Play To Learn and Grow

In a very short time technology has changed an entire generation’s behavior radically, and it behooves all of us who are not from that generation but whose daily life involves interaction with them, such as parents and teachers, to learn as much as we can about the new behaviors.

(If you are someone who doesn’t think behavior can change that fast around technology, try to think back to how quickly, when telephone answering machines first appeared, the norm went from “It’s rude to have an answering machine” to “It’s rude NOT to have an answering machine.)

Marc Prensky
The Emerging Online Life of the Digital Native 3

Many of us are reminded daily that we are strangers in a strange land. We approach the field of play in the classroom from a different direction than our students. What is normal to us is quaint to them; what is normal to them is unknown to us. Luckily for us, we have a weapon that many of our colleagues in other disciplines lack: our work as performing musicians has a strong collaborative element to it. We ask our students to work together, share, criticise themselves and their peers and synchronise sounds created by various anatomic or mechanical means to achieve a collaborative result. The group can achieve what the individual cannot.

Likewise we have a strong individual component to our subject where there are levels of performance - benchmarks for want of a better word - against which performers can measure their technical and artistic prowess as they progress in their studies. There are competitions, festivals, master classes and more where students perform for a "master teacher" and are critiqued and helped to work through problems that may be holding them back in the advancement of their studies.

Or discipline also contains the "experimental" branch where an individual sets themselves against the task of transcribing what they hear in their head to paper, or analog waves or bits. Tonalities, tunings, harmonies, melodies; combinations of instruments. voices and, well, who knows what in order to create "in the air" what previously only existed in their imagination.

How lucky we are in this digital age, that many of the tools of our trade have become ubiquitous objects in the household and school environment! Our digital native students can't imagine not being able to use a sequencer with realistic sampled sounds to program a piece of music. Creating music tracks and burning CDs, editing and creating DVDs, stop-motion animation - all with edited original soundtracks or mixes and mash-ups of their favourite music. They think nothing of creating formulae in spreadsheets to simplify their calculations and explore "if, then" questions. Digital images, instant messaging, blogging, Facebook, MySpace, Meebo, Twitter are the ways that they communicate. The mobile phone that we digital immigrants struggle with, is the everyday tool of choice for the digital native: camera, SMS, for starters and the more advanced phones include GPS, radio, Internet browser and access to the normal "office" style applications. We digital immigrants buy CDs - our digital natives download, usually from a Peer-to-Peer source or a Torrent that is outside the normal legitimate channel of distribution that the record companies have created.

We ask them to record reflections and progress on worksheets: they would prefer to have a wiki where the entire group can reflect and interact as well as individuals have individual pages where they can "soliliquise" and accept comments from their friends. Our concerts are posted on YouTube and the performing groups organise sites on Facebook. I am inspired by my fellow teachers who have taken the first steps into social networking and used Facebook to organise reunions and school celebrations. I am also inspired by, and more than a little envious of, my colleagues who tell me that the audition materials we supply are posted on their school provided web sites and the students download them, record the audition, evaluate their own performance and submit their best efforts back to their teacher via E-mail or the department shared space.

What is the end of year message in al of this? Ah, grasshopper. As the spring turns into summer and we begin to de-compress and re-create, all of us digital immigrants need to take a little step out of our comfort zone and explore some of the technology around us. If you have an interactive whiteboard, prepare a set of flipcharts for a favourite lesson. If you don't have an interactive whiteboard but have a projector or beamer in your room, prepare some PowerPoint or Keynote presentations of a lesson that you teach. Explore that mobile phone. Grab the digital camera and take a photo essay of your your holiday and use one of the free or inexpensive photo editing tools or web sites such as Picasa or Flickr to share your images with your friends, family and the world. Open up that copy of Garageband, Acid Pro, Cubase, Sibelius, Finale or whatever new music tool you have and play. That's right. Play. Arrange a song, write the Romantic Composer Rap, score that arrangement that you've always heard in the the back of your head.

Enjoy exploring the technology and enjoy some of the "new ways" of approaching our subject.

Hope is the thing with feathers

Why is Alice called Alice?
This is one of my favorite questions. It always lets me know the question asker is thinking in the correct direction. After all, the ability to name something is a tremendous power, and in this case, there's a terrific reason.

Alice pays homage to Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. Carroll was a mathematician, novelist, and photographer. Most important, he could do intellectually difficult things but also realized the most powerful thing was to be able to communicate clearly and in an entertaining way. This inspires our efforts to make something as complex as computer programming easy and fun.

Randy Pausch, answering "Why is Alice called Alice?"

Many of you devoted readers know my affection for the work of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and that his characters feature quite regularly in the jumping-off points for these missives. The whimsy and surprising logic of his world never ceases to amaze and enchant me. The software he is describing, Alice is a piece of free software that is a 3-D, graphics based computer programming tool. Bear with me, technophobes. It seems that in this day and age of everything computer, there is a significant drop in students enrolling in computer science courses in universities. Apparently the students are put off by rigourous courses that require hours of practise at a keyboard and a strict dedication to syntax and coherent expression of creative vision arising from the simplest of materials. To many of us, it sounds like the courses you had to take featuring the work of Palestrina and his 16th century polyphonic colleagues, and it is similar in many ways.

Alice was developed to offer a visual form of computer programming where it was impossible to create syntax errors in programming and to produce an engaging product. Many of you will remember the glory days of computer education for teachers when we were all expected to learn to program in order to use a computer and the lack of a bracket or semicolon would send your precious programme which printed a line of text or moved a coloured square across the screen into a tailspin. Alice uses the metaphors of story telling or creation of an interactive world to teach programming concepts. This is in some ways related to the visual programming now available in the music world in programmes such as Garage Band, Reason and other loop based compositional tools. You music tech historians may also remember the visual programming language Max.

It is not this programming language, but rather one of the men behind it that is the real focus of this article. You may recognise the name of the quotee - Randy Pausch. He has been featured heavily on the Internet and on the Carnegie Mellon University web site. You may of heard of him in conjunction the phrase "The Last Lecture". This refers to a tradition where a retiring or dying professor presents his final lecture and is feted by the academic community where he has toiled. Randy Pausch is a very young man who has delivered his last lecture - he is in the final stages of pancreatic cancer and has only been given months to live. He chose not to give a momento mori complete with the spectre of the grinning skull looming in the background in the background. He gave us a gift, what I would like to call a a momento spero - a remembrance of hope entitled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

He begins by telling us what he won't be speaking about - cancer, his wife and children, religion. He does, however admit a deathbed conversion: he bought a Macintosh. His theme speaks of the things that probably brought many of us into the teaching profession. He talks of facing brick walls, of being honest, of doing good things, and of love. He tells of the people who he met who believed in him and who helped him get over the brick walls he found in trying to achieve his dreams. Many would say that as teachers, helping achieve dreams is a part of our daily life. We've seen success and failures: we've seen brick walls fall as well as stand resolutely despite the best efforts of all concerned. I can not really do justice to any of the themes or ideas he brings to the speech – the transcript of the talk runs to twenty-six A4 pages, Nor do I want to give away any more of his illustrations, other than this one as it applies to us who work at bringing music into the lives of others:

And I think that that’s one of the best things you can give somebody – the chance to show them what it feels like to make other people get excited and happy. I mean that’s a tremendous gift.

Please look him up on Google, YouTube or via the Carnegie Mellon web site and watch and learn from his lecture.

Look to this day

Look to this day for it is life,
the very life of life...
For yesterday is already a dream and tomorrow is only a vision.
But today, well lived, makes yesterday a dream of happiness and every tomorrow a dream of hope.

Sanskrit Proverb

It seems as though the academic year just started. New faces; old faces; the hubbub and clamour of the academic wheel starting its relentless revolution. Now it is mid-February; March is just around the corner and the end of the year is zooming towards us. What happened to the time?

Our calendars are our saviours. They measure the days, mark the passage of events and help keep our disorderly lives relatively ordered. This year, the AMIS calendar has been available on the iCal site. This means that you are able to view the calendar with all the festivals and their attendant deadlines and way-points online. Not only online, but live. One change is made in the master calendar, and it rolls out automatically to all of its subscribers. The dates for next year are beginning to appear in it. Despite being "Made on a Mac", the AMIS calendar uses an open protocol called ICS. This means that any program that can read .ics formatted files can access the calendar. One open source and free calendar program that supports .ics files is "Sunbird" from the Mozilla Organization. It is also cross platform - available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

Why is subscribing to calendars a "good thing"? Every time you open your calendar program, all of your calendars and the calendars you subscribe to are displayed. Vista users, there are calendars that can live in your side bar. Macintosh users, iCal is free and comes installed as part of your operating system. Also, If you are a .Mac subscriber it is a one click task to publish your calendars so others may subscribe to them. You create the calendar on your computer and publish the changes. The next time your subscribers open their calendar, your calendar is fed to them - all the latest changes automatically published. Sound useful for extra rehearsal schedules? I'm sure that you can think of a few other uses that might make your teaching life easier.

How does one subscribe? Visit the AMIS calendar. linked from the top of the News section on the AMIS web site or the web version directly. If nothing else, bookmark that page in your favourite browser and visit it occasionally. That still requires you to open the bookmark - let's go for the fully automatic version. Once on that page, in the lower left hand corner, you'll find buttons allowing you to subscribe, download, or set preferences. If a Macintosh user clicks "Subscribe", the free iCal program will automatically open and start the subscription process. Once you have subscribed to the calendar, you can then set your calendar program to automatically open when you start the computer. Macintosh users, go to "System Preferences" and open the "Accounts" pane; Windows users will depend on the version of Windows you are running.

As the academic year begins its slide on the downhill slope to the end of the year, harness the power of Web 2.0 and let your computer take some of the strain. It may even help avoid the state relished by Douglas Adams when he said, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by."

From darkness, light.

The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by e-mail. The big players won't put a major push into building a new social network. Your e-mail account isn't valuable because it's got the e-mail addresses of other people who could be solicited commercially -- it's valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you.

Marshall Kirkpatrick
Read/Write Web

I realise for many of you, the above paragraph contained a few words you have heard but are unclear of their precise relevance to this message at the seasonal time of mid-winter greetings and festivities. Mr. Kirkpatrick is discussing the phenomenon of social networking and the explosion of sites like Facebook, Meebo and Twitter, to name just a few. On these sites you make contact with your friends, “add” them to your list of friends and are then added to their list of friends. Whatever you celebrate, be it Diwali, St. Nicholas, Hannukah, Christmas or the winter solstice you will probably be spending time with loved ones. In our interconnected world, we often share thoughts and often cards with the aforemntioned groups. In this twenty-first-century-web-2-point-oh world, we can share more than cards and E-mails.To share your holiday greetings, you could post a video with your holiday wishes on YouTube and link it into your social networking site. As you add friends to your site you also also grant your friends access to your thoughts, plans, pictures and…

Yes, the ellipsis is intentional. The list of what you can share with your online friends is limited only by the developers’ imagination. Music, movies, what music is playing on your computer at the moment are only the beginning of what can be shared. All of the developers want to have your social network account share their application with your friends, so they too will sign up to that service. Then all of their friends, ad infinitum. If I sign up for an application the E-mail that my friends receive in their profile will say, “Richard Hein would like to share this application with you. Sign up today and share with Richard!” By consenting to join the service, I have granted them the right to use my name in their marketing appeals. It’s there in the fine print, the bit that no one ever reads.

As in all things in life, it is the fine print where the devil hides. Many of you have used YouTube videos in your classroom and your students have probably posted videos there. What you and your students need to know is that the once a video is posted on YouTube, to paraphrase the fine print: until you remove the video from YouTube, and then for a commercially reasonable time, you grant YouTube permission to do whatever they wish to do with your video, in whatever format they wish and on any medium that exists or may exist. Yes, they may even sell your creation and not pay you a cent. I hope you noticed the “a commercially reasonable time.” What is the current length of copyright? That could be a commercially reasonable time, couldn’t it? Just a thought. Probably no need to worry, though. It also continues to say that just because you filmed something for your personal use that you must ensure that you have the permissions from the appropriate copyright holders to distribute those filmed images. Oh! Wait a minute, don’t forget the sound recordings as well. Oh.

So that probably leaves YouTube out of the running for assisting with your seasonal communications opus. Why not make a podcast? Plenty of tools to create with, especially on the Apple platform. Pop the photos of you and the family and friends into iPhoto, and create a slideshow there or use them to create an iMovie. Open GarageBand and choose appropriate instrumentation for your favourite public domain holiday song and arrange away: drum parts, synthesised sounds, special effects - whatever! You can even sing or play along with your backing track or sing or play the parts on different tracks and ignore the synthesised sounds completely. You can then use your arrangement as the sound track to your slideshow or movie, and publish it - you can pop one on any web space you own or very easily via Apple’s .mac services. There you go - a unique, personalised holiday greeting that will help to make the season bright for those whom you love both near and far.

For us in the northern hemisphere it is a time of endings and beginnings, darkness giving way to light, death and rebirth. In the darkness we remember those who are near and those who are with us only in memory. As we light candles or fires to ward away the darkness, we pause to remember all of the love that brought us to the place we are today, and look forward to all the love that we will share in the future as we move on to places now unknown to us.

Bright, glad tidings of the festive season to you all.

Simple Gifts

Country music is just three chords and the truth.
Harlan Howard

Sometimes it is the simplest stories that make the greatest impact. The finest writing is often the simplest and most direct. Many of us see beauty in zen koans. Haiku has fascinated readers for centuries. The starter for this piece appeared in an Emmylou Harris special called "The Ten Commandments of Country". One of the statements she made, after proffering that they really should be "suggestions" not commandments was that, "If love didn't hurt, there'd be no country music."

We might extend that idea to other types of music. If we think back to some of the memorable moments in our lives, the pain of a lost love or unrequited love or a broken heart will probably be present somewhere. Think of the songs that you have sung or performed where the subject or theme has been the pain of love dying or growing without reciprocation. Listen to the songs of John Jacob Niles, then bring out The Silver Swan. In studying the music of Appalachia, home of the roots of what today is called "classic" country music, he found links through images and language to the Elizabethan English poets.

Now the aural distance between "I Wonder As I Wander" and "Achy Breaky Heart" also tells a story of an urbanisation and transformation of an acoustic art and the people who perform and listen to it. In a gentler world we might say that the growth of the symphonic ensemble followed a similar path as it went from gut strings to wound. As the world grew noisier, the music grew louder as well. Much of modern day country is coloured with the twang of the electric guitar and the throb of drums. Blame or thank the Bobs - Wills and Dylan. From the big-band boogie of Texas swing to the electrification of folk music, the times, they were (and are) a-changin'.

The three chords provide the structure. Same three as the blues and many hymns and patriotic songs. We've all learned them. There is usually an image in the words that catches the ear of the composer. When we think of love, that love need not be limited to the romantic ideal, but may also include the love of beauty and sometimes the disappointment that pursuit of love can create. Take the following:

Songbird in a golden cage:
She'd prefer the blue.
How I crave the liquor of her song.
Poor bird who has done no harm:
What harm could she do?
She shall be my prisoner her life long.
My songbird wants her freedom:
Now don't you think I know.
But I can't find it in myself,
To let my songbird go:
I just can't let her go.

Jesse Winchester’s lyric, sung recently on Spyboy by Emmylou Harris, has the same swing between sweet and sour; happy and sad; and pride and disappointment that marks much of our journey through the world. The composers of art songs from every era have played the same balancing game. We each recognise our self in the singer and in that recognition, the humanity we share. Labels will get in the way: a simple melody, well sung or played will conjure up all the beauty that a heart can hold.

Practise Makes....Better

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke

Welcome and welcome back! By popular request (well, one person) I am re–presenting some of the material presented at last year's International Honor Band and Choir Festival and in a previous column. It once again is recording time for auditions for Honor Band, Choir, Orchestra and Middle School Honor Band. Jon Hodge has shared a guide for recording which is linked from the News page on the AMIS web site. My previous article is in the HeinSite archive on the AMIS web site - I've used the same quote to make it easier to find. This is a "variation on a theme" so apologies if you have heard the melody before. These same techniques may also be used to record your whole group in rehearsal or performance.

A brief philosophical diversion. One goal of the audition recording process is to present an accurate view of the performers capabilities and abilities through performing prescribed literature at controlled tempi and using common articulations. It is therefore possible for like to be judged against like. The tempo guidelines in the vocal audition for the song are the acceptable range for performance. Whether or not you artistically agree with that choice, it is what is given for the audition. The audition committee has made mistakes and is, indeed, flexible, but if everyone uses that range of tempos it is possible to compare how a variety of singers handle articulation, phrasing, diction, and rhythmic accuracy. To make an analogy; everyone is driving their individual cars on the same racetrack, with the same bends, straights and curves.

We, as artists and educators celebrating music, wish to minimise the intrusion of the recording process on our performers. They are nervous enough, and a teacher flapping about pushing buttons, setting levels, adjusting stands does little to calm the nervous performer. It also does little to calm the nervous teacher who may not have an advanced degree in audio engineering or years of experience gigging in lounges and bars, setting up and taking down increasingly intricate sound systems. There is an easy solution.

Practise. You always try to have your performing group rehearse in the performance space under simulated performance conditions, don't you? When you are working with your students, record them from their first efforts. Let the students hear their performances and make decisions about performance adaptations (breathing, tone, articulation) based not just on your feedback, but their own - based on listening and evaluating their performance.

By using a microphone and audio interface for your iPod you can carry your recording studio with you in a briefcase or book bag. You may have to carry the stand as well - a perfect task for helping the student take ownership in the recording process. Although the audio interfaces are available for the iPod nano, I would still recommend the iPod video - the small iPod video has four times the recording time as the largest iPod nano. Ten megabytes (MB) per minute of uncompressed audio, so one hundred megabytes is ten minutes, one gigabyte is approximately one hundred minutes of music.

You will have to experiment. Unlike more professional solutions, there is no level control. You'll have to move the student backwards and forwards to find the "sweet spot". You'll also have to experiment with metronome placement so the student, accompanist and microphone can all hear its important message.

I tend to place the iPod on the piano and set the microphone up so it is facing away from the piano. I also place the metronome on a music stand at 90° to the microphone. The singer (in my case), then stands facing the piano anywhere from two to three feet away from the microphone. Incredibly large and colourful voices will have to retreat to avoid creating distortion. This uses the microphone's natural rejection of sound coming from directly behind to minimise the piano sound going to the recorder and maximise the singer's sounds.

I then start the recorder and record the entire half hour session. I keep a sheet numbered 1 to 50 and have the student say a number before each trial - I then put a quick + - or √ as a rough guide to my impression of the performance. I'll listen to the first recored track and readjust the microphone position if necessary, but after that it is hands off the technology and all attention is on the performer and their performance. If there is time, I'll link the iPod back to my laptop, pull the recording into iTunes. It tells me that there are new voice recordings available and asks if I would like to import them now. This also gives me a backup recording automatically as it remains on the iPod until I delete it. Once it is in iTunes, I can rename it with the singer's name. The date is automatically entered. I can then drag it into a playlist and burn it straight to CD so the singer can take it home and listen to their performance and reflect on what they can do to change it.

Since we are already used to recording rehearsals, there is less tension when it is time to record the final performances. Beforehand, I'll have read through the audition instructions to see how my students should be announcing themselves and if I am supposed to be making one track for each candidate or four tracks for each candidate, one for each exercise and announcement. I stick to the plan, repeat the process, and will eventually ask the student which of the "takes" is their final performance. I remind them that only complete "takes" of an exercise can be used. If a student is still making pitch errors, note errors and rhythm errors I will continue with their evaluation and reflection process, but we will probably come to a mutual decision at the end of their recording session that perhaps this audition still isn't ready to submit. This means that the performer and I have decided not to submit the audition and that their advances from early attempts have been acknowledged, but that the singer has come to a greater understanding about what is meant by membership in an honor group and probably has new goals for their musical studies for the year.

If the audition process for that student continues, I then take the student's requests, compare them with my track sheet, and edit the long session file and find the versions they wish to use using an audio editor. Both the editors mentioned below have wave shape editors so you can see the conversation, singing and the metronome. I then export the final tracks as .wav or .aiff files and place them in a folder with that student's name. I'll also name the tracks, for Soprano 1 in this case; s1announce, s1ex1, s1ex2, s1song.

The final tracks are then dropped back into your CD burning application of choice - I still use iTunes as it creates yet another backup of my edited files and makes it easy to create a second CD as my insurance copy. There are numerous available for every platform: Roxio Toast, EasyMediaCreator and Nero come immediately to mind. Then, the dreary part; I go to the Lower School music room when no one is there and listen to the entire recording. This is my check. Is each audition complete? Are the tracks for each candidate in the correct order? Does it play on that stereo? How does it really sound? Any problems and it's back to the audio files. Hopefully recording problems like distortion will have been discovered earlier in the process. Then I'll take the CD(s) home and try the, on my stereo. If I have time, I'll listen to the whole thing again. If not, I'll listen to the beginning of the CD, the middle, and the last track. Then it's time to fill in the paperwork that accompanies the CD(s), the online form that accompanies the audition, and get the package ready for mailing.

So there it is in a nutshell. Practise. Demystify. Involve the student in the evaluation. Read instructions and follow them. Celebrate success at every stage of the audition process and remember that you are the first member of the audition panel.

Rick Hein
rahein@mac.com

Resources:

Audacity - Free - (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/)

Audacity is a free, easy-to-use audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:

* Record live audio.
* Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
* Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, and WAV sound files.
* Cut, copy, splice, and mix sounds together.

SoundStudio - $79.95 - (http://www.freeverse.com/apps/app/?id=5012)

Sound Studio 3 is an easy-to-use Mac OS X application for recording and editing digital audio on your computer. Digitize tapes and vinyl records, record live performances, create your own mixes with crossfades, tweak the levels and EQ, apply digital effects and save in all major file formats with Sound Studio 3!

xtrememac micromemo - $59.95 - (http://www.xtrememac.com/)

• high-fidelity digital audio recorder
• Turn your iPod into a portable recording studio. No tapes, no batteries, no cables. MicroMemo™ plugs • into your iPod to record interviews, meetings, lectures, a new guitar riff, or any audio content directly to your iPod nano or iPod video.

Sony ECMMS907 Digital Recording Microphone - $99.99 - (http://tinyurl.com/2flrab)

• Electret Condensor Stereo Microphone with Mid-side stereo system
• Wide Dynamic range for capturing high-quality sound through digital recording
• Directive angle can be set to between 90 and 120 degrees depending on environment and source
• Triangular shape design, fits comfortably in your hand

ROXIO - Toast & EasyMediaCreator - (http://www.roxio.com)

Nero - (http://www.nero.com/)

Garageband and iTunes ($79 - free with new Apple computers) can also be used to import voice memos from your iPod using iTunes, drag them to the desktop, drag the desktop file into Garageband, trim out talking and excess metronome run, and then send back to iTunes, where it can be burned as a CD.