Creating, Producing, Analyzing, & Critiquing Music in the Cloud: IndabaMusic & Music Education

Music educators can benefit from the increasing sophistication and ease of use of music web-based technologies allowing for a wide range of musical engagement. IndabaMusic is one such technology with great potential for music educators looking to have their students create, record, produce, listen to, analyze, and critique music. This web-based platform makes it easy for students to collaborate on projects in ways similar to that of professional musicians working together across the globe. In addition to serving as a tool for professional musicians, Indaba is beginning to address the music education community specifically. The Indaba Teacher’s Corner serves as an online meeting place for educators to meet, converse, and collaborate and a teacher’s resource center serves as a space for people to share curricular materials and examples of student work. Lessons such as this traditional music theory unit demonstrate the potential of combining information, embedded musical examples, and a space for interaction and dialogue. In addition to these education-focused spaces many of the general features of the Indaba Platform, when framed within a well thought out curricular project and appropriate pedagogy can serve as powerful tools for music teaching and learning.

Creating, Editing, & Producing

While many music educators lack access to music creation software in their classrooms, computers and Internet access are typically available at least somewhere in the school. The Indaba platform includes a web-based music Digital Audio Workstation program called Mantis, which can be used to record, edit, and manipulate music. This technology can be used in conjunction with the existing musical content and contests available on the Indaba website and/or the content that students generate through songwriting, composition, and/or performance. The experiences I’ve had including contests from Indaba in my own general music teaching and music ed. courses at ASU have been very positive both in terms of the musical engagement that takes place and the compelling conversations around the projects. The diverse set of musical material ranging from Hip Hop to collaborations with classical musicians such as Yo-Yo Ma that can be modified, added to, remixed, or produced through Indaba legally provide countless opportunities for music educators and students to engage with music in contemporary ways while thinking musically through the various challenges and musical problems that arise as they work.

Collaborating & Organizing Projects

Indaba makes it very easy to collaborate on music projects through features such as profiles, studios, and sessions. The system incorporates many of the features found in other social networking platforms including the ability to text/video chat within the system. Music educators will need to think through the philosophical, pedagogical, and policy issues surrounding the extent to which their students can/should engage with the larger Indaba community, however, the platform does allow for privacy controls to essentially create a locked internal space in which students could engage with each other and potentially other students through collaborations. While the platform offers a free basic membership, upgraded account settings allow for additional private and public sessions.

Listening to, Analyzing, and Critiquing

One of the most compelling aspects of the Indaba platform is the ease in which all musical content can be listened to, shared across the web, and interacted with through embeddable commenting and widgets. The example below is one type of widget that can be embedded across the web. This widget allows one to listen to an original version of a remix contest, the version created by a particular user, and a link to view the user-created version on the Indaba website with comments embedded in the music timeline/

Other widgets that can be embedded outside of the Indaba site display the music with comments. Here for example is a widget of music from a Wired contest that experimented with the idea of crowdsourcing music:

Ken Pendergrass, who has a fantastic blog Music Is Not For Insects, outlined how he used Indaba with his students as a way of listening to and critiquing their own performances through embedding comments in the music file hosted on Indaba’s platform. The post is complete with a video explaining his process and is well worth a look.

This aspect of Indaba allows for ongoing reflection and formative assessment to take place throughout all stages of a project. Students can assess their own and peers’ music allowing for a cycle of engagement, reflection, and growth. Music educators might even make use of resources such as Susan Farrell’s “Tools for Powerful Student Evaluation” to pose specific prompts as students engage in their project work:

Currently, in order to share the music across the web, one has to make the music public. This will get tricky for music educators wishing to keep the music and sessions private for the use of their students while complying with various district technology policies. However, students can access their music and respond to it within the private sessions without having the music embedded in other sites.

Moving Forward

Technologies such as IndabaMusic have tremendous potential for music classrooms and ensembles. Consider spending some time this summer giving the platform a try, enter a remixing contest, embed some comments on existing music, and maybe designing a project for your own program next school year. Have a conversation with your school and/or IT person about what resources are available for you to access the cloud and make use of services such as Indaba. Perhaps, this might even serve as a catalyst for an administrator to support your use of technology in the music classroom.