Over the past year, senior music education majors have been taking General Music Methods I and II with Dr. Gena Greher and me at UMass Lowell. Since October of 2008 these students have spent Wednesday mornings teaching 3rd, 6th and 7th grade classes at the Bartlett Community Partnership School here in Lowell, MA. Last week one group of our students invited the 7th grade class from the Bartlett School to spend the day at UMass Lowell recording a song the class arranged in the UMass Lowell recording studio.
Students spent the morning rehearsing their arrangements and taking turns leading peer-conducted free improvisations. Once rehearsed, they spent the balance of the morning laying down the vocal tracks, classroom instrument and guitar tracks followed by the piano accompaniment.
The rehearsing and recording was facilitated by UML graduate sound recording technology major Tim Brault and UML music education majors Jo Price, Lindsey Sherman and Zach Cooper.
After the recording session, the Bartlett School students experienced a rare treat… a live lecture demonstration of vintage Edison wax cylinder recording. UML Sound Recording Technology Professor Alex Case made arrangements for Gerald Fabris, curator of the Edison National Historical Site in West Orange, NJ, to visit and present the lecture/demo. Virgin wax cylinders were flown in from the United Kingdom and UMass Lowell SRT major Brian Corey composed a piece to be used in one of six live takes directly to wax cylinder.
Each of the takes were recorded directly to wax cylinder as well as digitally in mono, stereo and surround sound mic-ing. After each take, the composer listened back to the wax cylinder performance and physically readjusted the placement of the musician’s closer or further away from the recording “horn.” We take for granted today that we can simply move a microphone to achieve a different sound. Back then you had to move the musicians!
I am told that all of the wax cylinder recordings from the session will be digitized and the audio will be posted side by side with the digital mono, stereo and surround sound versions on the Edison National Historical Site webpage in the near future. I’ll be sure to post a link when that goes live.
During the Spring 2009 term, two music performamatics projects will be underway at UMass Lowell. As part of a National Science Foundation CPATH grant several of my faculty colleagues from the Music, Art, English and Computer Science departments are allied in collaborative interdisciplinary projects designed to attract more students to computer science majors through arts-focused experiences.
This semester, I am collaborating with computer science professor Jesse Heines as part of a synchronized course. My General Music Methods II students will be working together with students from Prof. Heines’ GUI Programming II course on a project to collaboratively develop online music composing software with middle school students at the Bartlett Community Partnership School in Lowell. Currently, the middle school students are coming up with ideas for music software they would like to have. They are sharing these with my General Methods Students, who have been working with them one day a week since September 2008. Once public beta versions of the software are up and running, I’ll post them here for you to try out and use with your students.
An additional structure for this project involves a social music component. Following the model of projects such as the UNESCO Sounds of our Water Project and CCMixter.org, the project will involve creating an online social music/sound repository where the middle school students can upload sounds and musical samples. These sounds and samples will serve as the source materials for the software the computer science students will design.
This semester my music education colleague Gena Greher and computer science professor Jesse Heines are also collaborating on a general education course entitled Sound Thinking:
Course Description:
What is sound? How do we capture it, manipulate it, and harness it in the digital world? The field for multimedia applications is expanding, creating new challenges for artists, technologists, and educators as well as consumers. This course will explore the intersection of the arts with technology, where students majoring in the arts will interact with those in computer science to explore the art and science of digital audio from the perspective of basic end-user applications. The specific applications to be examined will be chosen based on their abilities to promote creative expression and exploration. We will also consider the underlying code that allows these programs to run and function. This course will use a learner-centered approach that emphasizes project-based experiences. It will provide students with multiple opportunities to explore, create, and solve problems with music technology. The concept of collaboration is integral to this course. As the workforce moves to a more collaborative structure, it is important that students learn to work in groups with others who may not share their skill sets and levels of expertise, and that they gain experience in problem-solving the myriad issues that arise when using technology.
Examples of class projects and student work will be posted here throughout the course.
Earlier this month Evan Tobias posted about Noteflight, a new online flash-based notation application available at http://www.noteflight.com/. Over the past few weeks I have been exploring this software with college students in my Technology in Music Education course and with high school students enrolled in a beginning piano class at Lowell High School (LHS). Those of you who know me know how apprehensive I am when it comes to using notation software with students in general music or other technology classes in K-12 schools. Most of my concern centers around the common conflation of “notation software” with “composing software.” All too often I see teachers using notation software as a technological endpoint rather than as a means to the musical end of live performance. However, Noteflight is not your ordinary notation software.
What interests me about Noteflight is not the notation component. Instead, it is in the social tools that surround the notation engine. When you sign up at Noteflight.com (currently free) you create personal profile, just like you would at a social networking site like Facebook, MySpace or custom sites created at Ning.com. Once signed in, you can create a new score, view existing scores, or scores created by other users.
Built in to the web application is the ability to share your scores with other users. These scores can be easily embedded just like a YouTube video in a class website. The embedded score can be played back by clicking on the play button and additional interactive functions are being planned which could be helpful in guided listening activities. Coming from a constructivist perspective, this functionality enables teachers to give students the opportunity to share their musical understanding in interactive ways within and beyond class time. For example, a band director could post a Noteflight score without added articulation. Students could then be assigned to add their own articulations to the score. During the next class, the students and director could choose a few scores to play through. This approach gives students the opportunity to make creative articulation decisions as composers, rather than traditionally learning it through listening and performing.
A variation on this assignment could be to post an audio file of a musical line performed with different articulations. Below the audio file, a director could post the notation for that performance, but again without articulation added. As an assessment, students could then open the score and add articulations that in their mind matched the recorded performance.
Right now, there are some limitations to accomplishing this, but I’ve been assured by Joe Berkovitz, CEO of Noteflight, that these functions are currently in development.
This screenshot shows the “version” function for Noteflight. As you work on a score in Noteflight, it periodically saves a snapshot of your piece and gives you access to it as a different “Version.” If you open your score up to be added to by others, their versions show up in this box as well. At any point you can go back (revert) to a prior version. This is a cool function, not only because you can go back, but as a window into your students’ compositional processes. Though not a full account of their process, these snapshots can provide an opportunity to have discussions with your students about the changes they made in their composition and are great starting points for assessment.
Here’s a short piece I notated in Noteflight:
Right now, the interactivity is limited to simple whole piece playback and playback within measures (click above the measure). Soon, functions will be added that will enable the composer to add additional interactivity through scripting. Very cool.
My students and Noteflight
My college students have been using Noteflight with beginning piano students at Lowell High School (LHS) for the past few weeks. Students in my class created incomplete duets to be co-composed and performed with their partner students at LHS. The music teacher at LHS has for the most part have been using Alfred’s Adult Beginner Piano book to structure the curriculum. My college students wanted to add a composing/creativity aspect to the lessons. To do this, they created simple piano scores with either a chord progression in the bass clef or a melody in the treble clef (or some combination of the two) as a compositional frame to help scaffold the LHS students. Because the scores are online and viewable by the LHS students and my college students, both can practice alone and make edits to their duet scores. Tomorrow, they will meet again in person for a final run through and performance for the class. I’ll post some of the pieces and performances here soon.
Because Noteflight is an online application, the potential for collaborative work and learning with other students is high. I’m in the middle of planning a distance composing project with another school later in the term through Noteflight. Facilitated by a custom Ning.com social network, students at LHS will notate compositions in Noteflight and share them with other students at a distance site. Ning will enable them to post their files and provide peer comment and critique. This use is inspired in part by the work at the Vermont MIDI Project, but instead centers on the students as providers of compositional critique and feedback, rather than professional composers.
I’m very excited to see how this technology develops. If you are interested in collaborative projects using Noteflight with your students, drop me an email.
Caveat # 1: I am not a lawyer and do not pretend to be one.
Today, I read an article posted on Ars Technica written by Timothy Lee detailing a recent “fair use” Copyright decision by Judge Sidney Stein of the U.S. District Court - Southern District of New York.
From the article:
Judge Stein’s task wasn’t to critique the dubious logic of this segment, but to evaluate the narrower question of whether the film’s use of “Imagine” is fair under copyright law. He noted that the film was focused on a subject of public interest, and that the film was commenting on Lennon’s anti-religious message. The excerpting of copyrighted works for purpose of “comment and criticism” is explicitly protected by the Copyright Act, and Judge Stein ruled that this provision applied in this case.
The decision quotes extensively from Bill Graham Archives v. Dorling Kindersley, a 2006 decision that allowed the reprinting of reduced-size versions of several historical posters used in a coffee-table book about the Grateful Dead. In that case, as in this one, the alleged infringers had used the works in a commercial product, but the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit found that “courts are more willing to find a secondary use fair when it produces a value that benefits the broader public interest.” Whatever the merits of its argument, Expelled is clearly commentary on an issue of public concern, and the use of “Imagine” was central to its argument. Those facts weighed heavily in favor of a finding of fair use.
Stein and company were defended by lawyers from Stanford’s Fair Use Project. In a blog post announcing their decision to take the case, executive director Anthony Falzone wrote that “The right to quote from copyrighted works in order to criticize them and discuss the views they represent lies at the heart of the fair use doctrine,” and argued that Ono’s actions threaten free speech.
This decision and the 2006 decision referenced above cause me to ask a few questions regarding the implications for music education:
In the 2006 decision, the use of reduced sized Grateful Dead posters was upheld as “fair use” within a commercial product because “courts are more willing to find a secondary use fair when it produces a value that benefits the broader public interest.”
In the Sidney Stein decision, the use of an excerpt from John Lennon’s Imagine used in a commercial film for the purpose of criticizing and commenting on issues that “benefit the broader public interest.”
So, what are the implications of using copyrighted samples or excerpts of commercial music or videos as part of our students’ educational pursuits? Is careful musical and educational use of commercial music and video in school projects of “benefit to the broader public interest?” If our students are utilizing these materials (including YouTube videos) for the purpose of artistic, musical “comment and criticism,” would that not also be considered “fair use” in light of these decisions?
What is particularly interesting to me is that both of the approved uses described above - using a copyrighted image in reduced resolution and using an excerpt of a copyrighted and performance-righted musical recording - were found to be “fair use” in two commerical settings. Also, both uses of copyrighted material seem to have been interpreted b the Judges as a “transformative” use (see Wikipedia entry on Fair Use). It would seem to me (again I am NO lawyer) that similar uses and creation of original multimedia using music and popular commercial and non-commercial video for “comment and criticism” of “benefit to the broader public interest” where the work has been “transformed” and not wholly-duplicated within an non-profit educational setting of a school would now be permissible as documented by the above case law.
Let’s take a look at the “fair use” section of the Copyright Act of 1976, 17 U.S.C. § 107:
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections § 106 and § 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
the nature of the copyrighted work;
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole;
and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
Since the above uses were found to be “fair use” within commercial settings, factor #1 in the Copyright Act of 1976 would seem to provide students and teachers working in an educational context even more protection under “fair use.” I find the Sidney Stein ruling of particular importance to music educators because it provides case law that extends the “fair use” of images to copyrighted and performance-righted musical recordings.
In light of the cases described here, I feel more comfortable letting my students use copyrighted images and musical excerpts in the creative and educational work they do in my K-College music and music ed courses, with the following caveats:
The use of the works is in part, and not in whole (e.g., reduced resolution or size)
The use of the works for the purpose of “criticism and commentary”
The use and creation of the works results in a “value that benefits the public interest”
The use of the works is “transformative” such as in a parody or for “criticism and commentary”
The use of the works do not devalue or negatively impact the market of the original copyrighted works
And, I might even be inclined to allow them to put together a compilation CD or DVD and sell them as a fundraiser….
Over the past year, senior music education majors have been taking General Music Methods I and II with Dr. Gena Greher and me at UMass Lowell. Since October of 2008 these students have spent Wednesday mornings teaching 3rd, 6th and 7th grade classes at the Bartlett Community Partnership School here in Lowell, MA. 
Last week one group of our students invited the 7th grade class from the Bartlett School to spend the day at UMass Lowell recording a song the class arranged in the UMass Lowell recording studio.
The rehearsing and recording was facilitated by UML graduate sound recording technology major Tim Brault and UML music education majors Jo Price, Lindsey Sherman and Zach Cooper.
