While taking the visual thinking class at the Knowledge Media Design Institute this summer, inevitably I wanted to explore its applications within the domain of music. It started as a vague idea followed by a search for something scholarly that Lysanne and I could ground it in. All the while, I had to reign in my tendency to go off in tangents and dreaming up ideas before the practical foundations have been laid. In that sense, Lysanne and I were great partners. The fact that she claims to have no musical inclinations except as an audience no doubt forced me to clarify some of my ideas to make sure it can be well understood. My lack of familiarity with creating models was also cause for exasperation at times.
The initial research question was three folds. One, it addresses the pedagogical need of self-initiated students who want to advance themselves while having no access to a real life music teacher. Two, it reacts to to the ubiquitous term “musicianship” that is defined in its particulars differently in every manifestation of every musical tradition. That is, one of those words that describes everything, and thus describes nothing (I’m generalizing quite a bit here, but I got your attention didn’t I?). Third, as an alternative approach to reflecting about the first two ideas, how could/does visualization convey these concepts? Already I had quite a handful, but it is always better to have too many ideas, than to be short on inspiration.
The final result is an academic poster which is linked by the image above. It is a framework for an online (where else?) knowledge-sharing community that facilitates information exchange surrounding the topic of musicianship, broadly speaking. For novice students who may not even be familiar with the concept to begin with, we simplified Authur’s framework for a transdisciplinary music lexicon to four areas that concepts about musicianship could fall into. Basic Performance Skills, Form & Pattern Recognition, Active Listening and Cultural Context. This is meant to facilitate exploration of musicianship.
Musicians will notice that specific skills that one could identify has not been inserted into this model. Keep in mind that this is a framework to solicit knowledge from a bottom-up approach, not an authoritative approach, and as such we have only put in a few things to give a sense of how it may be utilized. The “leaves” represent individual modules that lead to a more detail page with resources, discussions, and general information pertaining to that particular skill. So should someone learning guitar on their own by taking lessons on youTube be inclined, they will be able to refine their rhythmic skills in particular by looking up resources here.
One addition way that the information is organized is also by genre. We did not have a chance to assess existing genre classifications to see which would be the best one to ‘seed’into this knowledge-sharing community, but we expect that the community would modify and enrich any classification system that they initially encounter on Musin’.
Much more detail on the design of this concept can be read in the poster itself, but i think this suffice as an introduction to the idea that was developed. I received some good feedback during its presentation a couple of weeks ago, and am trying to think of ways in which to further develop this into either a master’s thesis, as well as a collaboration project with others. For now, at least the idea is well formed. Perhaps by letting it simmer a bit, inspiration will come to me. Do leave feedback in the comment section below!
(Also, tree metaphor inspired by an online exhibit on Emily Carr. Looking for the original site to link to!)
