MUE6696: Technology Assisted Music Learning, Spring 2019

This week's blog post comes a bit earlier than the rest. I usually write these on Sunday, but this week, I am writing this on Friday because I am out of town for the weekend.  Our university's orchestra was invited to perform in Washington, D.C. as part of the Capital Orchestra Festival , hosted by Music Celebrations International . Due to that, I am glad that this week's work load was lesser than that of the previous modules. I am also glad of that because I got very sick Monday evening, which kept me home on Tuesday and Wednesday. This week's topic was instructional design. This was also the subject of a course here in the graduate program, and it was nice to see a connection between that course and this one, especially in our readings in which Bauer (2014) discussed backward design. In the Instructional Design course, the big project was to design a unit using backward design, and I used that to plan the first half of this semester for my concert band, which is go...

This week, our topic was Responding to Music with Technology. There are many ways in which we can use technology as a means of responding to music. In today's world, practically all students and teachers alike have a media device that can play music. Most are probably using their smartphones and using apps such as  Spotify or  YouTube , which now has  its own dedicated music app. Like many other music apps, Spotify presents a great way to share music, especially music that we are working on in our classes. If there is a specific version of a piece of music that I would want my students to listen to, I could use one of these apps and share that with them. Spotify, however, is limited in its music selection. For example, with our project this week, I would have liked to have found the exact arrangements of the pieces we are performing, but none appeared in my search. I got the original orchestral versions, which is great, but with Carmen, for example, the arrangement...

This week's topic was performing music with technology. Although that was the topic, it did not seem like it was the focus. The chapter from our readings this week was on performing music with technology, but my reasoning for feeling as if that was not the focus was because the bulk of this week's work was on remixing sound. In this week's readings, Bauer (2014) touched on a number of topics in regard to performing music with technology, providing a number of useful tools in helping with teaching performing music. One of which was SmartMusic , which I have previously spoken about. Another was digital audio and video from sources such as online music services, like  iTunes or Spotify , and online video services, like YouTube . Digital audio and video was in the section on Modeling, wherein students can use these resources at home to hear and see how things should be played or done. These of course can also be used in the classroom. From personal experience, I have been us...

This week's module focused on creating music with technology, with a focus on composing music. Every module, I start by doing the assigned readings, which of course is the recommended sequence of assigned work for each week. The readings discussed what we would explore further through  Lynda.com  and  Soundtrap : digital audio and composition. Lynda provided a long, in depth look at various audio cables, connectors, speakers, microphones, analog and digital audio, MIDI (musical instrument digital interface), and digital audio workstations (DAWs). There was a lot of great information there, a lot of which will be beneficial for myself as I want to start recording our concerts this semester. We have recorded concerts in the past, but in only one of two ways: a video camera or an audio recorder. What I want to do is to be able to record our performances with high quality audio and video (as you can see from the YouTube video below, it has good audio, but no actual v...

This week, one of the big topics was improvisation in both our readings and in our discussion post. Improvisation is an interesting subject in music education as there are teachers who are big proponents of it, but there are even more teachers who neglect it. In both cases, it comes down to their experience with improvisation, and even more so, their experience with jazz, as in most public school settings, and even in some colleges, jazz is viewed as the only place for improvisation to happen. Bauer (2014) points out that improvisation is found "in many vernacular musics (rock, pop, folk), jazz, musics of non-Western cultures, and historically in some Western art musics, such as the cadenzas of concertos" (p. 51). Many of us forget or just do not realize that improvisation is utilized in these other musics and a big part of that comes down to what we were taught in our own educational upbringings. For several music educators, either a change in their curriculum or a widening ...

This was my first time using Noteflight, and much like MuseScore, this is a great, free source for music composition and arranging. Although the paid version may offer some extra features, for a free version, this does a great job. From my time working on the above project, I already like this better than Finale Notepad, a free version of Finale but much more limited than what you can do with this free version of Noteflight. One example, you cannot put rehearsal marks in Finale Notepad. Although the piece for this project did not have any rehearsal marks, the ability to add them is there. The only real issue I had in my time using Noteflight for this project was when entering the lyrics. There are five instances when a word lands on a sustained note that is tied to another note. Typing the word and pressing the dash key will indicate that the word is supposed to be held all the way through, but the dash did not always correctly indicate that. For example, the very last lyric comes...