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How to write something long and complicated
I find myself in the new and delightful position of writing for money. So I needed to step up my game in terms of workflow and file management. The last time I tried to write something long, I was in...
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Eric B and Rakim
In 1987 I remember having my ears grabbed by this thing on the radio called “Pump Up The Volume” by MARRS. Now that mashups are so common, this track doesn’t sound particularly remarkable. But in...
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Teaching music with looping
Saville, Kirt. Strategies for Using Repetition as a Powerful Teaching Tool. Music Educators Journal, 2011 98: 69 When a student brings a recorded song to me that they want to learn, the first thing I...
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How to promote flow in music students
Continuing my research into the use of games in music education, I found this: Custodero, L. (2002). Seeking challenge, finding skill: Flow experience in music education. Arts Education and Policy...
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Music students and maker culture
For Alex Ruthmann’s class, we’re reading Music, Meaning and Transformation: Meaningful Music Making for Life by the late Steve Dillon. If you can get past the academic verbiage, there’s some valuable...
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Experience designers design experiences
Hassenzahl, M. (2010). Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons. Morgan & Claypool. For this week’s reading on experience design for music education, we moved up a level to think...
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Constructivist learning and Scratch
Brennan, K. (2013). Best of Both Worlds: Issues of Structure and Agency in Computational Creation, In and Out of School. Doctoral Dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had the very...
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Repetition defines music
Musical repetition has become a repeating theme of this blog. Seems appropriate, right? This post looks at a wonderful book by Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, called On Repeat: How Music Plays The Mind,...
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Killen and Marotta
Participants in Play With Your Music were recently treated to an in-depth interview with two Peter Gabriel collaborators, engineer Kevin Killen and drummer Jerry Marotta. Both are highly accomplished...
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Listening, hearing, and the infinite loop
I was reading this super valuable post by Rob Walker listing different strategies for how to pay attention. Deep attention makes the difference between looking at something and actually seeing it. Rob...
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Booking me for workshops
I want to expand my private teaching and speaking practice. If you were to book me for a workshop or seminar, what would you want it to be about? Music production? Intellectual property and authorship?...
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Lifelong general 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,...
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Music education at the grownups’ table
I was asked by Alison Armstrong to comment on this Time magazine op-ed by Todd Stoll, the vice president of education at Jazz at Lincoln Center. Before I do, let me give some context: Todd Stoll is a...
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John Dewey on music education as experience
If I’m going to understand progressive philosophies of education, then I need to understand John Dewey. So here we go. Dewey is a progressive hero. He was a supporter of women’s suffrage, a founding...
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Chance the Rapper’s verse on “Ultralight Beam”
One of the best guest verses in the history of hip-hop is the one that Chance The Rapper does on Kanye West’s beautiful “Ultralight Beam.” The song is built around an eight bar loop. (See this post for...
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Introduction to Research on Games and Simulations
Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass In this post I’m summarizing some writing about the foundations of research on games for learning. It’s a dry topic, so to enliven it...
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Measurement in games for learning research
Note-taking for Research on Games and Simulations with Jan Plass Kiili, K., &; Lainema, T. (2008). Foundation for Measuring Engagement in Educational Games. J of Interactive Learning Research,...
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Toni Blackman’s hip-hop meditation
Toni Blackman‘s hip-hop education practice resembles music therapy as much as it does traditional music teaching, so it makes perfect sense that she would release a hip-hop meditation album. I did a...
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