#scmtme

I finally dragged myself away from my new 3000 piece puzzle to do this online activity and blog post. However, after starting James’ video this week and witnessing the amount of effort and tech humour, it has revived me and encouraged me to learn new tech information! ....... also, the fact that his RØDE Podcaster mic reminds me of a stormtrooper gun.

PART ONE: Critical Thinking

It is important to be “enthusiastic critics,” (quote from James) and examine the ways in which we use technology. As Music Educators, we need to be able to move past traditions and constantly question and challenge our own practice. There are various pros and cons that can help us think deeper about this and balance our views.

Pros: Excitement with technology leads to motivation, and you can learn anywhere from a wide variety of sources. 

Cons: Distraction, attention span suffers, broader impact on wellbeing --> anxiety that results from distraction.

In James’ MOOC video titled, ‘The Right Age’, he discusses some of these in further depth providing examples of groups against young students exposure to media. The Australian Government Department of Health, Public Health Agency of Canada and the Canadian Society of Exercise Physiology all agree that there should be no screen time for children under two years. There is also continuous discussion surrounding teenage children having sleep issues due to gaming.

Resources for Mindfulness: Headspace and Waking Up

PART TWO: Tedx Talks (Childhood at Risk vs. Childhood Empowered)

James shared the link to two Tedx Talks that debated the pros and cons of technology with children, both of which I found highly engaging. 

Dimitri Christakis - Media and Children 

Dimitri is a researcher who is helping identify the optimal amount of media exposure beneficial to a child’s development. He starts off with statistics about brain development and change (really appealing to me through the rhetoric logos) and talks about how synapses are formed. It seems as though a balance needs to be found - as both over and under-stimulation can be detrimental. Studies found that students who had more cognitive stimulation at a young age, would have less attention issues when they were older older. Experiments on mice were conducted to see if there were issues with over exposure, and it was found that children (along with the mice!) need more real-time exposure than media and technology, which will benefit them in the future. 

Sugata Mitra -  Build a School in the Cloud

Sugata is a Professor of Educational Technology at Newcastle University, England (aka the James Humberstone of Newcastle). After hearing how many wealthy parents praised their children for their abilities to use technology. he wanted to see if anyone - even from the slums, would learn in the same way with no instruction. He conducted a ‘hole in the wall’ experiment, where he placed a computer into a hole in his wall in New Delhi and invited children to  access it. After a few months, children had learnt how to use various programs, download content and play games etc. When asked how they had learnt this, the response was that they had taught themselves. 

PART THREE: Blog Reflection

Cognitive Load Theory: Ok, I won’t like - I felt personally attacked whilst watching this part of the video because I kept reading ahead and zoning out - which was ironically the issue discussed in the first place :’((  #ok gen z . An interesting part of this video was that we would learn less with both audio and visual than just reading or listening to information. Words are a problem which result in people reducing texts to bullet points, in order to create information that is easier to digest. However, this still has the same issue, i.e., we need visuals to support text.

Eye Laser Tracking: This is a way that people work out where the human eye goes when people look at pages. Even when web pages are different we can see that the eye mostly follows the pattern of an F (sticking mainly to the left and then with streaks to the right. People spend roughly 70% on the left hand side of the page and 30% on the right hand side of the page. This can be seen on many websites such as Facebook and Google. I’ve tried to implement this into my blog by putting my important navigation links on the left such as home, ask, about page and project (for when we start it). I have also edited my html to shift my blog roll a few cms to the left to further adhere to this idea.

‘Above the Fold‘: An idea that originated with newspapers when they got folded in half for sale. News that was really important (or just good clickbait (iN ThiS EcOnOmY)) needed to go ‘above the fold‘ so that people would purchase it. I think my blog follows that because when you first enter the blog the first post is already above the fold and very close to the top of the screen - this is aided by the sidebar/navigation controls being on the side so there’s more room at the top. My sidebar is only just above the fold so it would be a good idea to move it up a few cm’s so it’s both in the F shape and above the fold. 

Signing off for sleep! Goodnight fellow tech masters zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Last night was our Presentation of Learning! It actually went really well and it was awesome to see all the incredible projects my friends made! 

This video is the recording of my live performance which I’m super happy with, went much better than my practices did yesterday! I was super nervous and a bit shaky which you can probably see, but it was actually really fun and I’ll definitely be buying a Push at some point soon so I can learn to use the rest of the features I didn’t quite get to discovering.

I think learning how to use Ableton, mainly on my own, was a really good experience for me as both a musician and a teacher, as this program can be in some schools (was in my prac school) and I’ll be able to use it to record my student’s performances, but also allowed me as a musician to explore a part of music which I haven’t had much experience in creating before. Many of my friends create their own music electronically, one even uses a Push, so I will be reaching out to them and getting more involved in that side of it soon I hope!

Below is the link to Sydney Con’s instagram page, where the story highlights are from the presentation. You can see a brief part of my performance (where I pressed the wrong buttons and quickly started again!) and some photos from my performance. 

I had another quick play with the Push this morning after a weekend away from it, just to double check what I wanted to perform. I am pretty happy with the sounds I’m making - using the Cashon kit, Acid Bass and Noise Machine 5 sounds to create the drum, bass and melodic lines.

I have noticed I am much faster at changing between them, and think I finally worked out how the record button works! (Starts recording at the start of the bar not straight away thank goodness!!!)

I will be spending this week finishing the piece off, practicing performing in front of my family ready to present on Friday night at uni! This will be playing with a few more sounds to probably create another melodic line to add another section in if I can think of one!

So what’s been happening on this silly tech project I talked about a couple weeks ago? I’m glad you asked, because I have the completed audio with vocals to share with you!  Here’s an update on what’s happened. As you can tell, I recorded the vocals myself on the track. I tried my best to seperate the vocal line from the original recording of I Can’t Go For That by Hall & Oates, but quickly realised it would be nearly impossible. I followed tutorials made on youtube, such as the one I’ve attached below, on how to use Logic Pro X and phase inversion on a stereo track to remove the instrumental and create a clean acapella track, but the way the song is mixed meant that the lead vocal line was placed in the middle of the mix, rather than a mono track on the left or right. 

I fussed with it for a bit before coming to the conclusion that recording the vocals myself would be just as fun and would ultimately make the music video (still in creation) more interesting. While I didn’t get to do this trick with this particular song, I still learnt a lot about mixing and how to seperate instrumental and vocal tracks for more modern songs that allow this technique to work!

Speaking of instrumental track, how about those keyboard and guitar sounds huh? Last blog post about this tech project I mentioned possibly using an audio sample of the oats hitting the side of the bowl to create a keyboard and guitar sound, and that’s what I ended up doing! For the keyboard, I added reverb, compression, EQ, chorus, and pitch correction to come up with a standard keyboard/synth sound. I then sampled this to my midi keyboard and created multiple tracks for the multiple different synth parts. 

These are pretty much my final ideas for next Friday - I will be practicing getting the transitions between them all much smoother and exciting, and will hopefully add in another kind of melodic line on top!

I’ve been listening to a lot of Dubstep and Psy-Trance and just electronically made music in general lately to find some great sounds and inspiration. 

I used quite a few tutorials to teach me how to use Ableton before I began working on the push - unfortunately my file I had been using before the push somehow corrupted so half the sounds don’t actually sound, but will upload what is left of it after this post. 

Here is a few of the tutorials I had a look at:

This was our final week of semester! We did a quick recap of what we’d done throughout the 12 weeks of class, as well as had lots of time to again work on our projects.

Getting Things Done

This was one of the most beneficial weeks for me . We looked at managing our productivity and what is important - using our time the best we can and not letting us overwhelm us. James gave us heaps of tips he uses, including keeping a well organised to-do list (which I have started doing better, and it has really been helping me manage what I need to do), as well as keeping up exercise and taking time for ourselves.