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