stacycep818-blog

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To train the ear, is it one thing to think musically and another to feel the music? What if the educative experience could connect it all?

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Elevator Pitch: Synthetic Knowing, Ear Training

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This is a link to my white paper on Google docs. Thank you.

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I played with our Playing Activity by writing a classroom music activity, in order to satisfy the requirements for this task.

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STUDENT WORK: A mash-up of Beethoven's 5th symphony and Robin Thicke's "When I Get You Alone."

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STUDENT WORK: A waveform of a portion of our iMovie musical mash-up became a novel visual form. "All composers play with simple patterns," (p. 262.) Please note where the pattern discrimination of one tune was flat, we went for a contrasting staccato pattern as they mashed. "Play with patterns of all kinds can improve skills in composition and improvisation," (p. 261.)

The waveform and mash-up transformations became "commutative," where the wave itself can be transformed into the aural listening experience, and the aural work transformed back into the waveform. (p. 283.)

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STUDENT WORK: Beethoven pictonym transformed our mash-up idea into another language of communication; a playful word image.

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Playful Teaching

TEACHER: Good Morning, Class (grades 9-12). Today we are going to learn through pure play! Through your knowledge of ear training, music theory, history, artwork, interactive software, and teamwork, you are going to present on Music History. You will become musicologists working on a transforming activity.

1. I'd like each of you to form small learning groups, and then go into your iTunes library to select 2 very unlikely pieces of music to mash together in GarageBand, iMovie or the app of your choice. Part One of the activity requires you to map the pieces onto one another and weave them together like "incredible ballet play," (Stuart Brown TED talk.) This might be a music video. The only requirement is that the 2 pieces in your creative production must be from different genres, musical periods, or cultures.

2. In order to involve more than just this music class, Part Two asks you to bring in other disciplines in order to transform your mash-up. "Transforming concepts from one form into another can yield discoveries in any field," (p. 286.) What comes to mind when you listen to your mash-up? (For example, you may want to incorporate a line drawing using the techniques from Courtney's art class. Or perhaps a mathematical waveform might be appropriately integrated into your work to show musical trends?) "The transformation of numerical data into information observed aurally produced a significant and useful increase in pattern discrimination," (p. 284.)

What will naturally begin to happen is a magical transformation of your original music mash-up into other "communicative languages." And with each transformation, you will indeed make different discoveries about genre, musical periods, cultures, and even "finding valuable things not sought after" in your pursuit of music. Imagine the possibilities of how you can play around with music.

You will be practicing music making, play-acting as a composer, and making new rules to the game. We're looking for collective improvisation and innovation, as we observed with the birth of jazz music.

3. Your team will share with the class, and I'd like your presentation to be multimodal (p. 289.) By that, I mean I'm after an aural portion and a visual one. Maybe you'll divide up the tasks and each wear a hat, (i.e. Jocelyn loves to draw, Punya is a math geek, Kristen loves baroque music.) This way, we're most likely to touch on talents and abilities held by each one of your team members. In addition, your audience's attention is more apt "to be caught" by this added interest. The presentation to the class will "structure up" a casual roundtable discussion to talk about your team's thoughts on how you got there, your video/music editing, pattern discrimination, and musicality.

Give yourself permission to cultivate "creative irresponsibility" that you can learn from. This is risk-free, deep play. There are no wrong methods or approaches to this task. Own your mash-up! Go play!

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DIMENSIONAL THINKING & MODELING

Music students in grades K-3 work with scarves to bring a sense of time signatures into 3-D space.

Click on the graphics and follow the arrows with your hands in space. They represents how we model time signatures of duple and triple meter in 3-D space with scarves. The children gets a sense of what musical time feels like multidimensionally.

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A graphical model of 3/4 (triple meter) and 4/4 (duple meter) time signatures. When conductors follow these patterns, they work to model a written 2-D time signature in 3-D space.

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Explanation of how we use 3-D modeling to teach musical instructions found on sheet music in 2-D.

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How Do I Love Thee: Modeling

Stacy Weiss Walden

November 16, 2011

CEP818 Creativity in Teaching & Learning

How Do I Love Thee: Modeling, A Written Reflection

Within music education, I have identified the topic area of the time signature of a piece of music. I created a model of the time signature by representing how you can feel music in space in two different ways. The first representation is by moving scarves to the beat. And the second way is through conducting time. A music educator might decide to use the musical scarves as a model for grades K-6, and the conducting model for grades 7-12.

Time signatures are a notational convention used in Western music to specify how many beats are in a measure of music and which note gets a full beat. I have demonstrated a 4/4 time signature (Mozart’s Queen of the Night Aria from The Magic Flute,) and a ¾ time signature (Chopin’s Waltz in A Minor) in my video. When you break down a ¾ time signature, it means that there are three beats per measure and the quarter note gets one beat.

When time is notated in music, it’s in a 2-D set of dimensions on paper. Sheet music acts as blueprints or instructions for navigating musical time. I was looking for ways to transform this information into fresh 3-D thinking, or a new spatial representation.

Feeling musical scarves float through space gives you a sense of musical time. Working with scarves in circular motions allows us to represent ¾ time, while the up/down movement models more of a 4/4 feel to the music.

A very masterful music teacher will use modeling as a way to make sense of what can be an elusive musical concept for her students – the time signature. In almost an intermediary stage, one could ask the children to simply put down the sheet music, put their instruments away, in order to “feel the time” in their bodies and work with conducting patterns (body thinking and modeling) and then musical scarves. After time is felt in their bodies, then the instructor could move back to the 2-D rendition of sheet music and the instrument for actual music making. “Models, in short, allow us to reify- make concrete- ideas and concepts that are otherwise difficult to understand,” (p 238).

Watching the visible gestures of a conductor as she shapes musical time is a way of thinking about time in 3-D.

The benefits of using this model in the classroom lie in that it brings into play every single cognitive tool that we have learned about in CEP818. It’s a creative way to teach and learn. The conducting model demonstrates and trains active observation and good visualizing. Conducting is, in itself, an abstraction, which along with dimensional thinking, creates the perfect model that explains musical time as defined in our Western world. Furthermore, conducting time makes use of body thinking, and empathy with the composer, musician and audience. It offers “emotional space,” (p 218.) In the classroom you can point to the visible patterning too. And, it’s obviously playing. It’s a surprisingly powerful and insightful abstraction.

Furthermore, you can take the 3-D model representation and plot it on paper in 2-D, as well. It’s a vice versa situation, and because of that, it offers better “understanding and control” in how we teach musical time.

It’s painful to read that “despite its widespread utility, the practice of dimensional thinking has been almost completely absent from education,” (p. 218). Yes, how many woodworking and shop classes are still offered in 7-12 education? Clearly, teaching musical time can be a dry pursuit, but by modeling in the ways demonstrated above, there’s the potential to lead our students to greater originality in thinking, while perceiving multidimensionally (p 219). For instance, what if we expanded this idea and asked our music students to start from either dimension- the sheet music or musical space via conducting or moving scarves? We would then ask them to compose complex, multiple rhythms. They could combine all sorts of time signatures in a piece! (e.g. In Rock music, composers like Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, Sting use complex time signatures, and Appalachian Spring and Moonlight Sonata are good examples of works in the Classical genre.)

Finally, the conducting and scarf models employ all four model types (p. 229).

Representational – physical characteristics are displayed.

Functional- shows the essential operations of how time signatures work.

Theoretical- embodies the basic concepts governing the operation of setting a time signature.

Imaginary- inventing a way to display the features of something we can’t observe directly.

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Audiation as Embodied Thinking & Empathizing

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Body awareness for Audiation

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How Do I Love Thee: Embodied Thinking, A Written Reflection

Stacy Weiss Walden

November 3, 2011

CEP818 Creativity in Teaching & Learning

How Do I Love Thee: Embodied Thinking

Before musical performances, teachers will offer good luck, telling their students to just relax because muscle memory will naturally kick in. When you see it happen, it’s almost an “out of body” experience, yet there is a good amount of “body” behind what is actually happening as we learn, and how the musical memory gets stored.

“Audiation” is an aspect of ear training that might not obviously be considered “of the body.” The concept of audiation is to hear music inside of one’s head without having to sound it out loud. It’s really anticipation in music, and that very idea on its own, would normally be considered strictly pertaining to the mind. How can anticipation be embodied? Yet, what is actually required is the combination of both mind and body, together at work, to yield “body imagination,” which allows the musician to sound her music.

For me, the reason that body imagination feels “out of body” is because the more I master my musical training, the more I make music without being cognizant of my true awareness of the bits of proprioperceptive sensing going on. This relates perfectly to our last module of Abstraction. Audiation is most likely an abstraction- something quite hidden from our realization, but always present as we grow our musical ears.

My photo montage is a visual representation of how one practices good audiation technique using the body. You are looking to find pitch and resonance. A lot of the embodiment is felt in the mask of the face (the area around the nose, under the eyes and the top of the teeth) while it vibrates. My vocal coach always told me to imagine a point at the end of my nose. The physical sensation of getting good pitch comes from a dropped jaw and relaxed tongue. This is the body's microphone. Always try to place the tone in the mask of the face. Chin up. Your shoulders should be relaxed, you can lean slightly forward, working the diaphragm while you breathe through your nose, hands at your side, while legs are slightly bent, and your feet are firmly planted on the ground. All of this muscular expression is felt as you sing and go for your pitch, and there is a wonderful connectedness to it all! “…it’s impossible to understand the performance of music fully without feeling the physical activity it entails,” (Root-Bernstein, p. 170.)

By accepting the physical sensations, the muscular feelings, the skills and the imaging required of audiation, a musician is then able to shift her perception (Module 2,) in order to fuse the body with the anticipated note about to be sounded. By empathizing with the notes, or the body of music and its composer, or even the subject of the music (our “Eensy Weensy Spider,”) we possess an intuitive interpretation and, then we can become the music itself. “A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved,” (p. 182.) Musicians are moved to become the very thing that they wish to understand. We become one with our music. This happens to be the definition of the word Musicophilia, a term coined by Dr. Oliver Sacks.

In his book, Musicophilia; Tales of Music and the Brain, Sacks dedicates his research to the imagining of music, and how deeply hidden it becomes within us. Sacks uses empathizing with music as a “living thing,” through his study of its profound emotional effect on all of the areas of the brain. People feel music with their “skin and their gut,” and audiation of musical notes is one strong demonstration of this body experience.

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How Do I Love Thee: Abstracting

An Introduction.

In ear training, a turnaround is a musical passage that leads to a different section. You may hear a turnaround as a harmonic passage, a short melody, or a chord pattern.

Turnarounds are “abstractions” in musical ear training.

Turnarounds are “abstractions” in that they are a single musical element serving a highly functional purpose. The function is critical to a musical piece, yet it is not always so obvious. What makes music move? What is it that compels our ear to hear and feel, taking us to the next musical movement or passage?

When we distill down exactly what makes music move, we come to some very simple elements; one element is the turnaround.

*Let us not confuse the musical turnaround with a musical hook. They work together and a hook may be a turnaround, but a turnaround is not necessarily a musical hook! (Bridge to the “musical hook” as studied in CEP 882).

Turnarounds are commonly heard in the 12 bar blues, played after the 12 bars as an intro to the next musical section. It ends one idea, and introduces or “turns” us towards another.

For this activity, we will be observing and imaging musical patterns that turn us around. After “training our ears” to hear the turnarounds (our abstraction,) we will compare how our senses perceive the functional properties of turnarounds, and draw inner relationships between turnarounds and different phenomena.

First, we have a video demonstration of “training the ear” to hear the turnaround. We use the 12 bar blues, and various tunes in popular music.

Secondly, we represent the turnaround in 2 other ways (through the gesture of a "chassé" in dance and "framed openings" in architecture) to show that our abstraction can take many forms. We key in on the fundamental aspects that are observed and simplified in the turnaround, in order to recognize and analogize a correspondence of function between our mediums.

Our goal is to learn how to map two domains onto one another through abstracting and analogizing.

Final reflection several posts below.

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Demonstration of abstractions- the turnaround in music.

Listen carefully to hear the student point out the turnarounds. Note how the abstractions are also musical patterns!