More on living traditions

November 6, 2018

Tradition was the first school. People learned to do things, more and more complex things, and they used the tools they had at their disposal to remember and share that growing knowledge. They embodied their knowledge. They talked about it. Maybe they drew a picture. When written language became a thing, they wrote it down. As time went on, our methods of documenting and notating our knowledge also became more and more complex. Today, having complex ideas is one thing, but having ideas about how to represent, capture, and share complex ideas (think Gantt charts, iPhones, 3D models, business plans, etc.) is another, even more valuable thing, culturally and economically speaking.

This shift to appreciating documentation and notation is also a shift to standardization. When you write something down, you lose the interaction or relationship which might have tailored the knowledge to your particular context. A farmer no longer finds out about the strange wind patterns on your land because of the way the hills are a half mile to the west. A clarinet technique book doesn’t know you like the aggressive, bending sound of Klezmer clarinet. The instructor in your Intro to Neuroscience course doesn’t know you’re there because you want to understand your mom while the person beside you is there because it’s a required course for all premeds while the person beside them believes in eugenics and is pursuing a passion project.

Today, living traditions are the “folk” schools that have persisted in the face of capitalism and institutionalization. Once you call it “school” or “training,” it’s proceduralized. Living traditions, instead, can take many forms. When something lives as a tradition in this way

1. It is actively connected to its past

2. It is present to the current moment

Program of study velocity

• Noise and the Novice site?

• Mindmap of exciting peripheral topics/details?

• Code snippets — Click on the left to request information “by hand.”

• Concept album posting

• Song arrangements posted

• Inspiring and related work

Improvisation Interviews Framing

October 4, 2018

I haven’t had a ton of new insight about how to reimagine or reframe my program of study based on the “living traditions” conversations we had a couple weeks back. In part, I think this is because I’ve inhabited the, “What is my program of study?” headspace for quite a while now. I’ve made a lot of progress on it, feel pretty connected to the ideas which most resonate with me, and now I just need to do something real and tangible. I want to jump into a project I’ve had stewing for a while, one which is very interesting and also very intimidating to me, which I’ve been calling The Improvisation Interviews.

To speak to the interesting parts:

• As a burgeoning improviser, I am just starting to notice my own processes and approaches to learning this skill. I’m noticing things I like about my own sound: patterns I fall into, riffs I return to, specific ways I play the horn. But I also notice things I don’t like. But the noticing is what’s really helpful, good or bad. It used to be I had no idea what happened when I took a solo and I just woke up at the end. Now, I am starting to notice, and I want to notice even more. This project is all about noticing my own experiences in order to learn from them, but also asking other people to notice so I can learn from them.

• The ways people talk about music fall on a spectrum from totally technical to textural. You can break down a musical phrase into pitch, melody, rhythm or even the BPM, spectral analysis, and sound frequencies. You can also break down a musical phrase in terms of tension and release, color, timbre, attitude, tone. The textural elements are connected to the technical ones, but we often lean to more technical explanations because textural ones are hard to capture and articulate. I want to capture the texture.

• This tension of texture and technicality is interesting to me, for sure, and the thought of documenting this investigation, creating permanent pieces which capture my “findings,” is really exciting because I don’t think traditional forms will be enough to capture the non-literal/non-technical elements I am really interested in. For example, I don’t think a straight up documentary will work because it’s not about these people and their backgrounds and relationships to music. I mean, it is, but it’s also about their actual mental models of music. But journal entries or visual/other representations of their mental models also aren’t enough, because it’s also about people’s relationship to musical training. And a poem series isn’t enough because the technical pieces are still relevant and I want to be able to dig into them somehow. So, I think this promises to be a really evolving, multimedia piece, which will be very hard to satisfy me.

To speak to the intimidating side:

• That last part, starting something expansive and challenging, working in mediums I’m not familiar with, beginning an artistic process where the final product isn’t already known, is pure intimidation for me. I think this is part of the reason I’ve been staying in the “about” place around my program of study, and is now why I want to push myself to just start.

So, what I want to do today is to get myself started on this road of work. I want to start by interviewing a few people I know very well about how they think about improvisation in order to get comfortable the tools and media involved in documenting work like this well and also to practice how to ask questions to get at the meat of what I want to learn more about. I know from casual conversations with musician friends that people aren’t primed to talk about these things in depth and that, like me, many people, especially those who are new to music-making, don’t notice or can’t articulate what it is they do when they make music. I want to learn more about how people improvise, what is actually going on in their minds when they are improvising in real time, and how the approach developing their craft of improvisation over the longer run.

In addition to all that, I also want to be thinking about where this project might ultimately go. I am personally drawn to projects with lots of smaller outputs along the way, e.g. the thought of making a feature-length documentary is not something I think I could just jump into. But, I do think I could collect some interviews and edit/post them in some form, do a second series of short interviews where the same (or different) people narrate their favorite improvisations, MST3K style. I could also imagine a poem series. Or some kind of musical analysis breaking down some of these improvisations and comparing them to each other (perhaps some of that social science coding we were talking about with regards to Plinkquito). Anyway, all of this is to say that, this is a huge question and I doubt I’m going to come to one unified goal for a large-scale project outcome exploring/answering the questions I have. Instead, I want to think about two things:

1. Questions I could ask in these introductory/”practice” interviews to start digging into the nature of improvisation and hone my own understanding of my direction

2. Different forms this project might take, in the long term or as by-products/mini-projects along the way

Improvisation interview questions

• What is improvisation?

• How do you improvise?

• How do you practice/work toward getting better at improvising?

• Having people narrate/respond to a favorite improvisation.

• When you “think about” a musical idea, what are you *actually *imagining? Is this the same vocabulary/imagery/etc. you use to imagine your own improvisations?

• Have people actually improvise with me in the moment and reflect, or looking at a recording from a session — perhaps this is also a possibility with other improvisations,

• Perhaps in different contexts to find/compare through lines

• What are one or two really clear memories you have related to improvisation? Maybe also asking about what the memory looks like, where are they in the memory, are you in your self/observing yourself? what stands out to you about the experience?

• Enlisting other people into the project in a longer term way, so that the people I’m talking about getting better and better at talking about improvisation, maybe getting together for a weekend retreat where we dig into it, all solo multiple times over the same song and then reflect on, video, watch and pause the

• Areas of therapy that try to uncover things they don’t have verbal memories might be a source of

• Books from Febo re: theater improvisation and

• The psychology of invention in mathematics re: ways to interview people to get them internalize things

• Product design, ethnographic studies, design research, etc. focus groups

Project forms and ideas

• Noble Oceans newsletter as a collection of reflections that might come out of individual interview sessions while the larger project is still underway

• During Christmas, Aginando — a song with a recurring melody and improvising within very specific constraints, perhaps with our group? (AF)

• Now this! News as a template — branded well and created with found footage, text, and a soundtrack over it — to create little video nuggets

• Portraits of people and their improvisations, doing the nonlinear pieces, perhaps with images or animations or poems, as a way to capture each person

• Related to the last one, Party Legends where people describe crazy party and a different artist illustrates it each time

• Could there be a shared prompt for each interviewee where you collect “the same”

• And all this is a part of traditions, like School of HONK, could the things we create be used by School of HONK, shared out, turn into workshops to share with people, live on the website, be in communication with the tradition, e.g. not anthropological

• What if there was a different interviewer? Either someone who was also prepared, or StoryLab style stuff

Interview info via Patrick Johnson

March 23, 2018

Hi Shaunalynn,

This folder contains videos from an online class by Alex Blumberg (This American Life, Planet Money, Startup, and CEO Gimlet Media) on the art of interviewing. If you have limited time, I would suggest watching/listening to episodes 3-6.

Patrick

Pitch/ask for Improv Interviews

March 22, 2018

When I experience a great piece of art, I have a feeling of expansiveness. I am moved and touched, but less transcendently, I often have trouble understanding—on a visceral level—that another human being, or a few of them, just some other sacks of skin and bones, made up the thing that has me shivering, shuddering, and elated. It came from inside them. It didn’t exist, and then it did. They brought it to life.

I feel the same way when I hear an incredible improvisation. Most of the recorded musicians I return to again and again, however, learned to play their instruments and to understand music in a different way than me. Whether they received formal training in music theory or instrument technique or they play full-time in professional bands or they are immersed in a specific musical scene or tradition which has built and imbued its own rules.

If I want to learn how to improvise better, there are a million books about counterpoint and chord progressions I could read. There are scales I could learn and backing tracks I could play along to. There are masters I could imitate. But I’m interested in learning from my bandmates, people who—when the collective energy of the group is behind them—I have heard take expansive, head turning solos again and again, regardless of their musical experience.

With that framing, I am wondering if you would be willing to talk to me on camera about how you approach solo improvisation. I’m not sure just yet what final form this will take, but I’m writing to you because you are someone I want to learn from, and suspect others might want to as well. Whether you have training or not, your playing has presence, and I’d love to hear if there are any tactics you used to get yourself to solo in the first place or things you do to grow and challenge yourself as an improviser in an ongoing way. Are there mantras you repeat to yourself? Do you have a rule that you always accept a solo when asked? Do you have a specific note ready for certain songs? Or a riff? Do you try to imitate solos you’ve heard and loved?

Let me know what you think, and we can try to find a time.

warmly,

-s

Notes from setting up Spotify API

March 5, 2018

• My Spotify login credentials

• Spotify API Docs / Beta Version

• Spotify API Setup Example

• Lyrics matrix from Alec

• MusixMatch API for lyrics

• RunKit Javascript sandbox

Program, project, proposal

December 14, 2017

Next steps: Prospective programs and projects

**Meta — **Design, deploy, and document at http://shaunalynn.org/noise

If good music has Energy in its sound, this site has it visually—in its colors, motions, and interactions. It captures a sense of the novice, communicating quality through well-scoped visual design choices which mirror the types of trade-offs a novice musician must make in order to create great music. That said, it should also be functional, serving as a (relatively) static landing page and portfolio site for N&tN endeavors, similar to my personal site, with some spaces for sharing related resources, updates, etc.

Anticipated milestones, artifacts, elements:

1. A mock-up and site map 

2. Very brief description of my interest/direction of inquiry

3. Portfolio of "finished," documentation-worthy work, or at least layout for this

4. Ongoing wonderings, nuggets, questions, resources, AKA blog

**Short term project — **Small Scale Song Stereotype Snippets (5S)

Making music is different from studying music. It’s different from appreciating, listening to, analyzing, and doing comparisons of music. Making music is live, at least in part. Even when you’re in a studio, you have to sing, hit the drum, or hit the loop pedal. At some point, the rubber hits the road. In studying music, you can sit. You are meta. You can reflect and rewind and fast forward. I want to cultivate my ability to answer questions about music using the tools of close listening, programmatic analysis and comparison, and acoustical analysis and comparison.

Anticipated milestones, artifacts, elements—probably in the form of blog posts:

1. Challenging my musical stereotypes and assumptions by answering questions using Echonest and related APIs into song characteristics, e.g.

    1. Did Adele sing every chorus in Rolling in the Deep?

    2. Did Oasis really only write one song?

    3. Is all Dub Step at the same BPM?

2. Close listenings to specific solos and melodies to draw out patterns, decisions, and other aspects of the music which make it good, catchy, moving, etc.

3. Timbre portraits, comparing different sounds/instruments through language (woody, wet, sharp) and acoustical properties (spectral analysis, waveform, etc.)

**Longer term project — **Improvising Improvisation: Tips, Tricks, Stories

At School of HONK, anyone can try out solo improvisation. Whether you’re a professional sax player or it’s your first day playing the trombone, you’re welcome to participate in the group’s music in this way, contributing your unique, solo voice in an ensemble which, most of the time, relies entirely on members’ ability to listen and be an ensemble player. With different backgrounds, in life and musical training, this project seeks to collect the stories of why, when, and how people improvise at School of HONK. What notes do they play? How do they come up with musical ideas? Were they intimidated the first time? Are they still? How do they learn more and improve? What do they consider to be great improvisation?

Anticipated milestones, artifacts, elements:

1. Collect video interviews with School of HONK members

2. Code some of the common things they identify and describe to analyze

3. Collect great, iconic improvisations and match with members’ criteria

**Program plan — **Musical Maps: Using our ears to remember & represent

When we hear the word “map,” our minds go first to visual artifacts. Whether they are traditional, spatial/geographical maps or nontraditional maps drawn with different projections or weighted by population or voter turnout or number of cows per hectare, they are all visual. To whatever extent maps are an attempt to represent and remember, however, there’s evidence that other senses might have something to contribute. Scientists have studied the direct connection between smell and memory. We’ve all experienced the way a song can bring you back to particular moment in your past. In this program, we will explore nontraditional ways to represent and remember information (as “maps”) and specifically look at how we can use sound and music, whether as the subjects represented in our maps or as the form or representation of some other subject.

Evocative projects and investigations:

1. Creating digital landscapes that are animated visually and aurally

2. Making interactive, musical memoirs, including templates to make this happen

3. Musical field guides laying out the various aspects of specific songs

4. Maps of hometown/childhood/a decade—laid out spatially, temporally, aurally

5. Creating a map of bands who influenced each other, sampling maps, etc.

More programs 'n projects

December 13, 2017

OK, so we are making materials for one program and one project. I need to do a few different things and, in particular, I think need to organize my approach to making work within this interest.

1. META WORK: Design/deploy shaunalynn.org/noise page for N&tN work

   1. Create a mock-up and site map

   2. Very brief description of my interest/direction of inquiry

   3. Portfolio of “finished,” documentation-worthy work (or at least layout for this)

   4. Ongoing wonderings, nuggets, questions, resources (AKA blog)

2. SHORT-TERM PROJECT: Snippet-based exploration of the analytical side of music

   1. Answering questions about my musical stereotypes using Echonest

      1. Did Adele sing each chorus separately in Rolling in the Deep?

      2. Did Oasis really only write one song?

      3. Is all Dub Step at the same BPM?

   2. Short write-ups about close listenings to specific songs/parts of songs

   3. Comparisons of the timbres of different instruments via language and acoustics

3. LONG-TERM PROJECT: Improvising music documentary snippet site

   1. Collect video clips of SoH folks describing the tactics they use to improvise

   2. When appropriate, finding recorded solos to complement the interview ideas

   3. Perhaps, once I figure out how to interview, reaching out to pros (Silkroad?)

4. PROGRAM: Musical mapping, relying on our ears to remember

   1. Creating digital landscapes that are animated visually and aurally

   2. Making interactive, musical memoirs, including templates to make this happen

   3. Musical field guides laying out the various aspects of specific songs

   4. Maps of hometown/childhood/a decade—laid out spatially, temporally, aurally

Physical projects to sense and interpret sound —

• This is something that I’m always interested in but stuck on doing because I don’t immediately know how, see how to get started, but I think I should dabble here to see.

Working with the Echonest API —

• Again, this is something I’ve wanted to do, and we’ve used as an example project so many times, that I think doing a small project in this arena would be useful, illuminating.

Found sound compositions —

• A la the Deerfield waste treatment facility piece shared at a spaghetti dinner

Small-scale write-ups around musical topics of interest —

• What I like about some of my favorite improvisations

• What I like about some of my favorite songs

Programs 'n projects, srsly

December 12, 2017

Musical improvisation —

• Collect School of HONK members’ tips and tricks in a beautiful way

• Utilize these tricks, plus others, to improvise a million different things and record

• Collect professional examples of solos that use these tricks to augment

• How could I present these in a beautiful way? A useful way? What form?

Loops —

• Hypothesis: No matter how random, your random thing (when looped) becomes regular

• Loop station: Mess around, what functions, what’s the best tool (price vs. ease of use)

• Round robin: Develop a hundred variations, ways to conduct, instrumentations to use

Aural mapping —

• Interactive, digital soundscapes: Sounds added by interaction with onscreen elements, sounds form a multisensory map of a place, sounds that are hidden or evocative, snail pops out and a sound represents that sound

• What about a sample map? Song connections based on where they’re sampled from?

Foley effects, soundtracking —

• Can we create different meanings for the same video clip with different soundtracks?

• How different can they be? Can they really suggest different endings altogether?

• What kind of clips are good for these?

Musical field guides —

• Obvious one is of instruments, very interesting objects, uses, users, etc.

• More interesting: How could we make a field guide to a song? Including references? Samples? Etc?

Arranging music —

• I believe this is a deep activity, I at least *love *doing it. I would love to do this with young people, and think the idea of covering songs is very appealing in an intrinsic kind of way. Should I do more work to understand the ways in which I think this work is deep?

More listening —

• I need to be listening to new music with an ear towards all these things!

Power of the Novice Links via Andrea Sachdeva

September 21, 2017

Hey friends!

Kris said you had some questions about the “power of the novice” idea that we used to talk about at ASP. From my understanding, this was something that David made up but that we found to be true in our work. A quick search yielded a few articles and blog posts that I thought you might find interesting:

• https://www.collegexpress.com/articles-and-advice/career-search/blog/advantages-fresh-perspective/

• http://99u.com/articles/52479/you-dont-need-new-ideas-you-need-a-new-perspective

• https://www.concept-21.com/blog/innovation/stay-ignorant-the-importance-of-a-beginners-mindset

• https://experiencelife.com/article/beginners-mind/

This is an idea that I see mentioned a lot, but I don’t really ever see a research backing for it. That said, if you wanted something more research-based, I might look to the perspective-taking literature, writings around the power of diversity in teams, and the HCD approach in general. I can also take a look through the archives this weekend if you’d like and look for presentations that we did on this idea at ASP, though I Know there won’t be a whole lot there and it will certainly be anecdotal rather than research-based. If that’s helpful though, let me know!

Hope you’re both well :)

Andrea Sachdeva

Living traditions outline

September 20, 2017

Noise and the novice has been about:

• what makes something music as opposed to noise and then,

• once its music, what makes it good music, and then,

• once we’re talking about good music, the role of musical study and training in accomplishing “good” “music” as opposed to lame/square/uninspired

In my original concept, a few ideas are a part of the narrative but not centered, and I think reframing my pos around living traditions really starts to center these implicit things and make new/more connections between existing ideas:

• the role of history, culture, and “scenes” in teaching and learning — connects to early thoughts about noise/novice and a bunch of research i’m interested in doing

  • Listening and reflecting directly on music as well as knowing the stories of musicians and communities that birthed different music now becomes central, feels related to the history of porridge/history of the penny whistle

• the role of identity in defining a person’s role in relation to a scene as well as indicating the line between participation, appreciation, and appropriation

  • Brings in a political angle, around power/community/identity, exploring the roots of music, influences, the lineage of samples, etc.

• how novices become expert within the scene/the scene’s explicit relationship w novices;

  • Brings in a meta level of interest, one much more directly aligned with Powderhouse’s goals around inventing the future of learning, while still allowing me to explore the idea of “energy”

• the role of repetition in the learning and listening process/the way immersion in the sounds of a scene are a part of mastering the scene’s vocabulary, learning its history, and why “outsiders” might hear noise (rock/rap) or trite droning (old time)

  • Offers a concrete way to enter into music that sounds like noise to you, what if we had an understanding that you had to listen to an album ten times before you could say you’d really listened to it? Many folk traditions allow you to hear a song more than once in “one” listening through internal repetition.

• this connects to some of the “this is your brain on music” style understanding about how we discern music from noise in a sensory/physiological sense, but also

• looping nature of living traditions offers many opportunities for novices to get on board with experts (and to fall back off), in music playing a song is practicing the song because it repeats/loops, this is obvious with music but I suspect also with any active domain (ask AR re: examples)

  • Exploring the nature of the loop/repetition as sacred/multidisciplinary now feels very relevant if the repetitiveness of the music becomes a part of its definition

• what makes something new or original, seeing old things in new ways a la TG

• what makes something good seems connected to what makes a tradition “alive”

My open questions and questions to the group during this conversation are a few fold.

• First, what is a living tradition? — We’re not going to answer this now, but I have a sense that a living tradition is something more specific than just “something with a lineage that’s still happening now.” Figuring out what this is is important.

• Second, what are some living traditions both inside and outside of music? — This I think we can brainstorm now, and that the examples we come up with will help me to triangulate what living traditions are more generally.

• Third, Improv Interviews — Depending on time, lay it out here and ask for critique

Concept Album Brainstorms w KP

August 7, 2017

Novice albums

• Ornette Coleman and Denardo, Ornette at 12

• Sun Ra Orkestar, Strange Strings — each member of band plays an instrument on which they had no practice time

• Wire — British punk band, signed up for a gig that was 90 days away, hadn’t played instruments or written any songs before, art school kids, treated it like a project

• Half Japanese — two brothers who couldn’t play their instruments

• Beat Happening — drummer plays a clothes hamper with blanket on top of it

• Entire post-punk in Britain, hardcore in US genres, circa 1979-1984

• The Ramones — not actually novices

• The Frogs

• Loren Mazzacane Connors (early/Daggett years), Glenn Gould — can’t stop themselves from moaning, etc. in a non-musical way, e.g. haven’t trained it out of them

Concept albums

• The Frogs — concept album re: gay couple, commentary on homophobia in punk scene

• The Magnetic Fields, 69 Love Songs

• Pink Floyd, The Wall

• Sufjan Stevens, albums about states

• Iron & Wine, Woman King EP

• Culturecide — record songs off the radio and then play over it

• Setting poetry to music

  • Maryann Gendron does Dorothy Parker

  • Allen Ginsburg does William Blake

• Beyonce, Lemonade

• Millie Jackson, Caught Up — about being a mistress to a married man

• Beach Boys, Pet Sounds

• Beatles, Sergeant Pepper

• Brian Eno, made deck of cards with chance operations on it so if you got stuck in the studio you would pull out a card and do what it said to get unstuck

• Prog Rock albums (e.g. Bo Hansen re: Lord of the Rings)

• Preggy Peggy and the Babymakers, A Short Visit to the City that Bleeds — recorded in and around an Enterprise rental car parked on 34th Street in Baltimore, MD

• Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn, Ginger Brooks Takahashi & Friends, Songs from the Black Mountain Music Project — two friends hide away with instruments for a month

**Collaborative composition ideas **

• Field Recordings

• Whistles

• Mugwumps

• Mouth Sounds

• Two Notes

• Two Notes each sampled from existing songs

• Poetry to Music

• Ransom Note/Exquisite Corpse Lyrics

• Recreate Existing Album in set amount of time

• A la 69 Love Songs

• Grades of school

• Non-places (waiting rooms, lobbies, bus depots)

• Kids Lyrics Songs

• 10 things we like

• 10 drugs

• Songs about friends

• After dinner mints — like lunch poems, recorded in some sliver of time we have together

Summer Project Scoping

August 5, 2017

Concept Album Plans:

• Found sound album, mouth sounds, two notes, after dinner mints — Still open…

Algorithmic Music Plans:

• Ringtone generator based on your name with varying sound, duration, and frequency

**Jam Session Bible: **

Each page should be the articulation of some structure you can use to facilitate jamming and improvisation with ideas for how to augment and “conduct” the jam. Each entry should include:

• Title

• Subtitle/description

• Necessary materials, space

• Optimal group size

• Description of how to get started, how it works

• Description of the stages of development, levels, etc.

Some of the jams I want to write up in the first version of this book include:

1. The Round Robin + Conducting

   1. Poetry

   2. Body Sounds

   3. With instruments: choosing key, mood, etc.

2. Establishing groove and passing around the “lead” voice

3. Call and Repeat / Call and Response

4. One Note / Two Note Improvisations based on Tension and Release

5. Blah — Instrumental version of “keep talking for a minute about…”

6. Chord-based layering, passing around the leadership of the rhythm

Y'all Ready For This — On Arranging Simple Songs

August 3, 2017

School of HONK ran its third Camp HONK this past month. An extension of the very successful (by enrollment numbers, which have started to decline the past few years) Somerville String Camp, Camp HONK is a two week long camp that runs from 9am-noon each weekday. We invite people of any age, who have been playing their instruments for at least a year, to join us for a week of playing and parading. It’s a great environment with the early hour for such loud noise-making being my main—and only—complaint.

This year, as part of this Program of Study, I wanted to make a point of arranging a new song for beginners. At School of HONK, all of our songs have “simple parts anyone can play.” We prioritize high pay-off songs that use simple lines and phrases to great musical effect, because we not only want new players to be able to play with us, we want them to be playing *satisfying *and *musically significant *lines. Some of our songs are just incredibly simple, high pay-off songs in this way. Period. No simplification needed. Rock Anthem uses three notes and a call and response. We Got That Fire clocks in with a whopping five notes.

But, as we’ve both grown our repertoire and the collective musicianship of our group, the desire for more complex songs has arisen, and so we also have songs like La Murga de Panama or Billie Jean, which are quite tricky but for which we offer alternative, counter-melodies and harmonies new players can opt into playing. So, I’ve been on the look out for a new, simple song to bring to the group, and I think I found it in the Jock Jam classic Y’all Ready for This (This is the only video I have right now). The song demonstrably works, but here are some of the things I think make it work so well:

1. While the full song is quite simple and tackle-able in full by new players, there is also a meaningful one-note version of the song that can be taught to brand new players, on the spot, and in such a way that you can play the song live rather than breaking out into sections to show notes and fingerings. This allows new players to focus on simply consistently creating sounds and then thinking about rhythms.

2. Still, in terms of its arrangement, there are some tricks. Having the whole band drop out for 2.5 beats is hard. I won’t happen the *first *time. But, not only is it incredibly satisfying once you do achieve it, it’s something the *ensemble *has to work on. It’s an exercise in collectively listening, watching, counting, and anticipating, not individual technique.

3. The song is upbeat and exciting. While many “simple” songs derive a part of their simplicity from having only a few notes and playing them slowly (think Hot Crossed Buns) this song is fast and upbeat. But, the technical challenge isn’t just handed over to the rhythm section. The drum part, because it’s spread out across multiple drums means that new players are only having to hit their drums once per beat.

4. There are a variety of parts, four to be exact. One is the incredibly popular melody, one involves yelling, one is a call and response, and one is a solo section. This means that, with just one note, you are actually participating in four different melodies and feels within the same song. If School of HONK decides to take on this song, varying the drum parts to accentuate these differences would be something I’d definitely want to tackle.

5. Vocals are key. Yelling “Hey!” during Part 2 gives people a break from playing, providing a moment to actually appreciate the song that’s being played but also to catch their breath and get back on the beat if they’ve become swept up in the tune’s quick tempo.

The only negative thing about this tune, I’d say, is what Kevin refers to as its testosterone. It is a traditional stadium jam and therefore connected to the values of that arena (yep, I did that). Ultimately, School of HONK will have to decide if we think we can make this song mean something new in our context or if we think this is just one of those great songs (like Macklemore’s Thriftshop) that just is what it is (shitty jam by a white rapper) and even though it would sound awesome in brass (thank you LGMC), oh well.

Summer Program Plans

July 21, 2017

To start out my program of study, I am going to focus on the composition of music and my own ability to deconstruct, discuss, and recombine the elements of sound/noise which create music. My plan this summer is to do three POS projects, each of which will be turned into the stub of a program or activity to be run at PHS (documented to the point of our first meetings with Healey staff about their programs) and be supported by some hands-on experiences I can mine, reflect, revise, and refine to develop the program’s arc and related resources.

Improvisations

Improvisation is the art of spontaneous music composition. In the right context, it can be a way to mess around and play with the tacit knowledge we all have about what makes something music. However, in the wrong context, it can make spontaneous musical expression feel like a test, like something that can easily fail or flop within a school-like tone. I want to create a **Bible **if improvisational frameworks and test a number of them in different contexts, with different groups of people before writing them out for future use within PHS.

• Improvisation games @ Camp HONK

• Quiet Instrument Jam w School of HONK

• Group soloing w School of HONK

• BAM (???)

Concepts

Concept art (a la The Darknet Shopper and Boilerstrap JS and the famous signed toilet) is a zone of art that deeply resonates with me on both an emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic level. I love that shit. It tickles me. Concept albums in music can have a similar effect, and I would like to create at least one concept album—potentially a couple, shorter EPs—which will help me to design a program to engage other people in conceptualizing and creating concept albums of their own design. I suspect that the constraints of a concept will help people give themselves permission to create, record, and try things out. But we shall see!

Algorithms

An area of music composition I’ve wanted to explore for a long time, but which I have no experience with, is algorithmic music design. Which, I guess, I would consider under the concept art umbrella. There are some incredibly boring versions of algorithmic music projects (e.g. mapping notes onto nucleotide pairs and then “playing back the human genome, omg so boring). I would like to create a tool or approach to using existing tools which makes it easy to incorporate complex sounds and rules for playing back sounds (e.g. more than when you see a “1” play a “C”) from different kinds of data sets. In particular, and in order to be musical, I believe there needs to be some messiness to avoid the MIDI/electronic exactitude that most exploratory algorithmic music projects share (Kate’s use of sound with the orbitar starts to get at the good version of what I mean, with extended and repeated sounds based on certain variables persisting while some discreet passing sounds are also created based on other variables).

Questions

So, these are the projects I intend to do this summer, and I want to talk a little bit today about which of the last two projects are most appealing to the two of you to be involved in this summer. While I have the least idea about the algorithmic piece, I can imagine it most effectively allowing each of you to engage your own interests and even programs of study in creating pieces. But would like to discuss more this afternoon.

POS-related program planning

July 12, 2017

One of the things we decided to commit to collectively this summer—and which I extended a bit for myself—is running a program related to our POS that includes the sprout team. The extension I made for myself is that, in addition to running one program, I want to document 3 to the extent we had the Healey programs documented before getting them underway, e.g. with an arc, daily plans, examples, and etc. all ready to go. Today, I’d like to choose the three programs I am going to prepare and hope that, as I prepare them, and through having M&A respond to/revise them, I will be able to choose the one I want to run with them (Of course, authenticity will also impact this choice, since they don’t really want to make music, per se =P). So… an open brainstorm, pulling on some of those I began thinking about below:

• Jam session bible (a la Rosalie’s game bible, but focused on ways to facilitate jams)

• Flutes & waves (documenting and reimagining one I’ve already run!)

• Conceptual album recording studio

• Loops (would want a collaborator re: including other fields)

• Instrument design & building (would need to be open-ended to be interesting)

• Algorithmic music design & analysis (via Echonest)

• Working with found sound (as yet to be defined)

• Music analysis circle/salon

• Musical memoir writing (using songs to tell the story of your life in moments/phases)

To start narrowing down this list, let’s be critical. Here are some glib comments about the feasibility of each with most appealing, remaining options bolded:

• Jam session bible — not actually a program, but definitely interesting to me

• Flutes & waves — appealing because it builds on past work, but diatonic flutes suck

• Concept album recording studio — could be built around personal experience

• Loops — seems interesting but so abstract I maybe don’t really know what’s interesting

• Instrument design & building — too broad a focus for me to do well now

• Algorithmic music design & analysis — appealing bc I sit at computer all day =) =(

• Working with found sound — no experience with this, but it’s cool

• Music analysis circle/salon — could be super douche-y, and also… with whom?

• **Musical memoir writing **— appealing aesthetically, only touches on why ppl like music

From these, I think choosing a focus that allows me to centralize the mediums I work in and the driving questions I’m digging into will make this endeavor the most fruitful. These all focus on deconstructing sound/noise/music and composition. So, I’m going to outline these programs:

• Jam session bible

• Concept album recording studio

• Algorithmic music design & analysis

Summer plan for starting my pos

July 11, 2017

There are a lot of paths I’d like to go down in order to move my research agenda forward. Given that there seem to be (somewhat) less outward constraints on me this summer, I am going to try and get a couple projects DONE (e.g. #1-3) and a couple UP AND RUNNING (#4-7) by the end of this quarter, in order to kickstart my program of study. Here is my plan:

Literature review beginnings

I don’t know anything about this field or what books exist, who’s studied in it, etc. For the most part, I think the academic field around what I’m interested in is probably a little bogus and self-absorbed/reflexive/drinking its own Kool Aid. That said, I want to dig into these books—ones that have been recommended to me over the years—and to spend at least a little time doing some kind of literature review to get a lay of the land for future book learning. I suspect that the books and accounts I will be most interested in will not be in this academic style, or at least not in the “music” zone—e.g. perhaps things like **Dancing in the Street*s.*

• How Musical Is Man

• This Is Your Brain on Music

• Keeping the Beat on the Street

• Songs in their Heads

• Exploring Bamberger’s work

Personal projects and programs

I create music in a relatively narrow way, even if I find it to be one of the most freeing, expressive, and ecstatic ways around. These projects are meant to get me creating music in different ways, using different tools, remembering the feeling of being a novice while also pushing me to get comfortable with different types of sound and music—exploring that noise-music boundary.

1. Record a concept album

2. Algorithmic music composition

3. Plans for jam session bible, algorithmic music, and concept album programs

4. 3 blog posts based in musical analysis/reflection

   1. Rolling in the Deep chorus analysis

5. A plan/sketch for a musical map/memoir

6. Choice for for 3-5 diy instruments to later concretize

7. Regular tumblring

School of HONK-related endeavors

*Both of these projects are ones meant to put me in touch with the experience of new/novice musicians in playing and leading roles within School of HONK. *

1. Practice facilitating jam sessions with different groups and goals

   1. Camp HONK

   2. Quiet instrument jam

   3. School of HONK group soloing

   4. BAM?

2. Finish arrangements/leader support materials for School of HONK repertoire

   1. Arrangements doc revised by Steering Committee and then mentors

   2. Attached to sheet music for our songs in the form of arrangement preface

   3. Digital hand gestures page revised by Kevin and posted on soh.org

————

Final Draft for Quarter 3 Progress

Prospective programs & projects

These ideas for programs, projects, workshops, activities, and events are meant to be evocative of those that I’d like to develop in more detail either as personal project or for work with young people at PHS. I’ve split them into three groups. The first is about how School of HONK, one of my largest projects, will play out in this program. The second are projects which I have done before or done something close enough that I am confident in my ability to try them out. The last are projects which are less developed, still in the idea phase, and need further work before deployment.

Learning from School of HONK

In this endeavor, School of HONK will serve as a living testbed for my learning and exploration. School of HONK is a teaching band in which we invite anyone, regardless of age, musical experience or background, to join in collective music-making. Some people join us as professional musicians. Others touch a trombone for the first time when they arrive and publicly perform on it two hours later. Some of our members go home and rent or buy their own horns. They practice our songs, learning the geographies of their instruments, and getting some technique and theory under their fingers. Others borrow a School instrument every week, picking up what they can and making spontaneous musical choices based on their untrained intuitions around music and spectacle. We all contribute. I would like to focus my time and attention in School of HONK around a few specific aspects of our which which are most aligned with the exploration of the line between noise/music and the role of the novice in both. In particular, I will be exploring:

• What techniques can we use to arrange songs to have simple, yet central, parts for brand new players?

  • To what extent do we adapt more complex songs, and what types of adaptations work in order to preserve Energy?

  • To what extent do we use songs which already have simple lines and what makes those simple songs effective as they are?

  • Where is the line between “too simple” and “just right,” given that a song perceived by the listener as too simple will be parsed as somewhere along the spectrum of an irritating noise (a la an alarm or other repeated tone) to a trite or child-like expression (e.g. your least favorite “kids” song).

• Why and how is the role of the rhythm section (bass/percussion) different from that of other sections and what does this say about the importance of rhythm in Energy and in differentiating noise from music?

• How does non-traditional musical training (e.g. learning by ear and rote versus reading music, performing regularly rather than after months and months of preparation for a single concert, playing in a group with mixed experience levels, etc.) differently affect people’s growing musicianship in terms of technique as well as Energy?

  • What tools and techniques can I create to support this non-traditional training?

  • What tools and techniques do people design for themselves? How do they work and what can I learn from them?

• Where is the line between the unpredictability of live performance in general and improvisation more specifically and the predictability of accurate, regular performance? What are the parameters of predictability important for us to perceive music rather than noise (e.g. regular tempo, key/note relationships, etc.)?

Ready to roll

• Jam Sessions — Creating improvised, live music with a group is a powerful, fun, and low pressure way to get people involved in music-making, even if they don’t have any experience. It’s a great team-building activity and can be done with instruments of any kind or with nothing except your own self. I’d like to develop a few different frameworks for facilitating jam sessions with different sized groups of different musical backgrounds with different goals. e.g. Jams can be a great way to develop riffs, melodies, and grooves while composing, but they can also just be fun ways to see, listen, and interact with others in a playful and creative way. Jam sessions are also natural ways to (implicitly) deconstruct music, forcing people to think about rhythm, tempo, looping, pitch and other elements that organize sound into music.

• *Impromptu Composition Events *— Composing a song, as a musician or not, forces a conversation about what makes a song a song. What are different ways to organize sound into music, at a higher level than jamming/establishing a groove? This type of activity offers an authentic context to explicitly break down the elements of a song and groove to think about the structure of a song and how to put one together from scratch.

• Collaborative Concept Albums — People conceptualize and record different tracks, composing pieces based on the constraints laid out by the album’s “concept” e.g. found sounds, kitchen implements, body sounds, in the key of Bb, etc. These can be the end result of a time-limited event, as described above, or a longer term, iterative process.

• Musical Instrument Design *— Based on the Flutes and Waves workshops as well as other recycled instrument-making workshops I’ve run in the past, I think there is a real place for designing—and then *playing—instruments as a way of exploring how your music-making tools impact the music you can make as well as asking questions about the measurable differences between different sounds. I’d love to further develop these workshops into creating “real” instruments like guitars, etc.

• Soundscape Stories — People write stories/poems/essays and record them, like podcasts, with sound effects, music, and other audio elements included to create different environments and illustrate the words using sound.

Just a twinkle in my eye

• Music Maps & Memoirs — Create an interactive, graphical interface to the music that was important to you at different times in your life, laying it out chronologically, with connections between songs you feel are related, including nodes for people who introduced you to things, places you associate with them, etc. This could also be extended to creating maps for others (your mom, your grandma) to illustrate their own musical biographies.

• Looping Workshops — This is the nub of an idea that I’ve had floating around for a couple years. The idea is to create an immersive workshop that introduces the idea of looping in many different mediums, blurring the lines between them to create creative works in different media based on loops. I’d like to work with someone with a background in CS (and/or some other zone that uses looping deeply) to design an this seminar around a series of projects that bring musical, geometric, physical, coding (and other?) looping together in a series of art pieces.

• Musical Analysis — Knowing what you like is important, but being able to talk about *why *is powerful. The language of analysis has allowed me to see songs in new ways by pulling out different tonal and timbral pieces‚ organizational structures, patterns, as well as guessing an artist’s intent when they made a certain decision. I’d like to investigate—and figure out compelling ways to invite young people to join me in investigating—questions like these:

  • Which song is “better?” And what constitutes “better?”

  • What characteristics do like songs share (a la echonest)?

  • Did Adele sing the chorus to Rolling in the Deep just once? Or is she perfect?

  • Corny Song Composition Competition! What makes it corny?

• *Musical Boxing Gym — *Are there ways of capturing the stories of untrained/deschooled music-making, a la Frederick Wiseman, StoryCorps, or some other form, which would help to capture as well as allow me to dig into and better understand how and why these environments work? Perhaps a history of the institutionalizing of music training? Or…?

Personal practice & progress markers for 2017Q3

Literature review beginnings

I don’t know anything about this field or what books exist, who’s studied in it, etc. For the most part, I think the academic field around what I’m interested in is probably a little bogus and self-absorbed/reflexive/drinking its own Kool Aid. That said, I want to dig into these books—ones that have been recommended to me over the years—and to spend at least a little time doing some kind of literature review to get a lay of the land for future book learning. I suspect that the books and accounts I will be most interested in will not be in this academic style, or at least not in the “music” zone—e.g. perhaps things like **Dancing in the Street*s.*

• How Musical Is Man

• This Is Your Brain on Music

• Keeping the Beat on the Street

• Songs in their Heads

• Exploring Bamberger’s work

Personal projects and programs

I create music in a relatively narrow way, even if I find it to be one of the most freeing, expressive, and ecstatic ways around. These projects are meant to get me creating music in different ways, using different tools, remembering the feeling of being a novice while also pushing me to get comfortable with different types of sound and music—exploring that noise-music boundary.

1. Record a concept album/Draft program plan around this project

2. Algorithmic music composition/Draft program plan around this project

3. Create a jam session bible

4. 3 blog posts based in musical analysis/reflection

   1. Rolling in the Deep chorus analysis

5. A plan/sketch for a musical map/memoir

6. Choice for for 3-5 diy instruments to later concretize

7. Regular tumblring

School of HONK-related endeavors

*Both of these projects are ones meant to put me in touch with the experience of new/novice musicians in playing and leading roles within School of HONK. *

1. Practice facilitating jam sessions with different groups and goals

   1. Camp HONK

   2. Quiet instrument jam

   3. School of HONK group soloing

   4. BAM?

2. Finish arrangements/leader support materials for School of HONK repertoire

   1. Arrangements doc revised by Steering Committee and then mentors

   2. Attached to sheet music for our songs in the form of arrangement preface

   3. Digital hand gestures page revised by K and posted on soh.org

Some thoughts about focus

July 1, 2017

When we first started to discuss the Programs of Study at PHS, I had this idea that there were many different directions I might want to go, so many things I might want to focus on. Would I look at music or theater or urban planning or programming and math puzzles or… While it is authentic for me to say I have interests in all of these and more, it’s disingenuous for me to behave as if the first one, music, isn’t the absolute center of my universe and—more importantly for what “program of study” will come to mean at PHS, and how I hope to operationalize it in my personal and professional life—the center of my lived experience.

At a minimum, I play music three times a week. That’s 5-6 hours of playing, rehearsing, and listening that I have built into my life in a sustainable way. Outside of that, I sometimes spend time arranging songs, trying to write them, practicing tunes, and then *playing gigs *of all different types. This practice is central to who I am, how I express myself, connect to others, and see and participate in the world. But, perhaps more simply, it is a practice. Having practices is hard. Perhaps not for everyone, and perhaps it is growing less hard for me as I find myself able to pick things up more easily as I get older, but this is a practice that feels natural and necessary. I do it. And that means that, even if the day-to-day of PHS operations take me all over the place, leaving me just dribs and drabs of time, each of which is also filled with other school-y details, I will still play music. And I will, therefore, still be making at least passive, ambient “progress” in thinking about a program of study that centers around this practice.

All that said, “music” does not a program of study make. Music is a field, a practice, a domain, an art, and within it and around it there are millions of questions to ask and stones to uncover. I’ve wondered about tons of them, read about fewer, and really thought in any organized way about how to investigate approximately… zero. This document is my first attempt to try and do this, collecting the wide range of questions I’ve wondered about and then trying to devise an approach to investigating a particular zone of questions through active and passive activities feasible for me to begin and establish now, in the year leading up to PHS but, even more importantly, which I can continue to dig into once we’ve got up and running.

This seems like about the place in my thinking where I need to create a bunch of lists to collect my concrete realities: what I like to do/do now, questions and projects I’m actually interested in, areas I’ve not explored but am authentically interested in expanding into. This balance of things I already do, that I demonstrably love and am driven by, along with the challenge to stretch myself in order to frame a grow these interests is key.

Some of the things I’m interested in with regards to music:

• I’m interested in what makes people move in response to music.

• I’m interested in the trust and silent communication involved in ensemble music-making.

• I’m interested in the different “zones” people get into when they play music (auto-pilot, uber-listener, fearful hunching, etc.).

• I’m interested in the line between music and noise.

• I’m interested in the institutionalizing/professionalizing process music has undergone over the past 500-800 years and how it mirrors other domains.

• I’m interested in the history of music, broadly.

• I’m interested in group singing.

• I’m interested in improvisation, in music and more broadly.

• I’m interested in what makes a song get stuck in your head.

Some other things I’m interested in, in the form of questions:

• What are the roles of living traditions and participatory culture-making in the modern world? How have folk traditions persisted and adapted to fit into our current now?

• How do stages change the nature of music creation, consumption and participation?

• Do music-lovers make better musicians?

• If technique and theory and other more academic musical constructs don’t make music “good,” what is it that does? How can we understand, describe, and get at these factors? I often talk about it as “energy,” but would like to be able to describe it in a deeper way.

• How can *very *simple musical lines come together to create music which, to the ears of an audience, sound complex and dynamic? This is related to loops and beats, but also arranging for new instrumentalists. Put another way, or at least a related question: What makes something complex/musically interesting versus noise? e.g. If it is a spectrum, how does one distinguish between things along that spectrum?

Things related to these interests that I have no experience with:

• Algorithmic music. For most of my music-related interests, there aren’t “tools and materials” I want to create in the sense that we usually talk about them at sprout. I would be interested, however, in creating a tool which allowed you to format (e.g. in a spreadsheet or some other human readable form) a set of data, and then assign values to sounds/sound patterns in order to generate music. I would obviously just need to do this a couple times, pre-framework, but this is super interesting to me. Ever since I listened to those, like, play-your-genome “music” makers.

• Waveform analysis, related to timbre.

• Playing back spectrograms, a la The Aphex Twins’ [Equation].

• Creating music based on found sounds. And, I don’t mean “music,” although the world of soundscapes (to get rid of my quotation-based cynical tone) are awesome. I mean, being able to collect a set of sounds, cut and code them in such a way, that you can recombine them into loops and patterns which create a strong timbre-al basis for music.

Here are some books people have recommended to me:

• This is your Brain on Music

• Shit by Jeanne Bamberger

• Rockin the Boat

• How Musical Is Man

• Community Music: In Theory and Practice

• Free to be Musical

• Songs in Their Heads: Music and its Meaning in Children’s Lives

• Roll With It: Brass Bands in the Streets of New Orleans

• Keeping the Beat on the Street: The New Orleans Brass Band Renaissance

Reframing around novice/noise

June 26, 2017

OK, so this broad-reaching framework about the role of music in and across cultures is VERY interesting to me. Aesthetically, it feels a lot like my long-time, but actually-never (e.g. once and future) project *Porridge: A History, *looking at the many different forms of porridge (gruel, cream of wheat, oatmeal, etc.) that have been developed over time and space, looking at the scientific/chemical similarities of these dishes in terms of how they gelatinize via starchy release, their place in culture and meal-making/sharing. This is great, in that it is an expression of a lens I love, and would love to develop in myself.

However, if I am to give real weight to the reality of how I spend my time as the best proxy for where my real interests and loyalties lie, then this interest doesn’t motivate me. I have not operationalized it in any deep or real way. This doesn’t mean I should give up on it, but to get things underway, to get things moving, I wonder if I might want to begin with a narrower scope, something that will tie together my projects in a more concrete and narrow way. This new idea for a frame is based as much in previous interests and lenses as the last one, but feels more incisive and directed.

When I worked at Artscience, I was introduced to the idea of, “The Power of the Novice.” This is the idea that, even in fields that are perceived as advanced, technical, specialized, there is a role for novices in that field, coming in with fresh eyes and new perspectives (especially with a perspective developed through practice in another field altogether) to solve hard problems, answer open questions, and more generally to innovate by *seeing old things in new ways. *At Artscience, David Edwards organized his thinking about this in scientific fields (e.g. Synthetic Biology, Neuroinformatics, etc.), but its resonance with me really came from the parallel I saw in music.

In music, novices don’t necessarily have the technique or the theory, they don’t have the symbolic manipulation or the muscle memory, but they have the *energy. *The ideas that new players can have, based on their previous relationships to music as listeners, singers, players of other instruments, producers, etc. can be more than enough to achieve the essence of what music is. Using fewer notes and their intuitions, they are able to use the skills they do have to create music that speaks, emotes, creates tension and release, which goes somewhere, as *usually *better than trained musicians, I think there is very much a real sense in which musicians’ training can get in their way of having new ideas, giving them traditional frameworks, precedent, and “the shoulders of giants” to lean on, rather than investigating that inarticulate energy that differentiates music from sound.

A famous jazz musician I’ve enjoyed for some time with no knowledge of their background or biography is Ornette Coleman. (I am not alone here, though he is also reviled, as he’s a free jazz dude.) The jam I’ve always loved by him is Friends and Neighbors. So good. Worth listening to. Anyway, through Kris’ copious knowledge of reviled, underground music, I’ve learned that Ornette did a lot of things that deeply offended Musicians of his time. One thing was having his 10 year old son Denaldo Coleman play drums on a number of his albums. Denaldo wasn’t a child prodigy. He’d never played drums. Another was that, one day, Ornette just decided to start playing the trumpet. And another day the violin. He wasn’t trained on either, though he was a skilled saxophone. He didn’t learn to play them. He didn’t train. He just played. As a novice. He channeled the energy of music, not the technique of instrument playing, and… depending on your taste… he made some AWESOME shit.

So, where is all this going. Today, I reread a document Alec put together about what makes good research/what the role of research is at PHS and in his opening paragraph he used the verb, “syllogize.” I was totally skeptical of its accessibility, so of course I’m going to reuse it here for my own purposes. In the thread of my research agenda, I want to ask, explore, and attempt to answer the following question:

• What differentiates noise from music?

In particular, if the quality of music (or the “music-ness” of noise) has to do with some intangible quality of the sound (let’s call it Energy) rather than with the technique and theory behind the sound’s pitch and other patterns, then doesn’t it follow, that novices could be as good at making music as trained Musicians assuming they made music based on this Energy?

Concrete ideas to do with kids

June 1, 2017

While I was able to capture something real yesterday, I was having a lot of trouble getting into a headspace where I was having new ideas, making new connections, or actually making new decisions about what I want to focus on in this program. Part of the reason is that my interests are do broad, not only within music but across many domains. I love the “powerful ideas” in fields I’ve never studied or even mucked around in. I love doing and making things. I live arguing and designing and making music. That said, I know the boundary conditions for my life, as it stands now and as I expect it to develop over the next couple years, and those constraints helped to point me toward music. In the same way, I’m hoping that thinking about the types of things I actually want to *do *with *young people *around *music *will help me to ground my thinking and commit—even if it is just for this iteration or until I try some things out and refocus and refine this vision—to a particular line of inquiry. I know, in an instinctual way, what I will get excited about designing and then actually doing with kids, and I want to trust those instincts. Be critical of them, sure, but to trust the wisdom of the gut to know something that resonates and then use the mind to try and understand where the resonance comes from.

What do I actually want to do with young people?

• Jam sessions, instrumentation doesn’t matter too much

• Musical instrument design, instrumentation doesn’t matter too much

• Loop workshops, this is the nub of an idea that I’ve had floating around for a couple years and I’d like to work with someone more interested in CS and/or another more ‘technical’ field that uses looping deeply to design an interdisciplinary seminar

• Music analysis, knowing what you like is important, but being able to talk about *why *is powerful, similar to discovering genre when I didn’t know how to find books I would like in any kind of consistent way, the language of analysis has allowed me to see songs in new ways but pulling out different tonal and timbral pieces‚ as well as guessing an artist’s intent when they made a certain decision

  • Which song is “better?” And what constitutes “better?”

  • What characteristics do like songs share (a la echonest)?

  • Did Adele sing the chorus to Rolling in the Deep just once? Or is she perfect?

  • Corny song composition competition !!! What makes it corny?

• Role of music in politics and activism, related to analysis

  • Looking at releases that “changed” things/artists who are considered political

  • “Effective” roles of music in activism, how do you measure efficacy?

  • Roles of music in live demonstrations and political actions

  • The political nature of some musical/cultural events (e.g. Carnaval, etc.)

• Soundscape stories, writing stories/poems/essays and recording them, like podcasts, with sound effects, music, and other audio elements included

• Collaborative concept albums, in which people conceptualize and record different tracks, composing pieces based on the constraints laid out by the album’s “concept” e.g. found sounds, kitchen implements, body sounds, etc.

• Music maps/memoirs, creating graphical layouts of music that was important to you at different times in your life, laying it out chronologically, with connections between songs you feel are related, possibly including nodes for friends who introduced you to things, etc. This could also be extended to creating maps for others (your mom, your grandma) to illustrate their own musical biographies.

So, what kind of themes and questions point me in that direction?

What ties all these things together? I think there are two levels I need to think about and organize. The first is just straight-up music and spectacle. This is what I want to create with people. At School of HONK, for example, while I have an interest in how people learn, listen, and collaborate to make and *perform *music and how, as an organization but also personally as a facilitator, I can support that process, that’s not what *School of HONK *is about. SoH is about having fun. We come together to do something we all love. And, for this reason, the whats and hows of our success, the machinations of the organization, especially around facilitation, are often invisible. It’s something that I, and other leaders and mentors, as organizers of SoH are engaged in, but not something we require SoH members to think about explicitly. Analogously, I am interested in working with young people to directly engage in music- and spectacle-making.

Why music and spectacle? Well, this gets at my interest in “simple” songs. While technique and theoretical background can be helpful, can allow you to express and organize musical thoughts and ideas, it’s not necessary to create music that speaks—both to express yourself and touch listeners. I am interested in music, but not in theory. I want to create music that speaks to people, that impacts them, gets them moving, makes them respond, regardless of their musical background, and that’s what I want to do with young people at PHS as well.

For example, there are a lot of jazz tunes that have a very surprising chord progression underneath them. In this case, surprising refers to a deviation from what, in the now-obscure tradition of jazz, has come to be expected, what is precedented. While knowing the lineage of a genre is a real thing, and has a certain power, there some “surprising” chord progressions (e.g. a lot of Stevie Wonder’s stuff) that sounds *completely natural and right *to untrained listeners. They are unprecedented, but speak. I want to create music like that. I want to perform like that. And while that type of performance doesn’t require that you *don’t *have training, it requires that you don’t start from training, theory, or history. You start from the music, and the music’s relationship to the performers and participants.

OK, so I want to LISTEN TO AND CREATE MUSIC with young people at PHS. But, the things I am interested in as a researcher are—in the SoH analogy above—about how musicians and audience members relate to their own practice. This means that, while I want to make music with young people, I also want to be thinking about their processes in an observant and critical way, possibly using ethnographic techniques to capture their work and their relationships to their work. And, assuming I am able to become more fluent in this realm of meta-musical stuff, I’d also love to circle back and include young people in thinking about the role of music in culture, how people relate to the music they produce and consume, etc.

Some of the best conversations I’ve had about these topics are with SoH members who began as HONK! Festival super fans who loved to listen and dance but never imagined they would play music themselves. Now, as musicians, their perspective about what makes a great performance is still most deeply informed by their perspectives as dancers and listeners. Because of this lens, even if they play the trumpet, they understand the role of the drums and bass in establishing a groove. Even if they play the drums, they understand the almost vocal aspect of the melody and the one-on-one interactions that can happen between melody players in the front line of the band interfacing with the audience. They are truly ensemble players because they think about bands as live, spectacle-making machines. And spectacle isn’t about note-perfect accuracy. It’s about energy and groove and connection. It’s about listening as much as playing. It’s about interaction and movement.

OK, so… can I say this in a shorter utterance:

A first attempt at a manifesto about my research agenda?

Music is primal, participatory, and personal. Its power stretches across scales making indelible marks on the history of the human race, on our communities, and on the hearts, minds, and tapping feet of individuals. It cannot be understood simply through the relationship of a teenager to their headphones or a culture to its traditions, by the act of singing in the shower or the musical impact of the introduction of guitars to western Africa during colonization on musical traditions. It must be all these things at once, otherwise it is denatured. For this reason, my program of study will explore the role of music along three dimensions.

Primal:** **People have been making music, responding to rhythms through dance, and coming together in community around music since pre-history. While explicit knowledge about the history of music—whether on a human time-scale as well as with regards to the more specific lineages of genres and traditions—isn’t necessary to make great music, I am interested in learning more about it, specifically with regards to the professionalizing of music and the impact of this pattern on folk traditions, in order to situate my own research interests and music making styles and perspectives in what has come before me.

*Participatory: *The oldest musical traditions are closely related to dance and movement, public spectacle, ecstatic ritual, and collective celebration and resistance. It’s only in the last few hundred years this has begun to change. Even so, the act of “consuming” music, even in the stodgiest of concert halls, still elicits involuntary participation. Humming along, tapping your foot, rocking back and forth, we can’t help ourselves. I am interested in understanding, not just in the historical(/primal) context described above, but also on a more human(/personal) level, what it is about music—as opposed to just sound—that does this to us and why people choose so consistently to come together around this art form in times of joy, woe, and anger.

*Personal: *I believe music is fundamentally social and collaborative. Whether you are a singer-songwriter alone on the stage, part of a classic four man rock band, or one clarinetist in a fifty person orchestra, you are a part of a conversation and collaboration with your audience, your bandmates, and your musical community. Still, as is always that case, we are fundamentally alone in the universe, and the act of producing and consuming music functions as a deep expression and exploration of the self. This makes it powerful to share music with anyone, but I think that power is even more so with young people who are often actively engaged in defining and expressing themselves.

To try and sum all this up in a graspable nugget: People like music. But they don’t just like it, it’s been an organizing element in almost all cultures throughout human history. Why is that? And, given its prominent place for individuals, within communities, and across cultures, what can we learn about its role in bringing people together? To try and even further nuggetize these instincts, I propose this series of questions to drive my program of study:

• Why do people like music?

• Where does music derive its power to impact individuals, communities, and culture?

• What is music’s role in self-determination and expression for individuals, their communities and cultures?

3P B4 Summer

February 27, 2017

This obtuse title refers to how I imagine achieving my 3P (e.g. Program, project, proposal from my last entry) by summertime. I have yet to get started on these projects, even after a couple months. Not gonna harp on that inside myself, though you can tell fair reader that I am already doing that if you are actually reading this text. Anyway, here is my plan for how to accomplish these things over the next few months.

/noise timeline

• Mar 10 — Mock-up for /noise site setup

• Mar 20 — First draft of site for review by AM

• Apr 1— Site finalized and being used

Improvising improvisation timeline

• Mar 15 — Develop pitch for project, talk to Patrick about interviewing techniques, identify first few interviewees and reach out to them about being involved in the project

• Apr 1 — First draft interview questions, interviews scheduled throughout April

• Apr ongoing — Conduct and record 10 interviews, revising process as I go

• May — Sit with, edit, take stock of first collection of footage

5S timeline

• Mar 5 — Set up Spotify API and development environment, ID questions to ask/answer

• Mar 13 — Answer and write up one question

• Mar 20 — Answer and write up one question

• Mar 27 — Answer and write up one question

Music Mapping timeline

• Apr 1 — Pitch for program laid out, 20 projects brainstormed, personal projects & collab studio project IDed and studio scheduled for end of April/early May with AM

• May 1 — Personal project done, collab studio planned/equipped