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Musicians actually have a great history,
with music technology going back thousands of years.
In Howard Goodall's, the Story of Music, he points out that the oldest discovered
musical instruments are flutes made from mammoth ivory and bird bones,
which are over 44,000 years old.
Consider the development of early strummed and bowed stringed instruments,
such as the lute or viol, to the guitar and violin, cello, or modern guzheng.
Or the early synthesis of the ondes Martenot, or the theremin,
to the digital instruments DJs use today.
Musicians haven't just embraced technological change, but
they've been instrumental in driving it.
In his book, Music Technology and Education, Amplifying Musicality,
Andrew Brown suggests that even a computer can be perceived as an instrument.
He outlines the intimate bond that we create with our instrument, how it
amplifies our musicality, and suggests that there's no reason a musician can't
have the same relationship expressing themselves musically with technology.
Be it an App, a MIDI controller, or a Smart Phone,
Brown suggest it's about unlocking expressive potential,
just as you do when you play a trumpet, a viola, the piano, or bass.
It's important to be open minded around the definitions and
applications of technology.
If you're a classically trained music teacher, the idea of using technology to
teach a year 7 class of 56 students for instance, may be a bit daunting.
The technology here is being used in exciting ways, and importantly,
it doesn't hinder music making.
It's possible, of course, with a big enough budget,
to build a full professional studio, or even several in a school.
But in this room the priority is more to provide every student with
a technology rich, but musical experience.
We don't want students to be waiting for us to say,
all right here's what I want you to do.
Plus, it's boring to say that over and over again.
So any time we think we might say this more than once,
we put that into the computer either as a video, or as text, or
as an animated character speaking on our behalf.
You open your computer, when you're ready, not when the teacher's ready.
Not when the class is settled, but when you're ready for work,
open the computer and everything you need to know is in the computer.
Okay, so I'm in year eight.
I've opened up my laptop.
It's told me that today I'm supposed to be in one of the jam rooms producing
something.
Looking at the technology in the jam room, I see a mixer, I see guitars, bass,
keyboards, lots of microphones.
It looks fairly complex, but you were telling me that's an easy room to work in.
Indeed.
You place your laptop on the stand, you plug the USB cable in, and
all of the audio funnels in, in glorious two channel stereo 44.1 kilohertz sound.
You press the record button and 20 minutes later, either in the cloud or on your HUD
driver, or an SD card, you have a document of what happened in that 20 minutes.
And what other examples are there in the classroom of that sort of,
already plugged in and ready to go kind of station.
We have zones in the classroom designed to make that happen.
Probably the first thing you would do in a creative process,
is a musician makes a demo right?
The first thing, you have an idea and you record that idea so
you can share it with people.
So we have places called the Creation Station where you go to create.
And that's a simple as sitting down at a chair, you've reached to here and
your head phones are there.
You place your laptop on a ready stand that we've place there perfectly for
you and there's a mini keyboard.
Which I will say as a guitar lead plugged in to it.
So any idea you could possibly have,
is ready to be put into the creation station and saved to the cloud.
So from that, you can then bring it to the jam room and
your colleagues can say, cool, let's jam, from there to the stage.
And the stage gives you a more sophisticated set of equipment, but
you've already practiced interacting with that equipment at the creation station and
the jam station.
Surely, that is actually much more complicated for the students to be making
music with all of those different types of technology there on the stage.
Sometimes we're thinking about technical and
sometimes we're thinking about creative.
We never want to deal with technical when we're trying to be creative.
So, on the stage, you can just walk straight up and
we have an invisible mixer, it's in a rack and it's digital.
Which then means that everybody's iPad has touch control and everybody can turn each
other up or down, so its very collaborative and its very cooperative.
But in terms of complexity, anybody who can go like that,
has the skill set they need to work on that stage.
We have a red button on the computer, that you go like that and
you have a 32 track digital multi track recording.
Which is also bounced out automatically to a two-channel stereo.
So we've got students right there at the moment working, jamming,
preparing for a live performance, and yet it's fairly quiet here.
Yeah, and not only do we have the entire year 12 class on the stage,
we actually have maybe five rock and roll bands making music in
this space at the same time, all within in sight of the teacher.
In the next module in this MOOC,
we'll discuss some of the subtleties of music making with technology.
And a bit to better understand the sophistication of electronic music
performance.
We'll also analyze Brown's other metaphors for
understanding technology as music making devices, as a medium, and as a tool.
In his book, Music Learning Today, Digital Petagold G, for Creating,
Performing and Responding to Music, Bill Bauer considers the impact of technology,
on the more traditional process of learning an instrument.
Especially in a school band context.
He points out the way that technology can be used to help students practice,
from the use of digital tuners or
metronomes, to software that can accompany and even listen to a student.
Following their tempo and giving feedback on wrong notes or timing.
Bauer also looks at new electronic ensembles that have used
the traditional band or orchestra as their model.
In this MOOC, we'll consider the new and the old.
The way technology impacts on traditional music education practices, but also, how
music education practices ought to change to be relevant to new musical cultures.
In fact, that's the focus of the next module.
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