Whats "new" about new media?

Before i even start, i must say that I am looking at this from a music learning standpoint, not just an overall new media standpoint. My reasons are simple: Thats what i'm interested in.

So what is "new" mean in new media in music learning? Well, I actually thought about this before class last week and was going to blog about it, but, as we know, life happens and i never got around to it. But Dr. Dodge brought up an interesting point in his talk. Do any of you audiophiles out there remember "reel to reel" tapes?

Well, I remember them, quite vividly. I was in a trade school for audio engineering (you know...record bands, film scores, sound design). Anyway, we spent weeks on learning how to cut and splice tape together. And not just little 1/4" tape (e.g. cassette size), but i'm talking the mammoth 2" stuff. Ahhh, those were the days. So I cut many a finger learning how to do this and once the unit was complete, they take us into a room and show us this (see above screen shot)

Yep...a Macintosh computer with a program called Sound Designer. They said, "you'll never have to edit tape again". And they were right.

Was I ticked off? Yeah! Was it beneficial to learn the right way? Yep! You see, since i learned how to do it the 'old-school' way, whenever i used a computer to edit audio, i always use my ears and not just my eyes. I make sure my edits sound clean. I've heard many recordings (bands, commercials, etc.) where I can hear the edits and it bugs me.

So what happened here? An appropriation of sorts i guess. The old merged with the new. The concept is the same, but a new aspect of the concept was added...vision. It's nothing new, really if you think about it.

Music-technology-learning
Throughout the years, music and the computer have been merging. This has allowed immediate feedback to the listener. Instead of writing music notes on a piece of paper, getting that music broke down into parts, hiring musicians, and finally getting to hear your creation (which could take months, even years), we now can hear it instantly. But here is the issue: What if you have never written music before or took a theory class or played an instrument?

What i'm about to type is NOT a condemnation of music classes or how music educators choose to teach music. I'm sure we can all agree that music is one of the lower subjects on the schools hierarchy of classes. However, the way music is taught in school is not beneficial to the students. In my view, it's archaic in some ways. It's also confusing as well.

Jeanne Bamberger, who's work on intution, states that musically untrained people (kids and adults) already know alot about music and the way we teach them is confusing. We are not allowing them to build and reflect on their intuitive knowledge. We are trying to replace what they already know with language and concepts that don't fit. Makes sense to me...but then again, i'm biased.

So what to do? Again, i think Bamberger says it best in her article "The Development of Intuative Musical Understanding: A Natural Experiment" (2003, p. 34):
If a general pedagogical approach emerges from this study, it rests on the finding that the basic characteristics of tonal structure are already part of musically untrained students’ intuitive knowledge-in-action. Thus, a curriculum for elementary music fundamentals classes should recognize, build on and help students develop these intuitions in at least the following ways: ● first, give students ‘units of work’ that are consistent with their intuitive ‘units of perception’ – aggregated, structurally meaningful entities such as motives, figures and phrases; ● second, provide a working environment such that materials are easily manipulated at mutiple levels of structure – for instance, at the aggregate motive level, and also easily modified at the more detailed level of their pitch and duration ‘contents’; ● third, encourage compositional, action-based projects that necessarily direct students’ attention to context and within contexts to structural functions; ● fourth, give students easy access to a variety of representations that include: multiple sensory modalities, multiple graphics and multiple levels of musical structure; ● fifth, encourage students to invoke strategies that will help make their intuitive knowledge explicit, e.g. listening critically, designing, improvising/ experimenting and reflecting on decision-making criteria, along with trying to account for results.

But what about the music? Shouldn't kids learn how to read music and play an instrument? I say yes, to a certain point. I'm self-taught, so most of my musical knowledge is from playing around...tinkering i suppose. Yes, i've had theory classes, and to be honest, i hated them. It actually made me not want to write music on a computer. And i loved doing that...just putting the little black notes on the sheet in weird combination and hearing the result. But no!! Theory classes took all the fun out of that (i.e. "you can't have parallel fifths, you can't skip that many steps between notes"). But now we're just getting into aesthetics...pure subjectivity. What i find pleasing to my ear, you won't. But my biggest regret is not taking theory early in life. I thought of theory as a set of rules to govern song writing, which i was very rebellious against (thank you Mr. Zappa), but it's not, it's just a theory, a set of practices. And what has to be done is merge those practices with new practices. Music has a language all it's own...and until recently, only a few could speak and write in that language. Now, with the appropriation of technologies, that language is taking on new meanings. Meanings being made up by 'musically untrained' individuals (whatever that means). So, review what Jeanne Bamberger said above and you tell me...make sense?