Hi. Welcome to Kultursaal, sorry it's so cold, but you're here and that's fantastic, so stay bundled up.
So for our next panel, we actually don't quite know what it's called yet, we're still working on that.
The way it's printed in the program is: Reinventing Music Education using Technology.
And some documents that I have, have an earlier title that I think we were also throwing around called:
New Approaches to Music Education using Technology. I think it's really interesting to think about the differences
between those two names, like, "Reinventing" implies that something is old or broken, and in need of fixing.
And "New Approaches" sounds sort of optimistic and sunny. So I'd like to go into this discussion with both possible
and see where we end up - maybe we end up picking one at the end, or throwing them both out.
I'm gonna introduce everybody briefly. Ethan Hein is a doctoral fellow in Music Education at NYU
and a professor of Music Technology at NYU in Montclaire State University,
sorry, I forget we're not in that neighborhood. Ethan works for the NYU Music Experience Design Lab
designing interfaces for music learning and expression.
Melissa Uye-Parker is a British songwriter, performer and educator based in London,
recently completed a masters in Psychology of Education at University College and is working on a mentoring program
to support technology integration in music classrooms.
At the end is Jack Schaedler, software developer at Ableton who spent a number of years working on Live and is now
working on a micro-site for learning music fundamentals. Full disclosure, Jack and I are the team working on that
so a lot of what we're gonna talk about today is stuff that we talk about at work all the time instead of working,
but this is not a plug for our project, if anything it's about thinking about all of our tensions around this project
by talking to people like you who actually know how music education works.
Jack's personal work explores the use of interactive media to explain difficult concepts like Forex Analysis,
Handwriting Recognition and now Music Theory.
Good. That's them, my name is Dennis Desantis. I wanna start with...
looking into a bunch of recent writing that's happened in journalism, particularly in the New York Times
they've been running a series of articles about Silicon Valley and its influence on the classroom.
And there's a kind of amazing quote from a recent article which I'd like to throw out and we can discuss:
"The involvement by some of the wealthiest and most influential titans of the 21st century
amounts to a singular experiment in education, with millions of students serving as a de facto beta-testers
for their ideas. Some tech leaders believe that applying an engineering mindset can improve just about any system
and that their business acumen qualifies them to rethink American education."
Thoughts about these risks?
I think that has the same risk as blindly following research. So if...
And that there are loads of good things that happen in research, as we all know, but if you just take that
and isolate it and chuck it onto a classroom without actually considering any of the experience that that teacher holds
and all of these ideas that have been fed through education, that's what's dangerous, and it's not having the mindset
to integrate, and I think fixers and panaceas being thrown, that's the difficulty, really.
To my mind the central truth of education is, it's complicated. It's social, and so you've got
all the political, racial, gender, class, all the identities of all the individual humans in the room
and yeah, I would be suspicious of any kind of theory of education or any kind of policy proposal
that tries to reduce that complexity, no matter how well-intentioned it is.
And by the same token, I feel like small and concrete fixes, that's the kind of stuff that I'm interested in. And I...
before we started, you were expressing a lot of concern, like, oh my God, by putting up this learning music website,
even though we're not specialists in education are we gonna harm a generation of people
trying to learn music? And I'm saying, no, you just put a tool into the world, like people can use it or not.
What I like about it is it's not a gigantic umbrella solution, it's just another thing in the kit.
Could you imagine a comparably sized tool that would do harm?
Oh God, I sort of don't want to. - I think it's anything that kind of removes
the teacher's autonomy, you know, if you give them... a device in order to be lazy, if you say,
stick the kid in this screen and this program will do all the work for you,
and you remove any of the teacher's presence, and I think that's what's damaging because
as you were saying, all that kind of social noise in the classroom, it's not being accounted for and that's
sort of the expertise the teacher has knowing every single child and how they respond and things so...
yeah, I think just to sort of eliminate the teacher, I think that's probably quite dangerous.
Along with that there's some idea that you can assess things, and I think the danger I see with this
influence from business is finding what you want to assess and then optimizing that particular measurement.
There's a nice aphorism that's like, we don't know how to measure what we care about
so we care about what we can measure, and I think that influence would be incredibly
damaging in an educational environment, would be my expectation.
There's a lot of assessment already in classrooms though, right? Like, we have to give the kids a grade and...
Victoria Armstrong was talking earlier about this doesn't necessarily come from a business mindset
but it's very much kind of using the same methodology.
Yeah, the term is like, "Scientism", right, the idea that if it's quantitative it must be more valid...
which is a bummer because learning, like anything social, it's really hard to quantify it in a meaningful way.
We as a society don't even totally agree on what we're trying to accomplish with schools in the first place,
we can't really agree on what the goals even are, so trying to sort of hang a simple quantitative
measurement system on top of that fundamental set of disagreements is not really a recipe for success.
One thing that also comes to mind about technology is that it makes it very easy to...
export western ideas of education into classrooms, and I'd be interested on what your thoughts are
about the implications for that, both and bad, in terms of music education.
So I wanna say, even though I am a teacher I think that the most meaningful music education
right now is happening outside of classrooms. For certain kinds of music - classical music and jazz -
the formal training is very important, but for all of the music that we in this room mostly like and make...
I don't about you guys but I learned all my production sitting in front of my computer in my house, right.
Presumably you guys mostly learned that way as well?
And it's interesting that you guys have talked about your trepidation about getting involved in education...
my buddy Adam Bell wrote a doctoral thesis about how DAWs themselves are the de facto music teachers
for everybody working in any kind of popular electronic idiom: Rock, Country, people learn that stuff
by just sitting in front of the computer and figuring it out, so in a funny way, the people who made all the presets
and all the plugins... are the people who trained a generation of audio engineers,
the people who designed the affordances and the editing windows
are the people who trained a generation of composers and songwriters.
So in a way, you guys have been doing music education for ten years.
Oops.
It seems like if that's the case then there's also a lot of room to get things wrong?
You make choices about culture, you make choices about genre that are informed maybe without
even thinking about their educational potential.
In terms of... answering that and sort of going back to slightly as well, in terms of imposing western ideals...
and I think we spoke before about the one laptop per child, the fact that this initiative wasn't really supported enough.
Sort of doing a bit of reading around that, I think there was support there but it's almost...
you sort of leave it, you give it in your perspective, and then you leave it for whoever to take up.
And I think that there needs to be that space to develop themselves, no matter what the situation is,
there needs to be enough time to reflect, to kind of critically think, what am I doing here,
and then I think their cultural ideas and norms can be imposed on whatever activity,
whether it's a piece of technology or a program, so I just think it's... I said before but it's really important
to allow autonomy... and promote it and encourage it. - Autonomy for an individual student?
No, actually for the practitioner, and hopefully they'll then impart that as well. But yeah, I just think...
for them to take some ownership and really understand what it is they're doing so it's meaningful,
and then I think problems of imposing other cultures maybe don't come into it quite as much,
because you've sort of given that responsibility.
Would an approach to this be to create very general-purpose tools,
this came up in the discussion about Web Audio the other day, the idea that do these environments for working
suggest ways of working? I'd be interested to... Is it possible for them not to? If you look at something like...
a piece of notation software or a blank piece of staff paper, it's already telling you a ton of information about
what you're allowed to do.
I was having an interesting conversation with Yotam Mann who's the author of this
library of which sits on top of Web Audio called Tone.js, we were talking about the affordance that he builds into
a software to make sure that he doesn't constrain musical possibilities
and he was mentioning that he has a background, or he took a class, where they looked at
different computer music languages, then listened to the kind of music that comes out of these
and then critically discussed what is baked into these languages that leads to the kind of music that comes out.
And I think maybe generally there's this notion that technical people are, I don't want to say a bit lazy,
but maybe don't engage at more of a superficial level with the disciplines they might be writing software to
support the people or the artist or something like this. I think it's a big problem,
I think the first grab that you can make when you're writing a piece of software is oftentimes not
the most open or inclusive...
incarnation of what you're trying to make.
You're never gonna be able to build a piece of software that's free from cultural biases and assumptions.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing. The Ableton Learning Music website
has a very strong cultural identity to it, it puts hip-hop and EDM and related pop styles very much
at the center, and it also makes some pretty bold gestures towards, you know, like, in the Advanced section
you can map 19-tone equal temperament onto your Qwerty keyboard and play that, which is delightful.
and that's like a pretty strong set of political statements about music and what music is valid,
and I think that's great because that's not the usual set of statements that you encounter
in music education about what's valid and legitimate. So, yeah, if everything in the entire world
had this sort of hegemonic set of values that would be a bummer but
I was really glad to see you guys putting A Tribe Called Quest into a fundamental
music theory learning resource, that's like a really welcome change of pace for me.
Welcome because... - Because it's not Beethoven, like it's...
yeah, we're getting outside the western cannon at last.
- But you could put Beethoven into these kinds of structures, right?
Oh, and they have, and they do. That's usually what's there.
So this is a natural segway to me wanting to quote that you send when we were exchanging some emails.
And you sent this really interesting quote that I want to poke at a little bit because I think there's something there
that is really elegant but also some things that push me in funny ways.
So Ethan wrote: "If we're using computers to deliver 19th century music pedagogy, as many currently are,
the results won't be any better than delivering that material via chalkboard.
And so my initial reaction to that was like, Hmm, OK, but then I thought about all the ways that
technology helped me a hundred years ago when I was in music school, and it was like,
for those of you who went to music school, you have to do all this 4-part choral writing, and I'm a crappy piano player,
so putting it into sequencers I could mute things and listen, Oh there's the Parallel Fifth, now I hear it,
and this was technology in service of 19th century music, well, 18th century music practice, I guess.
So I guess... OK, I'm gonna leave it at that, that was a statement, not a question, but... your turn.
So, those of you who've not gone to music school may not know how this works but...
everybody has to take music theory, and what they mean by that is like...
tonal practices of aristocratic western Europe between 1700 and 1900
which, if you're coming from where I come from and where most of you guys come from
seems like a weird and esoteric thing to require everybody to learn given that everybody doesn't also
learn, you know, the Blue Scale or the drums. It seems like an oddly specific thing to make everyone learn.
I don't think there's any harm in learning how to do chorals, I think it would make a lovely elective
but requiring everyone to do it regardless of where they're headed in life as a musician seems kind of perverse.
My point though is that technology really helped me with 19th century practice.
No question about that, but if the only thing you're doing is, OK, now we're gonna be doing the western cannon in the
piano roll instead of on staff paper, that's not a huge advance, it makes it easier, but it doesn't...
it doesn't liberate the possibilities of that tool, of the piano roll.
I'm probably just sort of echoing Dennis here, but I remember
in music school, and it was a very difference experience because it was popular music, but I still had this shock
of having to notate and compose in notations for the first ever time, and it allowed me... which I thought at the time
I think this was quite destructive language but it allowed me to cheat and blag my way through,
I was in constant Imposter Syndrome the whole way through because I was cheating but I was, you know...
what it actually allowed me to do, it was Sibelius, but it might as well have just been piano roll and I would...
look at those two acts very differently, if someone was gonna compose in piano roll, click in and make mistakes
and going through this trial and error process, I think I'd have a lighter, even myself back then,
I'd have more of a forgiving outlook rather than somebody cheating their way through Sibelius,
but in fact it was just technology that afforded me to be able to express myself
and write down what was in my head.
I think we'll get to this more later, Jack, but this is... I don't wanna put words in your mouth
but it feels to me from knowing you that this is a lot of your work, in terms of your solo... your side projects,
the things that you do are about taking a discipline and making it touchable, right?
Yeah, I would maybe consider it to be something like animating old teaching materials.
So for example, some of the things I've done is like taking sections of a textbook from the 1980s
and you can feel the authors wishing there was something more dynamic and more alive there, and then they maybe...
attempt to convey this by writing lots of texts and paragraphs, but imagine this, this this...
and then I just kind of come in as a very humble servant of this material and say, well let me just attempt
to animate that for you using the skills that I have and the tools I have available to me now
in this dynamic medium of the computer. So I think that there's
a lot to be said for technology being used to just kind of like reanimate and blow a little light into some of this stuff.
I speak to whether or not it makes sense for people to be learning Bach chorals but I think that
there are lots of technologists that would be interested in making that more, at least more exciting to people,
a bit more exploratory.
I assign all my music tech students to do the interactives on your Digital Signal Theory site.
He has a wonderful Digital Theory tutorial, and I... I don't ask them to read any of the texts
or try to wrap their head around the math, I say, just go and fiddle with the sliders,
and see how changing the amplitude of the different sine waves changes the overall shape of the squiggle.
You're gonna get such a stronger feeling for how sound works doing that than you can get from a thousand pages
of reading about it in English. For sure technology makes that kind of mathematical and technical conceptual matter
way easier.
I just realized that we're using this word "Technology" in this very specific way, we're talking about
computers with screens basically. And I had this question that I sent you guys ahead of time about
what has technology enabled in the music classroom and what has it taken away?
It occurs to me that you could've asked this question 200 years ago about pianos, right? I mean it's all technology
in some sense, but I wanna ask this question anyway, especially the "taken away" part,
what do you feel is now missing in your technologically rich teaching environments?
I think the main thing that we need to... One of my biggest challenges when I teach is
just making it more interactive, so there are certain parts and certain units that I can bring children out of, you know,
the box, really, but then, for a lot of stuff, I do feel that their... for the most amount of time,
they're sort of strapped to the screen. So for me it takes that sort of, and that's becoming easier
with things like Link, but then it's a constant troubleshoot to make sure we can get that up really quickly and we've got
a way to have 4 headphones that may involve us getting another mixer, so I just think...
And I'm prepared to do that because I'm focused, and I'm committed to it, not everybody wants to
scratch their head till 11 at night wondering how they're gonna make this happen the next day.
So for me, I just think the performance element is more difficult in an everyday classroom environment.
To my mind all the music technology doesn't take anything away because the choice is not, you know,
if you're some freshman in music school and you wanna write something for a string quartet
usually the choice is not: Shall I have a live string quartet play this, or shall I have it be fake strings and Sibelius.
No, the choice is fake strings and Sibelius or nothing. And certainly when they get out of music school
it's absolutely fake strings or nothing. So to me, it just enables a lot of stuff that's not possible
or was very difficult before. I see a lot of comparisons in the academic world between how we teach English
and how we traditionally teach music, and in music you're supposed to learn a lot of stuff
before you get to creativity, if you ever get to creativity. Whereas in English, you start writing stories in first grade.
Like creative, personal, expressive writing, that's how people learn to write now,
and I feel like the wonderful thing about making music in the computer is that it lowers the technical barriers
to the point where you can teach music the same way, kids can make pretty good sounding, original music
starting, I mean, my kids have been messing around with DAWs since they were 2.
And, yeah, that is empowering. - How's their music?
Chaotic. - You say that like it's a bad thing.
No, it's tremendous, they just have this enormous sense of possibility
that I certainly didn't have when I was a young kid.
I have a question for both of you, as a software person I spend a lot of time thinking about the fact that
the computer is largely interesting because it's universal and because and underneath this screen
I can change it to be a piano or a drum-pad or... it's a universal machine, the possibilities are endless
but there's always in the end the screen, and I worry a lot now, especially in the context of a music classroom,
the more tools that I make like this, I'm making a statement about removing the need for physicality
when it comes to making music, so bashing on this glass screen is not maybe...
the most relevant music making activity, so I wonder about this influence, and I can imagine similarly like,
if someone told me that you could do visual art completely in the computer, I think that's great,
but there's also a lot to be learned from using ink on a piece of paper, there's a different feel
there's a different dynamic to that. I just wonder how much I should be worried about being a software person
getting in on your turf when things like physicality are very important.
I think you can have that physicality, that's something that people sort of cry out for.
I think there was so much work around the Xbox Kinect and having all of this gesture-based movement that...
I think I got interested in far too late, and nothing would work so I downloaded CineApp
and it worked and it was brilliant, and then I'd update my software and it wouldn't work anymore,
and there was no support. And it seemed like there was this awesome movement that allowed kids to,
as I was just saying, get out of the box and you could talk, I mean if you could talk about changing a parameter...
you know, half of the kids don't really see how this with a mouse is gonna be expressionate
because that's a concept that they might not get instantly. They might hear it, feel it, but they might not.
But if you can do it with your hand if and you can make it into a game, and do it with your whole body
then I think that's really powerful. So for me, it's not moving away from the software but you're bringing it out...
from behind the screen.
Yeah, hopefully it's not a question of the computer or the physical instrument, ideally it's gonna be both.
For sure, Ableton Live has turned out to be one of the best things that's ever happened to me in my life
as a teacher of the guitar because...
you know, everyone hates the metronome, so I'm like, great, forget the metronome,
here's a folder full of break-beats that you can play at any tempo you want, practice over those,
'cause then you actually learn to feel, not just to correct time.
Oh, you wanna learn some song? Great, let me just work that out and then we'll slow it down to the tempo
where you can play along with the actual recording of it, but at a tempo that is approachable for you.
Oh, the key is annoying? Great, let's just bump it up to E so that you can play open your chords.
To me it's not, OK, put the guitar down because we have the computer, it's like, no, the computer affords
all these new ways of approaching the guitar. It's wonderful.
That's a super interesting way of thinking about it. Are there students, and I mean this both in music
and maybe your experience outside with maybe a broader sense of student,
as in anybody who's trying to learn something, are there students who are simply hindered by technology
who might benefit from a more traditional way of learning?
Either mentorship or one-on-one, or...
I don't think like, "hindered," I mean, sometimes they... and I spoke a bit about this yesterday,
they are psychologically... they might hinder themselves, and that's just a matter of overcoming whatever it is in them
usually, I mean, you were talking about your kids being super young and having no creative bounds
and as many people have seen, some people develop those after a while, so you get to 16, you're super hormonal,
and you can't do technology. So I think, like, if you just shove and you...
and you know, there's a kid that wants to study music and a traditional instrument
and you force them to do technology, to "do it," then that's gonna be really difficult for them
so you've just got to try to address that transition, really.
Honestly, I think that the biggest threat that technology poses to people's learning is option paralysis.
My first project in music tech 101 is just make a song with the loops that come with your DAW,
so the Ableton stock loops, the Garage Band stock loops, and I warn them, you're gonna have to spend
about 7 hours goin' all through the loops, 'cause there's a lot of them, and...
Yeah, an audio engineering professor of mine said, "The reason people like analog gear
is that it doesn't so a lot of stuff." Like, it just enforces limitations on you and people find that helpful.
But to me, that's a good problem to have: too many choices, that's the right problem, not,
I can't make the guitar do what I want it to do, so I give up, which right now is much the more common scenario.
It comes up over and over again when we do these talks about creative blocks and strategies with the artists
they always talk about option paralysis, even at the professional level, like you can easily pretend
that you're evaluating new gear, but you're actually just procrastinating. So maybe building...
strict limitations and frames into the tools is a useful... Do you think about this when you're building tools?
It's clear that you do, but I'm wondering how you do. - Yeah, I think the impulse is...
as a person who does computer stuff with software is to
pack in all the options because that's the thing that's exciting about this stuff is that you can add
more and more parameters and you can create this huge space of possibilities.
I think it takes a lot of restraint to pull back on that, and basically say, what is necessary to present
or what's tasteful to present. But I think it's a case where the medium is at odds with maybe what you're trying
to ultimately do because it pushes you in the direction of, well, just expose everything,
make everything tweakable, controllable, and it's probably not the best thing to do in all cases.
So I thought of this question in terms of the teachers in traditional classrooms
but I wanna open it also up to Jack and both of you as well.
Please Jack, don't say anything that's gonna get us fired,
but I'm curious from whom to do you meet resistance in your work?
You don't have to get into our internal politics. - I guess the thing that scares me
is that I don't meet a lot of resistance, to be honest. So for example I posted the Digital Signal Processing thing
that you mentioned that is now being used for a number of curriculums for university students, I know this,
not a single person has come back to me and said, "Actually I think this is crap."
And I think that's kind of terrifying.
I don't know exactly what that means, I don't know if the level of education materials are so low
that people are just happy there's something out there. There's not a whole... It makes me happy to contribute
but I also find it worrying 'cause it means that the level of vetting for this kind of stuff isn't super high.
So the lack of critical feedback is I think troubling. I think we're at this moment right now where people
are very happy to see anything that's well done and has an educational event to it.
And I think we just need to be a bit more critical. So I would say I don't receive a lot of this,
and that worries me.
And then re-framing the question for teachers and education-thinkers,
from whom do you meet resistance in your work?
I think I... It's not so much resistance, I think my department, and even my school, they're very supportive, but there is a...
I suppose sometime a fear, like a lack of understanding, so it's that they have to trust a lot for you to
implement something, so I was part of the Push initiative, for anyone who doesn't know,
Ableton donated some Push Ones to quite a few schools across the world and my school was one of them.
And it was actually quite a feat to persuade them to give up a term, because that's a critical term that
prepares the student for their GCSE, and it's actually just realizing we can cover all the same things
it doesn't have to be an isolated house music scheme. It can still be house music but we can
still address all of the things that... you know, your Film Music Composition term was gonna address.
So it's shifting ideas, shifting mindsets and that's where the resistance is, it's kind of like these old,
cultural musical ideas.
Yeah, I would say the same thing, that...
in... certainly the university level, the question that they ask is always like, well if we bring in somebody
to teach Michael Jackson, who are we firing? Which one of the Beethoven people are we firing?
You know, that in resource-constrained environment there are gonna be trade-offs,
and there is a lot of legitimate concern, like, yeah, sure kids love rap music, but like...
Aren't we sacrificing rigor or quality in some way by doing this, aren't we kind of lowering the bar?
And... I have an easy response to that which is:
rap music is more interesting than a lot of western classical music, so no sacrifice there whatsoever. That, you know,
Michael Jackson might be harmonically less complex than European classical music,
but like, timbrel-ly there is a lot going on there, the process of creating those recordings
is unbelievably complicated, they layering of the synths and the guitars and the drums...
is itself a form of orchestration that to my mind is as challenging to wrap your head around as
learning how to write for strings or for reeds or whatever. But it, you know, like...
people have to lose their jobs if they're gonna create new jobs, and that's a lot to ask.
I follow you on Twitter and so I know you say these things publicly a lot, but if you say them to your Department Chair
how does that work? Like, if you say rap is more interesting than a lot of the western cannon,
and you're talking to a guy who went to Columbia. What happens?
Well the people who would get really bent out of shape by that wouldn't hire me in the first place, so...
it all kinda works out.
Teaching music technology affords me a lot of privilege because nobody really understands what we're doing.
It seems very mysterious to the instrumentalists, and the pencil-and-paper composers,
and so there's definitely this sense of like, Oh, you're the music tech guy, we have no idea what you do. Have fun!
And, that's not gonna last forever as it becomes less mysterious to the general music making world, but...
for now, yeah, I have a lot of freedom.
So this leads me to a question, mostly to start with you Mel, about teacher training, and about what it means to mentor
other teachers, because you said it's gonna get less mysterious, but it's not gonna do it on its own.
And I think even that sort of mysteriousness works for you in the academic level
but I think when a teacher has to be like, both of those things, they have to be a music technologist
and they have to be sort of one that is seated in classical tradition, even though I'm not,
and then if you have the mysterious it just doesn't ever appear, it's ignored.
So... And that's why it's really important to... As I was saying before about just creating spaces
for teachers to learn and to become curious about technology, and it's not me handing over knowledge
I'd propose to do it through a mentor scheme, but it's not a handing over of knowledge,
it's handing over a way of learning, and sort of sparking that curiosity,
and seeing where that teacher could go to be curious and where they can learn from,
and I think as soon as that starts happening that is a mindset that you can (hopefully) leave alone
and that continues to grow, and that culture is passed on.
You always think, OK, so... all the new kids coming up are gonna be technology specialists
or they're gonna at least know what they're doing, and they'll come up and they'll have very little
DAW knowledge, which is surprising, so we're still getting two camps of teachers
so it's more important than it ever was and especially now technology is so relevant to children,
it's not just this mysterious option, it's the fabric of what they listen to and what they'll most probably end up doing if
that curiosity is sparked, so, yeah, I think it's super important.
And I guess it's probably common, or at least more common... it was probably never the case that
an introductory violin student was already a way more burning a violin player than their violin teacher,
but it's probably pretty common in the electronic music world,
that you have kids come in and show you things in Live you didn't know
or can teach you things you didn't know, maybe not you two, but a new music technology teacher.
I learned what 'sidechaining' was from one of my students, so no shame.
Yeah, and especially on the cultural side, like, I have to have the kids explain what dubstep is to me,
like what the word means, like I know what it sounds like but I'm like, can you define what it is though
because it seems like there are all these micro-genres of it,
so, I had a kid give like a history, a definition of dubstep
and I probably got more out of it than anyone else in the room.
That's super interesting.
I wanna shift over to Jack and sort of seed the floor to you a little while because I'm super interested in how
someone who studied computer science and specifically Digital Signal Processing
ended up with the interest that you have in making technology teach as oppose to making
a reverb, for example.
I think it has a lot to do with what excites me about the notion of the personal computer.
So I grew up always having a computer, I was lucky enough to have that and I always viewed it as sort of a...
a creative sandbox for myself or something like that.
I think there was this moment when I started working at Ableton
I realized I was working with a lot of really smart people, that I wanted to kind of go back and look at
the recent course of study that I did in Digital Signal Processing and see if I really understood it,
because it was prompted by lots of conversations I was having with my colleagues
and I started to realize like, hmm maybe I don't actually understand what I just got a degree in.
So I went through that process and started recapitulating the learning experience, and thought,
I should get this down in basically writing in some form right now, so I have it and can refer to it.
So I did that, and did it in a way that I thought was interesting and aligned with the way
that I think about a computer, so very interactive with lots of animations and that kind of thing
and I put it out into the world and it seemed to really resonate with people.
And I thought, maybe I have some kind of knack for this.
Then one of my colleagues said, well you need to read this book by Seymour Pepert called Mindstorms.
This is this seminal booked written in the 80s about the Logo programming environment.
which is an environment for teaching kids how to do, basically giving kids an environment in which the could
deeply internalize fundamental mathematical concepts.
And if you just follow this thread and try to unwind it you realize that the entire world of computing
that we live in right now, like the desktop software metaphor, object-orientated programming,
WYSIWYG text editing, the music environments that we use today, a lot of this stuff
was created with the intention of giving it to children, and a lot of this stuff has created the Xerox PARC laboratory
in the 1970s, so a lot of these fundamental aspects of the computing world we live in were actually conceived of
as fundamentally educational teaching tools for children, and I think that's a very beautiful conception of computing
and it seems to me particularly relevant right now because it's easy to be a bit disappointed or...
skeptical about the way that computers are being used right now, so Yotam Mann was talking about this,
the notion that we're at a crossroads where you can either do things that are targeted towards consumption
and passivity or you can do things which are targeted at engagement.
I think making tools for people to make things, like Ableton Live, is great,
but I also think making tools for people to learn is very exciting and it seems to me kind of like...
to be the destiny of the personal computer in some sense, I would like to be a part of shaping that feature.
You mentioned Seymour Pepert's book but this is actually like, there's a whole history
of early computer science thinkers who had this conception from the beginning, and they're all
generally disappointed with the way things have gone, right?
Yeah, I think they look around and are very saddened by the way things have gone.
So, in part I think it just requires lots of people to get excited about this and start making good examples
of how the computer and technology can be used to educate in clever and interesting ways.
So after the Learning Music site launched, Peter Kern wrote an article about it on his site
and first he talked about the content of the site itself but then asked:
Why is Ableton doing this? What business do they have in music education in the first place?
And my response in my head to that was, they have the resources, the can do it.
Computer programmers, like, good ones, are expensive.
And...
In the wrong city for that, but yes, go ahead. - OK, well, point taken.
In the United States they're expensive, and...
generally, so...
It's not like they're competing with a bunch of other awesome, active music creation browser tools,
there are some other ones, there's Soundtrap, which is like kinda Garageband in the browser,
And Noteflight which is basically the Sibelius in the browser, and a couple of other things.
But it's not like there's this vast universe of well-designed, interactive... you know, I mean... to me it's like,
you guys did this super generous thing, putting this out in the world and we could split hairs about the content
or the execution of it, but that would feel very ungrateful given how little high-quality stuff there is like it.
So this leads to maybe the next question: For the teachers here, you're sitting with a technologist who has shown
that he likes to make things to help teach, so what should he make?
I mean not the real him, but technologists in general.
I keep taking about more gesture-based stuff. I'm yet to find something that you could incorporate
just with a webcam, if you've got a Mac Suite and you've got this...
There was something once about manipulating and mapping parameters to the corner of your smile,
and I just think something that's so easy and switch-on-able but for me it's just not so specific, not so...
I like to have that freedom in how I teach. When I first started thinking about this
I'd zone in on particular tools but then that's a hell of a lot of work for maybe one function, or one part of my teaching,
so something that I can map on across my teaching from 11 to 18. So, gesture.
Yeah, stuff that you can do from the neck down, for sure. - I was thinking neck up. But you can use your hands.
Or both. So there's this music education school called Kodály, where everything is kind of movement, so...
the way you learn about 5-1, is the teacher is playing this chord progression and when she's on 5
we're supposed to run around and when she plays 1 you gotta be back at home-base.
And it's intended for little kids who need to be doing stuff from the neck down but I think it's stuff that'd be
really valuable and enjoyable for people at any age, I certainly enjoy doing that stuff.
And if you could use more dance-like activities for music creation that would be awesome.
And beyond that...
There's... this Rosetta Stone concept where there's music notation which for some people is super transparent
and wonderful and for other people is a major obstacle to learning.
There's the piano roll, which for the folks in this room, we probably all think it's delightful
but it's not very human readable for performance purposes. There's FFTs and spectrograms
and to me whenever you can get multiple representations of the same thing on the screen at the same time,
when you can see the piano roll and the staff and the spectrogram all at the same time
and you make them move on the staff and you see how it changes the piano roll, that stuff is a goldmine.
And that stuff is very generally applicable because then
people who are trying to teach notation to a bunch of producers can use it,
people trying to teach production to a bunch of classical musicians can use it.
I think this is a really interesting example, the piano roll, I look at the piano roll, and I'm not a trained musician,
but to me that looks like something that a technologist would come up with, maybe not a musician.
I think there are these possibilities now if you look at something like Web Audio,
there's 3 million Javascript developers in the world, they all have basically now...
a set of tools for making musical experiences, a lot of these people are incredibly talented
and they're cross-functional, so they can write the code to do the audio stuff; they can do design and this sort of thing.
And I wonder how to get these people in contact with someone like you,
and you say, I would like to re-conceive of the piano roll, I wonder how we'd get that conversation started,
so we could get you hooked up with these people to work on these kinds of projects,
that seems like a great opportunity, but also challenging to get this set up.
Well let me make a plug, so as Dennis said, I'm part of this research group at NYU
called the Music Experience Design Lab and the whole reason for it to exist is to get...
the music tech people and the developers and the designers in a room with the music educators.
And it's surprisingly difficult to make that happen, I mean,
music tech and music ed were on adjacent floors of the building for 40 years before this lab finally started
and got them talking to each other. Yeah, so come hang out at the lab,
we'd totally be happy to have you. That applies to all of you.
That gets to something you said in an email to me, and you talked about this earlier too,
that technologists just seem unwilling to be humble enough to admit that they don't know enough to teach certain topics,
like, it probably goes both ways, you have music educators and music technologists who have...
I mean, this isn't necessarily a bad thing but we got a lot of email when the Learning Music site launched
that was like, "Great, put notation in it." And I was like, we could do that,
we could also make things much weirder and start things way more outside of the box, right?
Like, as soon as you put a piano roll in it, and/or notation, 'cause they're essentially doing the same thing,
you're making lots of choices, you're making choices about equal temperament,
and these are the pitches you get to work with, etc. But on the other side also technologists are often trying
to do this kind of work without understanding the initial discipline.
So, maybe your lab has solved all these problems. - Oh yeah, totally. No...
The thing we're working on right now is just a way to represent all the chords and scales graphically,
so it's easier to understand them as a sequence of whole steps and half steps, and...
just getting the accidentals right, I can see why Ableton just puts everything in sharp, it's so much simpler.
I know, it's awful, but like, once we started getting in there, once you start like getting into like,
how do you do the sharps and flats and the octatonic scale especially in C-sharp or F-flat,
you start getting double flats and double sharps, it gets to be really horrible,
it turned out to be a really difficult problem that we're nowhere near, like, just chasing down all the edge cases...
is tough, and... I don't know why I started talking about that.
Yeah, except to say that...
western notation, it's like the qwerty keyboard, you know, we kinda got here through this path-dependent sequence
and now we're kinda stuck with it, but it does exist in the world and there are millions of people using it and...
I think it would be sad if the Learning Music website was only in notation but to have people be able
to jump back and forth between that and these newer systems we think are cooler, people need it.
Your experience in the lab when you're working with...
so your perspective is the musician then you have maybe a developer you're working with,
do you notice that there's an imbalance of power in terms of the technical person always having the say
or they seem to think that they're the most important person in the conversation,
so you say, hey we really need this to correctly show sharps and flats, and they say, well that's too hard,
or that's gonna take a long time and then... How does that work out in your lab?
The developers just have de facto vito power because if they don't feel like doing something it doesn't get done.
But it's an academic lab, people are getting paid but not well and a lot of the work is done on a volunteer basis so
people are coming in with this very collaborative mindset to begin with and usually...
especially the younger developers just love being told what to do with clarity, having a clear set of needs
that someone has, they're like, Oh great, you have a really specific problem that needs to be solved,
that's so much better than the usual working environment where nobody's totally clear on what the requirements are.
So the sharps and flats thing actually like, the devs have been having a lot of their version of fun...
trying to logically iron all this stuff out, but yeah, it is a problem that the only problems that get solved
in this domain are the ones that people like you happen to find interesting, for sure.
So sad.
That's why we're talking. - To flip the question around,
what should a technologist not make for you? I think the easy answer is like,
don't make a social network that throws an election for example.
But maybe a more nuanced answer than that, specifically about your practice,
what's gonna make music education worse?
Anything that can link it too closely with what the problem is already, so nothing with assessment in it.
Like, don't assess the clicks that they do, you know, And it's really easy to do that because that is... If you ask...
teachers, maybe on a Monday morning you could ask me and someone's been like down my neck about assessment,
I'm like, we need to measure this, but I just think it needs to kinda move away from these problems
around music curricula, so... But then to me... as I way saying, sort of broad, and...
something that I can be creative with but no assessment.
All these tools have unintended consequences that are positive and negative, right?
I like to think about autotune a lot, I really love autotune as a pedagogical tool,
it's very empowering for people who are not singers like me to not be able to sing any wrong notes.
And there are plenty of voices teachers out there who are horrified by the idea of it,
that kids could be learning this but ironically what studio engineers have been reporting is that
it has unintentionally made people's untuned singing better
because our expectations for in-tune singing are so much higher now, like you listen to The Beatles,
I love The Beatles but their singing, some of those harmonies are a little sour, where as now
you hear everything is always perfect so people are like, I gotta really bring it, I gotta sing in tune in the booth now.
Same with quantization and time-keeping, our expectations of time-keeping are a lot stricter
that they were in earlier generations, and you might say, ah the drum machine has made everyone too lazy
but in reality it's made everyone be like, Ooh, I got to...
So for all of you in a very general way, what's your bold vision for 5-10 years from now,
and also, what's your nightmare dystopia?
So, my bold vision would be... I'll start with that one, with optimism.
It would be full integration, I think it would be value added to technology and it not being a novel thing,
and it be implemented in teacher training so we're not chasing out tail when the teachers start.
And just, yeah, five years, it's not that long away, so I think at least we are moving in the direction
that we need to be.
Yeah, and hopefully by then we'll have a different government in England and we will
there'll be more money in the arts, and music will be valued on its own apart from the other subjects,
aside from the core subjects, and it won't be... We won't quantify it in the same way we quantify maths
because it's a different beast. So hopefully people will start realizing that when we've tried to delete it, and...
and the effect that might have on morale or just the school system,
it'll be nice to go back into that direction.
My utopian situation... Jack has got this book in his lap called "Lifelong kindergarten" by Mitchel Resnick
and in it he talks about how kindergarten isn't the best part of everyone's educational experience
it just kinda goes down hill from there, my son is in kindergarten right now,
he's having the best time, he loves to go to school, he can't wait to go to school in the morning.
And mostly what he's doing is making stuff with his hands and... he's learning a lot but...
a lot of the learning they're doing is with gestures and dance and singing songs,
they sing songs about math - no joke. They make jewelry, and my utopian scenario is that
the way that we teach music much more closely resembles the way that little kids are in art class,
where like, here's the materials, maybe there's a goal that you're working towards but
the point is just you're doing it with your own hands you're pretty self-directed, you make a god awful mess,
the end result maybe doesn't look like much but that's OK.
Yeah, I would love music education all the way up to university level to look a lot more like that.
As to the dystopian scenario...
all people do is standardized tests.
I think it's like a continuation, if it keeps going the way it's going then that's dystopia...
so let's just stop that, maybe. There's enough people to stop that.
But I think that they way, in my experience, in my school, the way it is going is we are being more
devalued and that will turn into... it will turn into no music. Music departments are being shut across the country...
there are a lot of departments with one person in, that person leaves and they shut it down,
or they'll merge it with Drama and so there'll be a non-music specialist teaching,
So it is pretty grim.
I think there's also loads of really encouraging things, so I just keep looking at those.
It's a dark reality though.
I think my dystopia has largely to do with assessment or this trend towards dehumanizing people
and representing them as a bucket of numbers which you can measure
and optimize for certain trends in these measurements, I think that seems really distasteful.
I am actually very hopeful, and very hopeful for the utopian vision and I think
that's because my perspective as a software person, what I'm seeing right now is we're now getting to the point
where creative well-meaning individuals can actually execute on a complete vision of software.
So I look at something like Groove Pizza, that would not have been possible maybe 15 years ago.
Five years ago would've been tough.
And it's an amazing experience, and you imagine there's gonna be a proliferation of this kind of
thing and I think it's gonna be really lovely, and in my utopias you have technologists intermingling
with people from other disciplines and creating these very engaging, exciting experiences
and I think that will happen, I really do.
I want to open it up for questions, we have about 15 minutes left.
There's microphones on the sides, so just get up and line up behind the mikes and, oh wow, OK...
we're gonna try to get through as much of this as we can.
If you have a question just head up to the mike and wait in line. OK, I'm gonna pick this side first.
I feel like I'm in heaven listening to you guys being here this weekend so thank you for curating this event.
My name's Liz Dobson, I come from Huddersfield University,
I'm gonna explain three things, then try and explain it and then see what your response is:
My PhD is in the Social Psychology of Creative Process in Music Technology Education.
And I feel like we need to activate meta cognition knowledge about process.
through dialog, through discourse, and why? Because the processes that we're engaged in
or they're engaged in induce a kind of creative trance and therefore the responsibility of the development
of the software feeds into the idea that Who is actually writing the music?
So I get a lot of students come in who are very heavily led by what the software is telling them to do,
they get engaged in what Csikszentmihalyi calls Flow, which is immersion which is used a lot in games,
psychology of immersion and all of that. And he relates that to enjoyment.
And when we try teach something else and disrupt that enjoyment, and that feeling of learning that comes with that
is uncomfortable. So we do a lot of stuff where we get all these different technologies out and they have to dialog.
Now Lev Vygotsky, a child psychologist, said that language is the psychological tool
for higher mental development, so if you ask somebody: Explain how this Ableton Push works to somebody else.
I interviewed Erin Barrow a couple of months ago and that's exactly what she does,
she gets 11-year-old girls explaining to adults how this Push works and that's so empowering
but it also helps them to realize if you can't explain Compression, maybe you don't actually understand it.
So by getting students by getting students to engage in a kind of inter-mental development process
they're co-developing learning together so I would love to see software that isn't just fetishizing the technology
but promoting them to become more meta-cog... more self-aware about how they engage with that technology
and what it is that they're actually doing.
I want people to also make their own software, maybe this is a horribly utopian vision
or an unachievable one but I would love it if instead of... oh God, now I'm gonna get fired,
I would love it if instead of people using Live they would also make their own Live, you know?
I think that's where you in the end wanna be.
I would love that too. If there was something where they were building things from scratch
and understanding the process of that as much as the results
and igniting that inquisitiveness about all of music technology, and all of what creativity means as well.
I mean the constructionist perspective, like if you can't explain what the compressor is doing,
maybe if you try to build one then you'll be able to. My experience is that's absolutely the case.
That seems like a heavy lift now, but on the other hand the idea that I would be sitting here with
a professional quality electronic music studio in my jacket pocket
would've seemed crazy 20 years ago too.
I'm talking about undergraduates when I say "compression" I wouldn't expect a young student to try and explain that
but the principle is there. - But actually why not, like if you tell a younger student:
Imagine when it gets too loud someone turns it down, that's kind of what compression is,
I could imagine a little kid understanding this concept, maybe not the electronics,
but maybe the principle that you don't want things to be too loud.
Some kind of system where students can explain this to each other via the system or in the classroom together
also online maybe would really activate their gray cells.
We move over to this side? - Hi, I have a question for Ethan.
I've taught music technology at high school level since 2006
and in doing that program I've encountered some of the greatest resistance I've seen from other music teachers,
usually it's not my administrators or my students but other music teachers.
Earlier you said something like "rap music is better than Beethoven," you said something like that,
I said something similar in a conference one time and I literally had a guy stand up and yell at me
in the middle of the speech. My students have been kicked out of the music convention for playing music.
How do you speak to the inherent... When you're teaching future music educators,
certainly you're getting some of that too in your classes and I'm curious how you deal with that.
It's a growth area. I mean, it's much easier talking to you guys where you're all like, "Yeah, right on!"
than it is...
The reason it's so heated is that it's not an aesthetic conversation, it's a political one.
We're talking about the era of Eastern European cultural dominance drawing to a close and the era of...
the African Diaspora not just occupying popular culture, which it's done for a hundred years, but now
starting to infiltrate like, "highbrow culture" too. People find that very threatening.
Many of those people voted for Donald Trump. If I knew how to better engage those people
my Twitter feed would be a much calmer more civilized place. I'm open to suggestions if you guys have 'em.
I found personally that once people saw that it worked and I was getting results from it
they would kind of shush about it, but I don't know what that looks like, you probably have seen people turn around,
what does it look like, do they say like, Wow my mind is open now. Or do they...
There has to be something... I'm sure you've seen it.
Well so I'm teaching in this classical music conservatory at Montclaire State University
and some of the kids are like, I only listen to Sibelius, I literally had a 19-year-old say that to me.
And some of them you can't reach but some of them get a taste of personal creativity
and of getting to express their own whims in the music, sometimes for the first time,
if they've been in the classical pipeline the whole way up.
And they find it intoxicating and liberating, empowering, and they never wanna turn back.
Hi my name's Max Wild, I teach at Dubspot in New York, and this is a big topic but I had hoped that we'd kind of
talked about it a bit, which is Online Education and especially how you see the future of that being
more interactive, especially considering that right now most of the formats are very video-based
and then there's a little bit of interaction with the instructor. I wanted to hear your views on that
and how we can change that in the next five years.
I had a thought today: There's been a promise ever since television came out
that television was gonna revolutionize education and that didn't ever happen,
but it seems to happening now, I would argue, if you look at something like YouTube, and I think the reason is
the tools are now good enough for an enthusiastic and dedicated educator to make music materials
and put them up on YouTube, so somehow the promise of technology being used as an educational tool
is actually happening.
Sorry to interrupt, but that doesn't explain interaction, there's a bit more interaction
but not like you would get in the classroom. - You're absolutely right, I'm being too long-winded.
So the thing about interaction is that I think the fact of the matter is right now it's still really hard
to make good interactive software, so if you look at the stuff that your lab is doing, like this is top-notch stuff
and it's literally pioneering, and the reason it's working is because you have really good developers working on it
but in my opinion what needs to happen for this to actually pick up steam is you need people like Yotam Mann
to make these amazing tools and make them freely available. I think this is happening but...
making the software is really hard.
Back over here. - Hello. To kind of build on that point actually,
and I'm a PhD computer science student looking at accessibility in instruments.
So I have a question about Open Source. The music industry, from being an ex-audio engineer,
I know that it's very proprietory and there's a lot of barriers about that kind of thing, and what you were talking Jack
about people building software themselves and doing that, I'm a campus rep for GitHub
so I see a lot of people putting stuff on that platform and collaborating on free software together
as a community, and I guess I wanna ask why... well, where you see that going from an Ableton point of view
and how from a teaching point of view perhaps you would see ways in which you could engage in that.
Because obviously not everybody is gonna look at code-bases and do all of that stuff
but the way that we use GitHub as campus experts isn't for any of that, it's for documentation, it's for
collaboration on issues and events and stuff, so there's a lot of things that can be done in Open Source
that I feel would be beneficial here and I want your views on that.
OK, so I think one really important thing is you have to have a platform
and that's one reason I'm excited about the web is because you now have a miniature audio engine
in every single browser anywhere in the world.
So any developer can crack open the Javascript console and start creating, not a professional quality, but a...
I've had some fun with it, it's great. - It's great, right?
And then what I think is interesting is people are going to share their code because for some reason that's the current
development culture, especially among web developers, is to share their stuff and put it online,
there are various reasons for this, some of them are well-intentioned, some aren't but... that's...
that's what's happening. I think in order to get it from the level of developers to people who could do something...
people who don't have those skills, we just basically need to build those capabilities outward,
and it's just gonna require lots of people creating libraries and tools and that sort of thing.
The exciting this for me is there's now a solid foundation, a solid, open and free foundation for this stuff.
From a teaching point of view... do you think... I don't know how much... as...
software engineers you know about the Open Source movement and everything around those co-bases but
what would make it more accessible for you to go towards that kind of stuff?
So for me, I've always loved the idea of grabbing shareware or anything that I can use to explain something.
So we have Live Intro, so sometimes I'll have to bring in a synthesizer or just so I can talk about synthesis.
So part of... Going back to my research project, part of that was encouraging teachers to go out
and maybe find some Open Source stuff, find some shareware that they could then
implement into their own practice. And what was difficult was
it felt a little bit like a scary sea for them and they didn't, so it ended up I was having to recommend it to them.
And so even though I don't have expertise in that area I kind of know a way to get there.
But I think for a complete novice it's a minefield, so maybe just some clearer guidance I think
and libraries, as you were saying.
Thank you very much.
They told us we can have 5 more minutes, we probably have time for a couple more, let me move over here.
Hi, I'm a German secondary music educator and to be honest I'm a little bit irritated about...
your understanding of music education, because for me, I think I can partly speak for my colleagues here in Germany
we are doing a lot of dance, a lot of movement, we are doing a lot of improvisation, we are inventing sounds
with things inside the classroom and there are so much more things we do than just, how did you call it,
transporting western art music heritage. And for me the main question is even if you guys
are doing a workshop here called "Don't Let Music Theory Bully You."
So music theory is important, it's not the important thing, it's just a part of it.
So the main question for me is how do you achieve to incorporate music technology into these other
very important fields, and you were already talking about gesture, about movement, about embodied interaction,
and I think these are the main questions, not if black or white than much more the question of
how do you incorporate these multiple musical activities to get it all together or maybe to use technology in a
fruitful way.
I know that there are a lot of European countries whose music education cultures are much more progressive
than the United States, and it sounds like Germany is probably one of those countries.
I mean, like the UK embraced popular music education long before the US did,
much like the UK embraced rock n' roll much before the US did for that matter.
So yeah, this is gonna vary by region, for sure.
Yeah, it varies by school, like we had a talk by Michael Hayden yesterday about
how he finds a curriculum actually quite freeing and another system can look at a curriculum and find that really rigid.
So I think it depends from country but also depends on institution as well, and what opportunities you can see in
an assignment brief. To some people that might be really restricting but there is creativity you can find.
And I think some of these issues are important to consider and it's not one or the other, it's not just...
movement or this political side either.
So, yeah, don't know if that answered.
I have a quick one. So I do have a suggestion for software.
I taught instrumental music, like a traditional band in the US for about 10 years and then accidentally
started teaching music tech full-time. And one of my greatest challenges was to reconcile
the different terminology between the production world and the traditional music world.
So I would love like a Google Translate app for my teachers, so you roll it over a pitch
and it gives you the frequency, you roll it over dynamics and it shows you automation curves.
You roll it over a dynamic marking and it gives you an amplitude, you know, something like that.
And then another great kinda software would be to able to analyze the skill-sets of incoming
maybe faculty candidates or music teacher candidates, so that you can... schools of music can...
by and large the people who select the faculty are steeped in more traditional ways
and they may not have a way to evaluate candidates with fewer skill-sets
and if we don't propagate newer skill-sets among college faculty then we can't expect them
to propagate those skill-sets among teachers. So those kind of analytics would be very helpful.
Can I just say, the Spectrum Visualizer in Live, you mouse over different parts of the thing and it shows you
the note name and the frequency, I , use that in the classroom every year that is super valuable, so yeah
from Ryan's mouth to God's ear.
I think we might have time for two more. This guy over here.
It's more of the comment on ten years of the Burial album "Untrue".
And I think one of the reasons why that is emotionally resonant to me and a lot of people is because
it not only uses traditional melody and harmony but it samples video games, for example,
amongst many other things, but you hear gun shells hitting the floor from... I can't remember the video game,
I guess the point is is that record was really resonant with a lot of people because it hit the zeitgeist,
it was something that was not harking back 200 years. And I think that in a way to connect...
to make kids excited about music, connect them to the zeitgeist, what are they listening to?
Is it a video game? Cool, let's sample the video game, or whatever it is. Is it like a vine or something on Instagram
I don't know what it is, just something they can relate to, and just because it's a gun shell hitting the floor from a
video game, you can use that and make music out of it, and I think the Burial album is a good example of that
and maybe that's a way to connect so it's not just like a piano roll, like you were saying,
but it's a scene from an Instagram post and you just sample that thing and slice it and move it around, I'm not really sure
but I think that's one of the things I really loved about that album, because it hit a zeitgeist and it was...
taking a lot of things that weren't necessarily music and making it to music. Does that make any sense?
It does. Thanks very much. - There's a bunch of really good assignment ideas in there.
Yeah, take some sounds from a video game you love, take an Instagram video and make a piece from it.
But anyways... I think that's something a lot of people miss, is that, you know, I came from a jazz background
I came from studying music theory and all that stuff, that was great for me later on,
but a lot of kids just wanna hang out and play video games. But just use that video game... I don't know.
Is there... Like Baudelaire, "The Painter of Modern Life," is that an equivalent piece
that addresses a similar issue for music? Or maybe there's an opportunity to write this essay.
Yeah, I think that's an opportunity.
Let's end that on Opportunity. Thank you to Ethan Hein, Melissa Uye-Parker and Jack Schaedler.
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