Music Tech Week 5

Week five’s focus was responding to music with the use of technology.  Through the readings, I realized that I already use technology to get students to respond to music more than I thought.  I frequently have students in my general music/ukulele class listen to/watch professional ukulele players perform and make written observations of the performances.  Students answer questions that range from technical (strumming pattern, muting of strings, etc.) to musical (tempo, dynamics), to the emotional message of the song.  This activity corresponds with the listening and responding activity types listed in Bauer (2014).  In this class the students keep all of their responses after they have been graded and this effectively becomes a journal.  I would like to add a reflection piece to this final product which would fit with the listen and reflect activity type listed in Bauer (2014).

I also have my ensemble students listen to music performed by professionals or college level groups.  I try to find recordings of the sheet music we’re playing using sites like www.jwpepper.com or I find recordings of pieces that are from a similar style.  Students listen to the recordings and use a rubric to evaluate the performance in relation to concepts we are learning in class.  The main point of these listening/evaluating exercises is to have students actively listen to music that they are playing using instruments that they are using so that they can get a mental representation of what each piece or style should sound like.  When we go to festivals to perform, judges often want to hear specific, characteristic sounds from the groups.  Many students are not familiar with the sounds judges listen for because they don’t listen to the type of music we play in class, or if they do, they rarely focus on elements like tone quality or characteristic sounds for the various instruments.  Asking students to produce these sounds and play in these unfamiliar styles is similar to asking someone who has never heard a Boston accent to speak with one.  A person could describe the accent very well but unless the other person has heard the accent being used, they are not likely to produce an authentic sounding accent.  I find this to be similar to asking students to perform with the appropriate sound for different styles of music.

This week we also used Spotify to create a playlist.  I had never used Spotify before and did not know much about what it offered until this week.  I realized after doing this project that Spotify would be a good resource to use to provide free listening examples to students.  Instead of having to use iTunes or other software where music is saved to a specific device, with Spotify, students can use any device with an internet connection to access playlists that have been put together for listening assignments.  Teachers could use these playlists to help students understand how music from different styles or genres sound when preparing to play pieces so that when students play the pieces they do so in the appropriate style.  Teachers could also use playlists to enable students to listen to music from all over the world.  These listening experiences could be combined with written responses where students evaluate and respond to music from other countries and cultures.

Reference

Bauer, W. I. (2014).  Music learning today: digital pedagogy for creating, performing, and responding to music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.