Stage 5 Film Project

I feel compelled to write about a unit of work just completed with a very talented stage 5 class despite the fact that I’m aware it wasn’t quite perfect. The reason for this is because it had so many good points that you can’t guarantee when you set out: self-motivated students, community and collaboration, a real-life, engaging final product and serious wow factor.

Film Composition with Sibelius & GarageBand

The unit was an expansion of one I developed a while ago. Students begin by learning simple film composition skills in Sibelius, based on the 212E Teaching Film Composition course that I wrote for Sibelius 5 3 years ago. There are resources and tutorial videos here if you’d like to use the course in your own teaching (the process is identical in Sibelius 6 and 7, although you’ll have to dig around the ribbon a bit in Sibelius 7). You can download the courseware to go with the videos here (if you’re going to give it to students, I just print from page 7). The skills they learn are to do with creating hit points (aka cues or markers) on the score and then timing the music they’ll compose to fit with those markers.

Alongside that we do the usual study of film scores. Music and mood. Motivic development. Diegetic and non diegetic sound. I love to do Star Wars, but that shows my age (and maleness somewhat), so I’ve found a few other films to balance that. This year I tried to flip that side of it by inviting the class to speak about development of a theme or motif in a film they liked. Since about 90% of the class chose Harry Potter, they were able to club together and talk about motivic development across films – it was impressive.

Oh, I should also mention that we begin by learning those same composing to video skills in GarageBand. The rather wonderful Nick Lane and I made tutorial videos to help students do that stuff and you can help yourself to those here.

Cloverfield

The culmination of all of this has always been to score the film trailer to Cloverfield. Why choose a scary monster-attacks-New-York movie? Well, because it’s big time hollywood (looks fabulous, has great mood contrast to match with music) and no soundtrack on it already!

You can see where this is going, I know. The year 10 class in question this year are brilliant. Not just well polished performers who’ve been drilled since Kindergarten: these students are thinking, creative musicians. In year 9 I arranged Reich’s Variations for them to perform because we were studying minimalism; in year 10 it’s Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas. So I bring out the “now you’ll write a soundtrack for the trailer” line and one student says “just the trailer?”. I love it. “You can do the whole film, if you like, that would be great!”, I say, and before they know it we’re brainstorming how that could work.

And here’s how it works

• Mr Humberstone goes home and cuts up the entire movie into 21 parts for 21 students. The movie isn’t long, so it’s about 3 1/2 minutes each. On the LMS he allocates a student to each portion and provides a download link for it.
• The class brainstorm motifs. This is how the soundtrack will stick together: each segment needs to include at least two motifs, and after that the composition is free, although I give them a few pointers like “don’t leave long sections silent, consider the use of drones or simple ostinati to paint a musical background when there isn’t a lot of action”.

The motif for Beth

The motif for the monster

• Mr Humberstone transcribes the motifs into the Ideas panel in Sibelius (if you don’t know about the Ideas panel, my very favourite Sibelius feature, click here), and in that same score sets out a big orchestral template which students can score into so they’re all using the same palette of sounds. Download it here.

A soundtrack in Sibelius with motifs in the Ideas Panel

• Students go away and compose for 6 weeks. During this time they are entirely self-directed, but can come back to Mr Humberstone if they need help or feedback. Generally, they don’t. Interesting!
• After hand-in day, Mr Humberstone sets up Vienna Symphonic Orchestra library with generous amounts of film compression and reverb, and converts each Sibelius file into rather lovely audio. The night before watching day, Mr Humberstone stays up until 1:30am carefully syncing each fragment of soundtrack to the film so the cues fit exactly the way each composer intended and set up in their Sibelius score.

Working independently and together

While the students were reluctant to share much of their ongoing work, one left and one was new and didn’t feel up to the project, so I said I’d do those two sections, and this gave me a great opportunity to share my work as a model for what could be done with the material they’d written. In addition, the more enthusiastic students delivered their Sibelius files early, so I could share what they’d done too. This served to spur them on.

Celebrating the achievement

After stitching the sections back together I booked the “cinema” space at school, which is a room with a data projector which can be completely darkened. We brought popcorn and watched the work with the wonderful playback from Vienna Symphonic Library. I’d love to share it with you complete with the film, but obviously that would create a few copyright issues, so instead here are a few excerpts from the soundtrack…

Cloverfield soundtrack excerpt 1

Cloverfield soundtrack excerpt 2

If you have purchased a copy of Cloverfield and would like to watch it with the entire soundtrack created by this class, you can download it here (email me if you need to know how to sync them – shouldn’t take long in a decent editing program).

Weaknesses?

So, we had great outcomes, engaged students and lots of independent learning. What were the weaknesses? First, you can’t pick a film that all students would like, but this one is far from ideal because of the content (they’re at the bottom of the age group for its certification). This wasn’t a problem with the trailer, but with the full film it was a problem. So I need better material – but it’s virtually impossible to get high quality high energy Hollywood footage that doesn’t already have John Williams dolloped all over it.

On the day that we watched the film there was a great energy in the room and some genuine moments of startled awe at hearing each others’ work or hearing their own work with the professional quality Vienna Symphonic Library samples yet three students didn’t watch it, choosing instead to look at their laptops – including one of the brilliant young composers whose work is sampled above. So engagement even in the cinema setting wasn’t complete. Maybe it never is.

The final possible flaw is how much work it involved for me. Now actually, I was and would always be prepared to go the extra mile to make something this good happen, so this relates to the last two points. Would I feel comfortable about 2 days of mastering and an all night session of syncing if the material were a little more appropriate and the students as committed to the project as me. Or does it not matter?

Student feedback

To conclude, I figured there was only one way to find out answers to these things that were bugging me, and whether the students really felt they’d got what I hoped they’d got out of it – ask them. So I made a Google form, and invited them to submit anonymously (although a few chose to tell me who they were in the context of their feedback). Of the 21, 9 submitted feedback. Here is a selection of questions and answers (I’ve carefully represented the balance of positive (majority) and negative):

Did you like the film personally?

I thought it was fun to make and I liked how we got to watch the end product. I really like this topic.

Yeah, but it was a bit gory and scary.

I quite like the scary/gruesome parts of the film, just because they were the most interesting. 

Whether you liked the film or not, was it good for the project?

It was not bad, everyone was able to produce a soundtrack according to what they got successfully. However, most of the parts were repetitive as most of the time, the characters were running away. Perhaps a movie with lots of different scenes/moods would be better for more variety

I think it was good for the project but I would of preferred a movie that was family friendly!

Yes, It was amazing to compose to because so much could done with it (well my bit anyway)

Did you feel you learned a lot about film composition and motivic development?

Not so much I didn’t really apply it to my composition. 

Yes. Because it’s fun

For the term? Yes. Through the film? No, not really.

Do you think the project should run again for the next class in 2012? Why?

Yes, because it is a fun little project that is essentially a job someone in music might like. Also, it gives the students an opportunity to explore writing motifs and developing them, which is important in any sort of music writing.

Yes. They will get a lot of enjoyment out of it. It was the best topic this whole year.

Yes, definitely, because it is a great way to do a project (because it’s enjoyable and fun) and because its an innovative and subtle way to see other class members’ compositions.

What’s your overall feeling about the project? Anything else you want to say?

I feel that it is both entertaining and educational. 

I REALLY WANT TO DO THIS SORT OF PROJECT AGAIN!

I like the project, but I had to put in music for a disgusting part of the movie so that wasn’t so good. Otherwise, the project was pretty awesome.

I enjoyed this project a lot and personally this was the first time i’ve done anything with movie soundtrack (apart from the ice age one) and it was better than i thought!

—-

I think they summed up all of both the positive things I felt we got out of it and a few of the things I felt could be improved. So, I need a better film for next year. Suggestions in the comments for this blog, please!

 

Avid Scorch for iPad in the classroom

Avid released their first iPad app only a few weeks ago, and it’s for my favourite ever software title – Sibelius. In fact, Avid Scorch is much, much more than a Sibelius file-reader for iPad. If it weren’t enough to be able to read and play back your Sibelius files, what about being able to perform some score-wide edits, like balancing the playback of the instruments in a mixer, or transposing a score to fit the range of your voice? You can change the tempo (perfect for practicing parts directly from the iPad with playback – more on that in a minute), view the notes being played on an interactive keyboard, change the font, the look and feel, and use a unique music-stand view which leaves you with the music and nothing else, so you can easily play along right from the iPad screen. And you can change the instrument of the staff you’re looking at – even from traditional notation into guitar tab or vice-versa! Read Daniel Spreadbury’s take on it here.

Now this is a cool tool for anyone who does their own compositions or arrangements in Sibelius. Your whole library can now be shared on the iPad, and I’m really interested in what the applications might be for teachers and students in schools who have bought class sets of iPads. Yes, those of us suitably inclined probably rather like the idea of taking our stage band on tour with their whole parts library on an iPad each. Need to change the set list at the last moment? No problem, you can drag the scores on your virtual shelves into any order! But if you don’t already use Sibelius, and therefore have lots of music in Sibelius format ready to go, you needn’t worry – Avid have thought of that, too. Scorch comes with a built in Store, where you can download literally thousands of scores ready-to-go, many of them free of charge.

The Scorch Store in action

But the focus of this article is to think about how we might use Avid Scorch for iPad in the classroom. I’ve been playing around with adapting my own Sibelius files for the iPad to create rehearsal parts for students to practice with at home, as my first idea to share. So imagine this: you have written an arrangement for your stage band, it has some pretty tricky syncopation and notes high in range, and you’ve got 2 weeks to learn it. Your students take their parts home on school-loaned iPads (or download to their own personal iPads at home), open their part and play along with it. But rather than hearing just their part, they hear the rest of the band, and they fill in their own part (band-karaoke!). Of course, while they’re learning, they can slow the tempo down, play from the point they keep getting stuck at, and so on. Here’s how I’ve achieved that:

As a sample I’ve used an excerpt from my 2004 piece Jabberwock. This was a fairly crazy setting of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” for combined school concert band and stage band and MLC School premiered it at the Sydney Opera House. You can watch a video of the performance and download the full score (which is also included in Sibelius’ Worksheet Creator, FWIW) here.

You can download the excerpt from the score, so far not edited for iPad to play around with yourself by clicking here (further down you can download the same score iPad-optimised).

The process to take the score onto the iPad is easy once you’ve done it once. And to make it even easier I’m providing House Style files you can download so you don’t even need to go through all these steps if you don’t want to or you’re in a hurry.

In Sibelius, I’ve opened the excerpt from the original score. The page size for both score and parts is set to A4. If you try opening this in Scorch you’ll see that the dimensions of the iPad screen are wider and shorter than the A4 page, and your staff sizes are probably set quite small, meaning that while you may be able to read them, you might struggle to perform from them. If you change the page setting to the US Letter standard size those dimensions work better on iPad, but you can get even better ones which will fit exactly when in Music Stand mode.

In Sibelius, go to Layout > Document Setup and change the sizes to the ones you see to the right, including margins. Once you’ve done this, go to Layout > Optimize Staff Spacing in case it has created any clashes between the staves in the score. Review your score, and if staves seem too close or too far apart, make the Staff size bigger or smaller by going back to Document Setup.

Next, you should open the parts Window (Window > Parts). Click on the Multiple Part Appearance button, and under Document Setup set the same values by choosing “Same as score” under both Page size and staff size, and then clicking the Margins button to edit the margins. Again, review the parts as you usually would, looking for clashes and considering making the staff size bigger, especially for younger players. You can download the Jabberwock score here with these dimensions set up and see how nicely it works. Once you’re in the score, just click on the parts list, press play, and you should hear the whole band playing while you play your part. Open the mixer and mute your part to play karaoke-style!

If changing all those values in Sibelius seems a little complicated, you can make it easier by using the House Styles I’ve created to do it quickly – download them here and here. For instructions on how to import them into Sibelius, go to the Help menu, open the Sibelius Reference, and read page 656 under “User-editable files”. Once you have imported them successfully, in your score go to House Style > Import House Style and choose iPad as seen on the left. As before, run Layout > Optimize Staff Spacing and check your score for any resulting clashes, then go to Multiple Part Appearance in the Parts Window and this time click on the House Style tab, then click the Import House Style button and choose the iPad parts House Style. A quick proofread of your parts and you’re ready to go!

There will be a whole host of other things you could do with Avid Scorch in the classroom. Let’s consider how useful the transpose feature is for vocalists needing to sing in-range. Or what about score study for senior students? Delivering folders of scores to students using Dropbox? Composition progress diaries online with linked Sibelius files for reading in Scorch (if you’re reading this blog on your iPad, you should be able to open the linked Sibelius files in Scorch seamlessly). Comment below!

 

#UWSMTeach Lecture 5 notes, part 1

These notes are just a few things that came up in the tutorials today, to make sure you’re covered for assignment 1. First, how about a video on how to use Divshare to share files on your blog other than pictures and YouTube movies?

I made this tutorial on how to make transposing parts in Sibelius live in our lecture, and may have forgotten to embed it in the notes, so here it is now:

 

#UWSMTeach Lecture notes week 4

Well, not much hard work from me this week. I dashed over for the lecture time after having my friends Ray and Attila from Roland run the tutorial, but you were still having lots of fun with whizzy things like v-drums, Jam Hubs and little handheld audio recorders, so I let them keep on going and joined in myself when things got relevant to that upcoming assignment.

By the way, if you’re sweating on that assignment, make sure you’ve looked at all the lecture notes from other weeks, and especially the tutorial videos I made which show you how to do… well… just about everything technical that you need to. All you need to do now, is come up with some great content to put into it! If you’re making loops for a composition project, check out this video I made which revises how to do it…

So anyway, back to those toys that the Roland boys brought over, this was indeed supposed to be the lecture on technology and performance, and it couldn’t have been much better than this. You can read people’s lecture notes in the #UWSMTeach community here if you want to know more or share ideas. Or do it on Twitter! With the 40-odd minutes left at the end, I showed you my Blue Yeti USB microphone and went on a fair bit about how you can get students really motivated with performance if you record them and let themselves reflect on their progress, and even better if you give them good repertoire and good gear to record it on and send them away with it.

On that front, don’t forget that in assignment 1 you have to work out a way for students to reflect on their performance progress. So this could be a good way to go – record themselves, upload it to a blog, and write about how they did. Or something like that.

After the lecture I stuck around to help a few people in the lab with the first assignment. I’ll make sure there’s time for that tomorrow. As ever, apologies these notes are late, but I think at least this week you now have everything you could possibly need already!

 

#UWSMTeach lecture 3, 2011

This week we were not beaten by technology, for a change, but by a locked door. Poor Gary had had a rough day and forgot to leave the instrument cupboard unlocked for us. However this wasn’t all doom and gloom, it did allow me to go into more detail on the assignment than I’d planned to. Much more of that follows. What we did miss out on was the opportunity to play the transcription I’d done of The Penguin Café Orchestra’s Music For a Found Harmonium. Hopefully we’ll do it again another week, because it’s a lot of fun (I got the idea from the marvelous Jon Madin who performs it on his wacky instruments) – this is the performance I transcribed:

LMS

So, what did we do in the lecture? Well, first of all I went through a Powerpoint on LMS (Learning Management System) which I’d made last year and which was fine, according to Sweller’s guidelines The lecture notes from last year provide you with that, but even better, there are some YouTube movies which practically recreate the whole lecture. I did a live demo of Screenflow, which is my preferred screen capture program. There are other programs, some of them free, and they’re mentioned in the lecture notes.

Assignment

When that was done we got into the assignment. I explained to you that you need to deliver assignment 1 online in your website, and the clearest way to do this will be to plan it in advance so that it ticks all of the boxes required. I suggested you have an introduction page, which it all hangs off, a teacher page, which will explain to a teacher (and me when I mark you!) how you will deliver the unit, what the pacing is (ie how many weeks to learn what), what stage you’ve aimed it at, the topic and the prior knowledge of the class.

Then you should have a series of student pages which take them through the unit. Yes, you will still teach it, but the information they need to do the project should all be on your website. I have created a similar kind of structure here as an example for you, or on my own website here (tho note this wasn’t done to exactly line up with the assignment outcomes so make sure you check those).

I showed you how to do this in static pages in WordPress, which you can use (even if you’re using Tumblr, Blogger or something else for your website) or you could use another website builder such as Google Sites. Do some searching for solutions – extra marks will definitely be awarded for creativity. The basics are outlined in the old lecture notes, but wouldn’t it be nice if I made it even clearer? Watch these:

 

Man, talk about leading from the front. You’re lucky!

Learn Sibelius 6 in 1 Hour

In the tutorials we learned to use Sibelius. We didn’t have time to do my whole 1 hour course, but since it’s free, why don’t you have a look at it here. Of course, you don’t have to do your assignment in Sibelius – if you’re already an expert in Finale, use that. But it’s very useful to know both programs as you never know what the school you end up in will have.

If you have any questions about the assignment email me. I’ll be in at the Opera House the next two days, so hassle me if you need a response, and don’t forget Monday’s tutorial starts at 5pm with the hands-on session on drum labs – get that at 4:30 or 4:45 if you can to help the load in. Wondering what I’m doing at the Opera House? Well, then you need to see this – the trailer for the documentary film made about what we do in Music at MLC. Go see it at the cinema if you can…

 

#UWSMTeach lecture 2, 2011

Garageband for iPad

Well, I am a slack toad. It is Friday night and I collapse into my chair knowing that the likelihood is I’ll have to complete these notes in the morning. Hey, what can you expect in the week GarageBand for iPad became available? I’ve been a busy boy! And that iPad 2, eh? Won’t have to think up many excuses before I buy that toy. Actually, the biggie for Apple toy-of-the-week for me was the new “Personal Hotspot” feature on iPhone, as those who have been following me on Twitter will have gathered. Now I don’t need the iPad 3G, because I can share the 3G connection from my iPhone wirelessly to my iPad. Genius. And no jailbreaking required.

Something that is going to save me a little time here is that much of the content of this lecture today is in my lecture notes from last year, so pop over there now and read those (although I have made some changes to assignment 1, so don’t use the guide there – I’ll be talking more about that tomorrow). As last week, that means that I can just fill you in on the extras we do. One other thing before I get onto the extras… if you’re blogging with WordPress (or even if you’re not!) check out these get started with WordPress movies which will probably give you some great ideas for how you can deliver your first assignment online.

Not a Powerpoint.

So I didn’t make a Powerpoint this week, but I did make a presentation in a package called Pages which featured some information on how you shouldn’t make Powerpoints. I included a lot of text by the wonderful John Sweller from one of his papers on Visual and Instructional Design. The main point to take away was that if you write what you’re saying on a Powerpoint, the spoken word and written text cancel each other out, and less is learned. Ideally you should use diagrams on Powerpoints that can’t be understood without your oral delivery (and vice versa) – this is the best use of something like Powerpoint. Keep words to a minimum – only a few per slide if possible. No dot points!

I then took this not-Powerpoint Pages file and explained that I’d created it there because it would allow me to export an ePub file, which is an open filetype for which there are quite a few readers around (check out Calibre and Adobe Digital Editions, for a start).

How is it useful, to be able to take resources for a lesson (I’d included video, scores and other images as useful resources for music lessons) and turn them into an ePub file then? Well, the readers are free, made for all sorts of devices – Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, etc – so you know that your students can open these and use them for revision. And why not just use PDF, MP3, and one of the popular video formats like avi or mp4? Well, because here is one file (it’s based on XHTML, for those interested, with all the links zipped up inside the file) which can contain all of those things together. I have to say, the ePub I came up with for the lecture was a bit slap-dash but hey, you get the idea. Download it here. I have cared about finding the right format for quite a while – don’t believe me? Read this blog from last year! This format seems to me to be the best, although some of the readers do not yet support video and audio…

The NSW Syllabus

We had a good bitch chat about the concepts as listed in the NSW syllabus. You really have to take yourself back to high school here. Memorise those 6:

• Pitch
• Duration
• Structure
• Texture
• Tone Colour
• Dynamics and Expressive Techniques

Because I’d already stressed you out enough by telling you I was going to lecture to 7:30pm, I didn’t go on about what I thought the ideal curriculum would be, but if you want to know (or not, actually), I agree with Lord Richard Gill. If it were down to me I think we could save a lot of time by focusing on pitch, metre and rhythm. Sure we’d discover the other NSW concepts along the way, but you show me a child who understands melody and harmony in stage 4, and I’ll show you a child (the same one you just showed me, by the way) who has been schooled in music outside the classroom. This sounds like I’m getting all old school on your, but I’m not. I mean, what do you think kids want to know about music the most? They want to know how songs are built. Understanding tonic and dominant roles, diatonic scales and further harmony from there is completely what they need to perform, improvise and write their own songs. They also need to know how rhythms are constructed and recorded. Music notation is a good skill for them to have too, so they can write down what they work out. Sure, learning what sonata form is and how it affects form of all different kinds of music for 200 years is interesting, but it’s not practically useful in learning the nuts and bolts of how music works.

Right, I’m off my soapbox. That’s it from last week. You know what you did in the tutorials and they are on last year’s lecture notes if you need them. I’m making something new for tomorrow tho. We’ll have fun. See you there.

 

 

#UWSMTeach lecture 1, 2011

What a start. Tutorial before the lecture. Fitting a 90 minute lecture into 60 minutes. A proxy server that blocked everything we tried to do online. How incredibly frustrating.

So I’m sorry about that. If I could do anything about these things, I would. I will, at least, pass a bit of feedback on to the powers-that-be. I felt the lecture was fun, anyway, once we’d got going, and while the tutorial was left rather insipid due to the above problems, hopefully you will have caught enough enthusiasm to get stuck into this whole online portfolio thing over the next few days.

I augmented the lecture that I gave this time last year a little bit. You will find plenty of information from the lecture notes for that lecture by clicking here, as well as some (hopefully) interesting pontification on how we can learn music today, background on where the vocal warm-ups came from, and so on.

Extra things from the lecture

After the warm-up games I inserted a short vocal piece I knocked-up last year to encourage students to improvise in Aeolean mode. Actually, if you sharpen the F it’s rather attractive in A Dorian, too. The process for teaching it was bottom part first (nice and easy), then the top part (which really is the middle part, sorry about that), then divide into two and perform those parts together. Then teach everyone the top part, divide in 3 parts, add middle then top parts. Layer in and out as you feel fit. Hey presto, 3 part singing. Finally, ask some to sing a drone, which then becomes a bed for solo improvs. You can easily transfer this to instruments, and because it’s aeolian A, it’s easy for kids who don’t know keyboard or have mallet percussion instruments to improv on too.

From this we followed a similar kind of pedagogical approach to learning 6834, from my Symphony for a Child. This is written up in my old lecture notes, as well as on my website, so you can download the score and other resources from there.

The idea in the tutorial was to use a GarageBand file of this piece to improvise our own solo over, which then extends the performance to improv in class and then the improv to composition (by way of recording and improving). We spent 15 mins doing this with the second tute, but obviously couldn’t do it meaningfully with the first.

MTEC

In the lecture I also mentioned the Music Technology in Education Conference (#MTEC2011). Through a special arrangement with the university, you can be released on April 11th-13th (there will also be a little bit of set-up work on the 10th, too) to attend the conference as a gopher. Gophers will be attending sessions and will have the job of helping the presenter or other delegates if needs be, but can join in with the session if not and if space. Note you will need to bring your own pack lunch. There are incredible speakers and sessions as you can see on the website, and full registration is $700, so to attend in this capacity is a great opportunity for a limited number of you. As I write, there are 4 places left.

Tutorial

As mentioned, things didn’t go so well in the tutorial, because the university’s proxy server blocked us from joining Twitter and setting up a blog on WordPress (or elsewhere). The idea was to do these things hands-on to help the more technophobic of you. Therefore I am including the following tutorial videos to show you exactly what you need to do. Remember, you can use any blog, including the very popular tumblr or blogger, or any other website builder, such as Google Sites but I am using Wordpress so if you think you’ll need help, use that. Here’s how to set up a WordPress account:

Sign Up to WordPress.com: Quickstart

►

And here’s the real me telling you how to write your first post:

I also asked you to set up a Twitter account. I know some of you morally object to this, and fair enough, but give it a go anonymously if you have to. And please PLEASE try using it as a research tool. You will be amazed how powerful it is. I don’t think I should need to put instructions for how to join Twitter up here. When you’ve finished, I asked you to write a first tweet, about anything you like, but make sure you put the #UWSMTeach hashtag in it (in any order).

I also suggest you do a Twitter search for #UWSMTeach to see what your peers have been saying, and also search for #musedchat which is the hashtag used my music educators worldwide. If you have a music education question, try asking it and adding that hashtag – you will be surprised how many responses you get and how quickly, probably.

Last but not least, I gave you some homework. So here’s your checklist:

1. Join Twitter and write your first Tweet.
2. Begin your web presence by creating a blog – WordPress if you’re not sure which one to choose.
3. Watch Ken Robinson’s 2006 TED talk called Do Schools Kill Creativity.
4. Write a blog on your thoughts about what Ken says in this video. What does it make you think about the importance of Music education? Are you passionate to advocate for your career?
5. Last but not least, email me the address of your blog so I can add you to the community list.

Tired? Sorry about that. Excited? I hope so. Enjoy the Ken Robbo.

 

Complete unit of work, scores and recordings published today

Today I’ve published a stack of work I did last year for when I rewrote my Daedalus and Icarus (text by John Hughes) for MLC School’s massed middle school choirs (over 300 voices) together with piano and strings. I created podcasts with karaoke-style follow-your-part videos so the students could learn their parts on their iPods or iPhones, MP3 backing tracks, downloadable scores, and I designed a composition unit of work which all students completed (writing their own pieces based on a myth) while they learned mine.

We performed the piece at Angel Place in November 2009, and it sounded like this:

As ever, it’s all free – all I ask is that you let me know if you perform it. It’s nice to know when it’s heard again. Just click here to have a look.

 

The iPad and reading

The iPad has been, on the whole, an enormous disappointment to me. Those who know me well or follow me on Twitter will be surprised at that statement. Because they know I love my iPad, and Tweet about the things I can do with it quite regularly.

But it has been a disappointment because my ambitions for it have not been realised, and not because of its own shortcomings. Yes, the doubters out there will be expecting me to say that it’s too difficult to type on, or it’s missing a camera, or a proper version of OSX, but actually no, I don’t feel it needs any of those things. I’d cart my laptop around for that. The iPad is for on-bus and in-bed and running-a-rehearsal and news-checking and reading – but more of that in a second. The only feature I feel it’s sorely lacking is a cross-app file management system, but I’m getting used to the workarounds.

So why is it such a disappointment to me? Well, when the first version came out I decided to go the base model because I’d probably also upgrade to the second version a year later, which will no doubt add some of the features other users are clamouring for (even though now I don’t really think I need them). I figured I didn’t need 3G because I move between home where I run separate N and G networks, school, which was a very early adopter of N wireless, and the universities I lecture and study at, which have a range of wireless availability (UNSW amazing, UWS mediocre at best). It would do for a year.

Except it hasn’t. And the main reason is that at the moment iPad apps can’t have their own proxy settings, so they can’t talk to the internet through my school’s proxy server. So if I want to do anything outside Mail and Safari it just won’t go. The iPad iOS4 update will, I’m assured, bring localised proxy settings to each app, which should fix the problem. How much I regret not getting the 3G iPad and being so limited in using it for education as a result.

So my iPad has stayed in my bag at school. In fact, I hardly used it at all until the recent school break, when on holiday in Tasmania I decided I’d try the whole reading a book on it thing. With iBooks limited to the project Guttenberg content (oh yes, and Winnie the Pooh) in Australia so far, I downloaded the Kindle app and bought the trashy novel everyone was talking about, Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.

I loved it. My wife was out doing gigs in the evening, so I would put our two babies to bed (tough gig in a hotel room) and then tiptoe to the fridge for a drink, and into bed (yes, at 7:30pm) with the app set to white text on a black background to create as little light as possible while they settled. Soon I forgot I was reading from the iPad at all – the only problem was getting used to holding it so that touching parts of the screen didn’t turn the page accidentally. This still happens a bit, but no more than the problems you have with reading pages and a book in bed. And in its case, the iPad was gentler on the arms and great on the eyes.

The other thing I quickly came to love about the Kindle app specifically, was the ability to look through the Amazon store and download the first section of the book for free to preview it. Since I got back from the break my eldest has been doing a cert 4 in website design (yes, the ages of my children span some 15 years) and so it has been wonderful to actually be able to read the contents and opening chapter(s) of books on HTML, CSS, Java, PHP, SQL and so on from the comfort of our living room to decide which one is pitched right for us. I need to buy him an iPad (he will agree). The other night, we were discussing that after he had completed the course it might be fun to try to learn iOS4 programming, and I downloaded the iPhone Programming for Dummies sample, only to see that the opening tells you there is a presumed knowledge of C++ for you begin the book. Hate to tell you, but that’s not for Dummies, and thanks Amazon and Kindle for saving me $50.

Discovering what could be done with reading enthused me. I got GoodReader and sat at a rehearsal following a score on my iPad. GoodReader is great, and working with PDFs is really fast. The file management is OK, but doesn’t feel completely intuitive (which, of course, is partly because of the lack of a unified file structure in the iPad OS). Its integration with all sorts of services such as Dropbox, iDisk and user configurable servers does definitely make it worth the $1, though: if you don’t need that, the PDF feature support in the free iBooks is more limited but the presentation better.

So this was what my iPad was for. A bit of a shame the proxy setting limitations meant I wasn’t trying to roll out much in the classroom, but it was making sense as a way to carry documents around with me. That would make it very useful for my PhD, which is in its final year to 18 months, depending on how I go with the remaining 30,000 words to write. Reading PDFs on a laptop screen has never felt natural, and so when I downloaded dozens of articles and papers from JSTOR I would either suffer, or print them out. The problem with printing them out is that notes and quotes have to be transferred back into digital format later on for use in my own papers and eventual text. At least in Acrobat you can make notes straight onto the page, and then view them in the Comments window later on, export them to another file, and so on. What I needed was Acrobat for iPad.

And it exists. Plagued by bad reviews, I put off purchasing (at the hefty price of AU$12.99) iAnnotate PDF for weeks, and carried on reading PDFs in GoodReader or iBooks and making notes directly on my laptop (yes, does seem to kind of miss the point, doesn’t it, but I was saving paper!) or by hand (Yes. Analogue notes. With no search function.). Many of the reviews claimed that annotations in iAnnotate did not survive transfer back to Acrobat, and there was no point making annotations in one app if I couldn’t read them, search them and export them back on my laptop when I came to write the final text.

Yesterday I took the plunge. It’s brilliant. Some of the other criticisms, such as strange UI and quirky file management are true, but no worse than apps like GoodReader and again really a result of the file management problems on iPad. But I used the Dropbox integration and it was just flawless. Fast. Perfect. It’s going to save me hours on my PhD, and it’s going to be so useful in other activities like annotating scores in rehearsals or listening lessons, and so on. Here’s the process that is working for me:

iAnnotate in action

1. If you haven’t already, get Dropbox. Set it up on your desktop or laptop (actually, set it up on every device you have: it’s superb) and it will sync files between them seamlessly. Make sure that you’ve got the PDFs you want to read in logical places. If you’re doing a lot of research online, you could even set up your browser to download each file straight into the right folder in your Dropbox, or you could tell Dropbox to include your download folders.
2. In iAnnotate PDF, sign into your Dropbox account. One slightly annoying thing at the moment (well, it’s one of this program’s many little quirks) is that you can only download one PDF at a time. Unless you’re doing more than 20, I’d still do it this way, for reasons that will become obvious – but if you’ve got hundreds (for instance, your book or score collection), you can drag them all in at once via iTunes.
3. Read and Annotate your PDFs. I have found the note and highlight tool to be most useful, because both will show up in Acrobat’s Comments window when you open the PDF later on your laptop or desktop. The highlight tool doesn’t just highlight the text, but also allows you to add a note to the highlight, so you get the best of both worlds. And if you find a bit of text you’d like to quote in your own essay/paper, you can select it and copy and paste it into a note for easily exporting later (even better than just highlighting).
4. Once you’ve finished working on a PDF, click the upload button. This re-syncs the PDF with the version you’d downloaded from Dropbox. You don’t need to worry about mixing up versions if you’re working on both laptop and iPad because Dropbox keeps previous versions as backups (to a limited extent, anyway).
5. Finally, when you need your annotations, simply open the PDF in Acrobat on your computer (which thanks to Dropbox will have already synced the changes) and go to View > Navigation Panels > Comments. You’ll see all of your comments and highlights, and if you made many, they can be searched. You can export them out with a simple copy and paste.

Annotations made in iAnnotate PDF showing in the comments panel in Acrobat Pro

Of course, I can’t transfer via Dropbox at work, because of the iPad’s proxy limitations, but hey, I now have a workflow which is much faster than anything I had before, convenient, easy to use and even perhaps slightly fun. When the updated iOS comes out for iPad, I’ll be able to report on how useful it is in music education for me, but at least now I can see a really superb use for students and academics alike.

 

Tutorial notes week 7 – and resources from the lecture

In the tutorial this week we created our own Wiki on the topic of music technology for education. After discussing how the structure of our Wiki would work, I demonstrated setting up the first few levels, and created a page on the Korg iElectribe for iPad. I then asked you each to create a page on a technology of your own choice, and to hyperlink it into the Wiki.

Have a look at the Wiki here.

At the moment it’s a bit of a mess, and the formatting and navigation is very very inconsistent, but with a bit of cleaning up it could begin to be a useful resource. Anyone feel like doing some more work on it?

Baroque Music resources

Here are the Baroque music resources from the lecture today:

• Badly Drawn Boy – The Shining – PDF to display for learning
• Interactive worksheet – realising figured bass
• Interactive worksheet – ground bass
• Given ground bass for students to compose a melody over – GarageBand file
• Given ground bass for students to compose a melody over – Sibelius file
• My canon over the same ground bass – Sibelius file
• Pachebel’s Canon – Sibelius file

Please do feel to use these as you see fit in your own classes.