[Alex Enkerli]

(Crossposting from the Open Music Theory — Instructor Community)

What are instructors\’ thoughts on using alternatives to staff notation for examples and exercises?

Context/disclaimer: I was trained in ethnomusicology and I\’m (slowly) conducting field research on electronic musicking.

 

In my experience, a focus on \”reading music\” has been a major obstacle for a large number of people who want to delve into the theoretical dimensions of music practice and analysis. It\’s like asking people (including practitioners) to learn a whole new language before they can get into the core of the matter, which is only tied to that language in a narrow context.

Far from ideal in terms of experiential learning.

 

One approach I\’ve been taking is to teach musicking (though not necessarily music theory) through Sonic Pi.

Sonic Pi – The Live Coding Music Synth for Everyone (sonic-pi.net)

It\’s a Free Software music making environment (with Creative Commons content) which has been crafted at Cambridge to be teachable to 10yo children. I\’ve done workshops with children (7–12) as well as with adult learners/teachers. It was most difficult with teachers (who wanted to resort to the approaches they found comfortable). Yet it was effective with everyone.

Though I didn\’t get the opportunity to use it to teach deep music theory, it has all sorts of affordances to make it easy to teach a wealth of MT topics, including tuning theory and (semi-)generative composition. Indeed, musical applications of Set Theory are simply trivial in such a context. And remarkably useful!

Quite a powerful move for those of us pushing for \”STEM\” fields towards \”STEAM\” (adding Arts in the dominant frame for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math).

Plus, it\’s more accessible than staff notation approaches for people with visual disabilities.

Another approach I was devising was to use Digital Audio Workstation software (Reaper, GarageBand, FL Studio, Ableton Live, Reason, Logic Pro, Bitwig Studio…). Some are Free Software, (partially) Open Source, freeware, or bundled with other purchases. Plus, many people have them already. And they all include some for of \”piano roll\” editor in which you can play with MIDI content.

Turns out, Catherine Anne Schmidt-Jones had the same idea. Some years back, she published an Open Textbook using this approach.

Learning by Doing: An Introduction – Exploring Music Theories – OpenStax CNX

Surprisingly, Schmidt-Jones only used audio files instead of MIDI.

So… What I perceive could be done with OMT is two simple (though possibly time-consuming) additions to the examples and exercises:

• Making the MIDI versions available for direct download without requiring an account with the (increasingly-controversial) Muse Group
• Display some form of \”piano-roll\” representation alongside the MuseScore plugin.

Of course, I know that this might require quite a bit of work. Although, it might be possible for me to get direct support for such an undertaking.

I\’m mostly wondering about instructors\’ thoughts (and experiences!) on alternatives to the staff notation while teaching music theory.

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