Noteflight score and review

Noteflight gives the unique opportunity to notate music exclusively online and free.  The sharing and commenting features make it almost like a social media venue where musicians showcase their creativity.  This would be a very attractive aspect of Noteflight to young students who are obsessed with social media.  I did find it more difficult and time-consuming to create a score than on Musescore.  Musescore had several similarities to Finale, making note entry fast with the number keys.  Noteflight allows you to enter notes with letter note names, but you have to chose rhythmic values manually by clicking the note type.  This took me a long time even though the piece I notated was not very rhythmically diverse.  I can imagine that a complex score with many rhythmic variations would take forever.  Noteflight would be a good option in a low budget, short class period  situation where students were asked to make short and simple compositions.  The online aspect also would save memory on computers.  Finale and Sibelius take a huge amount of storage space.

Week 2 reflection- MIDI and DAWs

It's remarkable how far digital sound has come over just the past decade.  I used to find it relatively easy to distinguish a MIDI recorded instrument from a real one.  It seems this is becoming more difficult to do the more advanced digital technology becomes.  The most current DAW software today contains thousands of MIDI sounds, many of which sound very authentic.  It is not uncommon for studio musicians to produce entire albums without recording a single real instrument.  MIDI brings a world of versatility to every musician regardless of their instrumental skills.  For example someone who can't play the bass guitar, but knows their way around a keyboard and a DAW, can create quality sounding bass tracks and never touch the actual instrument.  They can then take the track and edit the balance levels within a project, add effects, loop it, copy it and do many other things in the DAW.  MIDI also eliminates problems with performing on a real instruments such as bad intonation.  It is also easier to stop, delete and rerecord tracks on a MIDI keyboard.  The MIDI keyboard will also sound the same regardless of the environment or recording space.  There are many factors to consider about acoustics and microphone choice when recording real instruments that are irrelevant to plugging in a MIDI keyboard. 

Despite all the conveniences and possibilities of digital sound, I still place high value on recording real instruments when applicable in my Music Tech classes.  If a student can play an instrument I want to help foster that and give them the opportunity at some point to record themselves in the studio and edit the tracks they create in the DAW (usually GarageBand).  Most of the recording projects we do in Music Tech combine recording MIDI instruments and 1-2 real instruments or vocals.  I was glad chapter 2 in the Bauer book (p. 30) discussed audio-to-digital converting (ADC) and how that works technically.  We do this all the time in my classes yet I never stop to think about the process by which analog sound becomes an editable digital file.  After reading this chapter I feel more equipped to explain this process to my students. 

I also came across a really great article through feedly from the Designing Sound feed call "ADC, it's as easy as 1 10 11".  I thought this was so relevant to this discussion about how far we've come from analog to digital sound and all the advantages of today's music technology.  The article contains interviews with many professional audio designers for movies, tv and video games, in which they discuss the old methods of analog production compared to how versatile and efficient the new digital methods are. 

http://designingsound.org/2015/02/adc-its-easy-as-1-10-11-a-retrospective-from-the-pros/

Music Technology Week 1 Reflection

After reading the beginning of Bauer's book this week and being immersed in new social media, blogs and other internet resources, I have been able to deeply consider the vastness of technology's influence in every day life, school and music education in particular.  It seems the more involved and dependent we become on technology, the less we think about it.  So it was good this first week to start by setting up this PLN to "tap in" to more things that are out there and organize a system for technology resources. 

In the preface, Bauer discusses his personal experiences as a child with early technology and how the things that seem ancient to us now were so valuable and influential in shaping who he became.  I was able to make an interesting connection with this preface passage to a blog I subscribed to through Feedly.  I read through John Mackey's blog entry called "How I Spent My Teen Years."  Mackey is one of my favorite contemporary wind band composers.  It was so intriguing to learn that he did not play a band instrument in school.  He begins the article by saying that people always ask him what instrument he played and wonder how he became a composer when they find out he played none.  His response was brilliant and extremely relevant to this weeks readings.  He said, "The answer is that I have always used a computer – from the time I was really young."  

Mackey goes on to explain and give examples of early music software that allowed him to input and compose an enormous amount of music as a teenager.  He used early computers such as the Apple IIe and the Commodore 64, and primitive music software such as Music Construction Set and SidPlayer.  Mackey talks about the limitations he faced when composing with these systems, yet how his early experiences with these as a young person helped mold him as a composer.  It is astonishing to see how even the most early and basic forms of music technology brought us a composer such as John Mackey who never even played a wind instrument! 

http://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed/http://ostimusic.com/blog/feed/