Contents
#ImaginingPossibilities for Music Learning & Teaching
2023-11-13
Hello!
I’m Evan Tobias, Associate Professor of Music Learning & Teaching at Arizona State University. You’re receiving this email because you signed up for #ImaginingPossibilities an occasional newsletter on imagining possibilities for music learning and teaching and exploring academic workflows.
I’m happy to connect with you.
If you enjoy the newsletter, please forward it to someone who might find it interesting.
And you aren’t already subscribed, get on the list for your own in the future!
As we get closer to the end of Fall semester, I’m reflecting on how we can be our best in the world and support our local and global communities. With the war in Ukraine and the horrific loss of life among Israeli and Palestinian people and everything else going on it can sometimes be difficult to move through the world as our best selves.
I’ve shared my own perspectives on the Israeli~Palestinian conflict on Instagram so I won’t add more here other than to say I hope all of you reading and any of your family, friends, communities impacted by ongoing conflicts stay safe and as well as can be.
On a related note, I’m wondering how intentional we are in centering our health and wellbeing? I’ve been on sabbatical this semester and it’s been very generative and productive (I plan on livestreaming on YouTube this week sharing updates on the sabbatical project look on my IG or Twitter for an announcement if interested). But I’ve also kept the advice of a Music Therapy colleague close, reminding me to focus on health and wellbeing. I made an intentional effort to center health and wellbeing (which includes but goes beyond staying true to the email out of office responder!) and it’s made such a difference. I hope you are able to center your own health and wellbeing as well.
What do you do to maintain health and wellbeing?
Wonderments & Curiosities
How might we share our process work as resources for others?
In the last newsletter I mentioned that in addition to my video presentation “Convergence, Emergence, and Curricular Inquiry: Honoring and Building on the work of Janice Waldron,” for a MayDay Conference Panel, I built a resource called the Janice Waldron Project.
At the heart of the Janice Waldron project is a set of interconnected notes from 25 of Janice’s publications. The notes are mostly direct quotes, excerpts, and ideas from Janice’s work organized by theme and by publication mostly focused on participatory culture, community music making, and the intersection of online and physical communities of musical practice.
Organizing and synthesizing notes from existing scholarship and resources is typical when folks engage in research or writing, but it usually stays behind the scenes as part of our process except perhaps when it is shared as a final version as a lit review.
What if we organized our process work in a way that is useful for others and share it publicly?
The project page explains more about how I created the project, why I shared it, and how I think it relates to ideas circulating around like “Build in public,” “working in public,” “learning exhaust,” and ideas that Alex Laing and I worked on in our LiquidWeber project of process work being similar to compost or regenerative ecological processes.
I’m mentioning this here because I think it’s worth exploring the potential of sharing process work as “content” as well as sharing resources for people to access as part of our scholarship/creative work. For people in university positions where tenure & promotion and the notion of “impact” is a thing, I think this also links to the idea of expanding what is considered “creative work,” “contributions to the field,” and more expansive forms of “impact.”
Given the diversity of topics and expertise in the field, can you imagine if there were tons of resources like this available for people to build upon?
At minimum these kinds of resources can give folks newer to an area a starting point and springboard to build upon. There are a lot of implications to work through but something I think is worth thinking through. Thoughts? Perspectives? Other examples of what some of you or others are doing in this vein?
Ideas & Inspirations
I’ve always been intrigued with sonification and it’s potential for exploration in music learning contexts.
NASA has a pretty sweet sonification project !
Sonification is when you translate data into sound.
Think of those times when you hear a “ding” in a store every time a person comes through the door. The data of someone moving through the doorway gets turned into sound. Sonification involves thinking about characteristics of sounds and how they relate to data and people’s understanding of the data. For instance, imagine that you could assign other characteristics of sound to the way people walk in, perhaps the timbre of the sound relates to their gait or swagger etc.
People have sonified everything from the stock market to climate change. It’s the idea of being creative with sound and its connection to data or our observations of the world that I find interesting about sonification. The possibilities are endless.
What’s nice about the NASA sonifications is that they could also provide material for students to engage and create with.
What music might students create with existing NASA sonifications?
More broadly:
- How might students sonify data?
- What might students want to sonify?
- What types of musical decisions could be involved in sonification?
- What types of interdisciplinary projects are possible with sonification?
Explore the NASA project with students and find out. NASA has extensive information on media usage guidelines – you are pretty good to go for educational projects!
And check out SYSTEM Sounds, a related astronomical sonification project for additional ideas, activities, and inspirations.
If you end up doing anything with sonification in your own programs let me know and I’ll share it in the next newsletter.
Interested more broadly in expanded ways of thinking about sound in music education?
Check out Sound Meaning Education founded by Jashen Edwards & Rebecca Rinsema. It’s full of fantastic resources that can spur additional ideas for your programs.
Sparks & Springboards
- Explore sound design with this synth patch tutorial on how to create the sound for the chorus track in James Blake’s “Retrograde” (also the app “Syntorial” mentioned in the tutorial for learning how to create synths seems pretty cool).
- I’ve always enjoyed learning about extended techniques – here’s a collection of concert studies for extended techniques on the viola by Garth Knox that someone mentioned to me at an event. Is there a centralized place online where people collect all the resources on teaching extended techniques for students? If not, someone go do that!
- A comment on a recent question about active listening on the Music Teachers Facebook group reminded me of Pauline Oliveros’s idea of Deep Listening. I posted some years ago on Oliveros’s ideas and the work of R Murray Schafer to support more expansive listening practices in music programs – I highly recommend the World Wide Tuning Meditation!
Don’t Miss. . .
The formalization of a National Association of Media Arts Education.
Back when the National Core Arts Standards were published, the major arts organizations involved recognized Media Arts as a core arts discipline. The work to establish a national organization continues, and if this is an area of yours, you can get in on the ground floor to contribute to these efforts.
And just because . . .
We’ve had Phoenix-based artist Mega Ran’s new album “Buddy’s Magic Toy Box on heavy rotation in my home.
If you are interested in excellent Hip Hop music for kids (and adults) it’s perfect. “Loveable & Capable” should be in every elementary music program & we can all learn from “Friends Winning.” Highly recommend!
Thank you for imagining possibilities for music learning & teaching with me!
Consider looking through our most recent newsletters.
Share your perspectives by responding to any of the questions from this newsletter!
Until next time, keep on #ImaginingPossibilities
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed the email, share with others and tell your friends & colleagues to subscribe.