Presenter at NYSSMA/MENC

I am just back from NYSSMA (New York State School Music Association) Summer In-Service Conference in Albany, NY.  NYSSMA is considered one of the best MENC Chapters so I was honored to have been asked to present.  My presentation was bright and early Monday at 9AM and I managed to get a some what awake crowd of about 25 people.  Since this is the smaller of the two conferences NYSSMA does each year, I was happy to have the numbers.  My 1 hour and 15 min presentation was entitled, “Digital Media In & Out of the Classroom”.  My presentation covered two areas:

1 ) Keeping it safe and legal outside the classroom with regard to CD or video sales and posting student work on the Internet 2) How digital media can be used in the classroom to demonstrate an idea or concept or be used as materials for student projects

I used examples of student podcasts and compositions and also gave examples of how popular media, video, YouTube and contemporary songs can be used in the classroom.  Each participant left with a nice packet of information discussed in the presentation and several lesson plans that were discussed.  They seemed enthusiastic and appreciative of the presentation.

All in all, I had a good time and meet a few really nice people. Given I am a New Yorker at heart (I was raised in Brooklyn and have Permanent NYS Certification), it was nice meeting several people from Long Island with an accent I could easily recognize!

TI:ME Essay: Notation Software

As I said in my previous post, Electronic Instruments & MIDI, these essays are part of TI:ME Level 1 Certification and answer specific questions posed for certification.

This essay goes a little further as it address the concept of music literacy.  Before purists vote to lynch me, let me say that I think teaching students to read traditional music notation is important.  However, I don’t think it’s of primary importance and that becomes clearer in this article.  Reading music notation is crucial for recreating music but is not urgent, given today’s tools, to create music.  I think we spend far to much time emphasizing music notation as THE tool for music literacy.

Notation Software

Notation software is sophisticated graphics manipulation program made specifically for the needs of musicians.  The top notation software is Finale and Sibelius.  Fans of each could tell you why they prefer one product to the other that might include ease of use and learning curves.  With products this sophisticated, choosing becomes a matter of personal taste and personal needs.

TI:ME Essay: Electronic Instruments and MIDI

The Technology Institute for Music Educators (TI:ME) offers courses, workshops and conferences on technology and use to music educators and students of music and education.  TI:ME offers two levels of certification much like Suzuki, Orff or Kodaly offer certification to earned levels of knowledge and expertise.  For those working in the field already, TI:ME offers alternate certification for their Level 1 certification.  This and the following two articles are papers I wrote for that alternate certification.

First, a little clarification. Back in the day (as my students like to say), music software was divided into three separate and distinct categories. Software to manipulate MIDI, audio and notation were separate purchases. Today, the lines are blurred.  Sibelius & Finale, traditionally notation programs, offers some good MIDI and even audio.  Logic, traditionally a MIDI program, offers excellent audio and good notation.  Now that digidesign and Sibelius are owned by the same parent company, Avid, traditionally an audio program has some good notation and will only get better.  Although these programs can be considered “triple threats”, it’s still important to choose software based on your primary needs.  Although I can get some good notation out of Logic Studio, I wouldn’t publish music with it.  The same can be said for a notation program, it’s not my first choice for composing or teaching music through composition. I know that may be heresy to some but more on that in another article

Electronic Instruments and MIDI

Today’s electronic music instruments come in all shapes and sizes.  Keyboards, drums, guitars, winds, strings and even instruments you can play on your cell phone!  Around 1983, electronic instrument manufacturers got together and created a standard for transmitting musical information.  MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) was born and a new world of music was created.  MIDI is simply a standard digital format for devices to communicate to each other.  Think of it as the language of electronic music.  When you hit a note on a MIDI keyboard, a series of parameters is captured, translated to a digital format (a collection of 1 and 0). MIDI parameters include pitch (the actual note you want to play), velocity (how hard did you hit that note will effect the sound or tone quality), volume (loud and soft and everything in between) pan (what you hear in the right or left ear) and other parameters that can be entered and manipulated by the user. Remember, MIDI information is just the digital information.  It has no sounds. You’ll need something to interpret the MIDI information and reproduce the sounds.  That’s the sound module or what might be called the tone bank, a computing device that reinterprets the digital information and reproduces it as sound.  All sound modules contain the basic industry standard for General MIDI that includes a collection of 128 preset sounds divided into 16 channels (translate that into groups of sounds like Keyboards, Guitars, Bass, Strings, Reeds, Sound Effects, Drums and others) and certain functional parameters including the ability to interpret velocity, support polyphony (simultaneous multiple voices). What separates one manufacturer’s keyboard from the next and what distinguish entry level of keyboards from more expensive keyboards are the proprietary sounds in the sound module and the user’s ability to manipulate these sounds on the instrument.