Week 4

This week’s reading was all about music performance.  The main objectives from the chapter that stood out to me were the research and practices leading to skills and knowledge and the affordances and constraints of technology with application to performance.

There are so many factors involved in acquiring performance skills, including practice, motivation, modeling, and feedback.  It should go without saying that practice is crucial in learning a skill.  Simply spending a lot of time practicing does not make a great musician, but rather the quality of practice as well.  If a student studies for a test for hours on end, they are less likely to retain the information than if they break up the studying into smaller chunks.  The same goes for practicing an instrument.  According to the reading, “The brain needs time to solidify newly developed neural networks; frequent breaks and adequate sleep are important in this process.  These breaks become even more important when the brain is dealing with complex material (Altenmuller & Schneider, 2009).” (Bauer, pp. 81).  One of the main struggles with practice, though, is motivation.  Some students need to be extrinsically motivated to practice- i.e., being rewarded for their work.  Eventually, these extrinsic motivators should be designed to encourage intrinsic motivation.  As I look back on my practice, I cannot quite remember when my motivation changed from extrinsic to intrinsic, but at long as I can remember, I have always played because of my love of music.  I loved the feeling of making music, and improving every time I practiced.  One thing that has always encouraged this is by never being given an assignment that was out of my reach.  I was very lucky to have the teachers I did because they always challenged me and pushed me to be my best.  If a student does not have this, I think it makes the switch to intrinsic motivation take longer to acquire.

Modeling and feedback are two other very important parts to acquiring performance skills.  By observing and imitating others, students are able to gain skills such as proper tone, embouchure.  As teachers, we do not always have the skills needed to be a perfect example of every instrument.  This is where technology can come into play.  It is proven that people learn better through pictures and words, so by showing students video and audio of high quality musicians and recordings, they are able to improve their own musicianship.  From here, students also need to receive feedback in order to progress.  This allows students to have an idea of their progress and set goals for where they can improve.  Feedback also includes students themselves diagnosing their own problems and coming up with solutions.  This can be done utilizing digital audio software and having the students listen to their own performance.

One example of digital audio software we learned about this week was Audacity.  In my opinion, Audacity is more of an advanced software option.  When an audio file is put into audacity, you can see the actual waveforms.  This allows you to cut sections of the recording, add various effects, and mix and edit it in numerous ways.  Once you learn the program, I think it is very user friendly.  I already have past experience with Audacity so using the program for my assignment was simple.  I think for my elementary school students, Audacity would be out of the question, but for an older student I believe it has the potential to be a great tool. 

Our assignment this week was to create a remix of “Mahna Mahna” from the Muppets Show.  I had a tougher time with this assignment simply because I am not a huge fan of remixes.  I like everything to be in order and be neat and tidy.  However, I could easily see the benefit of an assignment like this in music education.  In fact, if I taught older students, it seems like something I would assign in a classroom.  It is a great assignment to reach “the other 80%”, as well as to be used in getting the other 20% of students to think outside of the box.  Though I did not use many effects besides fading the music in my composition, a program such as Audacity allows for so much to be done to a file, both through the program itself, and by things imported by the creator.  Though this did not bother me, the only downside I found was the lengths you have to go through to share your creation.  Some may think that having to download additional software to export your file as an MP3 and then uploading it through other outlets may be too much additional work.  The advantage to other cloud-based programs we have used so far, such as Soundtrap and Noteflight are that you can share your compositions and the simple click of the mouse.