Our class is officially ending next week, where a ‘near final’version of our artifact is to be handed in. Lysanne and I have managed to get a lot of the ground work done, and it’s a matter of actually creating the graphical elements of the poster now, and preparing them for review next Thursday.
This has become essentially a framework for a tool where both a general or amateur audience who is interested in music can explore vis-a-vis musicianship categories, and where more advance and self-aware musicians or students can share their knowledge, and learn from each other. We’re basing our model on Andy Arthur’s article entitled in part, “Transdisciplinary concepts and skills in artistic practice” (2006) and Michael Hannan’s article entitled, “Contemporary music student expectations of musicianship training” (2006).
Arthur’s work addresses a main interest I have, which is the diversity in what one might define as a music community when we look beyond any one tradition, and the interdisciplinary nature of music, in that it very rarely exists entirely on its own. He posits a few general areas of musicianship, and we have distilled it into 4 levels musicianship understand in which specific skills can be assigned (from macro to micro): Cultural Context of Music, Active Listening, Form & Pattern Recognition and Basic Performance Skills.
These four are closely interrelated, and skills that fall into the micro levels, are also relevant to the macro levels. For now, as a navigational decision, concepts that fall into the more macro levels are not addressed at the more micro level. For example, while a comprehension of the cultural context is necessary for any performer, it is difficult to come up with a taxonomy that encompasses that. That is, it is more of a qualitative skill than a quantitative skill. Things like rhythmic skills can be quantitative, in that it is easy to gage whether you have an understanding of rhythm, and how advance is your grasp of this skill.
This is by no means perfect, but we are not trying to be everything to everyone. This serves as a starting point to the design the interface and the conceptual model that runs the interface. So what can we test it with? This is where Hannan’s article comes into handy, as in his small survey of 43 students, students responded to a standard list of musicianship skills that they are trained in, and were asked to rate their importance. Furthermore, students were also asked to suggest what musicianship skills were most essential to the genre that they’d like to play in. Genre and skills can be tricky, especially when it is up to Lysanne and I to come up with relevant skills. However, the idea is that it is the community of users that will contribute to this knowledge base, and by consensus of majority — much like how wikipedia works — patterns will emerge on their own.
Seeing as how our job is not to be prescriptive, we are using the musicianship skills that were considered “important” by students who wishes to study Jazz. The four main skills that are jazz specific were: Improvisation, Listening and Responding to others, Chord Substitution, and Sight-reading or Chart-reading.
As for how all these interrelate, we’ve got some rough sketches which makes no sense to anyone else except for Lysanne and I. There are lots of things I haven’t addressed in this post, and it’s because a picture tells a thousand words. That was initially part of the challenge I set for myself in this course: how can you visualize aspects of music, and how can that be useful?
If you have made it this far without getting lost, I applaud you. I certainly can’t say I’ve been able to wrap my head around this consistently over the last few weeks! I will try to post some work-in-Progress by the end of Sunday. There has been a few great speakers over the last week too, like Sheelagh Carpendale and Greg Van Alstyne (which I had to miss unfortunately, archives will be up!). I will write more about them after I tackle a growing list of chores I’ve been neglecting lately.
