When first posed with this question I feared getting carried away with my answer. I have endless thoughts and feelings on technology, both from my personal tastes as a tech user and my professional career, which has dealt exclusively with music technology. Thus I figured that it would be important to make a clear distinction between two types of innovations:
- Technology that has changed music education
- Technology that has changed music
While I may share some thoughts about the latter category at the end of this post, I believe the above question has more to do with the former. Certain advances in technology- mostly during my lifetime- have created five major changes in music education that I can see. They are:
- Vastly increased access to music
- Vastly increased access to experts
- The ability to easily perform student music
- The ability to play back student performances
- A confusion over where and how new technologies should be implemented in the music classroom
1. Access to music has never been greater or easier. I believe this to be the primary influence of technology on the music classroom. In less than an instant I can call upon almost any piece of recorded music. Published songs, live performances, lyrics, and even simple transcriptions are available with the click of a button. This has enormous implications in the classroom. The kids want to learn a song that they know? The teacher can pull it up. The students aren't understanding how a certain passage should be performed? The teacher can instantly show them how the New York Philharmonic did it. The teacher wants to play numerous examples of Dorian tonality? No rummaging through CDs, no asking around, and no wasting class time- just the simple creation of a Spotify playlist. Lastly, if the teacher wants to assign the students listening for homework? I don't honestly know how this would have been done 25 years ago- it was probably impossible- but now the teacher can simply post links to the class web page. This advent of music ubiquity is every music teacher's dream, not only because it aids their ability to teach, but because it gives their students an effortless way to interact with music in their daily lives. I know that some lament the age of digital music- but I am not one of them. It has allowed me and everyone I know to listen to literally hundreds of times the amount of music I would have heard otherwise.
2. My example above of the New York Philharmonic is exactly what I mean by increased access to experts. As part of a teacher's job to best facilitate the learning and growth of their students, they can now call upon the world's greatest possible examples of the techniques, styles, skills, and content the are teaching. This is invaluable. Students require modeling. If a teacher can not appropriately model something, then they must call upon someone who can. Years ago this meant reaching out to the community or other regional experts and trying to coordinate visits to the classroom. While this is still a great idea and should be done- it is not the only way to give students a great model. YouTube alone is a music teacher's personal repository of musical performances and techniques. It can be used to instantly show students how a piece should sound, how certain instruments should sound, how vocal groups blend, or even how notable composers, writers, and producers do their jobs. As an example in my field, I'm certainly capable of explaining to students in a music tech class how to start a mix- but why wouldn't I let that information come from someone who has won eight Grammys and mixed over forty #1 albums?
3. When I was in music theory in high school- we arranged our favorite songs and themes for the marching band. Then they played them that season. Was this possible or realistic in high school before music notation software? I would venture to say that it wasn't. For each of us to perform that task we merely arranged the music in Sibelius, hit print, and handed the parts to the band. The same process without computers would have required a massive amount of editing, proofreading, and hand-copying of parts. With today's technology you can finish writing a piece of music and have it in the hands of a concert band the same day. This allows students to realistically hear their compositions and play a role that they may never have been able to play otherwise. Even in small ensembles, this increased efficiency makes it possible to cover more material than ever before.
4. Since this capability has existed for quite some time, I almost did not include it, but the vastly increased ease with which it can now be implemented makes it worthy of mention. In an instant a band director can record and play back a band's entire performance. He or she can post those performances online for critique and further listening/reflection, and create teachable moments that would be impossible without instant playback. Any musician who has come to master their craft knows the value of recording their playing. It is humbling, it strengthens your ability, and it allows you to perceive errors that could never be perceived while playing the music. These same effects apply to all music students. Further, it allows a teacher to track the progress of a student, and document the learning that happens in the classroom. I know that people have all sorts of varying opinions about this issue, but when taken by itself- apart from extrinsic forces- it is certainly a good thing.
5. Finally, I think there is one major negative impact of technology in the music classroom. We live in an age where we associate technology with progress. Therefore, I think that there is a tendency to shoehorn technology into situations that don't necessarily improve the quality of education. While technology can incite student interest to a certain point, I think that it's applications in this area are limited. In many classrooms, technology is used for tasks that could just as easily be accomplished without the technology. iPads, in particular, can be deceiving. It is crucially important that we ask ourselves how the use of technology promotes more meaningful learning in each instance. Technology should never be used for technology's sake, unless the use of that technology is the actual learning goal of the activity. In that case, the teacher is intentionally prioritizing a technological goal over a content area goal. This is ok, naturally, so long as it is not the norm. Below is a fantastic video that I can't recommend enough. It comes from Veritaseum about the role of technology in education and how learning works:
Here is a link to wonderful keynote address given by prolific engineer and producer Steve Albini that deals with some of the positive implications of easy music access on the actual music industry:
2. My example above of the New York Philharmonic is exactly what I mean by increased access to experts. As part of a teacher's job to best facilitate the learning and growth of their students, they can now call upon the world's greatest possible examples of the techniques, styles, skills, and content the are teaching. This is invaluable. Students require modeling. If a teacher can not appropriately model something, then they must call upon someone who can. Years ago this meant reaching out to the community or other regional experts and trying to coordinate visits to the classroom. While this is still a great idea and should be done- it is not the only way to give students a great model. YouTube alone is a music teacher's personal repository of musical performances and techniques. It can be used to instantly show students how a piece should sound, how certain instruments should sound, how vocal groups blend, or even how notable composers, writers, and producers do their jobs. As an example in my field, I'm certainly capable of explaining to students in a music tech class how to start a mix- but why wouldn't I let that information come from someone who has won eight Grammys and mixed over forty #1 albums?
3. When I was in music theory in high school- we arranged our favorite songs and themes for the marching band. Then they played them that season. Was this possible or realistic in high school before music notation software? I would venture to say that it wasn't. For each of us to perform that task we merely arranged the music in Sibelius, hit print, and handed the parts to the band. The same process without computers would have required a massive amount of editing, proofreading, and hand-copying of parts. With today's technology you can finish writing a piece of music and have it in the hands of a concert band the same day. This allows students to realistically hear their compositions and play a role that they may never have been able to play otherwise. Even in small ensembles, this increased efficiency makes it possible to cover more material than ever before.
4. Since this capability has existed for quite some time, I almost did not include it, but the vastly increased ease with which it can now be implemented makes it worthy of mention. In an instant a band director can record and play back a band's entire performance. He or she can post those performances online for critique and further listening/reflection, and create teachable moments that would be impossible without instant playback. Any musician who has come to master their craft knows the value of recording their playing. It is humbling, it strengthens your ability, and it allows you to perceive errors that could never be perceived while playing the music. These same effects apply to all music students. Further, it allows a teacher to track the progress of a student, and document the learning that happens in the classroom. I know that people have all sorts of varying opinions about this issue, but when taken by itself- apart from extrinsic forces- it is certainly a good thing.
5. Finally, I think there is one major negative impact of technology in the music classroom. We live in an age where we associate technology with progress. Therefore, I think that there is a tendency to shoehorn technology into situations that don't necessarily improve the quality of education. While technology can incite student interest to a certain point, I think that it's applications in this area are limited. In many classrooms, technology is used for tasks that could just as easily be accomplished without the technology. iPads, in particular, can be deceiving. It is crucially important that we ask ourselves how the use of technology promotes more meaningful learning in each instance. Technology should never be used for technology's sake, unless the use of that technology is the actual learning goal of the activity. In that case, the teacher is intentionally prioritizing a technological goal over a content area goal. This is ok, naturally, so long as it is not the norm. Below is a fantastic video that I can't recommend enough. It comes from Veritaseum about the role of technology in education and how learning works:
Now, after making that last point I think it's important to talk about music technology itself. As I said in the beginning, I think that this is an entirely different category. The fact is that technology, while perhaps only affecting music education in the above ways, has completely changed music itself. We now write music differently, record music differently, perform music differently, and even have entire, dominating branches of music that did not exist prior to the 1980's (i.e. music that is created from pre-exisiting recordings.) To ignore these technologies would be outright irresponsible in a comprehensive music curriculum.
In many ways, I think that music education has to catch up with how we actually make music in this century. I have been in classroom after classroom full of 3rd graders writing notes down on a staff and creating "compositions" to be played by the teacher. Students continue to do this through high school (some are even exposed to it for the first time in middle or high school...) even though NO ONE composes like this anymore. I compose, for a living, every single day of my life. I am representative of the largest group of working music composers- that is, individuals who write music for visual media and other non-print content. After a quick survey of everyone I know in this field, I can say definitively that none of us have ever put a pencil to a piece of paper and drawn a note while writing music for our job. When Hans Zimmer writes a score today- the process is COMPLETELY different than just 35 years ago when John Williams wrote the score to Star Wars. The two videos below illustrate this, but they're also just amazing to watch regardless!
This isn't to say that I don't think the essentials are necessary. We should teach students how to write notes- but shouldn't we also be teaching them how music is actually made today? Shouldn't we be prioritizing the skills that they would actually use if they pursued music? Let's show them how to take an empty multitrack session and turn it into a piece of music. Let's teach them how to think about the mix while they are writing. Zimmer, above, states "I write music in 5.1." That is a powerful statement! It could be made by anyone who writes music today. Technology in music is an integral part of the process and it must be taught as such.
Finally- here is a blog that seems truly useful about technology in the music classroom. The recommendations seem to be practical and focused on bettering the student's learning experiences!
Great and informative post Kyle. I like your point about over use of technology. I think you mentioned a great benchmark for judging whether the technology is helping: whether the lesson is actually a technology lesson and not a content lesson.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHey, Kyle! I greatly enjoyed this post, as you've provided a very fair analysis of the pros and cons of the explosion of modern tech that we and our students have access to. I especially liked your championing of giving students as much practical and meaningful experience creating material as possible- this is something that I wish I had gotten more of when I was starting out.
ReplyDeleteKnowing that iPads can sometimes run the risk of being tech shoehorning, as you mentioned, can you think of any ways to implement them into curriculum that would dodge that trap as well as provide useful knowledge and skills to students?