This week in Fundamentals of Western Music class at the New School, we did an in-class improvisation exercise, where students created spur-of-the-moment scores to scenes from No Country for Old Men. I did this in response to being told by a faculty evaluator that I should have more music-making during class, a suggestion I strongly …
Continue reading “Live scoring with No Country for Old Men: update”
Note-taking for Approaches to Qualitative Inquiry with Colleen Larson Willis, J.W., (2007) Foundations of Qualitative Research, Sage, chapters 1-4. The simplest way to define the difference between quantitative and qualitative research methods is that one uses numbers and the other uses words. But in reality, qualitative researchers use stats too, and all quantitative studies contextualize their …
Continue reading “The Interpretive Turn: From Sociological Positivism to Constructivism”
I use a project-based approach to teaching music technology. Technical concepts stick with you better if you learn them in the course of making actual music. Here’s the list of projects I assign to my college classes and private students. I’ve arranged them from easiest to hardest. The first five projects are suitable for a …
I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new interactive online music course called Theory for Producers. It’s a joint effort by Soundfly and the NYU MusEDLab, representing the culmination of several years worth of design and programming. We’re super proud of it. The course makes the abstractions of music theory concrete by presenting them in the form …
Here’s what happened in my life as an educator this past semester, and what I have planned for the coming semester. Montclair State University Intro To Music Technology I wonder how much longer “music technology” is going to exist as a subject. They don’t teach “piano technology” or “violin technology.” It makes sense to teach …
I’m part of a research group at NYU called the Music Experience Design Lab. One of our projects is called Play With Your Music, a series of online interactive music courses. We’re currently developing the latest iteration, called Play With Your Music: Theory. Each module presents a “musical simple,” a short and memorable loop of …
The NYU Music Experience Design Lab is putting together a new online music theory resource, and I’m writing a lot of the materials. We want to keep everything grounded in real-life musical practice. To that end, we’ve been gathering musical simples: phrases, riffs, and earworms that beginners can learn easily. My criteria for a good …
My newest music student is a gentleman named Rob Precht. As is increasingly the case with people I teach privately, Rob lives many time zones away, and he and I have never met face to face. Instead, we’ve been conducting lessons via a combination of Skype and Splice. It’s the first really practical remote music …
I’ve been blessed that both institutions where I teach music technology give me considerable freedom in how I do it. I find the music side to be quite a bit more interesting than the technology side, so I center my classes around creative music-making, and we address technical concepts as we encounter them. I’m learning …
Together with Adam Bell, I’m planning some in-depth writing about the phenomenon of pop musicians (like me) teaching in formal, classically-oriented institutional settings. This post is a loosely organized collection of relevant thoughts. What even is “pop music?” As far as the music academy is concerned, all music except classical or folk is “popular.” People …
