Technology in the Studio

I often go through my old "Flute Talk" magazines to look for articles that may help me with any current repertoire I am learning. While reading through an old magazine issue (from September 2005), I came across an article entitled "Technology in the Studio" written by Tiffany Campell. I know that it is 3 years old, but things that she writes still ring true today.

Tiffany Campbell pointed out how many resourceful, valuable, and educational software programs are out there for flutists (and all other musicians!) There are programs that help to reinforce basic skills. In fact, while reading this I do recall using one of these types of software during my entrance exam for my undergraduate studies! These are things like musictheory.net, and Fast Rabbit Software (they have Dolce Ear Training and Dolce Music Flash Cards).

She also pointed out the various practice tools available. There is an online metronome! I had no idea!  (Of course, now I really don't have an excuse when I leave my metronome at school...) She also wrote about SmartMusic (see my old blogs!!) In my old blog, I believe I failed to mention that the program writes out the line you played and actually highlights your mistakes and shows you on the staff the correct note! That is really helpful for students.

She also brings up Supplemental Material - these are mostly just flutey things. There are recorded performances of Moyse's Tone Development Through Interpretation online ( I had no idea ).

Campell states the opportunities we now have to record recitals and lessons - which is very common now. I really should start doing this more often. She talks about using Audacity, but of course now there are many other options as well. For instance, you can record yourself on an mp3 recorder, and on your iPod touch!

Something that I may use in the future that I read in this article is a tool for teachers called Blue Box Invoices. This software creates invoices for unpaid lessons and automatically generates yearly or quarterly income and outstanding-balance statements! She states, "these forms may be e-mailed, faxed posted to a website, or printed with a studio logo and mailing labels." How useful for a teacher with his or her own studio!!! I just might put this into use when I get my own studio of students!

Final Project

My final project was another iMovie. I am still very frustrated with both of the iMovies I have created during the duration of the semester. Both of them seem to have cut off the edges of my pictures and have made them very fuzzy, when really the pictures are very clear! I think maybe this has something to do with the way I converted them into movie form while taking them out of iMovie. I converted them to a ".mov" file by using quicktime. Is this the problem for the cutting off of the actual size of the movie??

I know that the quality of pictures problem has something to do with iMovie and not with Quicktime, though. When I imported my (clear) pictures into iMovie, immediately they were fuzzy. It is so frustrating because I took so much time choosing the pictures to use. My final project used pictures of beautiful flowers, and I took a portion of a song (edited by using Audacity) entitiled "Hello Sunshine" because I thought it was appropriate for the flowers!!

Please comment if you have any advice on how I could improve these problems in the future!! Thanks!

Table Project

The table project - now this was probably my second favorite assignment. At first, I was frustrated with it because I wasn't familiar with it and I am a perfectionist. Then, I played around with it lots and realized how easy it was to just add more columns and rows!

I decided to do my table project on my influences on the flute. My two biggest influences were my teachers. I dedicated the first column to my undergraduate flute professor, and I dedicated the last column to my teacher here during my master's degree. In the middle, I had inserted the title of the table, and pictures of flutes, because that's what joins the two. Under the table, I typed out a little explanation of it all and talked a bit about why/how these two particular teachers have influenced me!

I see how useful using tables is. When I am on webpages now, I try my best to look at them in different ways, seeing how it could have been made from a table. Something that I would like to learn how to do is to make the columns differ from one another in size, because I have seen a lot of that on webpages, and I can't seem to figure it out. If I inserted a picture into one column that was larger than the picture in the next column, the table just seemed to put in extra space in the smaller picture's column so that it would end up being the same size as the first column.

Flash Project

I did a pretty basic flash project, just to familiarize myself with the program, which I have never used before. I think that it was pretty user-friendly. The layers were easy to figure out, I added text as well. I used a picture of Will Ferrell as Buddy the Elf, because I love the movie Elf and this is the time of year when I watch it a billion times! (If you haven't seen it, please do - you will have a great laugh, especially if you love stupid humor!) I also included a picture of a candy cane (because that's in the movie, too, as one of the four food groups of the elf culture...)

Somethings that I would have fixed in my flash project using CS3:

     I would have liked the pictures to BOTH glide instead of just appearing at the next location.

     I would have liked the candy cane not to have a white box around it when it spun, because you could see it cut into the other picture and it really bothered me.

I'm sure that those things could easily be fixed if I just sat down and familiarized myself a lot more with the program and how to navigate around it well. However, I spent most of my time getting to better know Audacity, and I had so much fun with that - see last post!

I was really impressed with a lot of other students' flash projects in our class. Good job, everyone!

Concrete Project

At first, I had a lot of trouble with my concrete project and got very frustrated! I had started with cat sounds, and I was having so much trouble making it sound like music. I think that most of the problem was that I have never used audacity before besides to cut the time down to a certain amount so that it could be added to a video or something like that. Needless to say, my first few concrete projects (if you could even call them projects) were horrible! After meeting with Dr. Gilbert, he assured me that it is indeed hard for just about anyone to make their concrete sound like music, and suggested that I try to use some kind of sounds that are longer so that I have more to work with.

Taking Dr. Gilbert's advice, I found some different sounds. These sounds were longer, and more rhythmic, so it would be easier to make it sound like music. I used sounds entitled: hammer, saw, spray, phone, and creaky door. These sounds all go together because they are all sounds that I associate with people remodeling a house. (My parents do lots of buying and flipping houses, so these are indeed all familiar to me!)

After using these sounds, and after getting better acquainted with using audacity, I found it a lot easier to make it groove. I found it a lot easier to navigate my way around audacity, using silence, cut, copy, paste, etc. I also played around with the wahwah affect and changing pitches, though I did not include it in my final concrete project, because the phone and the creaky door had changing pitches as it was, so I left those as is.

I'm glad that I kept trying different things so that I could better adjust myself to the Audacity program. I feel like I could definitely use Audacity for useful things in the future!

Julia Nunes

There is a girl on YouTube that is hilarious. She plays ukulele (and sometimes melodica) and sings originals and covers. I don't know what kind of movie making software she uses, but because of the music technology class, I am able to understand all the posibilities of programs she could have used to put these many movies & podcasts together. Most of the videos have more than one track going on at a time, and the picture cuts to other scenes of her in different outfits and on different days singing the harmonies and such.





The video above was seen by Ben Folds and Julia Nunes was invited to sing with him in a tour.

I also found a video that was made entirely out of pictures...just like our animation assignment in tech class! I think it is so impressive especially because of how long it is and how many people, poses, and outfit changes were involved. I can only imagine how many hours or days this took to put together! Here is that video:





Enjoy! I hope that you see the connection to what we've done in class all semester!

Smart Music

I was trying to think of some technology tools that I have used in the past to teach music, and I came across "Smart Music." Some of you may be familiar with Smart Music. I first used it during one of my student teaching placements. Smart Music is a computer program designed for students to help with practicing. It does so much to help the student. It has a variety of levels of exercises, and has a huge library of repertoire for each instrument so the student can hear a solo piece they are working on. Let's say we are talking about a clarinet student working on a clarinet and piano piece. The student may choose to play through the piece, or sections of it, along with the clarinet. He or she can eliminate the piano part so they can listen to their accuracy with their instrument. In the same respect, the student is also able to eliminate the clarinet part and play along only with the piano part. This is great for many things, one of them being ensemble. Especially when you are teaching in a school with a ton of students and limited one-on-one teacher/student time, this is a wonderful tool.

Another thing I particularly love about this program for the students is that the student has control over the tempo. The program also will respond to mistakes by marking what was wrong in which measure. This is great to train the student, because the student can go back and listen to the correct way, and then the way they played it.

The teacher I was working with at this particular placement used Smart Music for student homework. Especially around competition times such as NYSSMA and All-County, he would have students do specific things with Smart Music, and then the student would burn their recorded progress on to a cd or simply email it to the teacher. That is another wonderful thing about this program because the student can not only listen back to themselves, but within that practice time where the teacher could not interact with the student, the teacher could still listen to it afterwards and help the student out with things. I think this is a very productive way to handle the inconvenience of time and student to teacher ratio that so often interferes with teachers being able to give individual attention to students.

I think this is a great program to use with your students if you are teaching music, especially in a middle school and high school. It engages the students and makes practicing a little more fun. It gives feedback when there may be no one around to do so, and it is very interactive. I think this is something that would have helped a lot of students stick with playing had it been around while I was a younger student.