Congratulations HASTAC Digital Media & Learning Grant Winners! Another look at technology based ensembles!

Congratulations to Daniel Truemen and Perry Cook for their Mobile Musical Networks project as well as the other winners of the HASTAC Digital Media & Learning Grant Competition! The following is a description of the Mobile Musical Networks project:

Project Description:

Mobile Musical Networks will build an expressive mobile musical laboratory for exploring new ways of making music with laptops and local-area-networks. Students will collaborate in designing these technologies. In the process, they will learn about a variety of subjects, including musical acoustics, networking, instrument design, human-computer interfacing, procedural programming, signal processing, and musical aesthetics.

This has some exciting potential for music education. The current related project taking place at Princeton is PLOrk (The Princeton Laptop Orchestra). Both James Frankel and I have written about PLOrk before and the exciting potential for similar types of ensembles in public schools. I also can’t wait for their upcoming performance at Northwestern University’s Sonic Divergence Music Festival!

It will be interesting to see how school music ensembles might evolve through the use of various technologies. An interesting blog discussion took place on this topic back in July of 2006 when the provocative question of “Are the traditional ensembles worth continuing?” was posed. Owen Bradley has recently been blogging about his students’ use of various electronic instruments as well as silent brass systems for some of his brass players. In 2006 at the International Computer Music Conference, Nathan Wolek and Virgil Moorefield co-chaired a panel discussion titled “The Laptop Ensemble as Pedagogical Tool.” Are technology based ensembles such as PLOrk, University of Michigan’s Digital Music Ensemble, MSUM’s Interactive Electronica Ensemble , Northwestern University’s Lucid Dream Ensemble or Steston University’s Mobile Performance Group, more common at the university level than at public schools? (While not all of these ensembles still exist they are interesting models for potential ensembles in public schools) If so why do you think this is? Should we have public school ensembles such as these? How would we go about creating them? How would they function in the typical public school music program?

Good luck to the Mobile Music Laboratory project! Perhaps it will spark some interest for similar projects in public school music programs.