Responding to Music with Technology

Listening to music is not the same as hearing it. Hearing it can be considered a passive process, while listening is a process involving attention and cognition (Bauer, 2014). Listening is one of the most important abilities for a musician (Bauer, 2014). Listening, however, is culture dependent, and therefore proper listening depends on the values of each culture. Preference is related to experience with a style of music and the ability to listen to it properly (Bauer, 2014). In our modern society, some desirable outcomes for any student are the ability and openness to listen to diverse musics, the ability to provide verbal or nonverbal reaction to the expressive qualities of music, the use of appropriate vocabulary according to the music style, relate music to another discipline, and describe why music is important personally.

Some tools used to promote an adequate music listening are call charts and listening maps. I decided to focus on listening maps, which are graphical tools to follow some determined aspects of a piece, in the same fashion of a score, but not necessarily involving music notation. Charts also may involve text, drawings, and more.

Internet access as we know it today has broadened the possible ways in which we can use technology to facilitate music learning and, specifically, response to music. .

Perhaps one of the greatest resources available today is Youtube.com.One of the great things about youtube is that it afford us to integrate visual elements with the sound element of music, and have access to a variety of mixed arts works. This can be useful in a variety of ways, but I will just show here two cases from Western Art Music.

 

The video above is the video made by Donald Craig of the visual score developed by Rainer Wehinger to accompany Gyorgy Ligeti's Artikulation. Since the video follow the picture as the music happens, it can be used as a listening map, which can help the student to engage in attentive listening.

The following video is an example of a visual interpretation of Mozart's music according to the harmonic functions.

 

Another interesting web tool is Zaption.com. Through Zaption, one can manipulate a video to include captions, questions, pictures, and more, to create a sort of tour through a video (See here my Zaption tour example). In the case of music education, we can make comments on videos with music pieces, scores, listening maps and more. Students could also create their own Zaption projects to show to the rest of the class, and the teacher can organize a cycle of Zaption tours. The important thing, in the case of culturally relevant music education, is to be flexible and honest: We have to assume the limitations of our perspectives and we have to be open to our student’s interests and opinions.