Digital jamming for music education on upcycled PCs
Posted: Wed Jan 09, 2019 11:58 pm
Dear everyone,
I’m pleased to join this forum. My name is James Humberstone. I’m a composer and senior lecturer in music education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, in Australia. If you’re interested in innovative music pedagogies you may have heard of my MOOC, “The Place of Music in 21st Century Education”, on Coursera.
Anyway, my summer hobby-project is to try to upcycle some old PCs around my house and to develop a station for 4 or 5 students to make digital music together. In my courses I’ve been doing this for a few years with the many apps that support Ableton Link, and before that used to use tonnes of MIDI controllers (inc. wireless ones) on a single Ableton session. Of course, many schools can’t afford expensive devices, and as we know, music education remains hugely irrelevant to most children even though all of those same children say music is one of the most important parts of their developing adult identities.
So. Build a station where kids can create, improvise, and perform electronic music together, with a very minimal cost. And a great excuse to get into the Linux world and discover what music software runs fast on decade-old PCs!
While I’d love any comments/feedback on this idea now, I’m not asking questions YET here because I know I need to do a lot of reading first. I’m looking at Jack-MIDI for syncing between PCs, and probably some peer-to-peer network to save buying a hub, although wifi isn’t off the table. At some point I’ll also be trying to build a cheap mixer, because I need students to be able to control how much they can hear of what they’re doing and how much of the others in the mix, as they’re working. Perhaps I’ll be dusting off the soldering iron for that as spending (much) money on mixers won’t be an option!
Anyway, that’s me. Thanks for allowing me to join this group!
J
I’m pleased to join this forum. My name is James Humberstone. I’m a composer and senior lecturer in music education at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music, in Australia. If you’re interested in innovative music pedagogies you may have heard of my MOOC, “The Place of Music in 21st Century Education”, on Coursera.
Anyway, my summer hobby-project is to try to upcycle some old PCs around my house and to develop a station for 4 or 5 students to make digital music together. In my courses I’ve been doing this for a few years with the many apps that support Ableton Link, and before that used to use tonnes of MIDI controllers (inc. wireless ones) on a single Ableton session. Of course, many schools can’t afford expensive devices, and as we know, music education remains hugely irrelevant to most children even though all of those same children say music is one of the most important parts of their developing adult identities.
So. Build a station where kids can create, improvise, and perform electronic music together, with a very minimal cost. And a great excuse to get into the Linux world and discover what music software runs fast on decade-old PCs!
While I’d love any comments/feedback on this idea now, I’m not asking questions YET here because I know I need to do a lot of reading first. I’m looking at Jack-MIDI for syncing between PCs, and probably some peer-to-peer network to save buying a hub, although wifi isn’t off the table. At some point I’ll also be trying to build a cheap mixer, because I need students to be able to control how much they can hear of what they’re doing and how much of the others in the mix, as they’re working. Perhaps I’ll be dusting off the soldering iron for that as spending (much) money on mixers won’t be an option!
Anyway, that’s me. Thanks for allowing me to join this group!
J
