I am thrilled to be presenting at TMEA again this year. Both of my sessions, “Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers” and “Working with Digital Scores” will be taking place on February 17th, at 8 am and 11 am, respectively.
Here are the session notes:
Spotify Buys Online Recording Studio Soundtrap:
STOCKHOLM — Music streaming company Spotify has bought online music and audio recording studio Soundtrap, it said on Friday, declining to give financial details of the deal.
Stockholm-based Soundtrap allows its subscribers to have an online music studio and create music together with other people in real time, its website says.
”Soundtrap’s rapidly growing business is highly aligned with Spotify’s vision of democratising the music ecosystem,” Spotify said in a statement.
This is a really interesting deal for music technology education. Spotify is a major player in the music streaming space and is well known to the major public. I can definitely see how Soundtrap fits into Spotify’s vision. But it will be interesting to see what they actually do with it, and if it has any influence over Soundtrap’s usefulness in the music classroom.
This is a video from the school district I teach in highlighting one of our middle school bands and their efforts to commission new works every school year.
Andy Spang, Director at Folly Quarter Middle School, is a fantastic educator, and I think all teachers in the performing arts can be inspired and learn something from what he is doing with this program.
There is a new Teaching Music magazine out. Here is the cover:
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Even more fun is what’s on the inside! There is a two page article on using technology to be better organized. It features some of my Todoist, Notability, and Dropbox workflows. Also featured is the amazing Amy Burns, who explains how she is using the apps iDoceo and Seesaw in the elementary general music classroom.
It is totally worth checking out. Also, Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers is featured in the recommended resources section of the magazine, along with the next book in the Prestissimo Series, Recording Tips for Music Educators, by Ron Kearns.
Check out some pictures below…
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SoundCloud, Which Rose to Stardom on Indie Talent, Lays Off 173:
Not long ago, SoundCloud was one of the fastest-growing and most influential players in the streaming business. Now it is shrinking, and faces an uncertain future in the rapidly consolidating online music market.
On Thursday, SoundCloud announced that it was laying off 173 employees, about 40 percent of its work force. The company will also close its offices in London and San Francisco, concentrating its business in Berlin and New York.
Note: this article is a couple of weeks old now.
SoundCloud is a brilliant service, essential for new and upcoming artists to be discovered, and perfectly applicable in a music education setting for sharing projects. It is great for hundreds of other things too, including podcasting, though my own is not hosted there. I am not sure what the solution for SoundCloud is but I would hate to see them go. If they do, I would be curious if someone could think up a more disruptive and pervasive model for an audio based social media platform.
Best Music Technology Books for Teachers | Midnight Music:
I love buying books – both digital and paper – especially when they are relevant and useful. Here are a number of music technology in education books I recommend. I own almost all of these books and they contain excellent ideas for music technology curriculum integration.
I am honored that my book is on the list. Definitely check out the link. Some of these books are epically good, especially if you teach a music technology subject. Others, like mine, are suitable for a music teacher of any subject.
UPDATE: I address my favorite automations and advanced workflows in a recent episode of my podcast. Listen and subscribe below…
Listen on Apple PodcastsListen on SpotifyRSS Feed
Interested in learning some apps this summer that will make your school year easier in the fall? Here are my favorite automation apps for iOS and a very brief explanation of each. Don’t worry, I am planning on blogging about a few of these at length later this year.
Note: All of these apps take a little bit of an investment to learn but the payoff is HUGE. You will find yourself doing things on your iPhone and iPad you never thought were possible. If customizing your own automations seems daunting, every one of these apps has a user-submitted gallery where you can download actions that other people have already made.
Workflow is an automation tool that allows you to string together various different actions so that they can be initiated with a single tap. The list of actions you can choose from is dense and many of them are easy to understand without any coding experience. You could do something as simple as open the camera, take three pictures, and generate a .gif file all in one tap (see below). This idea is novel of course. The real power is in figuring out how to take tedious actions that require multiple taps and apps and string them all up into one tap using Workflow’s rich list of integrated apps. One of my favorite Workflows looks into my Dropbox folder for a PDF of a seating chart, generates a copy, and opens it in Notability on my iPad, where I can scribble information about my student’s progress with an Apple Pencil. (See this workflow depicted below).
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Apple just purchased Workflow earlier this year. My hope is that this will allow users to better automate Apple’s own apps and even system level actions down the road.
Drafts is a clean and minimalist text editor that allows you to send text to other apps. Think of it as the starting point for all text on you iPhone or iPad. It functions like a simple, text based, note taking app, until you swipe left and reveal a series of actions you can perform on the text. You can perform actions as simple as posting your text as a Facebook status, Tweet, text message, or email. You can also create actions so complex that they can include JavaScript. One of my more basic Drafts actions takes a list of items I have typed in a rush and imports them all into my Grocery list, which is a list I keep in the Apple Reminders app.
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IFTTT (If This Then That) is a web service that allows you to create If-Then statements that trigger actions to happen in apps. First, the user logs into all of their connected services (Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Philips Hue Lights, Gmail, etc…). Then the user creates “Applets” where something that is done in one service can trigger something to happen in another service. For example, I could say “IF I am tagged in a Facebook post, THEN save that photo to my Dropbox. Or “IF I favorite that YouTube video, THEN save it to my Evernote notebook and tag it videos.” Of course, you can get really crazy with home automation apps and do things like “IF someone mentions me on Twitter, THEN flicker my Philips Hue light bulbs red.”
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Editorial is a text editor meant primarily for longer form writing. If you have a blog and an iPad, this app really shines. The app supports plain text, Markdown, and TaskPaper. Markdown is a syntax that allows users to create formatting like headings, bullet lists, tables, and expressions for the web without actually using HTML. For example, when I wrote this blog post, I did not click around in the toolbar to make each of the sections of this post into headings. Instead I just typed ‘##’ in front of each of them, and my blogging service of choice, Squarespace (which interprets Markdown), automatically did the formatting for me. See below for an example.
TaskPaper is an amazing app for Mac that allows you to create checkable todo lists using only plain text. The syntax that the app uses also goes by the same name – TaskPaper. It is a really friendly way to work with checklists without taking your finger off the keyboard to format things. See the example below to get an idea what TaskPaper does. TaskPaper doesn’t have an iOS app, so the fact that Editorial works with TaskPaper files is great!
Much like Drafts, Editorial also has powerful user customizable workflows that you can perform on your text. You could have it post to your WordPress blog in one tap, for example. My favorite Editorial Workflow takes a list I wrote in the TaskPaper format and uses it as a template for reoccurring projects in my task app of choice, OmniFocus. Certain projects that I perform over and over again contain similar tasks. For example, I always do the same fifteen to twenty things every time I put on a band concert at my school. I keep a checklists of these tasks stored in Editorial so that every time I have a concert, take a sub day, or go on a field trip, I tap one button in Editorial and it imports the list into OmniFocus, complete with due dates, flags, and tags.
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Launch Center Pro is kind of like a springboard (the screen of apps you see when you unlock your iPhone) only it launches actions instead of apps. Actions can do almost anything. In fact, all of the apps in this post can be launched from within Launch Center. For example, I can publish my Workflows as buttons in Launch Center. I can create buttons in Launch Center that trigger IFTTT Applets. Launch Center actions can also launch apps, turn lights on and off in my house, take me into specific lists within my todo app, and more!
Launch Center Pro took me a little more time to get my head around because it assumes that the user knows a little bit about something called x-callback-url. This is a protocol that most of the apps in this post take advantage of but don’t quite expose to the user. With Launch Center Pro, I felt like I really had to learn this system before digging in. Fortunately, MacStories has a great tutorial that you can read here.
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Launcher is a much simpler and friendlier version of Launch Center Pro. Setting up actions is very straightforward and a number of them are available as pre-built templates. Launcher lives entirely inside of a Today Widget, which is a special widget that you can invoke on iOS by dragging down from the top of the screen or by swiping to the right of your first screen of apps. Launch Center Pro also has a widget available that does much the same thing, but you might find that you prefer Launcher if the learning curve for LCP is steep.
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Soundtrap Enable Import Export MIDI Music Files:
The MIDI music technology protocol is used worldwide to enable electronic devices — computers, cellphones, karaoke machines and more — to generate sounds. The enhanced MIDI support by Soundtrap furthers the creative process by making the multiple tools used to make music interoperable online. This is part of an effort by Soundtrap to broaden its ecosystem of best-of-breed industry solutions so that musicians and music creators have even more flexibility in their music-making efforts. For example, Soundtrap is now interoperable with digital audio workstations (DAWs) through MIDI File Export so users can send all or part of their composition to other solutions such as GarageBand or Pro Tools.
I experimented with Soundtrap with my general music classes last Spring. I was entirely skeptical about the prospect of running a DAW in a web browser but Soundtrap impressed me. It does a great job handling audio and MIDI files in a way that doesn’t feel much slower than using a native app like GarageBand. My students loved the collaborative features and we were all left wanting more.
One of my GarageBand assignments in previous years was a MIDI remix, where I put MIDI files for familiar movie and pop songs in a shared folder and encouraged students to remix them, altering the instrument voices, form, and adding loops to transform the style. The fact that I can actually now do this assignment entirely in a web based application through Soundtrap’s MIDI import and export is impressive. And this is not even to mention the fact that Soundtrap can perform import and export between other web-only based applications like Noteflight. Very cool. If you have been thinking about checking out Soundtrap for yourself, or for a classroom, I highly encourage it.
This week, middle school choral educator, music technology specialist, blogger, and podcaster, Chris Russell, joins the show to talk about using scanning apps in the music classroom.
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of working with Robert Sheldon as he conducted the Regional Repertory Wind Ensemble. The RRWE is a Maryland based honor band that I have assisted for the past seven years. Early each summer, the organization finds a composer/clinicain/educator to come in and direct the audition based group on a concert of their own compositions. Many conductors have worked with the group over the years, all of whom are master composers, educators, AND conductors. Sam Hazo, Frank Ticheli, Richard Saucedo, and Brian Balmages have all worked with the group.
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Working with Robert Sheldon is a real treat. His music finds a way of strongly connecting to the students. It is just so fun to play! I can hear and see how naturally they gravitate towards it in performance. One of the things I really admire about Sheldon is that he is a real instructor. His years of teaching experience have crafted him into someone who is really able to rehearse an ensemble, assess where the problems are, and immediately give just the right feedback to get the musical result he wants. And he gets these results without ever once raising his voice, putting a student on the spot, or diminishing their efforts. In every interaction he was complimentary, patient, and spoke deliberately. When he needed students to step up, he would always find a way to make them feel great as a member of the ensemble before first offering a suggestion. His manner of offering suggestions was much like dangling a carrot just far enough in front of them that they would want to sit up a little straighter, put their instrument in playing position sooner, reach for the peak of the phrase, etc.
I witnessed expert music teaching this weekend. And for that I thank Mr. Sheldon for his involvement with the ensemble.
Music Ed Tech Talk 
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