Interactivity #3

What about the final inventory that emerged? Do you have any thoughts on these technologies as a collective for your particular content area?


I think our final inventory is a good list of technologies that can be used to aid our teaching of music.  I have discovered many new technologies from my peers and this list.  Some of these are obvious (I contributed the metronome, tuner, guitar amp) and some of them are things I have never heard of.  I just read Matt Pietrucha's post before writing this.  I think of Matt as the "Music Tech" guy of the music building here at MSU.  His post challenged the paradigm of "band/orchestra/chorus" in the music education world.  To many of us students and to many of our teachers, music education is about music performance done on acoustic instruments in one of these three classes.  There is general music in Elementary School but...that is usually only to prepare students for the ensembles they will be in in middle and high school.  


A majority of our musical experiences in school before college followed this model.  We were lucky if we came from a school that utilized state of the art music technology.  I know that Millburn HS and Roxbury HS both have Music Tech classes and equipment.  We were also lucky if we talked in-depth about music history, music philosophy, and the cultural implications of music.  Most of us learned how to execute note-reading, rhythm reading, and dynamic (louds, softs, different articulations) reading.  Not many of us learned what was so important about that.  We stuck with it because we enjoyed it but we didn't get opportunities to think about what we were doing.  Many of the technologies in our inventory serve the "band/orchestra/chorus" model.


Matt raises an interesting point.  Music Ed doesn't have to be that way.  We don't have to be put into boxes of "band kids" or "string players" or "singers."  All of these titles come with really unnecessary negative baggage and stigma.  YES, we can use technology to aid "band/orchestra/chorus/acoustic performance"  BUT we can't be afraid of the technologies that don't aid these traditional models of music education.  Utilizing new and outside-the-box technologies gives us the opportunity to talk about what music really is, challenge world views, and break down these divisive barriers and paradigms of genre.