Where Would You Like To Go Today?

Perhaps one way to use the Internet and digital technology as a platform is to explore possibilities individually and Blog your expedition. That way you take us with you. By the way, it is all right to get lost. Often that is how you discover the most amazing things!

We have enough technology (horsepower under the hood), to launch ourselves. What are our tools for musicing? We have our instruments and our passions. We have our ears, eyes, and our intellect. These may be primary.

The tech tools are for tinkering. What are our tech tools? What are tools? Generally tools are for extending our reach and multiplying our power. Heidegger calls such things our equipment. We have all sorts of mechanical tools, and now digital technology is replacing the mechanical implements with code...code for making new worlds.

Some of our work will be creating. Some of our work will be problem solving. Is there a difference between solving a problem and creating? Much of the research literature seems to suggest that problem solving is creativity. What do you think?

So we have infinite possibilities at our disposal. We have imagination unleashed to the nth power. Where would you like to go today?

New Directions, All Directions

It is up to us as educators and musicians to raise serious questions about digital technology and the internet and their impact on musicing. From the earliest of historical times, music has always been on the leading edge of technology. The piano and most instruments of the orchestra benefitted from the machine edge and the industrial revolution. Even the orchestra itself is modelled after machine technology with the replaceable parts brought together and run by an operator. The conductor wields the baton before the 19th century's marvelous music-making machine. The orchstra may have been the most sophisticated machine to come out of the 19th century.

Even the first super computers emerged as an effort to crunch the huge numbers needed for creating and making music. The Illiac at the University of Illinois represented the first efforts to move music through super computers. Actually most of personal computers have faster processors and more memory than those early super computers.

The creation of the first synthesizer was an attempt by RCA to replace musicians with synthesis, but it failed and was donated to Princeton/Columbia (probably as a tax write-off), and the academy put it good use in making new music. But the computer music studio became an isolated operation that was difficult for most people to access.

In the 1970s-80s, small personal synthesizers exploded on the music scene, completely transforming the music business and bringing synthesizers and music computers into the heart of the music academy with programs in music technology.

The Internet brought yet another stage of development in which music became the driving force for the rapid, almost cataclysmic expansion of the Internet because mp3 files made it possible to download and upload music for everyone, including those who previously had no background in working with music technology or computers.

Now we stand at a crossroad for musicing and technology. Can we develop a musical blogging in which our creative efforts result in the development of new skills, knowledge, and understanding? Then music teaching/learning is created by the student as process of interaction and self-inquiry. Knowledge is produced by the engagement of the student. What happens now to the teacher?

Making Music as Blogging

In this miraculous world of blogging there is a a profound process that shapes perception and discloses a new beingness that is simultaneously intimate and distant.

In music I am committed to making music and music making in the context of a blogging process, an encounter with an expansion of conscious awareness. Thus my views are reflected in the questions raised by Stephen Downes:

What happens when online learning ceases to be like a medium, and becomes more like a platform? What happens when online learning software ceases to be a type of content-consumption tool, where learning is "delivered," and becomes more like a content-authoring tool, where learning is created? The model of e-learning as being a type of content, produced by publishers, organized and structured into courses, and consumed by students, is turned on its head. Insofar as there is content, it is used rather than read— and is, in any case, more likely to be produced by students than courseware authors. And insofar as there is structure, it is more likely to resemble a language or a conversation rather than a book or a manual.

The e-learning application, therefore, begins to look very much like a blogging tool.

from E-learning 2.0

So the point of our inquiry is to raise questions about our process as we engage music making. We need to notice the intimate details of how we grow and how we change as we become the embodiment of music either as listeners or performers.