to the fore previously veiled tensions among representatives of different disciplines, professions and particular viewpoints. Team teaching is not, of course, an idiosyncrasy of distance education, but it has grown into the predominant style for developing curriculum and creating learning resources in distance-education institutions. Indeed, according to Chung (2001), the structure of these organizations – and the UK OU is here only one example among others – tends to reflect a commonly perceived need to endow course development with a more widely accepted notion of ‘professionalism’. At the UK OU, the current model of the course production process is described, in its various stages, processes and personnel required, in an online document available internally to staff (OU, Curriculum Management Guide), which outlines the relationships among the various areas of the university responsible for the creation and delivery of a course. Interestingly, non-academic services are no longer construed as subsidiary to the development process, even though this is assumedly based on pedagogical and academic considerations. A focus on budgetary and market-related concerns, traditionally not major academic affairs, compels a radically different reality that opens up an avenue for much controversy and disagreement. CTs can, therefore, be viewed as arenas that highlight administrative, disciplinary and professional divides; from this perspective they are sites of debate, contestation and conflict, as examined in Ferreira (2006). It was within the convoluted scenario of change sketched above that the course TA225 The Technology of Music was proposed and developed. The fact that an initial proposal was informally circulated in the mid-1990s, but a course team assembled only by 2001, points to the difficulties in carrying out what had been construed, from its early stages, as an ‘ambitious project’. Crossing borders: issues in music technology education

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3. ALs are part-time members of staff recruited according to their subject expertise; they are often full-time members of staff in further education or other higher education institutions.


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The course was proposed as a collaboration between the faculties of technology (which bears the presentation responsibilities) and arts, but the academic core of the CT included members from across three different faculties (including science), associated with the disciplines of electronics engineering, ICTs, manufacturing technology, music and physics. Despite some controversy around the academic ‘credibility’ of a course in this area vis-à-vis institutional perceptions of the student ‘market’, TA225 was launched in 2004 and attracted cohorts of between 400 to 600 learners per year in its three years of presentation. TA212 (also entitled The Technology of Music) replaced TA225 in 2007 and was developed in response to the perceived need to reflect the actual workload involved (see next section) as well as expand some of the fundamental and practical aspects of the course.

Course materials and structure TA225 was a level-2, 30 CAT-points course, corresponding to approximately 300 hours of part-time study spread over 9 months, about a quarter of the yearly study load in a full-time system. The course was based on a tripartite Block structure: the first Block covering the ‘basics’ (in acoustics, psychoacoustics and music theory), the second examining musical instruments (including voice and electronic instruments), and the third dealing with sound recording and processing, with particular focus on desktop sound processing and MIDI (and some coverage of topical issues such as intellectual property). These topics were presented using a relatively ‘traditional’ combination of media that had a set of printed texts as their backbone. Each Block of text was accompanied by an audio CD containing sound examples and a CD-ROM containing software (a number of software packages, including commercial programs – Adobe Audition and Cubasis VST 4.0 [this has been replaced with Cubase LE in TA212]). There was also a printed Reference Manual that conflated information on fundamental formulae and musical terminology (‘Music Primer’), as well as having sections dedicated to the basic functions provided by the various software packages used in the course. In addition, students received a Home Experiment Kit (HEK), consisting of a selection of materials used to support the development of practical skills (a microphone and a pair of headphones) and the study of acoustic instruments (various small items including a recorder, tubes of various sizes and a drinking straw). Finally, the course incorporated two DVDs containing a set of tailor-made video sequences to support the study of Blocks 2 and 3, including a selection of broadcast materials chosen from the BBC archives assembled as a ‘library’ to support, in particular, the study of electronic instruments. TA212, on the other hand, is a full-blown 60-point course (600 hours of part-time study over 9 months) and incorporates the core materials developed for TA225 into a 5-Block structure. In this structure, the original Blocks 1, 2 and 3 of TA225 are ‘sandwiched’ between a new introductory Block, which expands considerably on the original ‘Music Primer’, and a final Block that aims to prepare students for the final piece of assessed work. Block 1 introduces basic music notation and theory within a text that aims to develop the learners’ listening skills and, to a limited extent, their ability to understand and follow scores of different degrees of complexity. 26



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Student feedback from TA225 indicated that the ‘Primer’ was of limited usefulness to students entirely new to music notation, as it was developed as a subsidiary reference and not a teaching text as such, while Block 1 of TA212 provides a much more substantial introduction. Block 5, on the other hand, covers two different areas, namely, communication skills and practical work. The practical work in this last Block expands on work carried out throughout the course, providing opportunities for further use of the course software in preparation for the final project, which requires students to carry out a number of tasks and write a structured report. Figure 1 illustrates the interface of the ‘TA212 Activities’ utility program created to provide access to the learning materials on CD. The figure shows, specifically, the activities associated with chapter 5 in Block 2; the chapter includes various simulations created to support the study of topics in psychoacoustics as well as numerous musical examples, which are included on the audio CD that accompanies the Block. The software provides coherent access to all the computer-based and listening activities contained in the course, organized by Block and chapter, respectively. Computer-based activities consist of simulations and animations developed in-house, some of which are interactive. Other chapters include practical tasks using the third-party software listed above, and the ‘TA212 Activities’ utility program provides access to the subsidiary program(s). Although the focus of both courses is on the technologies, these are generally contextualized in historical and musical terms across most of the course text. The CT, however, agreed not to impose on all text any single rationale for providing contextual information, leaving individual authors to decide how (and if at all) to incorporate details on people, places and times associated with the topics taught. Contextualization was indeed assumed as an important ingredient to provide interest and motivation to arts-based students, in particular, although, as in other areas of debate, the notions of ‘context’ and ‘history’ appeared to be construed in very different ways by different members of the team. Another essential element informing authors’ decisions was the assumed relevance of this sort of detail/structure vis-à-vis the constraints imposed on each part of the course in terms of the study time implications for students. Consequently, some chapters (particularly the introductory chapters in Block 2, which deal with basic notions in acoustics and tonal music theory, as well as

Figure 1: Screen-shot of the course utility program.

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4. See Johnson (2003: 36– 45) for an overview of the UK OU’s SOL model. 5. See ww.firstclass.com

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most of the chapters in Block 3, which present contextual details in separate boxes) have little or no contextual information, while others are framed ‘historically’ (e.g. recording and storage). In addition to the materials described above, direct student support is provided by ALs within the Supported Open Learning (SOL) framework,4 including, as usual at the UK OU, a number of face-to-face tutorials organized regionally. Asynchronous online support (along the lines of other OU offerings, e.g. Weller 2000; 2002) is offered optionally. A group of (coursewide) conferences using the University’s system (FirstClass)5 is provided, one specifically for peer support among tutors (supported by the CT), and three bundled conferences for students (a ‘Café’ for informal chat; a ‘Course discussion’ and ‘Course Assessment’ for self-help among students), the latter overviewed by the CT. Also, a password-protected website contains electronic versions (pdf) of the printed text as well as a number of resources; this is a compulsory element of the course in that it includes a ‘news’ area that acts as a vehicle for the delivery of noticeboard information (e.g. errata) quickly and directly by the presentation team (a sub-group of the CT). Course assessment in TA225 was assignment-based, comprising a total of four short, question-based assignments (averaged to provide the student’s continuous assessment score) and a final unseen invigilated exam (the examined component), and a ‘pass’ was guaranteed when scores above 40 per cent are obtained in both components. The style of the questions used parallelled that of the many in-text activities interspersed throughout the teaching text and associated with specific learning outcomes. On the other hand, in TA212 the exam has been replaced with a final project, and the number of tutor-marked assignments is increased to six. An important observation in respect to the courses’ emphasis on technologies is that a ‘creative’ element – understood in terms of developing skills in the area of musicianship and applying the skills and techniques taught for compositional purposes – is absent. The courses teach the principles upon which the operation of musical instruments and technologies is based, providing a fairly limited picture of the many contexts associated with those technologies. In other words, the courses are relevant to performers (professional and ‘amateur’ alike) in that they may, in principle, inform their practices; the courses are also potentially of interest to music teachers who may wish to develop their ICT skills with a view to introducing changes in their practice. However, TA225 and TA212 cannot fulfil the role of many other ‘creative music technology’ courses/programmes in the UK that teach, specifically, compositional thinking associated with the technologies they explore.

Creating the courses: issues and attempted solutions For the ensuing discussion, I would like to group the production issues in three general areas, as follows: (1) background knowledge; (2) musical repertoire (range of musical examples included); (3) repertoire of technologies (range of technologies included). In using these categories to frame my discussion, I am implying that the course development was primarily guided by decisions on content. The CT indeed used, both in planning and writing the courses, a learning-outcomes framework based on QAAHE 28



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recommendations,6 which splits learning outcomes into various categories (‘knowledge and understanding’, ‘cognitive skills’, ‘practical and professional skills’ and ‘key skills’). However, in practice, despite the variety of categories entailed in the model, the focus was on knowledge (hence, content) and, to a lesser extent, practical and professional skills, as appropriate to a level-2 course. Internal, institutional perceptions of the project as ‘ambitious’, as noted above, may have contributed to this situation; given that ‘music technology’ was an area in which the institution had not previously ventured, the disquiet regarding the ‘credibility’ or ‘legitimacy’ of the courses in academic terms compounded those concerns with the appeal of the courses to students. The institutional location of the development process has clearly had an enormous impact on the courses eventually produced, which supports the notion that curriculum ‘reflects cultural beliefs – folk traditions – as well as social and political values and organization’ (Joseph et al. 2000: 19). Nevertheless, the focus on content can be understood as symptomatic of a broader questioning, namely, that of defining what ‘music technology’ is. The conflation of views on what ‘music technology’ as a subject entails – or should entail – has certainly been a significant factor impacting on procedures involved in the development of TA225 and TA212. In this sense, the courses emerged as a response to the challenge articulated in Boehm (2004): ‘if [music technology] is to exist successfully within current HE institutions, there is a need for institutions to explicitly formulate teaching-content responsibilities according to faculties, department or schools, and it requires those involved to lay down and quantify the amount of knowledge, i.e. to create a corpus and thus define a discipline’. The need to outline boundaries and, crucially, locate these within the existing institutional framework, provided the CT with profound questions and implied tacit disputes that much contributed to the final shape of the courses.

Background knowledge: ‘what do students need to know at the start of the course?’ Controversy in this area revolved around two general issues brought to the fore by CT members upon reflection on their previous experiences. On the one hand, there was the question, raised by technology-based members, of how to deliver (and if at all) any potential ‘mathematical’ content.7 This question was particularly relevant to the portions of the courses dealing with topics in acoustics. On the other hand, arts-based staff described their experiences in running ‘purely musical’ courses at the level of TA225/TA212; for example, an understanding of staff notation in respect to time signatures is a major learning outcome of the core level-2 UK OU music course. These questions illustrate the problem of outlining what type of background knowledge should (or could) be assumed, as opposed to what the courses should (or could) potentially teach. The concept of ‘decibels’ provides a helpful illustration of what appears to be the underlying problem, given that it is a key term in the audiotechnology vernacular. Understanding this notion implies a fairly sophisticated type of conceptual ‘move’: the ability to construe meanings based on mathematical formalization, which is a fundamental skill in engineering Crossing borders: issues in music technology education

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6. Quality Assurance Agency in Higher Education, online at www.qaa.ac.uk 7. I am using quotes here to highlight that the meaning of the term in this context is not necessarily precise; indeed, students’ discourses often construe simple algebraic operations as ‘mathematics’, and this seems to be an issue that emerges time and time again in student discussions online.


8. These assumptions, albeit grounded in the members’ experiences (extensive for a number of CT members, but also relevant to more junior staff, as such assumptions appear, to a certain extent, to be ‘ingrained’ in internal, institutional discourses on students’ profiles), seem to me crucial but, significantly, potentially harmful to the development process. Given the current rate at which the institution and its ‘market’ appear to be changing, it would be potentially damaging to use such assumptions as the only source informing CTs on the potential audience of the courses we produce. The fact that some of the CT members also operate ‘at the point of delivery’ as ALs or in some other capacity somewhat alleviates the problem.

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and science. Epistemologically, the issue at stake here is that of representation, of acknowledging that ‘the map is not the territory’ (as Gregory Bateson puts it in Bateson 1980: 32) while exploring the implications of the relationship established between them. Accordingly, questions concerning representation are also crucial in musical thinking when notation is approached from a broader, epistemological perspective. The question of identity of the author/teacher emerges here significantly, suggesting that the CT itself mirrored, generally, the potential variety of students’ backgrounds in that members’ experiences and perspectives of the relationship between music and technology varied dramatically, as did their fluency in each other’s specialist vernacular. Indeed, the chapter on ‘music representation’ included in the third Block aims, essentially, at providing a preamble to MIDI coding and digital storage formats by locating them in some sort of historical continuity. However, materials exploring contemporary issues of relevance to musicians (e.g. the advent of alternative, at times composerspecific, notation systems from the 1960s onwards, and the emergence of compositional methods that are not mediated by widely agreed notational systems) were not included. The encounter of experiences and perspectives re-enacted in the CT meetings thus intensified intra-disciplinary debates by suggesting a further avenue for questioning: would arts-based students be able to cope with ‘the maths’? Would technology-based students be able to cope with ‘the music bits’? What types of resources would be required to support students in their development of skills across the borders? Clearly, these issues are not idiosyncratic to educational enterprises in music technology; they are, indeed, the types of questions that would need to be asked in the development of any course above introductory level with an open entry policy. In TA225/TA212, however, the problems were compounded by likely differences between perceptions of technology-based students, on the one hand, and those of arts-based students, on the other hand (although the courses might clearly appeal to a variety of learners located in different disciplines or studying, simply, for leisure, without specific disciplinary allegiances).8 One solution adopted by the CT was to include teaching material on some topics while marking them clearly as non-assessable. A number of points were considered essential (e.g. the relationship between frequency and period of a waveform, the ability to perform calculations with powers of 10, naming notes and relating these to staff notation, to name just a few) and, therefore, covered in the main text materials but included in the Reference Manual that students were allowed to take with them to the final exam in TA225. There was also considerable debate regarding the use of musical notation, which is the usual visual basis upon which comparisons and, generally, commentary on sound/music, are based. Naturally, in a course as broad as TA225/TA212, listening activities appear associated with a wide variety of purposes, including demonstrating basic psychoacoustical phenomena (e.g. beating, masking and examples of auditory illusions), supporting the development of listening skills (e.g. identifying musical instruments, identifying features of sound, assessing the balance of a mix or the quality of a recording) generally, developing skills that are fundamental to sound recording and processing. Creating such activities required careful consideration of envisaged benefits and possible complications

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created with the use of musical notation. A further resource was created to address this question, the ‘Music Primer’, which groups together fundamental concepts in tonal music theory; this provides a reference (that is, a summarized presentation of notes) and not a piece of teaching material as understood at the UK OU. Indeed, students’ response to the ‘Primer’ was mixed, and this partially guided the development of a new introductory Block for TA212.

Musical repertoire: ‘what music should be included in the course?’ Viewed as a unit, the CT possessed considerable breadth (and depth) of knowledge in terms of a variety of musical genres and styles, but tonality was the prevalent musical model and the source of most of the musical examples selected for the courses. Indeed, many of the concepts proposed as ‘fundamentals’ (for example, consonance/dissonance) were much negotiated from perspectives that, predominantly, either simply described or attempted to explicate the concepts in terms of harmonic/numerical relationships. There was, significantly, considerable tension surrounding issues that have fostered alternative theorization and/or common-sense understandings, for example, in biological terms (as if anatomically/physiologically ‘hard-wired’), in cognitive psychological terms (schemata that can be acquired or ‘programmed’), or in constructionist terms (discourses and social interaction construing epistemologies, identities and realities). The topic consonance/dissonance, in particular, appears twice at different stages of the courses, reflecting a polarization of positions within the CT. On the other hand, and most importantly, this recurrence also points to the CT’s general approach of allowing for multiplicity of views. It appears, indeed, that a ‘teach the conflicts’ rationale (Baynham 2002) eventually permeates the materials. A more appropriate analogy for the negotiation process on this matter, however, is with that of an emergent property of a complex system, since this rationale was neither articulated nor discussed beyond the unspoken tactic of ‘agreeing to disagree’ that eventually characterized production. If ‘consensus forms the basis of a team development model’, as Moore and Kearsley (1996: 105) suggest, that was the form ultimately negotiated by the TA225/TA212 CT. The fundamental observation concerning the consonance/dissonance debate is that it suggests different views of music and, in pragmatic terms, choices of repertoire to be included in listening exercises. Overall, post1950s western ‘art’ styles are frequently perceived as exclusionary (often by musicians themselves), and this view was represented in fairly strong reactions from some CT members. Despite that (and the eventual focus on tonality), the variety of CT members’ backgrounds and experiences with music has contributed to an arguably richer collection of musics represented in the courses than might be possible in other settings. Examples provided on CD consist of excerpts and complete pieces alike, including, in addition to exemplars selected from the western ‘art canon’, jazz, ‘pop’, various styles of electronic/electroacoustic music (musique concréte, elektronische Musik, acousmatic music, electronica), world musics, to name a few. In a setting in which developers/educators were more closely grouped (e.g. in a music department with a tradition in a given musical style, for example,


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9. Course development at the UK OU includes three stages of drafting (interspersed with CT-wide discussions) and a final stage of preparing a ‘handover’ version of the chapter, which is then passed on to the editor, who also coordinates the various areas involved in preparing the complete set of materials associated with the chapter text (e.g. illustrations – either bought in via the Rights department or prepared in the design studio – and sound examples – sometimes prepared by authors but produced, in their final form, by professional personnel).

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electroacoustic composition or, perhaps, in a computer science department with a group working on computational musicology), such variety might not be possible. On the other hand, as discussed below, choices of musical repertoire are closely linked with choices of the musical technologies themselves. As I suggested earlier, musical styles and musical instrumentation are closely connected, implying that choosing musical examples defines a given universe of relevant musical technologies, in the same way that choosing musical technologies outlines, to a large extent, a given musical universe and, consequently, implies a particular view of music itself.

Repertoire of technologies: ‘what technologies do students need to learn about?’ There was some debate on the possible perception of TA225/TA212 as a course focusing on digital and computer-based technologies. This was neither intended nor wanted, partially because TA225 was predetermined, from early in its planning, to contain a considerable contribution focusing on acoustic instruments, their underlying principles and manufacturing techniques. Interestingly, despite the vastness of the area, which includes a wealth of instruments located in cultures outside the Western European tradition, there was relatively little debate on the selection of particular instruments to be covered in detail, mentioned in passing or simply omitted from the course. On the other hand, the area of electronic instruments created much dispute, partly in connection with selecting what would be effectively included (e.g. from the so-called ‘precursors’, the Telharmonium was included among a wide variety of equally interesting candidates), but, most importantly, in connection with latest developments in electronic instrument technology that have fostered a re-evaluation of what a musical instrument may eventually be (or become). The suggestion that the tape recorder, for example, is a musical instrument in its own right (in association, at least, with a particular musical style, musique concrète, which has a strong connection with contemporary turntablism), was overwhelmingly rejected to favour a categorization of the device as a ‘recording technology’. Another topic that generated particular debate was sound synthesis. The literature on sound synthesis does not offer a widely accepted taxonomy of methods (see, for example, Roads 1996 and Miranda 2002) and indeed, in some texts it is the distinction analogue/digital that provides a framework for organizing these methods. This, in itself, implied the need for ‘executive decisions’ on the CT’s part, but these were not made any easier, given the relatively widespread association between synthesis and keyboard-based synthesizers and samplers. Indeed, the prominence of the chapter on electronic instruments was severely altered during the discussion of its first draft,9 when the final distribution of topics began to be clarified (e.g. samplers might have been included in the third Block, but are covered together with electronic instruments). The chapter, eventually, was recognized as a potentially crucial element of the course in respect to students’ expectations, but MIDI and desktop processing (two areas of particular relevance in the CT’s assumptions on students’ requirements) are covered in the subsequent Block. 32



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This apparently arbitrary assigning of category membership to different technologies suggests a fairly fundamental question: in what ways are TA225/TA212 courses on ‘the technology of music’ rather than ‘music technology’? In other words, does the expression ‘music technology’ differ significantly from ‘the technology of music’? As I suggested above, the terms ‘music’ and technology’ appear, in different combinations, in various policy documents as well as in the vernacular of musicians and technologists in ways that suggest, if not totally opposed, at least contrasting notions of the relationship between music and technology. Considering, in addition, the possibility that ‘music technology’ may be viewed as an area linked, exclusively, with digital and computer-based technologies, as I also noted, it is fair to suspect that choosing between the expressions above is not merely a semantic move. Selecting musical examples and exemplars of technology entailed in an underlying conceptualization of ‘music technology’ implies a more essential epistemic move: assessing the terms ‘musical’ and ‘technological’ in their appropriateness to a given situation (e.g. instruments, sounds, discourses). As noted above, choices of musical examples are inherently linked with choices of technologies, that is, essentially, they reveal some form of agreement on what ‘music’ is to be represented. All of these choices are profoundly significant to curriculum development, suggesting an understanding that is consistent with the view put forward earlier that locates curriculum in culture and, perhaps more importantly, politics.

Conclusion In summary, this article has provided an account that highlights ways in which the multiplicity of the subject area is reflected in both the course development process and the course materials themselves. This ‘mapping’ of multiplicity brought to the fore a fairly broad range of questions concerning music technology education. One crucial issue implied, nonetheless, is that the coming together of specialists in different areas does not guarantee the existence of a common language for the negotiations involved: the ability to identify (or, perhaps, construe) links across disciplinary borders does not pertain to a multidisciplinary encounter, a mere conflation of methods, approaches and languages. This is all the more obvious vis-à-vis contextual factors such as disciplinary, professional and institutional allegiances. I do wonder whether, perhaps, the main question that should be considered by teaching teams is not how students with different backgrounds will be able to cope with skills across the border, but how team members themselves can do so in the first place. Works Cited Bateson, G. (1980), Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity, New York: Bantam Books. Baynham, M. (2002), ‘Academic writing in new and emergent discipline areas’, in R. Harrison, F. Reeves, A. Hanson and J. Clarke (eds) Supporting Lifelong Learning. Volume 1: Perspectives on Learning. London: Routledge/Falmer. Boehm, C. (2004), ‘Music Technology in Higher Education’. in T. Claes (ed.), The Idea of Education, Interdisciplinary Press vol. 12, eBook available online at www.inter-disciplinary.net/publishing/idp/eBooks/ptboindex.htm Accessed 3 August 2007. Crossing borders: issues in music technology education

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Boehm, C. (2005a), ‘Betweening. How to put an “and” between music and technology’, Leeds Music Technology Education Conference (LMTEC), Leeds College of Music. Available online at www.mccarthy-boehm.org.uk/projects/ Betweening/20051112_Leeds_V1.2.pdf Accessed 3 August 2007. Boehm, C. (2005b), ‘Staying in-between. “Music Technology” in Higher Education’, Digital Music Research Network (DMRN) Roadmap Launch Workshop, London. Available online at www.elec.qmul.ac.uk/dmrn/events/ roadmap05/20051221_DMRN_StayingInBetween_v1.4.pdf Accessed 3 August 2007. Chung, H. J. (2001), The Nature of the Course Team Approach at the UK Open University, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Milton Keynes: The Open University. Di Scipio, A. (1998), ‘Questions Concerning Music Technology’, Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities, 3: 2, pp. 31– 40. Ferreira, G. M. d. S. (2006), ‘Multidisciplinarity in Practice: a case-study of consonance, dissonance, or, perhaps, noise?’, International Journal of the Humanities 2: 2, article HC04-0143-2004. Available online at http://ijh.cgpublisher.com/ product/pub.26/prod.255 Accessed 3 August 2007. Johnson, J. L. (2003), Distance Education. The Complete Guide to Design, Delivery and Improvement, New York: Teacher’s College Press. Joseph, P. B., Bravmann, S. L., Windschitl, M. A., Mikel, E. R. and Green, N. S. (2000), Cultures of Curriculum, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers. Klein, J. T. (1990), Interdisciplinarity. History, Theory and Practice, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. McGettrick, P. (n.d.), ‘Music and technology in the 21st century. A brief overview’, Federation of Music Collectives Factsheet. Available online at www.fmc-ireland.com/publications/factsheets/music_tech.doc Accessed 3 August 2007. Miranda, E. R. (2002), Computer Sound Design. Synthesis Techniques and Programming (2nd edn), Oxford: Focal Press. Moore, M. G. and Kearsley, G. (1996), Distance Education. A Systems View. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Orton, R. (1992), ‘Musical, Cultural and Educational Implications of Digital Technology’, in J. Paynter, T. Howell, R. Orton and P. Seymour (eds), Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought. Volume 1, pp. 319–28, London: Routledge. OU (Open University) (n.d.), Curriculum Management Guide, internal document available online to staff. QAA (Quality Assurance Agency) (2002), Music Benchmark Statement, Gloucester: Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. Available online at www.qaa.ac.uk/academicinfrastructure/benchmark/honours/music.pdf Accessed 3 August 2007. Roads, C. (1996), The Computer Music Tutorial, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Taylor, T. D. (2001), Strange Sounds. Music, Technology and Culture. London: Routledge. Théberge, P. (1997), Any Sound you can Imagine. Making Music/Consuming Technology, Hanover, London: Wesleyan University Press. Weller, M. (2000), ‘The use of narrative to provide a cohesive structure for a Webbased computing course’, Journal of Interactive Media in Education, August. Available online at www-jime.open.ac.uk/00/1/weller-00-1-t.html Accessed 3 August 2007.

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Weller. M. (2002), Delivering learning on the net: the why, what and, how of online education, London: Kogan Paul. Wishart, T. (1992), ‘Music and Technology: problems and possibilities’, in J. Paynter, T. Howell, R. Orton and P. Seymour (eds), Companion to Contemporary Musical Thought. Volume 1, pp. 565–82, London: Routledge.

Suggested citation Ferreira, M. d. S. G. (2007), ‘Crossing borders: issues in music technology education’ Journal of Music,’ Technology and Education 1: 1, pp. 23–35, doi: 10.1386/jmte.1.1.23/1

Contributor details Giselle Ferreira is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Maths, Computing and Technology at the UK Open University, where she is part of the team responsible for the introduction, integration and development of music technology in the university’s curriculum. Giselle has a multidisciplinary background in electronic engineering, music and education, and her research interests include issues surrounding disciplinarity, with particular interest on questions that arise in the relationship between education, technology and politics. She is a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy and has been recently awarded a Teaching Fellowship at the Open University’s Centre for Open Learning of Mathematics, Science, Computing and Technology, COLMSCT. Giselle is currently a member of the Academic Team of OpenLearn, the university’s Open Educational Resources initiative. Contact: Giselle M. d. S. Ferreira, Walton Hall, Milton Keynes MK7 6AA, United Kingdom. E-mail: [email protected]


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Reframing creativity and technology: promoting pedagogic change in music education Pamela Burnard University of Cambridge Abstract

Keywords

No matter what else may divide us, most music educators are agreed on one general point. A central aim of defining how effective music educational practice should happen in the new e-learning environments which expand and connect communities of learners in music classrooms, is an imperative; a view which is emphasized in policy and widely acknowledged in teacher training. Yet, the critical roles played by creativity and technology in supporting the promotion of pedagogic change are less clear. This paper integrates theoretical framing and practical insights into a set of basic principles that may be useful for researching the interrelationship between creativity (as an essential human attribute lying at the heart of all learning and as processes of making something new) and technology (as tools that mediate how creative activity occurs). Several ways of driving pedagogical evolution, in ways that resemble the relationship between creativity and technology as we see in the world beyond school, are introduced. These include consideration of the potential contribution of sociocultural, post-Vygotskian Activity Theory (AT) to overcome some of the problems that have plagued both music educational theorizing and practice. While outlining potentials for future research, the article highlights how these processes may be brought into a productive relation as agents of pedagogic change in music education.

creativity technology music education pedagogy pedagogic change activity theory

Introduction Imagine a music pedagogy that builds upon assumptions about creativity and the instrumental use of technology as unrelated concepts, treated separately or at best where one was made to ‘fit in’ to the other’s way of working. Imagine having no expectations about the usefulness of integrating creativity and technology in aiding and extending musical learning or meeting a pedagogical need in classroom practice – in fact, that the essence of each was to be not-the-other. Imagine creativity as an internal process and technology as an external strategy for (rather than process of) acquiring musical knowledge, skills and understanding that teachers would use at different instructional levels. Conversely, imagine multiple forms of music pedagogy, where creativity (like inspiration) comes from outside in and inside out as a process inseparable from technology, playing into and recruiting different forms of pedagogy. Where a gradual but perceptible process of pedagogical evolution takes place, with music educators developing new strategies that go beyond


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making new tools ‘fit in’ to current ways of working. Instead, the ‘deeper’ object of musical learning arises inseparably from creativity and technology as interrelated tools. Both teachers and learners use these tools to manage their own learning, creating opportunities for the making, creating, receiving and producing of music. In this scenario, learning goals concern how the pupils would like to work musically and what resources they would like to use: e-learning tasks and e-communication are expected ways of promoting creativity in the music classroom. Various models of artistic and creative engagement are negotiated with collaborative opportunities for media-rich choices in adaptive learning environments. These are richly resourced to both provoke and support reflection between participants, where interaction with and through diversified networks supports worldwide access to school and home. Clearly, there are many approaches to and models of music pedagogy that reside on a spectrum between simple dichotomies. Where these dichotomies emphasize assumptions about the mutuality of creativity and technology they suggest that creativity and technology are not autonomous, nor are they competing or irrelevant to each other. Discourse on teacher effectiveness in music education (Savage 2007; Mills 1997; QCA 2005) brings the notion of pedagogic change with new technology use into unprecedented focus. The following article offers some framing points for reframing how creativity and technology may be brought into productive relation as catalysts for change in pedagogic practice, policy and teacher professionalism in music education.

Framing point 1: The interrelationship between creativity and technology Several factors may have an impact on teacher practice. Many studies have pointed to the school-level and teacher-level barriers and practical constraints within the workplace (Webster 2006). Developing effective music pedagogy around technology-based and creativity-integrated activity is now emphasized in the ‘ICT in Schools’ initiative (DfES 2003). Along with the demands of curriculum coverage and assessment, if music teachers are to become flexible learning leaders they need to be researching how effective teaching (and learning) happens in their own digital-rich music classrooms (Mills 1997, 2005; Pitts 2001; Price 2005). In practice, as noted by Hennessy, Ruthven and Brindley (2005), ‘the research literature offers little support for the popular (though perhaps unrealistic) rhetoric about technology revolutionizing teaching and learning or teachers fundamentally reworking their lesson plans and pedagogy’ (p. 156). These are issues about which, in music education, we presently have little understanding or consensus. Research has also shown that technology is deeply embedded in the contemporary lexicon of young people’s musical lives (Folkestad 2006). The Internet, for example, is their new playground and creates different social rooms for them. In addition, many young people are already high-end or passive, consumption-bound users and consumers of music technology, mass media and the production technologies when they come to school. They are often motivated by out-of-school experiences of music technologies. What they bring to school from home and community, key sites in the

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context of leisure for cultural consumption, offers new challenges to teachers (Leong 2007). On the one hand, technologically mediated music making can shake the most cherished practices of classroom music teachers – but, on the other, it can generate the desire to (and ways in which to) diversify existing pedagogical practice. Furthermore, the online technologies available, along with the shift towards a second generation internet (Web 2.01) can be adapted to constructive learning environments in which the making, experiencing, receiving and creating of music changes dramatically (Fautley and Savage 2007; Ruthmann, 2007). There is growing research interest in how teachers define and discuss the enhancement of their pedagogical repertoires through the use of online collaborative technologies in music teaching. Yet, conceptual frameworks for investigating the multifaceted nature of creativity and technology are desperately lacking (see for example Prensky, 2001; Webster 2002, 2006; Finney and Burnard 2007). The application of new technologies to support and develop music learning and teaching in school and how students use technology at home preoccupies teacher thinking about what should be included in the curriculum, how it should be delivered, and the confluent questions of why, when and where in the curriculum it should be positioned (Espeland 2006). The particular ways in which new technologies (including ICT) and creativity are promoted, perceived and practised continue to underscore key reports and promotions in resource materials (Fautley and Savage, 2007; Ofsted 2004, 2006). There have been a small number of studies that have explicitly examined the processes of creative music making in a computer-mediated environment (Hickey 1997; Seddon and O’Neill 2003; Collins 2005; Kirkman 2007) or the impact of technology on learners’ creativity (Dillon 2003, 2004, 2006). Studies of collaborative creativity using music technologies (Dillon 2003, 2004) and of students’ perspectives on composing with MIDI (Airy and Parr 2001), and web-enhanced learning (Bauer 2001) establish that technology provides an enabling environment in which learners and teachers enter a co-participative process around activities and explorations where learners can take back control of their learning (Challis 2007). Various potential lines of enquiry originate from the intersecting contexts in which teaching and learning are situated. These may include the kinds of creative courses of action that young people choose and the extent to which these courses are imbued with dilemmas relating to technology. For example, as passive consumers, who are the subjects of musical learning, how do they learn, what do they learn, why do they learn, what makes them make the effort and where? Whether seeing creativity being in relationship with technology or creativity as emerging through technology, both vantage points are essential to genuinely fostering music learning. This assumes that we know where technology belongs and how it is embodied in accounts of creativity, and whether one is different from and more than, the other, or not irreducible, and thus essentially different from the reality of the other. While some work is taking place in this area (Reese, McCord and Walls 2001; Baer 2001; Reese 2001; Seddon and O’Neill, 2003; Nilsson and Folkestad,

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1. Designed to enhance social collaboration as illustrated by wikis and blogs.


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2005; Dillon, T. 2006; Savage 2005, Tafuri 2006), our understanding of how this interrelationship translates into musical learning, is still imperfect. Figure 1 provides a view of creativity and technology as intersecting lines of enquiry for documenting the inextricable connections between ‘what’ assumptions underpin the demands of music curricular coverage and the usefulness of technology in aiding and extending musical (e-)learning; ‘why’ they are played out in certain ways; and ‘how’ they are played out by and to different individuals and groups in different cultures, communities, institutions and societies. ‘When’ do opportunities and aspects of school-based activities carry over beyond school? ‘How’ do different contexts in which music-specific technology arise and shape the pupils’ experience of musical production and consumption differently? ‘Why’ do some classroom practices clash with whilst others enhance the culture of student exploration, collaboration and interactivity and involve both pupils and teachers developing new strategies and ways of thinking in response to new experiences? ‘What’ role does the curriculum play in the complementary recasting of home and school use of music technology? The documentation of these issues, and the ways they are situated in different contexts, certainly warrants greater attention in the coming

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Figure 1: Situating the interrelationship between creativity and technology in musical learning. 40

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years. Yet, if it is possible for teachers to radically change how they teach, then coming to new understandings of how creativity and technology can mediate the learning environment as creative spaces in which pupils (and teachers) learn collaboratively, is crucial. We need to take account of ‘how’ these environments conform to the learner and ‘what’ role is played in the complementary recasting of home and school use of music technology.

Framing point 2: Building flexible educational environments that conform to the learner – a shifting amalgam The second framing point involves the tool of ‘reframing’ self/others (i.e. teachers and learners) together in an adaptive learning environment. Moreover, in taking account of new thinking about pedagogy and the making of links between local communities and the global community, then we need to reframe the expanding classroom environment. What evidence do we have for ‘how’ pupils (and teachers) learn collaboratively? ‘When’ and in ‘what’ contexts is the establishment of creative spaces made implicit as technologically and pedagogically coupled? Educational environments differ from those characterized in earlier decades, as exemplified in music classrooms. The rich connections built as consequences of using integrated, pervasive networks to support innovations in teaching have been well documented and theorized in educational research (see Loi and Dillon 2006; Deaney and Hennessy 2007); less so in music education research. Studies have been published, however, on the possibility of media-rich sources of musical information (Dillon, S. 2006), the opportunity to interact and collaborate with people who otherwise are inaccessible (Seddon 2007), and the use of digital networked technologies in adaptive educational environments where these facilitate creative music activities (Ruthmann 2007). We have seen that technology frees time for creative development through automation. Several studies have pointed to time saved when teachers use online technologies and collaborative tools, which include blogs, podcasts and wikis used instrumentally in their practice to amplify and extend pre-existing instructional practices (Loveless et al 2001; Nordkvelle and Olson 2005) and develop reflective practices which increase collaboration within and beyond formal school settings (Ruthmann, 2007b). Somekh (2000), Savage (2005, 2007), Ruthmann (2007a; 2007b), Brown and Dillon (2007), along with Jennings (2007), maintain that digital technologies offer the opportunity to extend the spaces for creativity by bringing communities together – for example, in collaborative partnerships between schools and other learning sites at the level of individual artist, arts organization, school and university. Composers, performers, audiences and artists offer teachers new, collaborative kinds of interactivity (see for example Musical Futures2 and Interconnected Musical Networks or IMNs3) which extend the spaces available for interaction and exhibition. For example, in a study of synchronous communication (based on real0time interaction) and asynchronous communication (based on delayed interaction), Seddon (2007) highlights key considerations to be made in an on-line classroom and the benefits of interactive e-learning, not only within and between schools but also in terms of group composing in global classrooms. These musical networks occur through the technology. There are many examples Reframing creativity and technology: promoting pedagogic change in music education

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2. Musical Futures provides online access to specialist music technology experts and resources. 3. Interconnected Musical Networks (or IMNs), a phrase coined by Weinberg (2005), are computer systems that allow players to independently share and shape each others’ music in realtime, facilitating both synchronous and asynchronous communication.


4. National Music Management Group provides advice on embedding ICT into the music curriculum. This initiative is funded by the British Education Communication Techology Agency (Becta) and the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). 5. Many of the online music-learning communities use collaborative tools such as blogs as course websites, peer-feedback, peer-teaching, online media and music sample galleries and Wikis as spaces for group collaboration (see Ruthmann, 2007b for valuable ways for music educators to engage and extend students’ learning unsing online technologies). 6. Futurelab develops innovative resources and practices that support new approaches to learning. http://www. futurelab.org.uk/. 7. NESTA is a forwardlooking funding partially governmentrelated body for creativity in England established through an endowment in 1998 from the National Lottery.

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in the literature of evidenced-based classroom practice where technology makes it possible to plug into, create and share and shape music through these networks in real-time (see examples T. Dillon 2007; Brown and Dillon, 2007). It also becomes possible to experiment, be innovative, take risks and close the traditional gap (and relationship!) between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ school communities of learning. This line of research has been highlighted in the work on collaborative composition and performance with new technologies in the work, amongst others, of Challis and Savage (2001) and Espeland (2006). In a recent study of learner’s musical identity, Challis (2007) investigated how teenagers in a Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) were motivated to use music technology to extend Key Stage 4 students who had little or no experience of composition (see also exemplars from National Music Management Group4. See also the work of Sefton-Green (1999) on digital arts and Ledgard (2006) for a discussion of the work of the Teacher Artist Partnerships (TAP) consortium). The potential of the Internet as a new learning environment has resulted in several organizations developing online music-learning communities5. The Associated Board, for example, recently launched an innovative free website, www.soundjunction.org. SoundJunction comprises a set of dynamic tools for exploring, discovering and creating music. The site offers opportunities to link creativity with technology. Another online learning environment for stimulating creativity with innovative technological practice is Sonic Postcards. This is a national education programme devised and delivered by Sonic Arts Network, which promotes and explores the art of sound via the Internet (www. sonicartsnetwork.org). The way it works is through enabling pupils from across the United Kingdom to explore and compare their local sound environment through the composition and exchange with other schools of sound postcards via the Internet. It illustrates how the impact of digital technologies, intersecting with civic life, can affect a small community or an entire nation. This is a promising use of technology that involves both pupils and teachers developing new strategies and ways of thinking in response to new experiences. In this way, it extends rather than reinforces traditional models of music teaching and learning. Recent research has shown how online, mobile and wireless networks are creating new learning environments at the intersection of formal and informal educational settings (Webster and Hickey 2006; T. Dillon 2007). The Internet has shown itself to be a dynamic teaching tool for exploring, discovering, creating, communicating about and playing in virtual music-making contexts. It provides a mechanism for connecting a network of places, spaces (both physical and symbolic), musical worlds, music makers, generators, performances and productions. In doing so, it enables participation across places and fields through multiple forms of expression. (Examples of what this kind of learning environment offers are illustrated by Futurelab6.) The establishment of a community of engagement was possibly implicit in perspectives on nurturing creativity in a computer-mediated learning environment by the team involved in Ignite, a programme for exceptional young people in England, funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA7). This initiative offered a combination of residential Creativity Labs (for 10- to 15-year-olds) and Creativity

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Fellowships, with mentors and creative advisers (for 16- to 21-year-olds). The accounts of the 10- to 15-year-olds highlight the need to overcome fear of failure and feelings of self-consciousness (Burnard 2006b). Similiarly, the kinds of barriers that teachers face, such as pedagogical beliefs, teacher confidence and technical skill are equally influential and may affect how those who aspire to excel creatively view themselves in relation to technology use at school (Craft et al. 2004). Each of these organizations described a shifting amalgam of creativity and technology as vital dimensions in transforming learning and teaching practice. The challenges posed by aiming to facilitate – both technologically and pedagogically – adaptive educational environments that conform to the musical needs and interests of the learner (rather than the learner to the system) are great indeed. The paradox lies in establishing an appropriate organizational climate (i.e. of course structures) and adaptive environments (a model proposed by Loi and Dillon 2006 for creative spaces) in the midst of a policy agenda which sometimes treats teachers as technicians rather than artists and centrally controls both curriculum content and teacher practice (Craft 2005). What, then, are the principles that might apply to and support classrooms as creative spaces that hold out the possibilities for and implementation of new kinds of relationship between creativity and technology? How might we proceed with knowing how (not whether) to position and define new kinds of relationships between creativity and technology in the curriculum? How do we create, perform, learn and talk about music in ways which, are at least compatible with existing pedagogy and at best, stimulate innovation and changes in teaching practices and result in a positive impact on pupils’ musical learning? At present, these are all factors which may have an impact on the working contexts and educational environments in which music teachers currently find themselves. One such model for conceptualizing educational environments, such as music classrooms, is suggested by Loi and Dillon (2006). Loi, an architect, and Dillon, an educational researcher, theorise educational environments as creative spaces in which interaction with the situational and social dynamics at play are designed to be adaptive. The model shows the relationship between adaptive educational environments and creative spaces by showing how the positioning of individuals (and one’s sense of self) interact with the environment through which the potential for transference and synthesis as well as analysis, qualities which need to be implemented both technologically and pedagogically, occur. In adapting this model, I have positioned creativity and technology (rather than self and environment) through which the potential for transfer and synthesis is facilitated through musical networks which elicit new forms of musical participation and stimulate the emergence of innovative practices (i.e. a process of pedagogical evolution). The music classroom – both inside and outside of the physical space – is experienced as an adaptive learning environment which extends and enhances creative possibilities for musical learning which is supported by a range of technologies (not just including mobile, locative, virtual and other highly interactive collaborative platforms). The music classroom is where innovation and adaption occurs; a creative space where communication and interaction can take both real-world and virtual forms, in some cases


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with face-to-face interaction and side-by-side interaction whilst in other cases the interactions can be synchronous or asynchronous where learning is facilitated, influenced, shared, shaped and responded to by key stakeholders both inside and outside of the classroom and of class time. If, as mentioned at the outset of this article, a universal aspiration of all music educators is to improve the quality of musical learning and its relevance to the young learner, then we need to rethink how a teacher’s capacity to effectively use technology matches the pupils’ learning needs. A common finding across educational research in general, and music education research in particular, is that learners need to build on their experiences and existing relationships with places and people. They need to collaborate over tasks, contribute to curriculum planning, interact with new forms of musical participation, networks and practices in adaptive learning environments (Figure 2) (Jeffrey 2004; Craft 2005; Burnard 2006a). The case for establishing (and researching) adaptive learning environments in music education needs highlighting here. Documenting, analysing and theorizing on what teachers might usefully do to create an adaptive learning environment for their pupils, particularly for descriptions of practice, participation and collaborative networking, requires careful attention to the detail of (the systems of) activity that support and nourish them. If we are to understand how music education might be reshaped for a changing and interdependent world we need a perspective that also focuses on unravelling the interplay of the social and material resources

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Figure 2: Framing classrooms as adaptive learning environments. 44

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that are salient to learning (and the detail of the systems of activity that support it) at a macro (i.e. the social/collective level) and micro level (i.e. at the individual learner level) of analysis. Teaching and learning are selforganizing events framed by activity. These activity systems include pedagogical practices and involve the elements of community, rules, divisions of labour, object-oriented actions, norms of practice and sense making (Daniels, 2006). Activity Theory (AT) provides a theoretical tool and means for studying musical learning as the expansion through change and development of pedagogy. It has the potential to overcome some of the most profound problems that have plagued attempts to look well below the surface of interactions – at the exchange sequences and mechanisms of creativity and technology mediating pedagogic processes (and musical learning). Furthermore, it relates to what music educators (and researchers) might usefully do to create, consult and research adaptive learning environments in music education settings.

Framing point 3: The potential of Activity Theory (AT) for studying adaptive learning environments As with most sociocultural theory and practices, the starting point is the principle that individual learning is a social activity mediated by psychological tools (e.g. language and other symbols) and shaped by cultural artefacts (e.g. music, literature, computers), expectations, ‘rules’/conventions and norms as defined by membership of groups within a wider community (cf. Bannon 1997; Cole 1999). The agency of the individual learner is facilitated by the Vygotskyan concept of internalization whereby the mind creates mental models of artifacts as tools (in this instance, for creative thinking) by intervening in and interacting with them – enabling the possibility of consequent change within the culture. An ongoing mediation process in how the individual interacts with the world around them is a key concept in Activity Theory (AT). As shown in Figure 3, Engeström’s model (1999a; 1999b) of AT acknowledges the ‘object’ of an action by (or on) a ‘subject’ as being culturally ‘mediated’ by ‘mediating artefacts’ (such as computers, speaking, gestures, music, instruments). In the lower part of the figure, the model is extended to encompass the individual and at the level of the collective operating with tools in which ‘rules’, a sense of ‘community’ and ‘division of labour’ (division of effort) are also evidenced. Research using AT, often referred to as cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT), which evolved from Vygotsky, continues to the present with the analysis of interaction in medical workplace practices or the ICT industry (Edwards 2001); university-school initial teacher education and training partnerships (Wilson 2004); cross-case comparison of journal sharing (Gutierrez and Stone 2000); primary literacy classrooms and human computer action (Nardi 1996; Zinchenko 1996) and methodologically in action research (Edwards 2001). Use of AT in music education research, however, remains relatively under-represented (Barrett 2005; Welch 2007; Burnard and Younker 2007). Theoretically, AT provides a means of tracking, over time, the interconnections between creativity and technology embedded, enabled, and/or Reframing creativity and technology: promoting pedagogic change in music education

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OBJECT refers to the products and outcomes of learning

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Figure 3: The structure of [the classroom environment as] a human activity system (Engeström 1998: 33). central to teaching and learning, though not perhaps manifest in the initial contact between teacher and students. Through the myriad of systems exhibiting patterns of contradictions and tension, AT can make visible the relationships and structures within music participation and the roles and rules within practices. In this way, it has the potential to illustrate the key components of the relationship between creativity and technology as they develop in different learning communities. 46

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So, what might the interrelationships between creativity and technology be and what can we say about pedagogy in exploring these? This is a challenging question, which the National Advisory Committee on Creative and Culture Education report (NACCE 1999) perhaps anticipated in recognizing the close relationship between teaching for creativity, creative teaching and creative learning. The report notes that ‘Young people’s creative abilities are most likely to be developed in an atmosphere in which the teacher’s creative abilities are properly engaged’ (NACCCE 1999: 90). Most significant is that music education has long been criticized for its use of restrictive pedagogic ideologies (Hogg 1994; Burnard 1995; Cox 2002). While there have been substantial studies on creative music making using technology, there are relatively few identifying the resources of research in practice and pupil consultation on teaching – learning strategies that use technology creatively. AT offers a theoretically nuanced empiricism that focuses on and relies as much on students’ reflections and participation as teachers’ actions. Pedagogic discourses and the values underpinning normative practices that prevail in music classrooms, reinforced through the rules and regulations governing, among other things, roles and relationships, provide the focus. How these are mediated verbally and through nonverbal, meaning-making systems provides a way forward in identifying the dual threads of creativity and technology as they simultaneously construct and shape the products and learning outcomes that characterize how pedagogic action and learning activity changes. Both are grounded in the specific historical and cultural circumstances of the community of learners and create the contexts for future actions. As in any societal activity, individuals’ understandings of the ‘rules of the game’ in which they are involved (whether it be composing, improvising, listening, performing, reflecting or appraising music), provide clues to the nature of the action and inform how they behave. This makes tacit ways of doing things in music explicit.

Framing point 4: A framework for researching pedagogic change in music education Research, like teaching, involves the fundamental act of reflection. The arguments for its value and the purposes it serves are reiterated throughout this article. We know that real change in values and attitudes which takes place through professional reflection leads to more effective practice in teaching. If music teaching is to become not just a research-informed profession but a research-based profession, as thought to be the most enduring and successful way of ensuring progress in high-quality musical learning, then we need a genuine attempt to engage the whole professional community of music teachers in reflecting on their pedagogical practice. Reflective practice could act as both catalyst and response in creating a practical agenda for pedagogic change and improvement. In this way, pedagogy becomes a means by which the teacher is able to sustain the self and retain professionalism. It involves connection with other teachers and time to discuss professional issues. When considering how creativity and technology can be repositioned in the music curriculum, we need to have clear understandings. While these understandings may be rooted in all kinds of research, the most important is practitioner (or teacher) and pupil research, since this is the Reframing creativity and technology: promoting pedagogic change in music education

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process whereby teachers (along with their pupils) look critically not only at their own practice (and learning) but at broader educational questions (Burton and Bartlett 2005; Hargreaves 1996; Burnard and Hennessy 2006; Fishman et al. 2006). This should involve both teachers and pupils developing new strategies and ways of thinking in response to new experiences of musical networks, new forms of musical participation and new technological practices. As Figure 4 illustrates, when technology and creativity are construed as closely interrelated, Activity Theory (AT) can provide a means of investigating musical learning understood as the expansion of the learning environment through pedagogic change. Teachers are currently under increasing pressure – they have less time and opportunity for professional risk taking, innovation and deep engagement with the principles and tensions between practice and policy (DfES 2003, 2004). Yet, as researcher practitioners, it is possible for teachers to author change from inside the classroom. Teachers can combine observational data with interviews of learners as they interact with and react upon the issues they seek to understand. This is not a pretentious claim because the human capacity for sheer adaptation is as defining of teachers’ work as it is of their life histories (Anderson 1997; Baker 2005; Day et al., 2006). Although music education ‘enjoys’ the educational potentials of creativity and technology, in order to do so vigorously, teachers need to recognize the problems besetting music education as opportunities for change (Iemma 2006). Teachers need to view the educational experience through the eyes and perspectives of their pupils. They also need to understand, and trace the roots of, success and failure in classroom practice, and motivation and demotivation in both themselves and their pupils. Some ideas for practitioner-researchers’ pedagogic enquiries have been articulated in this article. Others might include: •

• •

•

•

Exploring how the real creative use of technological platforms for new media and creative production helps and potentially may inhibit pupil creativity. Identifying how this (wired) generation of creative users (along with the technophobic users) differs from other generations. Developing deep understanding of what the relationship with the technology reveals and conceals about how adaptive learning environments and creativity interact and support music teaching and learning. Evaluating the affordances (or enabling conditions and limitations) of webbased and e-technology environments for advancing the development of musical creativity, i.e. what technology reveals and conceals as opportunities in creative production or in teaching when blocked by technological rather than musical problems (see Dillon, S. 2006; Heidegger 1977); Consulting pupils (i.e. giving learners a critical and democratic or genuine say) about the acquisition of technologies, how to use new learning technologies and opportunities to create their own learning technologies. These may be different kinds of technological spaces that enhance collaborative and personal creativity.

If understanding is to be the goal, then future practitioner research needs to involve both teachers and learners. We need much more classroom

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PUPILS AS RESEARCHERS

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Figure 4: Researching pedagogic change using an activity theory research perspective. enquiry into aspects of what is distinctive about views at the level of (1) learner and classroom and (2) learner and out-of-school settings. We need to take into account the institutional and home factors that contribute to learning and thereby to new models of creative teaching with technologies (as illustrated by the reframings offered earlier). We need to understand what learners say and do as a consequence of how they interpret the world. Importantly, we need to understand more about experiences, interactions and events from the viewpoints of students. Teachers need to aspire to work as practitioner-researchers and to consult their pupils in contexts where researching their own classrooms and learning together is the norm (Price 2005). University lecturer-researchers can help with mentoring conversations in producing new classroom-based enquiry and the effective use to which academic research may be put by teachers anxious to learn from research findings (see Wubbels and Poppleton 1999; CapeUK 2006; Creative Partnerships 2004a, 2004b). In the 1970s, Stenhouse (1975) advocated classrooms as sites for teacher research. He also advocated learning itself as a research process and research as the basis for teaching (Stenhouse, 1983). Schools and teachers need to acknowledge classrooms as collaborative, adaptive learning


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environments as well as potential research sites that extend across and beyond the walls of classrooms and schools; to develop new ways of thinking about classroom practice, to be better able to provoke and release learners rather than to impose and control them. It is this that is the fundamental point. Understanding how effective learning should happen in music education requires a realignment of both learner creativity and the creativity of the teacher with the ICT reform agenda. Moreover, the connections between school learning culture and that of musical learning in general, and e-learning in particular, need to reflect the real world of music making in policy and practice. One hope for the reframing of technology and creativity for pedagogic change in music education is that it may offer teachers informal and formal opportunities for collegial interaction and encourage both teacher and pupils as researcher. Students have a right to and should be involved (in collaboration with teachers and software developers) in making recommendations about their learning environment and be involved in the implementation of change. As Rudduck and Flutter argue (2004), we should ‘take seriously what pupils can tell us about their experience of being a learner in school – about what gets in the way of their learning and what helps them to learn’ (p. 2). The design of such studies may help surface some of the social, cultural and contextual opportunities and challenges that warrant greater research attention in the coming years. Perhaps, most significantly, teacher and pupil research (as shown in Figure 4) will bring agreement, at least, about the ‘who’ and ‘how’ of creative teaching and learning practices. This is the big challenge for developing e-confident music teachers and schools. We need to foster innovative and effective teacher research and resist the current trend towards the domination of curriculum and pedagogy by ‘technical standards’ based on ‘expert research’ and imposed in a ‘top-down’ manner by educational administrators and policy makers. In the grips of the early twenty-first century, we need to make progress in empirical work which allows us to identify and investigate issues of serious concern which undermine music teachers’ professionalism and self-worth. We need to share practice via networked learning communities that can play a critical role in providing opportunities for exploration and familiarization with new technologies in order to boost teacher confidence and solicit commitment to pedagogic change. Works Cited Airy, S. and Parr, J. (2001), ‘MIDI, music and ME: student’s perspectives on composing and MIDI’, Music Education Research, 3(1), 42–9. Anderson, L.W. (1997), ‘The stories teachers tell and what they tell us’, Teaching and Teacher Education, 13: 1, 131–36. Bauer, W. (2001), ‘Student attitudes toward web-enhanced learning in a music education methods class: A case study’, Journal of Technology in Music Learning, 2: 2, 2–20. Baker, D. (2005), ‘Voices in Concert: Life Histories of Peripatetic Music Teachers’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Reading. Bannon, L. (1997), Activity Theory, www-sv.cict.fr/cotcos/pjs/Theoretical Approaches/ Activity/ActivitypaperBannon.htm Accessed 24 October 2005. 50

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Barrett, M.S. (2005), ‘Musical communication and children’s communities of musical practice’, in D. Miell, R. MacDonald and D.J. Hargreaves (eds), Musical Communication, pp. 261–80, New York: Oxford University Press. Brown, A.R. and Dillon, S. (2007), ‘Networked improvisational musical environments: learning through online collaborative music making’, in J. Finney and P. Burnard (eds), Music Education with Digital Technology, pp. 162–77, London: Continuum. Burnard, P. and Younker, B.A. (2007), ‘Using Engeström’s Activity Theory (AT) as an analytical lens to investigate interaction in children’s collaborative creative music making’, International Journal of Educational Research, in press. Burnard, P. (2006a), ‘Reflecting on the creativity agenda in education’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 36: 3, 313–18. Burnard, P. (2006b), ‘The individual and social worlds of children’s musical creativity’, in G. McPherson (ed.), The Child as Musician: A Handbook of Musical Development, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 353–74. Burnard, P. and Hennessy, S. (eds) (2006), Reflective Practices in Arts Education, Dordrecht: Springer. Burnard, P. (1995), ‘Task design and experience in composition’, Research Studies in Music Education, 5, pp. 32–46. Burton, D. and Bartlett, S. (2005), Practitioner Research for Teachers, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. CapeUK (2006), Creative Action Research Awards 2: The Handbook, A programme initiated and commissioned by Creative Partnerships, led and managed by CapeUK, Leeds: CapeUK. Challis, M. (2007), ‘The DJ Factor: teaching performance and composition from back to front’, in J. Finney and P. Burnard (eds), Music Education with Digital Technology, pp. 112–24, London: Continuum. Craft, A. (2005), Creativity in Schools: Tensions and Dilemmas, London: Routledge. Craft, A., Miell, D., Joubert, M., Littleton, K., Murphy, P., Vass, E. and Whitelock, D. (2004), Final report for the NESTA’s Fellowship Young People Project, Ignite, September, London: National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA). Cole, M. (1999), ‘Cultural psychology: some general principles and a concrete example’, in Y. Engestrom, R. Miettinen, and R.L. Punamki (eds), Perspectives on Activity Theory, pp. 87–106. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cox, G. (2002), Living Music in Schools 1923–1000: Studies in the History of Music Education in England, London: Ashgate. Collins, D. (2005), ‘A synthesis process model of creative thinking in music composition’, Psychology of Music, 33: 2, pp. 193–216. Creative Partnerships (2004a), Catalyst: This Is How Education Should Be, Isn’t It? London: Creative Partnerships. Creative Partnerships (2004b), Creative Partnerships Website. Available at: http://www.creative-partnerships.com/aboutcp/ Accessed July 2004. Daniels, H. (2006), ‘Activity, discourse and pedagogic change’, in R. Moore, M. Arnot, J. Beck and H. Daniels (eds) Knowledge, Power and Educational Reform, pp. 163–178. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Day, C., Kington, A., Stobart, G. and Sammons, P. (2006), ‘The personal and professional selves of teachers: stable and unstable identities’, British Educational Research Journal, 32: 4, pp. 601–16. Deaney, R. and Hennessy, S. (2007), ‘Sustainability, evolution and dissemination of information and communication technology-supported classroom practice’, Research Papers in Education, 27: 1, pp. 65–94. Reframing creativity and technology: promoting pedagogic change in music education

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DfES (Department for Education and Skills) (2003), Excellence and Enjoyment. London: HMSO. —— (2004), Key Stage 3 National Strategy: ICT Across the Curriculum, London: DfES. Dillon, S. (2006), ‘Before the eyes glaze over’, Music Forum: Music Council of Australia, 13, pp. 32–33. Dillon, T. (2003), ‘Collaborating and creating using music technologies’, International Journal of Educational Research, 39: 8, pp. 893–97. Dillon, T. (2004), ‘It’s in the mix baby: exploring how meaning is created within music technology collaborations’, in D. Miell and K. Littleton, Collaborative Creativity, Contemporary Perspectives, London: Free Association Books. Dillon, T. (2006), Exploring Young People’s Collaborative and Creative Processes Using Keyboard and Computer Based Music Technologies in Formal and Non-Formal Settings. Milton Keynes: Open University. Edwards, A. (2001), ‘Researching Pedagogy: a sociocultural agenda’, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 9: 2, pp. 161–86. Engeström, Y. (1998), ’Reorganising the motivational sphere of classroom culture: An activity-theoretical analysis of planning in a teacher team’, in F. Seeger, J. Voigt and U. Waschescio (eds), The Culture of Mathematics Classrooms, pp. 125–40, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engeström, Y. (1999a), ‘Activity theory and individual and social transformation’, in Y. Engeström, R. Miettinen and R. Punamaki (eds), Perspectives on Activity Theory, pp. 19–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Engeström, Y. (1999b), ‘Communication, discourse and activity’, The Communication Review, 3: 1–2, pp. 165–85. Espeland, M. (2006), Symposium papers on Internet Based Music Education in Schools presented at the International Society of Music Education (ISME) World Conference, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, July. Fautley, M. and Savage, J. (2007), Creativity in Secondary Education, Exeter: Learning Matters. Finney, J. and Burnard, P. (eds) (2007), Music Education with Digital Technology, London: Continuum. Fishman, W., DiBara, J.A. and Gardner, G. (2006), ‘Creating good education against the odds’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 36: 3, pp. 383–98. Folkestad, G. (2006), ‘Formal and informal learning situations or practices vs. formal and informal ways of learning’, British Journal of Music Education, 23: 2, pp. 135–46. Gutierrez, K.D. and Stone, L.D. (2000), ‘Synchronic and diachronic dimensions of social practice: an emerging methodology for cultural-historical perspectives on literacy learning’, in C.D. Lee and P. Smagroinsky (eds), Vygotskian Perspectives on Literacy Research: Constructing Meaning through Collaborative Inquiry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hargreaves, D. (1996), ‘Teaching as a Research Based Profession: Possibilities and Prospects’, TTA Annual Lecture, April. Heidegger, M. (1977), The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and with an introduction by William Lovitt, New York: Garland. Hennessy, S., Ruthven, K., and Brindley, S. (2005), ‘Teacher perspectives on integrating ICT into subject teaching: commitment, constraints, caution and change’, Journal of Curriculum Studies, 37: 2, pp. 155–92. Hickey, M. (1997), ‘The computer as a tool in creative music making’, Research Studies in Music Education, 8, pp. 56–70.

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Hogg, N. (1994), ‘Strategies to facilitate student composing’, Research Studies in Music Education, 2, pp. 15–24. Iemma, M. (2006), ‘Six ways to iPoD: MP3 tools for your classroom’, Music in Action for Australian Educators, 4: 1, pp. 26–27. Jeffrey, B. (2004), ‘End of Award Report’, Creative Learning and Student Perspectives (CLASP), submitted to ESRC, November. Jennings, K. (2007), ‘Composing with graphical technologies: representations, manipulations and affordances’, in J. Finney and P. Burnard (eds), Music Education with Digital Technology, pp. 134–55, London: Continuum. Kirkman, P.R. (2007), ‘An investigation of the composing strategies employed by GCSE music students in a computer-mediated environment’, unpublished M.Phil. dissertation, University of Cambridge. Ledgard, A. (2006), ‘Fair Exchange: Shared professional development and reflective action’, in P. Burnard and S. Hennessy (eds), Reflective Practices in Arts Education, Dordrecht: Springer. Leong, S. (2007), ‘Strategies for enabling curriculum reform: lessons from Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong’, in J. Finney and P. Burnard (eds), Music Education with Digital Technology, pp. 276–79, London: Continuum. Loi, D. and Dillon, P. (2006), ‘Adaptive educational environments as creative spaces’, Cambridge Journal of Education, 36: 3, pp. 363–82. Loveless, A., DeVoogd, G.L. and Bohlin, R.M. (2001), ‘Something old, something new… Is pedagogy affected by ICT? in: A. Loveless and V. Ellis (eds), ICT, Pedagogy and the Curriculum: Subject to Change, pp. 63–83. London: RoutledgeFalmer. Mills, J. (1997), ‘A comparison of the quality of class music teaching in Primary and Secondary Schools in England’, Bulletin of the Council for Research in Music Education, 133, pp. 72–6. Mills, J. (2005), Music in Schools, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nardi, B. (ed.) (1996), Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and HumanComputer Interaction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. NACCCE (National Advisory Committee on Creative and Culture Education) (1999), All Our Futures, Creativity, Culture and Education, London: Department for Education and Employment. National College for School Leadership (NCSL) (2005), Available at www.ncsl.org.uk/ index.cfm. Accessed on 22 September 2006. Nilsson, B., and Folkestad, G. (2005), ‘Children’s practice of computer-based composition’, Music Education Research, 7: 1, pp. 22–37. Nordkvelle, Y.T. and Olson, J.K. (2005), ‘Visions for ICT, ethics and the practice of teachers, Education and Information Technologies, 10: 1–2, pp. 21–32. Ofsted (2004), Tuning in: wider opportunities in specialist instrumental tuition for pupils in Key Stage 2, London: Office for Standards in Education. Ofsted (2006), Inspection reports for schools available at www.ofsted.gov.uk. Last accessed 14 July 2006. Pitts, S. (2001), ‘Whose Aesthetics? Public, professional and pupil perceptions of music education’, Research Studies in Music Education, 17, pp. 54–60. Prensky, M. (2001), ‘Digital natives, digital immigrants’, On the Horizon, 9: 5, pp. 27–39. Price, D. (2005), Transforming Musical Leadership: Shaping Music Education – an Emerging Vision, London: Musical Futures/Paul Hamlyn Foundation.


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Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (2005), Music: 2004/5 annual report on curriculum and assessment. London: QCA. Reese, S. (2001), ‘Tools for thinking in sound’, Music Educators Journal, 88: 1, pp. 42–45, 53. Reese, S., McCord, K., and Walls, K. (2001), Strategies for Teaching: Technology, Reston, VA: MENC, the National Association for Music Education. Rudduck, J. and Flutter, J. (2004), How to Improve Your School, London: Continuum. Ruthmann, A. (2007a), ‘The composers’ workshop: An emergent approach to composing in the classroom’, Music Educators Journal, 93: 4, pp. 38–43. Ruthmann, A. (2007b), ‘Strategies for supporting music learning through online collaborative technologies’, in J. Finney and P. Burnard (eds), Music Education with Digital Technology, pp. 230–25, London: Continuum. Savage, J. (2005), ‘Working towards a theory of music technologies in the classroom: how pupils engage with and organize sounds with new technologies’, British Journal of Music Education, 22: 2, pp. 167–80. Savage, J. (2007), ‘Pedagogical strategies for change’, in J. Finney. and P. Burnard (eds), Music Education with Digital Technology, pp. 248–58, London: Continuum. Savage, J. and Challis, M. (2001), ‘Dunwich revisited: collaborative composition and performance with new technologies’. British Journal of Music Education, 18: 2, pp. 139–49. Seddon, F.A. (2007), ‘Music e-learning environments: young people, composing and the internet’ in J. Finney. and P. Burnard (eds), Music Education with Digital Technology, pp. 107–116, London: Continuum. Seddon, F.A., and O’Neill, S. (2003), ‘Creative thinking processes in adolescent computer-based compositions: An analysis of strategies adopted and the influence of instrumental music training’, Music Education Research, 5: 2, pp. 125–35. Sefton-Green, J. (ed), Young People, Creativity and New Technologies: The Challenge of the Digital Age. London: Routledge. Somekh, B. (2000), ‘New technology and learning: Policy and practice in the UK, 1980–2019’, Education and Information Technologies, 5: 1, pp. 19–37. Stenhouse, L. (1975), An Introduction to Curriculum Research and Development, London: Heinemann. Stenhouse, L. (1983), Authority, Education and Emancipation, London: Heinemann. Tafuri, J. (2006), ‘Processes and teaching strategies in musical improvisation with children’, in I. Deliege and G. Wiggins (eds), Musical Creativity: Multidisciplinary Research in Theory and Practice, pp. 134–58, New York: Psychology Press. Webster, P. (2002), ‘Computer-based technology and music teaching and learning’, in R. Colwell and C. Richardson (eds), The New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning, pp. 416–39, New York: Oxford University Press. Webster, P. and Hickey, M. (2006), ‘Computers and technology’, in G. McPherson (ed), The Child as Musician: A Handbook of Musical Development, pp. 375–96, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Webster, P. (2006), ‘Computer-based technology and music teaching and learning: 2000–2005’, in L. Bresler (ed.) International Handbook of Research in Arts Education, pp. 1311–328, Dordrecht: Springer. Welch, G. (2007), ‘Addressing the multifaceted nature of music education: An activity theory research perspective’, Research Studies in Music Education, 28, pp. 23–37.

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Weinberg, G. (2005), ‘Interconnected musical networks: toward a theoretical framework’, Computer Music Journal, 29: 2, pp. 23–39. Wilson, E. (2004), ‘Using activity theory as a lens to analyse interaction in a university-school initial teacher education and training partnership’, International Action Research, 12: 4, pp. 587–612. Wubbels, T. and Poppleton, P. (1999), ‘Knowledge about change and its effects on teachers’, in M. Lang, J. Olson, H. Hansen and W. Bunder (eds), Changing Schools/Changing Practices: Perspectives on Educational Reform and Teacher Professionalism, pp. 149–56, Louvain, Brussels: Garant. Zinchenko, V. (1996), ‘Developing activity theory: the zone of proximal development and beyond’, in B. Nardi (ed.), Context and Consciousness: Activity Theory and Human-Computer Interaction, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Suggested citation Burnard, P. (2007), ‘Reframing creativity and technology: promoting pedagogic change in music education,’ Journal of Music, Technology and Education 1: 1, pp. 37–55, doi: 10.1386/ jmte.1.1.37/1

Contributor details Pamela Burnard, PhD is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge, UK where she coordinates and lectures on the MPhil in Educational Research and the MPhil in Arts, Culture and Education courses, supervisors PhD students and teaches courses on creativity, creative learning and teaching, musical creativity, artist partnerships and visual-based research methods. She is Co-editor of the British Journal of Music Education, Treasurer of SEMPRE, an Executive member of the Board of Directors for ISME, and co-convener of BERA: SIG Creativity in Education. She has co-edited 3 books including Reflective Practices in Arts Education, Kluwer; Music Education with Digital Technologies, Continuum; and Documenting Creative Learning, Trentham; edited the Creativity Section in L. Bresler (Ed) International Handbook of Research in Arts Education and has been guest editor for special issues of the Cambridge Journal of Education (CJE) and Music Education Research (MER). Contact: Pamela Burnard Faculty of Education 184 Hills Rd Cambridge CB2 2PQ. E-mail: [email protected]


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Problem solving with learning technology in the music studio Andrew King University of Hull, Paul Vickers Northumbria University Abstract

Keywords

This article presents some of the findings from a mixed-methods case study that investigated studio recording for undergraduate students collaborating in pairs. The students were actively engaged in experiential learning (Dewey 1966) and the idea that students will develop within an environment with their peers (Pear and Crowne-Todd 2001). Using a stratified purposive sampling technique students were matched with a learner of similar ability via a pre-test, often referred to as a social-conflict approach (Schneider 2002). The groups of students were then allocated a support mechanism (either a learning technology interface or paper-based manual) to provide contingent on-demand assistance (Wood and Wood 1999) during the recording of a drum kit. Analysis of observational data revealed the types of studio-based problems the learners were encountering, and that the learning technology solution suggested a quicker and more reliable form of support.

recording learning technology studio practice music problem solving contingent learning

Introduction While to date there have been no empirical investigations into the use of learning technology to support activity in the recording studio, there have been a number of studies both within the music domain and outside; we will deal with the latter first. Chang (2001) describes and evaluates a case study in the earth sciences using learning technology to support the completion of a test. In addition to the computing technology, the student also has access to a number of other resources such as maps, weather images and precipitation data. Spicer and Stratford (2001) investigated the use of computing technology to implement a virtual field trip for students with embedded questions within the hypertext. Not surprisingly, students reported that they preferred the actual visits to the virtual. In addition to these studies that centre on computers supporting practical activity, there are also a number of other studies in the area of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). Weinberger and Fischer (2005) propose a framework for analysing knowledge construction in a CSCL environment. This is analysed and segmented into four different dimensions of learning: participation, epistemics, argument and social construction; while Baker et al (2003) specifically highlights argument within an online collaborative learning environment.


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Within the music domain there has been considerable research into using computers to support or develop skills such as music analysis, aural awareness and music synthesis by groups of researchers at Huddersfield (the CALMA project) and Edinburgh universities. Other empirical studies include the development of a unique symbolic language for the study of composition in the form of networked drum steps (McCarthy et al 2005) and Harmony Space (Holland 1989), which is an interactive interface to aid both novices and more experienced composers with aspects of tonal harmony. More recent researches into the use of computers in music education involve designing online communities for creative musical activities (Salavuo 2007) and how young people listen to, compose and share music with technology (Gall 2007). Dillon and Brown (2007) discuss the philosophical implications of introducing technology into music making, and put forward methods and ideas for exploration. The need for an investigation area of practical activity in a situated environment (Lave and Wenger 1991) such as the recording studio has thus far been neglected.

Technology in the studio The use of technology in the music curriculum poses a problem for the educator: how can students gain access to support when using complex tools in creative work, and what is the nature of the problems they are encountering? Software packages such as Cubase and Pro Tools offer support in the form of online help and minimal manuals embedded within the software; however, little help is provided beyond the procedural knowledge (Anderson 1996) concerned with these tools. In addition, support for the use of hardware recording devices such as mixing desks, signal processors (noise gates, compressors) and signal generators (reverb, delay, chorus etc) usually relies upon either the student’s ability to take effective notes in a workshop, or the use of manuals. These hardware recording devices are often used by audio professionals and the manuals are written for this particular audience, and this can present a problem for the student of music and technology. A survey of 150 students over three years conducted at the University of Hull revealed that students were more likely to seek studio support guidance from a member of staff (43%) or a peer (41%) than a manual (16%) or a textbook (0%). Indeed, while overburdening the student with technical specifications and data concerning maintenance of a particular item, rarely (if ever) do textbooks or manuals include within their pages pedagogical strategies for problem solving. It is possible to see the number of potential pitfalls for a student when considering a basic input (Figure 1). Figure 1 illustrates the various stages followed by a source sound (such as a voice or guitar) through a mixing-desk channel: sound is converted from acoustical to electrical energy by the microphone, transmitted out of phase via a balanced cable and then put back into phase at the mixing desk. The student of sound recording is then faced with a series of options: selection of the type of input (microphone or line), whether the phase of the signal needs to be inverted, the possibility to decrease the input amplitude (pad switch), a gain (potentiometer) dial, parametric equalization, auxiliary sends, panning, signal routing (to a group fader or main studio monitors) and finally the slider that controls the overall amplitude of the signal. If any stage is set incorrectly, this can lead to an unintentional 58

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Source

Microphone

Cable

Mixing desk

Input

EQ

Aux

Stereo Placement

Signal Routing

Amplitude Level

Figure 1: Mapping out the process from sound source into the mixing desk channel. alteration, misdirection or colouration of the sound; alternatively (and more typically) it will result in no sound being produced at all. Thus it is possible to see the complexity of using such tools in the creation of a recording in the studio, especially when what we have outlined so far is one of the most basic of operations: that of routing a microphone signal through a mixing-desk channel. Often student users require on-demand support to solve problems in the studio. However, the studio session is generally conducted outside of normal office hours (65% of studio sessions take place after 6 p.m. or at the weekend), when the level of technical support is either reduced or non-existent. In the following sections an investigation of the use of learning technology in the studio is presented.

Problem solving with learning technology in the studio The participants in this study completed a drum kit recording in the studio in pairs. The students had access to support material to carry out the Problem solving with learning technology in the music studio

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task: a learning technology interface (LTI) and a paper-based manual (control). The information contained in the support materials was identical. The students were given a specific amount and type of studio apparatus (discussed below) and then expected to complete the task using the available resources. The information given to the students in the support material was to provide technical support; issues such as aesthetics were not covered. For example, the learner could access the support material for information on how to use parametric equalization and what, in essence, is its function. However, information such as ‘for more low-end weight on the kick drum apply some boost at 70–90 kHz’ was not included. There is a multitude of different ways to achieve different drum kit recordings depending upon the kit, the style of music, the acoustic of the room and the player. It was the intention of the support materials merely to aid the novice user to overcome problems such as signal routing, while also providing an understanding of areas such as equalization, although suggestions were made regarding the position of microphones and which of the available apparatus might be more appropriate on a certain part of the instrument (such as using the D112 for the kick drum). Thus, what can be examined is the ways students are able to solve problems using the equipment and support materials available.

Design and methodology The empirical research carried out for this study was motivated from a social-constructivist standpoint. Students of similar abilities were paired together after analysis of pre-test results (the pre-test was a written paper that assessed the students’ knowledge and experience of recording-studio practice), and in line with the social-conflict (Schneider 2002) theory of learning. Learners were set the task of recording a drum kit during a twohour studio session (the drum kit was already set up). The idea was to reflect professional studio practice in which recording time is at a premium and studio users need to be able to deliver within strict time constraints. The goal of the session was to produce a 2-minute audio recording of a drum kit on compact disc. The study had a between-subjects design, and used an opportunity sample of 64 undergraduate students reading for a BA (Hons) in Creative Music Technology at the University of Hull (mean age = 18.4 years). Based on pre-test scores, students were matched according to performance and assigned to pairs. The groups were divided equally into group 1 (experimental) and group 2 (control). There were two dependent variables (DV): (1) the pre- and post-test percentage scores for each student; and (2) the completion of the set task. The independent variable (IV) was the use of an LTI for one group (experimental condition) and the use of handouts for the other (control condition). The handouts contained exactly the same information as the LTI, but were in the form of a manual.

Materials and apparatus The apparatus used in the study is shown below. The following list details the main hardware associated with the drum-kit recording that is located in the recording studio as well as the equipment used for observing the students during the study:

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• • • • • •

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Multimedia computer (AMD 2.2 GHz, 1024 megabytes of RAM, 200 gigabyte hard disk and a compact disc writer) Soundcraft Ghost mixing desk and microphones Signal generators and processors Multi track (Alesis HD24) and two track recorders (Tascam CD writer) Microphones (2 x AKG 414, 1 x Shure SM57, 3 x Sennheiser e604, 1 x AKG D112) and Three Panasonic VHS video cameras, each mounted on a Velbon tripod.

The support material included either the LTI or a manual, one of which was placed in the control room of the recording studio. The drum kit was set up in the studio floor for the duration of the study, while all the necessary cables, microphones and stands were stored in the studio ready for use. The following material was used in the assessment and evaluation of the study: • • •

A blank compact disc (CD) A pre-test and post-test A feedback questionnaire.

A blank CD was given to each pair of students for their audio recording. The pre-test and post-test were designed to evaluate students’ knowledge of the theory and practice of drum-kit recording. Both tests followed the same format, so the nature and standard of questions was equivalent. The feedback questionnaire contained open and closed questions (see Oppenheim 1992; Gillham 2000) to allow students to comment on the task and the support material.

Procedure The directions given to the participating students are shown below. Note that each pair was allocated a 2-hour session in the studio to complete the set task and the drummer was available in the studio to perform when required. The musician did not interfere with the music technology students, except to play a drum sequence. Preliminary task: • Complete pre-test. Main study (1 week later): • Complete set task with student peer using the support material for guidance as required • Produce audio-CD recording of drum kit (2 minutes in length) • Complete feedback questionnaire.

Data analysis A considerable amount of data was produced as part of the study. For the purposes of this article the following data was analysed: • •

64 completed pre-tests 16 data logs of students’ interactions with the LTI (group 1 only)

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Video data (32 recording sessions of maximum 2 hours each) 32 audio recordings of a drum kit.

The video cameras collected around 200 hours of data. Three cameras were used to collect the data (two in the control room of the studio and one on the studio floor). In order to analyse this data, the tapes from the three video cameras were played simultaneously on separate monitors. This was then dual-coded (verbatim) and utterances were categorized using Interactive Process Analysis (IPA) (Bales 1999). IPA is a method of categorizing utterances based upon direct observation. There are twelve categories of utterance (e.g. shows tension release and asks for opinion) which are further sub-divided into four main areas: positive and negative social emotional responses, and questions and answers concerning a task. These are sub-classified further into the following six areas: orientation, evaluation, control, decision, tension management and integration. It is then possible to assign a particular utterance to one of the twelve observational categories. Afterwards, a comparison of the quantity and type of utterances with the mean profiles developed by Bales is possible. Bales and his team analysed thousands of groups of different sizes and in different contexts to discover the types and amount of utterances the individuals used. All this data was compiled into a single set of tables that investigators can use to compare their own work.

Analysis Broadly speaking, it is possible to consider the process of studio recording in three main areas: pre-production, production and post production. Pre-production involves preparing for a session by setting up technical equipment (microphones, mixing desks and recording apparatus) and musical (drum kit) instruments. Production is the actual recording, and post-production the modification and balancing of the recorded tracks. However, it is worth pointing out at this stage that some industry experts (and educators) prefer to think of the process more holistically and the term production is used to describe the whole process. For the purposes of this study it is easier to consider the recording in these three stages in order to understand the problems encountered by learners, and at what stage of the process they arise. The most common problem to emerge in the recording sessions for all of the students was the use of the talkback system. Using the timings recorded in the transcriptions, it was also possible to work out how long it took for each pair to arrive at the solution. It is evident from this data that all of the students who encountered problems using the studio talkback were able resolve the problem by using the LTI. The average time spent using the LTI to resolve the problem was 2 minutes 57 seconds. The data relating specifically to those students who used the manual shows that only three of the seven pairs in the group were able to resolve the problem of using the studio talkback. The average time spent using the manual to resolve the issue was 6 minutes 30 seconds for all of the pairs; for the three pairs who managed to resolve the problem, the average time taken was 7 minutes 10 seconds. In all cases, the students tackled the problem by consulting the support material.

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A range of other problems was encountered across each stage of the recording session. For example, technical problems at the pre-production stage included positioning the microphones and deciding upon their proximity to the instrument. The following four problems at the production stage were especially common: • • • •

Phantom powering (when to use it and where to locate it) Alesis HD24 recorder (how to set up and record the drum tracks using this device) Signal routing (getting sound into the mixing desk, and out again through the monitors) Using the auxiliary sends (for adding effects such as reverb).

These problem areas reflect a similar story to the issue of using the studio talkback: while all of the students who had access to the LTI were able to resolve a given problem having consulted the support tool, the problems that hampered the students who were using the manual were not always resolved. Moreover, in these cases the students did not always manage the problem by exclusive use of the manual; use of trial and error was evident. The average time spent resolving these technical issues was 1 minute 36 seconds for pairs in the LTI group, and 4 minutes 18 seconds for pairs using the manual. The problems encountered during the post-production stage of the recording sessions were as follows: • • •

Signal processing Recording practice Signal routing.

Interestingly, more problems arose at the post-production stage for students in the LTI group than those in the manual group (this relates to the fact that the latter adopted an alternative process (without signal generation) at this point). In addition to the technical problems discussed above, a number of task-related issues arose in the recording sessions. Overall, there were four main areas of task-related discourse: • • • •

Problem-solving (mainly technical) Planning/management of task Division of labour Feedback.

Figure 2 provides an example of one of these four mains areas. An example of planning is given above. The students planned the task by deciding what to do first, then worked collaboratively with the support materials, deciding which microphones to use in which part of the drum kit, and how they should be positioned. There is evidence here of both longterm planning (overall session) and short-term planning (pre-production: how to allocate and manage the resources to set up the recording).


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Row Student Discourse/Action 1

A+B

IPA

[pick up and start to read support material]

Apparatus

Time

Manual

0’00

Manual

0’30

2

B

“What shall we do first? Shall we set up the mics or look at mic positions?”

3

A

“Yeah.”

3

0’33

4

A

“I reckon we should turn this [points at mixer] on first.”

5

0’38

5

A+B

[Look at microphones and position in the manual.]

6

A

“I’ll make a start.” [goes to studio floor]

7

B

[Continues to look at manual]

Manual

1’46

8

A

[Sets up microphone on bass drum]

D112

1’55

9

B

[Leaves studio floor and heads for control room.]

10

A

[Takes microphone to position on snare drum.]

11

B

“What shall I do?” [up to this point he has been watching A]

12

A

“Just jump in.”

8

Manual

4

0’45

1’45

2’43

SM57

2’50

8

4’20

4

4’23

Figure 2: Example of planning/management of task (Pair 18, manual group). It should also be noted, however, that other pairs in the manual group did not consult the support material at the pre-production stage at all, so the management of the task arose in a more ad hoc fashion. Figure 3 is an extract of transcript taken from the pre-production stage of a session in which the students launch immediately into the practical activity without consultation about the process. Here, management of the task is implicit and not made verbally explicit, so there appears to be a lack of planning in how to go about the task. In Figure 3, student B requires information regarding the deployment of the microphones; student A gives mixed information based on personal knowledge. If the manual had been consulted, these students would have found out that while the SM57 can be used with a floor tom, it could be a 64



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1

A+B

[Students leave control room and go straight to studio floor]

2

A

[Starts to position microphone on bass drum]

3

B

“What do you use this microphone on?”

7

4

A

“It’s a SM57 so snare or floor tom.”

6

5

B

[Positions SM57 on floor tom]

0’00

D112

0’32

SM57

0’45

0’50 SM57

0’55

Figure 3: Example of management (Pair 21, manual group). more suitable choice for the snare drum in this particular set-up because of the microphones available. From the outset, therefore, the students have perhaps deployed a less suitable microphone on the snare drum, considering the other microphone resources available.

Discussion and future directions Learning technology facilitated problem solving by reducing trial and error In the learning process, one of the main areas of task-related discourse concerned problem solving. Examples of problems encountered in the recording process were drawn from across the data, using the transcriptions, and were discussed with reference to how they were resolved (what mechanism was used) and how long this took. The students in the LTI group solved problems more rapidly than those using the manual. In the latter case, the resolution of problems was often prolonged by the use of trial and error techniques either before or after aborting consultation of the manual. Learning technology thus facilitated problem solving by reducing the need for trial and error (studio equipment is expensive and sensitive; learning by trial and error can sometimes damage this equipment).

Learning technology facilitated problem solving by enabling (guaranteeing) resolution On some occasions, students in the manual group could not solve the problems they encountered. In particular, one of the main problems noted across the data concerned the use of the studio talkback facility. All of the students in the LTI group who had difficulty operating this equipment managed to solve the problem after consultation of the support tool. The students in the manual group, however, did not always manage to overcome this problem and, as a result, had to perform the task without the studio talkback. In these cases, the consequent lack of communication through the sound-proofed glass between the control room and the studio floor slowed down activity (students had to continually walk from area to Problem solving with learning technology in the music studio

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area to communicate with the musician). This problem (among other unresolved ones) did not impinge directly upon task performance because all of the students in the manual group completed and passed the set task.

Learning technology facilitated problem solving by reducing the time taken to overcome problems As mentioned above, the students in the LTI group completed the set task more quickly than those in the manual group. Given that problem solving was the most prevalent area of task-related discourse, it is important to reiterate the impact of time on the completion of activity: the data showed that problems were solved (on average) more quickly by students using the LTI. This contingent tool, therefore, facilitated problem solving by reducing the time taken to find a solution, and this in turn influenced the overall time required to complete the set task. This point also implies that, if less time were taken resolving problems, more time could be devoted to fine-tuning performance on the set task.

Themes within the data It is evident from this study that problem solving relating to technical issues (such as signal routing) was not the only issue to arise. In addition, it was apparent that there were three other areas of task-orientated discourse: planning/management of a task, division of labour, and feedback. The educator needs to consider these areas when planning effective collaborative assessments. Also, the types of problem encountered by the learners may not always be consistent, because different environments may raise different issues. It is important to note that the students carrying out this project were only 4 weeks into the first year of an undergraduate programme; the fact that they were able to complete the project in a studio they had little experience of using is commendable. Futures studies will involve not only drum-kit recording but also vocal, guitar and keyboards. In addition, a study is planned to examine the use of different types of support material over a longer period of time, with different group sizes, instead of a single studio recording session. Works cited Anderson, J. R. (1996), The architecture of cognition, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum. Baker, M. J., Quignard, M., Lund, K. and Séjourné, A. (2003), ‘Computer supported collaborative learning in the space of debate’, in B. Wasson, S. Ludvigsen and U. Hoppe (eds), Designing for Change in Networked Learning Environments: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning 2003 Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 11–20. Bales, R. F. (1999), Social Interaction systems: Theory and Measurement, New Jersey: Transaction. Chang, C. Y. (2001), ‘A problem-solving based computer-assisted tutorial for the earth sciences’, Journal of computer assisted learning, 17, pp. 263–74. Dewey, J. (1966), Democracy and Education. An introduction to the Philosophy of Education, New York: Free Press. Dillon, S. C. and Brown, A. (2007), ‘Realising the possibilities of technology in music education research and philosophy’, in Proceedings of The Fifth International Research in Music Education, Exeter University. Gall, M. (2007), ‘Youth and the new digital age: how are young people using music technology in their lives?’ in Proceedings of The Fifth International Research in Music Education, Exeter University. 66



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Gillham, W. (2000), Developing a questionnaire, London: Continuum. Holland, S. (1989), Artificial intelligence, education and music, Milton Keynes: Open University. King, A. (2006a), ‘Contingent learning for creative music technologists’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis. King, A., 2006b: ‘Problem solving with learning technology’, Leeds International Music Technology Education Conference, Leeds College of Music. King, A., 2007: ‘Student collaboration with learning technology in the music studio’, in Proceedings of The Fifth International Research in Music Education, Exeter University. Lave, J. and Wenger, E. (eds), (1991), Situated Learning: Legitimate peripheral participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCarthy, C., Bligh, J., Jennings, K. and Tangney, B. (2005), ‘Virtual collaborative learning environments for music: networked drumsteps’, Computers in Education, 44, pp. 173–95. Oppenheim, A.N. (1992), Questionnaire design, interviewing and attitude measurement, London: Pinter. Pear, J. J. and Crowne-Todd, D. E. (2002), ‘A social constructivist approach to computer-mediated instruction’, Computers and Education, 38, pp. 221–31. Salvuo, M. (2007), ‘Both sides now … designing an online community for creative musical activities and learning’, in Proceedings of The Fifth International Research in Music Education, Exeter University. Schneider, D. (2002), ‘Community, Content and Collaboration Management Systems in Education: A new chance for socio-constructivist scenarios?’ Proceedings of the 3rd congress on Information and Communication Technologies in Education, Rhodes, pp. 2–11. Spicer, J. J. and Stratford, J. (2001), ‘Student perceptions of a virtual field trip to replace a real field trip’, Journal of Computer Assisted Learning, 17, pp. 345–54. Weinberger, A. and Fischer, F. (2005), ‘A framework to analyze argumentative knowledge construction in computer-supported collaborative learning’, Computer in Education, pp. 25–32. Wood, H. and Wood, D. (1999), ‘Help seeking, learning and contingent tutoring’, Computers in education 33, pp. 153–69

Suggested citation King, A. and Vickers, P. (2007), ‘Problem solving with learning technology in the music studio,’ Journal of Music, Technology and Education 1: 1, pp. 57–67, doi: 10.1386/ jmte.1.1.57/1

Contributor details Contact: Dr Andrew King, School of Arts and New Media, University of Hull, Scarborough Campus, Filey Road, Scarborough. North Yorkshire, YO11 3AZ, UK. E-mail: [email protected]. Contact: Dr Paul Vickers, School of informatics, Northumbria University, Pandon Building, Camden Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 1XE. UK. E-mail: [email protected]


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Journal of Music, Technology and Education Volume 1 Number 1 © 2007 Intellect Ltd Editorial. English language. doi: 10.1386/jmte.1.1.69/1

The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) Leigh Landy De Montfort University Abstract

Keywords

This article introduces the reader to the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS, www.ears.dmu.ac.uk). It examines the site’s raison d’être, its history thus far, challenges encountered, and then moves on to introduce the project’s future plans, in particular within electroacoustic music education for children. A key focus is how those working on EARS are attempting to make the site relevant to anyone involved in the field of electroacoustic music studies, regardless of previous experience.

electroacoustic music studies Internet resources online learning access

Context As we welcome this new education journal for music technology, a question comes to mind. To what extent are we aware of the subjects that should ideally constitute music technology courses? One of the areas within music technology is that of electroacoustic music. Its associated field of studies will be the focus of this article.1 Electroacoustic music tends to be taught in music and, more recently, music technology departments, an entirely logical state of affairs. An increasing percentage of staff members of many of these music departments is now represented by technological development researchers, particularly in American universities. Again, this seems rather logical, given the two words of the phrase ‘music technology’. The humanities side, that is, the study of the music, its history, theoretical bases and its place in culture, is often seen to be a bolt-on. This state of affairs may be considered something of a shame, because the success of any type of art is the sum of its appreciation, knowledge related to it and, in our case, knowledge of the technology supporting it as well. Perhaps the humanities side has been kept to a minimum partially due to the fact that the field of studies related to electroacoustic music is currently somewhat ill defined. How might one delineate this field? Which disciplines are involved? Does it even have a commonly accepted name? Furthermore, how easy is it for people interested in studying electroacoustic music to locate the research of others working within the same area of specialization? At the beginning of this decade, it appeared that whenever one wanted to discover something about the technological aspects of electroacoustic music, the information was normally not difficult to trace. Similarly, there was a reasonable selection of histories related to this music.2 However, most specialists in the field would also have been aware of the challenges facing them as well as many of their students when searching for sources related to musical issues. Part of that challenge is relevant to education and deserves mention within this contextual introduction. The scholarship available today in JMTE 1 (1) 69–81 © Intellect Ltd 2007

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1. In recent years, there seems to be a tension between the usage of the term electroacoustic music on the one hand and sonic art on the other. For those whose work is with sounds more than notes, sonic art may be seen as the better designator, but there is an awkward issue with this term. If you consider sonic artworks to be music – and the word ‘music’ is absent from the term – sonic art gives people the opportunity to separate its works from music. Electroacoustic music, on the other hand, is not involved with, for example, acoustic sound works, and also includes a fairly significant number of note-based compositions. To avoid this conundrum, I have recently coined the term, sound-based music (Landy 2007). It would be a radical step to rename EARS to take this into account at this point


and, therefore, the term, electroacoustic music has been maintained. 2. Regarding these histories, note that many of them miss two opportunities: (1) they tend to focus on art or pop music – few look across electroacoustic music’s broad horizon; and (2) they tend to be technologydriven or person- or studio-driven, but rarely combine historical, musical, technological and socio-cultural developments, all of which contribute to electroacoustic music history. 3. Regular readers of the CEC Conference forum (www.concordia.ca/cec-conference /index.html) will be aware of how many terms are causing problems similar to what is presented here.

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our field is reasonably abundant as is evident given the size of EARS’s bibliography; however, other than those historical overviews, to what extent do we have foundational level publications for people interested in learning more about electroacoustic music from the musical point of view? Taking this one step further, to involve pre-university students: to what extent are we developing electroacoustic music courseware of all sorts for entry-level students at secondary (or even primary) schools? The fact that a good deal of useful foundational material is missing has done the field of electroacoustic music studies little good.

EARS: Why it was needed EARS has come into being due to the issues just raised: the difficulty one encounters in finding sources related to a musical area within electroacoustic music studies and the fact that the discipline has not yet been properly delineated nor been provided with a widely accepted framework. Such a framework could be easily integrated with studies in electroacoustic music making, relevant aspects of computing and other forms of technology, etc. In short, it has direct bearing on our music technology curricula. There is one further subject that deserves some discussion before presenting the EARS site, another issue of foundational importance. To what extent do we, music technology specialists, use our terminology in a consistent manner? Let’s start with a curious example, ‘computer music’. Granted, this term is not used very often in the United Kingdom; but it is quite common in many countries around the globe, not least in the United States. But what does it mean? Ages ago one was taught that computers could be used musically as assistant composers, such as in algorithmic composition and/or to produce audio, as in computer synthesis. The ‘and/or’ is quite important, as the first-known computer composition was the ‘Iliac Suite’ for string quartet by Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson (1957). In other words, traditional instruments can perform computer music. However, many use the term ‘computer music’ to mean music produced and performed by a computer. To complicate matters further, there is the annual International Computer Music Conference in which everything ranging from any technological development related to computers and music, music cognition and computational analysis and much more are all welcome, and thus form part of computer music. Yet old analogue electronic or electroacoustic works that are not digital do not fit under computer music – but how many are aware of this? Is this separation of any particular relevance today? ‘Computer music’ is but one of many terms that are highly problematic.3 Of course, even the term ‘electroacoustic music’ knows several variances in its definition. For the purposes of this article and to avoid any further ambiguity it will now be defined in its broadest sense: ‘Electroacoustic music refers to any music in which electricity has had some involvement in sound registration and/or production other than that of simple microphone recording or amplification’ (Landy 1999: 61). Suffice it to say that not everyone uses the term this way. Such terms are indeed at the foundation of our field, and without some consensus, the rest of that foundation may remain difficult to construct. This lack of consensus regarding terminology usage was a further stimulus for creating the original EARS site. The idea was to find a way to 70

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provide the general public an unbiased view of the state of play in terms of our terminology, create the architecture for the field of electroacoustic music studies and use this architecture to help interested parties find research results in their particular area(s) of focus. These goals are reflected in the site’s glossary, its structured index and its bibliography respectively; they will now be introduced.

EARS: Its development up to the present Initially, before embarking on this rather ambitious journey, colleagues were contacted around the globe and asked what might be needed on the site. Clearly, future advisers were being sought. Other than the UQAM (Montreal) Dictionnaire des arts médiatiques (www.comm.uqam.ca/GRAM/), which consists of a modest glossary of terms relevant to new media, including electroacoustic music,4 there was nothing available that was comparable to what was being planned. The general view was that there was a need for EARS and that, as suggested, it should focus on terminology and resources. Funding was received from the then Arts and Humanities Research Board (now Council, AHRC), the first of three grants that EARS has received from it thus far. The goal was to set up an international consortium, define the goals of the EARS project and suggest a planning scheme for its initial phases. This was achieved by 2001, the original consortium consisting of Kevin Austin (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada), Marc Battier (Sorbonne, Paris, France), Joel Chadabe (Electronic Music Foundation, EMF, Albany, New York), Bernd Enders (University of Osnabrück, Germany) and Simon Waters (University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom). It was decided to attempt first to create the glossary and structure a subject index that would help delineate the field, before embarking on the much more ambitious bibliography project. The discussions also involved creating the parameters of operation of this steering board. The second grant supported a six-month part-time postdoctoral research fellow, Simon Atkinson (who has since become co-director of the project). Some 360 defined terms, 165 referred terms (see ‘x’) and 375 keywords were collected in the initial index, a number of which appear more than once.5 The point of departure was to include terms that could be called upon as keywords regarding electroacoustic research related to the music, thus not solely technological. Granted, within acoustics, for example, there are literally dozens of terms to choose from, obviously a selection was made. This notion of music-related research remained the key criterion for choice because otherwise the project would simply have become unfeasible. Wherever possible, multiple definitions have been included to illustrate eventual inconsistent word usage. Preferences are not suggested; the focus is simply on current word usage. Making sense of the entries in terms of creating the index structure was a marvellous exercise in finding an optimal solution. It took months before the site’s six main headings were chosen. They were (and still are): Disciplines of Study (DoS) Genres & Categories (G&C) Musicology of Electroacoustic Music (MEM)

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4. The UQAM team, led by Louise Poissant, now has plans to expand its project into an ‘Encyclopédie des arts médiatiques’ (see www.teleinfo. uqam.ca/projets/ gram/). 5. A reasonable proportion of the 360 terms were for the glossary only, as we did not expect articles to refer to them specifically. In 2006 it was decided that this was an inefficient approach. A few terms were turned into referred items, as they were relatively obscure; most of them were added to the index.


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Performance Practice and Presentation (PPP) Sound Production and Manipulation (SPM) Structure, Musical (Str)

6. For a discussion concerning the poietic in music, see, for example, Nattiez 1990.

The first heading underscores the interdisciplinary nature of electroacoustic music studies. The listening experience is important to the second and third, although there are exceptions such as poietic analysis,6 that is, analysis based on construction based; furthermore there is an another exception as many categories name the technology used in making a work, thus having little to do with the reception. The final three categories could easily be identified as typical categories related to computer music. They all belong to what might be called the creative practice, not to mention the technological side of electroacoustic music. We will now briefly look at the six headings individually. The first, Disciplines of Study (DoS), currently lists 21 sub-headings, clearly illustrating how electroacoustic music and its field of studies is informed by many disciplines. Many of these represent clusters, such as Interdisciplinary Studies. The subject areas range from science to philosophy. More predictable entries include Acoustic Communication, Acoustics, Audio Engineering, Cognitive Science, Computing, Music Education and Psychoacoustics. Musicology is treated separately (see below). Less predictable, but extremely pertinent entries nevertheless, include Archiving, Critical and Cultural Theory, Linguistics and Media Theory. Areas such as Gender Studies and Semiotics appear at the third (sub-sub-heading) level. A close look through this list demonstrates the amazing breadth of the field. It raises another question concerning how much our students need to know of each of these areas in electroacoustic music studies as well as in more general music technology courses. Genres and Categories (G&C) is an essential part of the site, as it is here that many a battle has been fought and will continue to be fought in terms of much of our basic terminology. When the site was originally set up the same approach to nesting terms hierarchically was used as is the case throughout the rest of the EARS site. Some terms ended up appearing several times under broader categories. However, given the fact that many terms had no unique definition, these decisions were often based on one of the definitions of a higher-level term. In 2006 a decision was reached whereby terms were no longer hierarchically placed; the 80 terms are currently listed alphabetically. The search for cohesion among the genres and categories will need to be achieved in a different manner than for the other five areas. What is most peculiar about the G&C list is how few genres one is able to identify. The vast majority of terms are categories, many of which are reliant on descriptions of the technique or technology involved (for example, Granular Music or Tape Music). This lack of genres may be influenced by the fact that electroacoustic music developed in the middle of the postmodernist era, when schools of thought were generally avoided at all cost. Still, it is to be hoped that, as interested parties work on terminological issues, we may be able to construct some relevant genre terms that will be useful in terms of bringing much of the repertoire into a cohesive structure. This would aid both the education and appreciation of electroacoustic 72

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music. For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that genre and category terms that have had an extremely ephemeral existence have not been included. The index would simply become too cumbersome and there would be a risk of bibliographic items’ keywords not working efficiently. Through referral, these terms do appear on the site; a less ephemeral genre or category is called upon to represent the area in question. The Musicology of Electroacoustic Music is, in many ways, the heart of the EARS site. A list of the second-level sub-headings is useful in terms of gaining a view of the types of areas represented. Aesthetics Analysis History of Electroacoustic Music Music Criticism Music Theory Philosophy of Music Socio-cultural Aspects of Electroacoustic Music7

8. Pierre Schaeffer is singled out as the most prolific author, not to mention one of the earliest, to have contributed to electroacoustic music theory (see, for example, his mostcited work, Traité des objets musicaux, Schaeffer 1977). 9. The Russian constructivist term faktura has been found to be of importance as one means of discussing this subject (see, for example, Battier 2003: 249–55).

The third level (sub-sub-heading) under Music Theory includes: Classification of Sound Discourse within Electroacoustic Music Listening Experience Schaefferian Theory8

Much of this represents to the study of electroacoustic music what general musical studies represent to students in music departments. The key difference here is the integration of these areas of focus with the other disciplines that appear under the DoS heading. The Performance Practice and Presentation heading is fairly wide ranging. It considers issues from collaboration to new forms of virtuosity,9 real and virtual environments, spatialization and venues as well as electroacoustic performance techniques ranging from live electronics to turntablism. Sound Production and Manipulation (SPM) is the key technologybased EARS main heading. It covers a vast area, ranging from electroacoustic devices and instruments to synthesis and resynthesis techniques, sound shaping and associated aspects such as recording and mixing. Jumping to where the EARS site is today, the number of items listed in the EARS bibliography that appear under SPM is smaller than the list of terms may suggest. This is due to the selection process. EARS has developed a policy of including published works that in some manner address essentially technological subjects from a musical point of view. Let’s take a look at an example. Physical modelling is one of many areas of development in the area of sound synthesis. Annually dozens of papers are published on the subject. Of those, at most a handful discuss musical issues or potential musical application of, for example, physical modelling, but not one single example demonstrating both technical and musical content analysis comes to mind. It is only this minority group that is of interest to us. The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS)

7. Socio-cultural aspects include access and impact issues as well as culture-theoretical issues, among others.

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Similar examples can also be cited within the Performance Practice and Presentation and Structure, Musical headings. Analogous with concepts of sound production and manipulation are those related to musical structure (Str). Musicians involved in the application of formalism in electroacoustic music, such as algorithmic composition, will find a number of relevant terms in this list. Structure can be approached at different levels. The sub-headings Macro-level and Micro-level Structure assist in this differentiation. Of course, an increasing number of people are creating formalisms that work at several levels, so some of their writing may fall under more than one Str header. These six main headings and all entries under them delineate and define the structure of electroacoustic music studies. The terms delineate the field; the disciplines and subjects of inquiry form the site’s contents. Clearly, there are things that have been missed. As EARS is an Internet resource, what’s wrong can always be put right with little or no delay. It is for that reason that user feedback is essential to its success. The original LaTeX-based EARS site went public in 2002. The following year UNESCO adopted it as part of its DigiArts initiative (portal. unesco.org/digiarts). As will become clear below, EARS is now working even more closely with UNESCO, reflecting the desire that EARS’s content in the future become even more relevant to people in developing nations. In 2004 a third EARS-related grant was received from the AHRC. This time substantial funding resulted in two postdoctoral researchers joining us over the period 2004–2007. Pierre Couprie joined the project in 2004 and Rob Weale a year later. During this period the creation of the bibliography has been the key focus. Pierre Couprie redesigned the site immediately, using SPIP (www. spip.net) for the organization of the site’s data. This has led to significant improvements, although it is hoped that a future version will allow for the implementation of an even more sophisticated form of search protocol than that currently available. Throughout this period, the glossary and index have undergone dynamic changes under the editorial direction of Simon Atkinson, including a major updating process in 2006/2007 when the number of glossary terms exceeded 500. Still, the main task during the period was to create the site’s bibliography. During the first two years, all bibliographic items were entered solely in English, regardless of the original language. Where relevant, translations of titles and, for books, chapter titles are included. As more and more entries for non-English-language publications were entered, it became clear that it would be useful to be able to look up these works in their original language as well. Therefore, today, for example, Italian-language publications’ abstracts and keywords appear in Italian and in English; French, Spanish and German texts are similarly treated. To facilitate this, translations of the index and, wherever possible, of the glossary were needed. Thus far the glossary has appeared in French (Pierre Couprie) and Spanish (Ricardo Dal Farra). At present a possible Mandarin translation, requested by UNESCO, is under investigation and a German translation is planned. The index is also available in German (Martin Supper) and Italian (Laura Zattra). Consortium member Marc

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Battier proposed the publication of an international thesaurus of terms. The thesaurus can currently be found on EARS in five languages. At the time of writing, EARS is approaching its three thousandth bibliographic entry. In English and French, at least, the phase has been reached where those involved in the project are dealing with items that are more difficult to obtain, as well as with the normal abstraction of newly appearing publications. Items in other media that are of relevance to the project continue to be sought. The project has been significantly internationalized during this threeyear period and the intention is that this will continue in the future (see below). This internationalization is reflected in today’s consortium in which Battier and Chadabe continue alongside Ricardo Dal Farra (National University of Tres de Frbuaro, Buenos Aires, Argentina), Kenneth Fields (Central Conservatory of Music and University of Peking, Beijing, China), Rosemary Mountain (Concordia University, Montreal, Canada) and Martin Supper (University of the Arts, Berlin, Germany). One of the frequently asked questions about EARS is how its editorial policy was created. A question often accompanying this is why the project does not use a Wiki approach to data acquisition. Part of the answer has to do with user feedback: in terms of catching minor errors on the site, making suggestions for new terms, adding new definitions and, of course, new items for the bibliography. These suggestions, alongside the work of the core EARS team and the network of researchers affiliated with the project, have led to the current total of 3,000 bibliographic entries and the large-scale glossary. Still, a majority of the suggestions made for references to be entered onto the site concern technology-only publications, something that was decided early on not to include, as they would have made the project too large and too unfocused. In this way, project members act as a filter for incoming suggestions, more than as editors. Team members do consider themselves to be working on an open platform, albeit one without direct Wiki-like user input. Recently the opportunity to publish relevant texts on the EARS site has been established. The first publication was Antonio de Sousa Dias’s Portuguese translation of Schaeffer’s Solfège de l’objet sonore from 1967 (Schaeffer, Reibel and Ferreyra 1998). John Dack and Christine North’s long-awaited translation of Michel Chion’s Guide des objets sonores (Chion 1983) in English is expected in the near future. Chion’s text treats all major Schaefferian terms introduced in his Traité des objets musicaux (Schaeffer 1977). The site obviously will not focus solely on Schaefferian texts; there are plans to publish EARS-related materials, in the widest sense, more frequently as time goes on. EARS-related articles for which rights have been obtained have also been recently republished on the site. What has been gratifying for the EARS team is to watch its usage statistics rise year on year. After one of my talks on EARS in 2006 a lecturer came to me and said: ‘We are all grateful to you for creating this resource, but it is also upsetting as it has made our students’ lives so easy. They are constantly quoting it.’ The usage statistics can, of course, be a bit difficult to comprehend. Nevertheless, the trend has grown enormously throughout the years and the ease whereby EARS comes up under major search engines supports the view that EARS is a much-used portal in today’s field


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of electroacoustic music studies. Another reason for increasing usage is the fact that in 2007 UNESCO funded a project whereby all relevant information on its DigiArts portal became hyperlinked to EARS and vice versa. In the autumn of 2007 the three-year AHRC funding came to an end; plans have been developed for an even more dynamic future for EARS. As this article is being written, EARS finds itself at a crossroads. This has partly to do with future funding opportunities, but more significantly to do with its having grown in importance so rapidly. Those involved with the project have decided to: (1) continue the work of the project as it is, perhaps altering it, taking into account new approaches to semantic web design; and (2) start a large-scale project provisionally called ‘Pedagogical EARS’. These plans form the subject of the next two parts of this article and bring us directly back to the subject of music education.

Moving forward 1: a greater global focus So far as the continuation of the current work is concerned, it is clear that EARS can no longer rely on British support, because the site’s weaknesses can be found to a large extent in other language areas rather than in those that are already represented. The project is now reliant on the goodwill of the current team as well as network members working with the team to achieve language-area funding. For example, a bid of Martin Supper’s was supported by the Universität der Künste Berlin as this article was being prepared. This means that the German translation of the glossary and further bibliographic work can be expected in the not-too-distant future. Similar initiatives are under way regarding Mandarin, Greek and Portuguese translations. The Italian glossary translation will go online in late 2007. EARS will and must continue to internationalize its presence in all three key areas of the site. It will also pursue its recent efforts in terms of increasing the list of online publications that can be downloaded from the site. Finally, in collaboration with Kenneth Fields, opportunities will be investigated within the realm of new approaches to ontologies. In a recent article (Fields 2007) he asks several relevant questions concerning the somewhat traditional presentation of EARS, and illustrates current alternatives including ‘folksonomies’ that are now on offer. The EARS principle will not change, but its design will, it is hoped, appear more intelligent. This part of the project will take place in collaboration with the University of Peking. All of this will allow EARS to become accessible to a greater number of interested people around the globe; its usage and user input should develop similarly. As access has always been part of EARS’s raison d’être, it has, furthermore, been decided to work towards the creation of Pedagogical EARS.

Moving forward 2: ‘Pedagogical EARS’ The story of Pedagogical EARS started at UNESCO’s offices in Paris. Jaco Du Toit, former member of the DigiArts team, asked: ‘Would it be possible to create a version of EARS with a reduced number of terms for people starting out in the field?’ This single question started the ball rolling, leading towards the design of a three-part project that will be developed in parallel with the current EARS site. This project is being prepared specifically for the young – and other interested parties of all ages – and will go several steps beyond serving as a structured Internet portal for information. 76

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Du Toit’s question made complete sense and the EARS team’s immediate reaction was positive, especially given today’s lack of opportunities available regarding electroacoustic music instruction at pre-university levels and the fairly ‘how to’ approach applied to music technology education in many schools internationally. Pedagogical EARS could potentially offer a clear, educationally innovative alternative. Although making the key decisions concerning which terms to retain and which to drop for this project will be extremely challenging, it is clear that definitions adopted for those with no prior knowledge can be created and supported, where relevant, with sound examples and with relevant opportunities to try out concepts, such as the various types of filters and of visual representations of a given recording. In other words all online10 new media and hypermedia aids can be incorporated, something EARS does not yet provide – a truly exciting opportunity. However, it is logical to suggest that creating a pedagogical form of EARS solely based on its current format may not be sufficient. The reason for this can be found on the Groupe de Recherches Musicales’s CD-ROM entitled La musique électroacoustique (Ina/GRM-Hyptique 2000). This superb new media publication offers the user three choices upon opening: connaître (understand), entendre (hear) and faire (do). This tripartite approach is extremely sensible, focusing on the comprehension of concepts and gaining historical knowledge; supporting music appreciation through documented examples, with evocative scores providing users something to hold on to when first hearing music that is possibly totally new; and allowing learning to take place through creativity, by providing users the opportunity to manipulate sounds. This approach is holistic; its holism would be essential to support the request made during that meeting in Paris. EARS is therefore planning its own tripartite project, all based on current initiatives of the Music, Technology and Innovation Centre (MTI) at De Montfort University (DMU). It, too, involves an understanding aspect on what has been named “EARS II”, an adaptable listening methodology supporting access and appreciation, part of the MTI’s ongoing Intention/Reception (I/R) project and a ‘learning by doing’ aspect by way of the Sound Organiser audio software program currently under development for any novice user group. All three are introduced below.

Supporting Understanding: EARS II This first part of Pedagogical EARS has already been described. Of the approximately 500 EARS terms, a much more modest set will be chosen, definitions adapted to the audience of young people and adults with no previous experience, and examples will be provided in the form of listening clips, interactive opportunities to try out concepts, and hyperlinks to sites related to the subject at hand. An influential example of this multimedia approach to learning concepts is Barry Truax’s Handbook of Acoustic Ecology (Truax 1999). An associated learning plan will also be developed. Nevertheless, some flexibility in this must be allowed for, so that different didactic approaches and culturally based sound examples can be included wherever possible. Clearly, it is hoped to have EARS II translated into as many languages as possible. In this way, the intention is to make learning The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS)

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10. An offline, standalone version could eventually also be created.


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basic concepts accessible to as many people as possible and to provide an enjoyable means of learning at the same time. In 2007 funding was obtained from De Montfort University’s Institute of Creative Technologies to support a research studentship directly related to the EARS II project. However, this part of Pedagogical EARS is not to exist in isolation.

Supporting access and appreciation: the intention/reception approach The second and third parts of Pedagogical EARS are worthy of their own articles in this journal. For the present, summaries will have to suffice. The I/R project commenced in 2001. Since then it has led to a Ph.D. dissertation and several articles, the most important of which are Weale (2006) and Landy (2006). Although the project has existed happily in isolation thus far, its future version is best integrated into this broader holistic context. The project has two goals, one of which is more pertinent to the current discussion. Firstly, it has investigated whether listeners with varied levels of experience with this musical corpus are receiving composers’ intentions during the listening experience of electroacoustic compositions. More important in this context is the project’s aim to gauge how accessible electroacoustic works are, in particular to inexperienced listeners. The hypothesis at the foundation of the project is that much electroacoustic music has become marginalized in today’s society for a number of reasons, and that this position is unmerited. The publications cited discuss the project goals and methods at length. For our current purposes a short summary will be provided that largely excludes the aspect of the intention/reception loop. Until now compositions have been chosen in which real-world sounds are heard or perceived. The reason for this restriction has to do with a long-held view of mine: people are more likely in general to find connections through personal experience with works that include (perceived) real-world sounds than with works that include only abstract sounds. Electroacoustic compositions have been chosen within the range of soundscape composition, that is, works involving overt references to source and context, to works in which most sources are not directly identifiable, such as acousmatic ones in which the aspect of not being able to see sound sources or causes is vital. Of course works have also been chosen in between these two extremes. From the so-called inexperienced listeners groups, including both non-musicians and musicians who have had little to no exposure to electroacoustic music, the I/R project researchers have yet to encounter a composition where, after one single listening, fewer than a majority of listeners wanted to hear the work or similar type of work again. In some cases, the percentage was over three-quarters of listeners. These results are far higher than the original expectations and provide ammunition for those who believe that electroacoustic music should be given more attention in schools and on our communications media. In terms of intention, listeners are provided the opportunity to listen to works three times, the first time (after which the question concerning the desire to hear such works again was posed) with absolutely no information at all; the second listening is preceded by giving listeners the title of the work or, if that was not relevant, one aspect of importance; before the third listening, all 78

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participants are provided the composer’s intention, information based on a previously received questionnaire and any other available information. Inexperienced listeners largely found being provided with this type of information very useful in terms of their finding new works accessible to them. Recently a different type of intention/reception project, involving contemporary dance, was discovered that took place in Australia (see Grove, Stevens and McKechnie 2005). Catherine Stevens of the MARCS Auditory Laboratories at the University of Western Sydney has been advising the project, providing input from a psychology point of view. Her empirical methodologies go well beyond the more traditional sociology-based questionnaire approach applied in the I/R project thus far. Through the addition of such methods to our project, the idea is to gain greater insight into the listening experience of people new to electroacoustic music. As with the understanding aspect, EARS II, the I/R approach will be developed to take cultural circumstances into account whenever possible so as to facilitate interest in local electroacoustic works. Chronologically, the I/R aspect of this tripartite project comes first, and continues as people gain more confidence with electroacoustic works.

Supporting creativity: Sound Organiser The third and final ‘doing’ part of Pedagogical EARS takes the form of an audio software package that is currently being developed, provisionally named Sound Organiser. The object here is that the package functions in a manner similar to computer games, something many people using it will already have experienced. The higher the level one reaches, the more skills, opportunities and artistic challenges will be introduced. To cite an example of how this works in context: some schools may not be able to offer children the opportunity to record sounds. Properly recording sounds is not something one encounters early on when learning how to organize sound. Therefore, recording is offered after many levels have already been achieved and, in fact, an alternative will be on offer in situations where recording is not possible. The approach is as user friendly as is possible. Unlike current software, there is no assumption that one can handle several windows at once, comprehend a Fourier graphic image, understand acoustic concepts or be literate in music notation when one uses Sound Organiser for the first time. DMU’s Centre of Excellence for Performance Arts (one of the United Kingdom’s Centres of Excellence in Teaching and Learning) originally funded the Sound Organiser project. A prototype of the initial level of Sound Organiser was developed by John Anderson and the author to demonstrate the direction of the project, and tested in schools around Leicester. Interest for the next, main phase of development has come from the Groupe de Recherches Musicales in Paris and the above-mentioned Institute of Creative Technologies. The Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing has offered to produce a Chinese version of Sound Organiser and take the package into Chinese schools for testing, while investigating whether the package is culturally adequately flexible. The Sound Organiser will be usable as a standalone program or within the context of networked (Internet) performance for more advanced users. The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS)

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Obviously, the three parts of this project will be harmonized in the form of a curriculum so that asp1ects learned on Pedagogical EARS can be heard in context in the I/R environment and applied creatively on the Sound Organiser platform. As more and more countries move towards including various forms of music technology onto their schools’ curricula, Pedagogical EARS will be ready for use by younger students. Sound organization is already part of their aural experience and they are extremely open to discovery at late primary/early secondary school age. By using an integrated, holistic system such as the one proposed here, scientific, IT and graphic concepts can be developed alongside electroacoustic musical ones.

Brief conclusion ‘Somebody had to do it’ is the answer to the query, ‘Why did you all embark on the EARS project in the first place?’ As stated at the beginning of this article, the field of electroacoustic music studies was discovered to be somewhat ill defined. Its related curricula are extremely diverse: some are more related to media, some to traditional music and some to directly vocational aspects. EARS, a project that might have taken place within a library science department, has become increasingly gratifying to those involved as the years have gone by. Its need has been proven through its usage. The field of electroacoustic music studies no longer seems like an odd concept. Now the time has come for people in the field to find holes in areas of scholarship through searching the EARS site. The MTI, for example, plans to develop a large-scale electroacoustic music analysis project in an attempt to discover which analytical tools are most appropriate in which circumstances. Alongside such high-level research, specialists must also ensure that the foundation of the field is solid, something that is hardly the case at present. Both EARS and Pedagogical EARS will represent a contribution to the creation of that foundation for interested people of all ages. Works Cited Battier, Marc (2003), ‘A Constructivist Approach to the Analysis of Electronic Music and Audio Art – Between Instruments and Faktura’. Organised Sound, 8: 3, pp. 249–255. Chion, Michel (1983), Guide des objets sonores: Pierre Schaeffer et la recherche musicale, Paris: Ina-GRM/Buchet-Chastel. Fields, Kenneth (2007), ‘Ontologies, Categories, Folksonomies: An organised language of sound’, Organised Sound, 12: 2, pp. 101–111. Grove, Robin, Stevens, Catherine and McKechnie, Shirley (eds) (2005), Thinking in Four Dimensions: Creativity and Cognition in Contemporary Dance, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press (e-book). Ina/GRM-Hyptique (2000), La musique électroacoustique, Paris: Éditions hyptique.net, CD-ROM. Landy, Leigh (1999), ‘Reviewing the Musicology of Electroacoustic Music’, Organised Sound, 4: 1, pp. 61–70. —— , (2006), ‘The Intention/Reception Project’, in Mary Simoni (ed.), Analytical Methods of Electroacoustic Music, New York: Routledge, pp. 29–53 + appendix on the volume’s DVD. —— (2007), Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 80

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Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1990), Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schaeffer, Pierre (1977), Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines, Paris: Seuil. Schaeffer, Pierre, Reibel, Guy and Ferreyra, Beatriz (1998 [1967]), Solfège de l’objet sonore, Paris: Ina-GRM (book with 3 CDs). Truax, Barry (1999), Handbook for Acoustic Ecology, CD-ROM edition, Burnaby, BC: Cambridge Street Publishing, CSR-CDR 9901. Weale, Rob (2006), ‘Discovering How Accessible Electroacoustic Music Can Be: The Intention/Reception Project’, Organised Sound, 11: 2, pp. 189–200.

Suggested citation Landy, L. (2007), ‘The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS),’ Journal of Music, Technology and Education 1: 1, pp. 69–81, doi: 10.1386/ jmte.1.1.69/1

Contributor details Leigh Landy is a composer and researcher in an area that he calls sound-based music. He has written five books, including the recent La musique des sons / The Music of Sounds (OMF/MINT Sorbonne, 2007) and Understanding the Art of Sound Organization (MIT Press, 2007) and is editor of the journal Organised Sound. He is director of the Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre at De Montfort University and co-founder/director of the Electroacoustic Music Studies Network. He is also Artistic Director of the company Idée Fixe – Sound and Movement Theatre. Contact: Leigh Landy, Music, Technology and Innovation Research Centre, De Montfort University, Clephan Building, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK. E-mail: [email protected]


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DubDubDub: Improvisation using the sounds of the World Wide Web Jonathan Savage Manchester Metropolitan University and Jason Butcher Egerton High School Abstract

Keywords

DubDubDub was an educational project conducted by staff at Egerton High School, Manchester Metropolitan University and UCan.tv. It introduced a new type of musical instrument to the classroom, the DubDubDub player, which developed pupils’ musical performance and improvisation skills by using the sonic environment of the Internet. Users of DubDubDub remixed the sonic content of the Internet, arranged sounds and prioritised them in real time to form new musical works. The name DubDubDub references the three ‘w’s of internet URLs: http://www. The musical improvisations generated by DubDubDub can be combined with other instruments, as illustrated during DubDubDub’s first performance at the Discourse, Power and Resistance conference (hosted by the University of Plymouth and Manchester Metropolitan University on 21 April 2006). This paper reflects on the development of DubDubDub and this first performance, providing an insight into how technologies can facilitate new models of musical performance and improvisation that may be beneficial for educational application.

musical performance improvisation world wide web Internet music technology new instrument design

Introduction Musical performance and improvisation with new technologies is an emerging focus area for music education. Researchers have investigated the range of applications of technology in the teaching of musical composition (Savage 2002 and 2003), but the use of new technologies to help pupils develop performance skill or technique in classroom settings is rare and less widely reported in the literature. There are some notable exceptions to this, however, particularly in the field of music education for pupils with special educational needs. Here, innovative products such as the Soundbeam1 have been used for many years. In contrast to the rather limited application within education contexts, contemporary musicians are developing, building and performing with new instruments on a regular basis. There is a yearly conference devoted to ‘new interfaces for musical expression’ (NIME). A review of the research evidence from conferences like this provides a useful backdrop the DubDubDub project. Blaine (2005) starts from the position that many young people today have a familiarity, and significant dexterity, with a range of potential performance interfaces. Her investigation includes the application of a number of


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games controllers as musical instruments. discussing how a user might learn a new instrument, she suggests that: Musical instruments must strike the right balance between challenge, frustration and boredom: devices that are too simple tend not to provide rich experiences, and devices that are too complex alienate the user before their richness can be extracted from them. In game design, these same principles or learnability are the fundamental principles of level design used to build an interest curve to engage players. (Blaine 2005: 28)

Oore (2005) picks up on a number of these points. Like Blaine, his first concern is with technique and how this is developed with a new instrument. His key question is ‘What does one do with a complex new digital instrument?’ (Oore 2005: 60). Like Blaine, he makes the obvious point that if an instrument was designed to be ‘easy to master’ it would quite possibly not be that interesting to play or to listen to once the initial novelty of the instrument had worn off. Secondly, he goes on to analyse a range of general concepts that, he suggests, might apply to the learning of a new instrument. These are couched under a statement that ‘the individuality of a musician is manifest in their learning process as much as in their performance’ (Oore 2005: 61). This may be true, it is not a lot of help for the educator, who has to presume that there will be a common sequence of learning for the majority of learners and prioritise knowledge accordingly. But the important point here for the DubDubDub project is that the process of learning to control a new instrument and explore its musical potential is a vital element in an overall learning process that cannot be short-circuited. Additionally, how a user learns a digital instrument is an important consideration in that instrument’s design. As he states in his concluding paragraphs: ‘The newinstrument performer must often be the initiator and driver of the exploration of the new instrument […] The true creative journey begins when the user’s own goals and style drive the learning, and when basic elements begin to be internalized and built upon’ (Oore 2005: 64). Buxton asks questions that should be central to educators’ thoughts when using new technologies to promote musical performance in the classroom. Why should musical performance be live? What difference does it make? For Buxton, musical performance is a compromise between the presentation of the scored and the improvisational where physical, emotional, gestural, active and reactive components all have a part to play. He draws up a continuum within which the visibility or invisibility of musical cause and effect outwork: I must confess, that I have the same emotional and intellectual response to watching someone huddle over a laptop as I did 20–30 years ago when they were huddled over a Revox tape recorder. The more invisible the gesture and the more tenuous my perception of the correlation between cause and effect, the less relevant it is to me that a performance is ‘live’. (Buxton 2005: 4)

As we shall see, a key informant of the DubDubDub project was to keep music live within the classroom. In an age when more and more pupils are

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huddled, staring at computer screens in their music lessons, DubDubDub sought to place an emphasis on live performance in small ensembles at the heart of music education for Key Stages 3 and 4. An introduction to the DubDubDub concept is well overdue.

The DubDubDub concept DubDubDub was a project conducted by staff at Egerton High School, Manchester Metropolitan University and UCan.tv. It introduced a new type of digital musical instrument to the classroom, the DubDubDub player, which developed pupils’ musical performance skills by drawing on the sonic environment of the Internet. Within this context, users of DubDubDub remixed the sonic content of the Internet, arranged sounds and prioritised them in real time to form new musical works. The name DubDubDub references the three ‘w’s of internet URLs http://www. The initial aim of the project was to develop an intuitive software instrument that would facilitate effective control of live Internet audio and then to use this tool in a performance setting. The first DubDubDub performance took place with a string quartet from the Royal Northern College of Music and a group of MCs and DJs drawn from an extended schools project held at Egerton High School at the Discourse, Power and Resistance conference (hosted by the University of Plymouth and Manchester Metropolitan University) on 21 April 2006.

Lyrics delivered by Impulse Adults fink they no bout lyf. (Lyric from UK TRAP delivered during the DubDubDub project by ‘Impulse’, a Year 10 student ‘reppin’ [representing] the L.T.C. (Lyrically Talented Crew).

Egerton High School is a special school for children statemented with social, emotional and behavioural difficulties in Trafford, Manchester. All pupils have been excluded from mainstream schools in the local authority and have significant gaps in their learning. The project leader and co-author of this paper was the Expressive Arts subject leader and ICT co-ordinator at the school. DubDubDub was born out of his own artistic practice and the opportunities that have arisen from working alongside pupils at the school. This work has embraced interdisciplinary projects that include music technology, film-making and critical studies. Many of the inspirational features of this work came from the pupils at the school themselves. For them, music, rapping, beats, DJ-ing and MC-ing are common features of a rich artistic sense of self-expression and a normal part of their day-to-day lives. Through working alongside these pupils as an artist, teacher and co-learner, the project leader developed an interest in how chance informed both his own and their work. In particular, the synergy between music, visual media and technology has been a source of inspiration. The freedom of expression that this synergy brings allowed pupils to make sense of the ubiquitous violence and problems that permeate their lives, sharing and communicating solutions through forming and performing in music-focused ‘crews’. These groups include DJs, MCs, beat programmers and producers. Lyric writing (the construction of ‘bars’) is prolific, their use of music hardware highly skilful, and pupils are

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adept at using a range of freeware, shareware and professional software tools for musical composition. The effective engagement of these disaffected pupils at Egerton High School through allowing them to direct their own learning, develop a high level of multimedia ICT skills and develop their passion for music and verbal expression, led to early Expressive Arts GCSE examination entry and successful results for pupils aged 14 and above. It was this richly talented and artistic, yet challenging, group of young people that provided the opportunity to develop the DubDubDub project from concept to reality.

The DubDubDub genesis DubDubDub was preceded by a number of other projects that have taken place at Egerton High School and Manchester Metropolitan University. These projects provide a useful insight into some of the main features of the DubDubDub work and will be briefly traced below. Found Sound was a CD-ROM song-writing resource produced by the Virtual Learning Environments Foundation for Yamaha UK in 2003. It contained video clips and guidance notes for teachers. Part of the resource highlighted the processes that StatikSoundSystem, a Drum and Bass outfit based in Bristol, used to build their individual tracks into songs. They created starting points with sounds sourced from their travels locally and internationally, recorded them onto Minidisc and took them into the studio to edit, loop, develop and blend with beats. This process inspired pupils at Egerton High School. They sourced videos from the Internet of the natural environment. The incidental sounds that these videos contained were recorded through the computer’s sound card as the video played. Pupils worked on the resulting files, collating, editing and processing them to form libraries of sound files. These sounds were sequenced with recordings of instruments or other samples to form compositions. The results ranged from videos of urban activities to videos of natural ambiences in isolated wilderness spaces. This type of study resulted in pupils becoming more aware of their own sonic environments. Subsequently, these have been recorded on their mobile phones and brought into school to convert and work with in a similar manner. Parallel to this activity was an investigation of the sound design process through a trial of the UCan.tv resource – Sound2Picture (Savage 2005a). This resource enabled pupils to develop their skills in the production of ambient loops, spot effects and other elements by experimenting with sounds and video clips. The resource contained a library of sounds and video clips and an interactive mixing environment for trying out combinations of sounds and visuals quickly and intuitively. Pupils used sounds they had created themselves rather than exclusively using the samples provided; examples of their work can be experienced at www.sound2picture.net. The process of completing a sound design to a video facilitated an improvement in the pupils’ software skills, sound manipulation and sequencing. It promoted sound design as an accessible way of composing that was not dependent on playing traditional musical instruments. The classroom within which these projects took place contained no MIDI keyboards or traditional musical instruments. However, the headsets pupils used comprised headphones and microphone, and this led to some pupils 86



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generating sounds with their voices and manipulating the waveforms to create new samples. The third project at Egerton High School that helped fine-tune the DubDubDub concept was part of a ‘Super Learning Week’ on recycling in 2005. The timetable at the school was collapsed for a week and pupils worked in vertical groupings (i.e. with a mixture of pupils from each of Years 7 to 11) looking at aspects of recycling across the curriculum. There was an interdisciplinary emphasis to activities. The Expressive Arts programme of study related the work that these artistically literate pupils had been doing to the concept of recycling by re-using audio from the Internet in a random and non-linear way to form compositions. Entitled ‘Recycled Audio Portraits’, the pupils were free to use the Internet as they wanted for an hour providing that they recorded all the incidental sounds that they discovered through the computer’s sound card. Pupils were informed that the resulting sounds would be used to create an individual aural portrait of their Internet usage. For this reason, it was suggested that they place an emphasis on visiting bookmarked sites so as to present as broad a reflection of themselves as possible. A complementary task involved recycling prose by cutting words out of poems and picking them out of a bag at random to form new syllabic expressions. Pasting words into new orders reinforced the recycling concept, and pupils were encouraged to record their new verbal pieces on the computer and mix them into their Internet inspired audio portraits. Many initial recordings drawn from the Internet were edited to fit the length of the recorded vocal track. This provided a simple way of delineate the length of the piece. All the finished tracks were mixed together by a pupil as an extension task and the result was played as part of a series of performances on the Friday afternoon that celebrated the work done during ‘Super Learning Week’. Critical studies during the week included an investigation of the Dada and Surrealist art movements, including art, games and films, and the cut-up technique used and developed by William S. Burroughs and others, as popular d by David Bowie. Finally, a couple of months prior to the commencement of the DubDubDub project, Urban Classic happened. ‘Urban Classic was a meeting of musical cultures that brought together some of the biggest names in UK black music with the BBC Concert Orchestra in a ground-breaking live event’ (BBC 2007). Urban Classic provided a relevant and contemporary context for the work that the pupils were about to engage in and led to a notable increase in their confidence. The collaborative elements of these pupils’ work with postgraduate students from the Royal Northern College of Music (in the final stage of the DubDubDub project) and the experiences of working together within a diverse musical ensemble were authenticated by the Grime scene approval and a BBC rubber stamp. Urban Classic was a timely and very happy coincidence for the DubDubDub project.

The DubDubDub project The aim of DubDubDub was to develop an intuitive performance instrument for pupils that would facilitate the control of Internet live audio and its recording and capture in real time. The initial presumption was that the interface would allow for everything to be in one place. To this end, an DubDubDub: Improvisation using the sounds of the World Wide Web

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interactive artist was employed to help design and make the software. The prototype was produced using Macromedia Flash. It allowed for Internet pages, along with embedded sounds, to be assigned to keys on the computer keyboard with each page opened or closed by pressing the appropriate key. The prototype that resulted from these early experiments was similar to Soundplant (http://soundplant.org), an excellent piece of freeware within which one can attach sound samples from a computer hard disk to a computer keyboard; however Soundplant does not allow the access of sounds contained within Internet pages. Pupils are Egerton High School tried out the initial DubDubDub interface. During this trial they commented that they had no problems using a standard Internet browser to open several web pages at a time on their desktop or keep them tabbed on the taskbar. But this method highlighted some problems. Although it was easy to navigate the open web pages, it was not always easy to find out which page was playing which audio element. The way in which the DubDubDub interface should empower a user’s engagement with Internet audio was of paramount importance. In this method, there were just too many mouse clicks getting in the way of creating mixes and performing with Internet audio. During subsequent searches of the Internet for new browsers, a web browser was discovered that allowed for the tiling of pages within one page. The Avant Browser (www.avantbrowser.com) was free to download and proved to be fast, stable, customizable and easy to use. Its use removed the need for the creation of a specific piece of DubDubDub software. For example eight web pages can be opened in any one Avant browser page each with different web searches. A very useful performance application of the Avant browser facilitated the collection and storage of sets of favourite pages, enabling the user to return to them quickly in a live performance setting. The browser also facilitated the mixing of sounds as each ‘tile’ of a web page has controls for volume and looping its sonic content. A second piece of software was combined with the Avant browser for the DubDubDub project. Google Video (http://video.google.co.uk/) is a dedicated video search engine that is content-safe to use with pupils. Controls at the bottom of each page include a pause/play button, a timeline cursor to locate or repeat sounds and a volume-control slider. By downloading the Google video player rather than just playing back videos within the Google video homepage, pupils were able to use these controls to facilitate a greater degree of versatility in terms of managing audio (as well as providing an enhanced quality of video playback). Some six videos could be open at once within the Avant browser, each with controls accessible and a thumbnail of the selected video playing. The combination of Google Video in the Avant browser effectively provided pupils with a sound-mixing environment. The sonic environment of the Internet, or specifically, in this case, the sounds attached to videos uploaded to Google Video, are manipulated and controlled by the DubDubDub player which is, itself, a conflation of existing technologies. Audio exists on the Internet for a variety of reasons and serves a number of functions. It may arise incidentally by way of an embellishment to a corporate website or it may have a specific function such as a radio station.

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Sounds of the natural environment exist on the Internet and it is certainly easier to discover the sounds of a tropical rain forest on the Internet than to organise the recording of these on location! There is a vast array of other sounds attached to web pages, many of which can be triggered through the control of a mouse. This interaction with a website can become part of the audio mix, e.g. the controlled output through clicking and triggering sounds with a mouse can feature alongside various embedded sounds that exist within the web page. The DubDubDub player worked on the principle that these sounds will resonate together and that it is the user’s skill, practice and sensibilities towards these sounds and processes that produce effective improvisations. This type of musical skill or understanding is not dissimilar to the sensibilities needed in a range of other musical activities with which pupils were familiar. Firstly, by learning to play vinyl decks, CD turntables or PCs as instruments pupils were able to develop a range of skills that transferred well to the DubDubDub project. As well as the DJing techniques that pupils were familiar with, spitting (free styling bars, rhymes and phrasing) over a spacious grime beat, typically around 135 beats per minute, also harnessed the sensitivity, listening and responding skills needed for effective DubDubDub use. For pupils, it was a natural progression to use these DJing and spitting techniques when using DubDubDub. At this stage, the DubDubDub player was a facility comprising a conflation of web technologies and a taught sensibility, a real-time interactive tool and concept. The final element was a straightforward way to capture the player’s decisions and record the outcomes for further use, analysis or editing. This tool became the UCan.tv sound recorder. It provided a way to record any audio that was passing through the computer’s sound card without having to change any computer audio settings (as you would have to do with a piece of freeware such as Audacity). Sound captured by the recorder can be edited and uploaded to a sequencer for future use. The UCan.tv sound recorder was the final part of the DubDubDub player.

The first DubDubDub performance Prior to the first performance with DubDubDub, a number of extended teaching sessions was held at Egerton High School. These included a number of students from the Manchester Metropolitan University’s PGCE in Music with Specialist Strings Teaching course (taught in collaboration with the Royal Northern College of Music). These students worked with the school pupils to develop their skills with the DubDubDub player. During these sessions, the MCs and DJs had shared their enthusiasm for music, demonstrated their skills and discussed ideas for the performance with the university students. As a new type of instrument, the musical material generated via DubDubDub can be combined with other instruments in a performance setting. It can sit with any existing style or genre of music, and this is what the authors aimed to illustrate during a performance at the Discourse, Power and Resistance conference hosted by the University of Plymouth and Manchester Metropolitan University on 21 April 2006. For the performance, the DubDubDub player was combined with a string quartet (formed by the PGCE students) and some MCs and DJs from


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Figure 1: The initial DubDubDub interface. an extended schools project being held at Egerton High School. Figure 1 shows the performance group. More pictures from the performance, a link to a video of the performance and other resources can be found at www.dub3.tv. The performance moved through three sections. The string quartet opened with a traditional performance of Pachelbel’s Canon. During the second stage of the performance, this was deconstructed as students moved away from their string instruments, one at a time, to add sounds and music using the DubDubDub interface on four Internet-enabled laptop computers. The resulting mix of sounds from the Internet formed the middle section of the performance. During the performance, one student searched for Google videos of violinists performing the same opening piece and this provided a simple conceptual link to the first section of the performance. The nature of the DubDubDub player means that each performance is uniquely different because the content relies on live Internet, in this case complete with its quirky connection status. The final movement of the performance involved the MCs and DJs from Egerton High School and the extended schools project. They introduced and blended in some contemporary grime beats using an MP3 player, a CD deck and a cross-fade mixer. Quite naturally they started spitting lyrics over the resulting sounds. Through these lyrics they introduced themselves, who they were reppin (representing) and established their style. Much of this was freestyling (a kind of vocal improvisation) combined with the inclusion of existing bars (sections of lyrics) that they had written to suit the occasion. During this final stage of the performance the string quartet/DubDubDub players gradually moved back to their string instruments from the laptops and improvised with the MCs and DJs. At the end of the performance all performers were contributing to the piece. The string players were improvising with the MCs and DJs using the wider sonics and harmonics of their instruments to complement the 90



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grime beats through emulating scratch sounds, sub-bass riffs, bass drum grooves and claps. The original Baroque piece had been transformed through a DubDubDub-inspired breakdown into a unique presentation of improvised music and expression.

Analysis of the DubDubDub project The performance was well received. Afterwards the audience (mainly consisting of academics and researchers) had the opportunity to direct questions to any of the team. These included questions about the processes and outcomes and significant interest in the delivery from the MCs and DJs. Several questions focused on the links between improvisation and freestyling. Here, the authors have drawn a range of conclusions from these questions and answers that have helped inform their own judgements about the DubDubDub project.

Artistic processes were central to DubDubDub Fundamentally, indeterminate art is concerned with artistic process. The DubDubDub project engaged students and pupils in an indeterminate process of musical performance, albeit with a range of pre-established reference points that informed their decision-making process (e.g. bookmarks of Internet sites, pre-written lyrical content and musical beats, etc). We were pleased to note that both groups of young people were not afraid to explore the improvisation al process as an integral element of the musical performance. More widely, many of them were able to incorporate ideas about improvisatory practices drawn from a range of other work that they had recently completed. For the students from Manchester Metropolitan University, this included elements of improvisation pedagogy drawn from their Dalcroze studies, particularly principles from eurhythmics classes. For the Egerton High School pupils, the projects discussed above placed the DubDubDub project in a wider context of multimedia work centred on preparations for a GCSE in Expressive Arts (which pupils undertake in Year 9).

Music and the visual image During the DubDubDub performance the visual output from each of the four laptop screens was mixed and displayed for the audience on a large screen. Figure 2 shows how the screen gave the audience the opportunity to see how the DubDubDub player was being used in real time. Although music was the main focus of the DubDubDub performance, having a screen that presented the decisions about which websites the DubDubDub players decided to visit created some transparency for the audience and demystified the sources of sounds. In Buxton’s terms (Buxton 2005: 5) it provided the audience with a visible side to musical cause and effect. Through discussion after the performance, it was apparent that it enriched the audience’s appreciation of the skills and control of the sounds that the players were manipulating. This is equivalent to watching string players’ physical manipulation of their instruments. Using the DubDubDub player is, by nature, an audio and visual experience. It allows the user to cut up culture, rearrange and subvert images, video and sounds live from the Internet to create new and unique audio or visual DubDubDub: Improvisation using the sounds of the World Wide Web

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Figure 2: The Avant browser. ‘instances’. Whether the user is dealing with sonic or visual elements, or both, the DubDubDub player facilitates artistic expression through the sonic and visual environment of the Internet, honing an appreciation of the role of chance in musical performance.

Democratising performance skills The DubDubDub player can be used by anyone so long as they have access to a computer, an Internet connection and some speakers or headphones. All actions are triggered through a traditional mouse and QWERTY keyboard. The skills needed to perform with DubDubDub are similar to those generic musical skills that all improvising musicians should have, i.e. the ability to listen, to respond, to select and modify, to take the lead on occasions or sit back, to work collaboratively or with a degree of independence, etc. The interface of the DubDubDub instrument is familiar and deliberately simple. As such, it is easily accessible and allows the user to get involved easily in the process of musical performance. Within the educational context, a networked computer suite is an ideal platform for a DubDubDub performance. From any Internet enabled computer, a pupil is able to apply their natural creative ability to creating music, by finding sounds attached to web pages, managing, mixing and recording them to form compositions and document their processes using screen-capture tools. As the DubDubDub performance demonstrated, music created in this way sits alongside traditional musical instruments very comfortably.

Musical collages and the immediacy of artistic expression DubDubDub allows users to combine the sounds attached to various Internet sites in a way that creates very powerful musical collages. Clear comparisons can be made to a number contemporary works, e.g. John Cage’s Roaratorio. This work, constructed by Cage in 1979, would be an 92



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excellent resource to illustrate the range of musical outcomes one could construct through the interface between traditional instruments and new technologies. Consisting of three main elements, Roaratorio combines a narrated poem with traditional Irish musicians and over 4000 different recorded sounds on tape. It is important to remember that Cage produced Roaratorio without the benefits of modern sampling techniques. His statement that ‘I never imagine anything until I experience it’ is extremely relevant in this context (Cage 2007). It is this sensibility to the spontaneous and immediate working with sound that was central to the DubDubDub performance. It was pleasing to note that this concept, complete with its technological, visual and musical dimensions, promoted the musical understanding and appreciation of two very diverse groups of young people. Not only that, but it brought them together to share a common musical discourse which, we believe, it would have been hard to imagine through any other means.

Conclusion We [the NIME community] are in a unique position to raise the bar as to the quality and range of experiences, devices, and the expressive capabilities they inspire, particularly as it relates to music creation and education. (Blaine 2005: 32)

Many contemporary musicians and artists are exploring the potential of new technologies as musical performance tools. In what is a very gradual, but well documented, process, these new technologies are beginning to be applied and explored within educational contexts in the United Kingdom (Savage 2005b, Savage 2007). This is not without its difficulties. Many teachers are inherently conservative in their views and reluctant to embrace change: Many music teachers are reluctant to use ICT extensively in their teaching. It may be for a number of reasons: lack of confidence in their own ICT capabilities; fear that their students know more than they do; lack of awareness of the potential benefits of using ICT; concerns that technology-based music may take over from more traditional approaches. (Ashworth 2007: 3)

Blaine’s encouragement (2005: 32) to us is to reconceptualise the notion of a musical instrument for the 21st century. Associated with this change in mindset is the opportunity to reanalyse the process of musical performance and improvisation. There is an opportunity to get beyond the stereotypical notions of technique, interpretation and re-creation as being central to instrumental performance and use new, technological innovations in such as way as to support the development of generic, accessible and intuitive musical performance skills. To do this, Blaine emphasises that designers of these new instruments will need to consider a range of issues, including: • •

How gestures can be mapped to musical outputs Creating more expressive controllers


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Meta, Hyper & Cyber-instruments

Infra-Instruments

Rich interactive capability

Constrained interactive repertoire

Detailed performance measurement

Few sensors or few gestural measurements

Engendering complex music

Engender relatively simple music

Expressivity and virtuosity

Restricted in terms of virtuosity and expressivity

Table 1: Categorisations of new instruments. (after Bowers & Archer 2005, p.6)

• • •

Integrating multiple combinations of sensors Developing musical learning systems alongside new instruments Adding levels of engagement with new musical instruments that lead to expert performance (Blaine 2005: 32).

DubDubDub is an example of some of these processes (although the concept of a linear progression of instrumental use from beginner to expert performer seems overly simplistic). It falls within what Bowers and Archer (2005: 6) have called an ‘infra-instrument’. In their useful summary of meta-, hyper- and cyber-instruments a number of themes are identified that richly contrast with their notion of an infra-instrument’ (Table 1). Despite these apparent reversals of instrument design, they argue that infra-instruments are nonetheless ‘aesthetically engaging and technically intriguing’ (Bowers and Archer 2005: 6) and worthy of further study, which they go on to do in some detail. Their findings have some relevance to our discussion here, particularly that infra-instruments are evaluated best within the context of a ‘performance setting’: ‘Handling an assembly of stuff is often facilitated by an infra-instrument designing philosophy, where each device plays its part in a manageable hybrid environment [...] The whole performance setting becomes the unit of analysis, design and evaluation, not just a single “new interface for musical expression”’ (Bowers and Archer 2005: 6). This reflects a recent theme in Bowers’s work, that of ‘performance ecology’. This has a rich resonance for those involved in formal, classroom-based music education. By ‘performance ecology’, Bowers (2003) means a closer analysis of the places for practical action and its display to others (performers or audience). Examples include desktop performance ecologies (or even classroom performance ecologies) that may: • •

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Be differentiated (a place for the computational, for the acoustical and for other tools) Be integrated in a variety of ways



•

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Allow opportunities for juxtapositions and for legible, embodied conduct (how performers look for, reach for, touch, communicate in non-verbal ways, etc.).

This notion of ‘performance ecology’ reminds us that all musical interactions are contextualised. Regardless of whether they are technological in the digital sense, traditional in the musical sense, or a juxtaposition of the two, musical interactions between young people need to be understood in the context of a wider performance ecology. DubDubDub presented a new mode of artistic expression to a group of postgraduate students and school pupils. In many senses it is character d by infrainstrument design: it was based on few gestural movements; it was constrained in terms of operability; it was deliberately simple to use and based on pre-existent web-based technologies. Did it produce or engender simple music? That is a judgement to be made by the listener. Readers of this article can make their own judgement by viewing and listening to the performance hosted on Google Video2 (UCan.tv 2007). Either way, DubDubDub may be one tool that the contemporary music educator can use to help develop young people’s musical performance and improvisation skills. Works cited Ashworth, D. (2007), Electrifying Music: A guide to using ICT in music education, London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation. BBC (2007), www.bbc.co.uk/1xtra/events/urbanclassic/features/event.shtml Accessed July 2007. Blaine, T. (2005), ‘The Convergence of Alternate Controllers and Musical Interfaces in Interactive Entertainment’, Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on New Interfaces for Music Expression, Vancouver, BC. Bowers, J. (2003), ‘Improvisationing Machines’, Advanced Research in Aesthetics in the Digital Arts, 4, http://www.ariada.uea.ac.uk/ariadatexts/ariada4/ Accessed 10 July 2007. Bowers, J. and Archer, P. (2005), ‘Not Hyper, Not Meta, Not Cyber but InfraInstruments’, Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on New Interfaces for Music Expression, Vancouver, BC. Buxton, B. (2005), ‘Causality and Striking the Right Note’, Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on New Interfaces for Music Expression, Vancouver, BC. Cage, J. (2007), ‘Roaratorio: An Irish Circus on Finnegan’s Wake, for voice, tape and Irish musicians’, www.answers.com/topic/roaratorio-an-irish-circus-onfinnegan-s-wake-for-voice-tape-irish-musicians?cat=entertainment Accessed 4 July 2007. Oore, S. (2005), ‘Learning Advanced Skills on New Instruments’, Proceedings of the 2005 International Conference on New Interfaces for Music Expression, Vancouver, BC. Savage, J. (2002), ‘Electroacoustic Composition: Practical models of composition with new technologies’, Journal of the Sonic Arts Network, 14, pp. 8–13. —— (2003), ‘Informal Approaches to the Development of Young People’s Composition Skills’, Music Education Research 5: 1, pp. 81–85. —— (2005a), ‘Developing Compositional Pedagogies from the Sound Designer’s World’, Music Education Research, 7: 3, pp. 331–48.


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2. The DubDubDub Performance can be accessed at http://video.google.co. uk/videoplay?docid=2 3568487482597859 82&q=dubdubdub&to tal=4&start=0&num =10&so=0&type=sea rch&plindex=0.


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—— (2005b), ‘Working Towards a Theory for Music Technologies in the Classroom: How pupils engage with and organise sounds with new technologies’, British Journal of Music Education, 22: 2, pp. 167–80. —— (2007), ‘Reconstructing Music Education through ICT’. Research in Education.

Acknowledgement This project was funded by the Bernarr Rainbow Awards for Music Teachers and supported by UCan.tv (www.ucan.tv).

Suggested citation Savage, J. and Butcher J. (2007), ‘DubDubDub: Improvisation using the sounds of the World Wide Web,’ Journal of Music, Technology and Education 1: 1, pp. 83–96, doi: 10.1386/ jmte.1.1.83/1

Contributor details Jonathan Savage is a Senior Lecturer in Music Education at the Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University. His main research interests lie in the field of developing innovative uses of new technologies within the music curriculum. He is Managing Director of UCan.tv, a not-for-profit company that produces engaging educational software and hardware including Sound2Game (www.sound2game.net) and Hand2Hand (www.hand2hand.co.uk). Free moodle courses are available at www.ucan.me.uk. Contact: Dr Jonathan Savage, Institute of Education, Manchester Metropolitan University, 799 Wilmslow Road, Didsbury, Manchester, M20 2RR, UK.

E-mail: [email protected] Jason Butcher is a deputy head teacher and Head of Expressive Arts at Egerton High School in Trafford, Manchester. As well as over twenty years’ experience of managing creative and educational projects with funding from a broad range of organ s, he has a range of pedagogical, technological, creative and design skills and has a strong interest communication, teaching and learning in ways that build on pupils’ latent interests in new media.

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Volume 1 Number 1 – 2008 3–5

Editorial David Collins Articles

7–21

The discipline that never was: current developments in music technology in higher education in Britain Carola Boehm

23–35

Crossing borders: issues in music technology education Giselle M. d. S. Ferreira

37–55

Reframing creativity and technology: promoting pedagogic change in music education Pamela Burnard

57–67

Problem solving with learning technology in the music studio Andrew King and Paul Vickers

69–81

The ElectroAcoustic Resource Site (EARS) Leigh Landy

83–96

DubDubDub: Improvisation using the sounds of the World Wide Web Jonathan Savage and Jason Butcher

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