The construction of creativity: using video to explore secondary school music teachers’ views

This paper is taken from research which seeks to illustrate how English secondary school music teachers view creativity. It explores methodological issues regarding the eliciting of the views of teachers regarding creativity, with particular reference to the use of videotaped extracts of lessons during in-depth semi-structured interviews. Various research designs and results from previous studies are examined and the implications pointed out. A pilot study using a theoretical four-fold framework (pupil-environment-process-product) is reported. A qualitative research design was used to allow teachers to reflect on their own ideas. Music lessons on composition and improvisation from three schools were observed and videotaped. The teachers were interviewed and asked to complete a ‘Musical Career Path’. The process of analysis was assisted by a software package for qualitative research (i.e. NUDIST). The conclusions presented some subcategories that supported the initial framework and exemplified the complexities in defining the term ‘creativity’, pointing to a need for further enquiry. It is suggested that the use of videotaped extracts of lessons for the purpose of discussion with participants during the interviews, proved beneficial in exploring the teachers’ views of creativity. This method may have relevance for both researchers and practitioners interested in teachers’ attitudes

Social Media and Political Participation in Saudi\ud Arabia: The Case of the 2009 Floods in Jeddah

The aim of this study was to explore the use of social media for political participation in Saudi Arabia taking the case of the Jeddah 2009 floods as an example. Data were collected for this qualitative study between 2010 and 2012 and were analyzed with the help of NVivo, a software for qualitative data analysis. The study followed the principles of thematic analysis to analyze 40 posts and the readers’ comments on them from YouTube, Facebook, an online community, and Al Arabiya site. The findings of this study show that people used social media to express their feelings and emotions about the loss of lives, express their opinions about what happened and call for action about what should happen or organize themselves to take part in volunteer work. The results of this research contribute to an understanding of the role of social media in encouraging political\ud participation in countries where participation in public affairs in some cases is not encouraged and in others, for example, street protests is not permitted

How do secondary school music teachers view creativity? A report on educators' views of teaching composing skills

This paper explores secondary school music teachers' views of creativity and some of their ideas about teaching composing skills. In order to do this, firstly an initial explanation of past and present controversies surrounding the meaning of the term creativity is given. The centralised production of music curricula during the 1990s has unified the knowledge pupils are expected to ‘attain’. However, issues concerning creativity, its meanings and their interpretation remain because they have not been resolved by centralised policy production. Secondly, different approaches taken by several studies on creativity are reviewed and a four-fold framework for researching music teachers' views of creativity is suggested (i.e. Pupil - Environment - Process - Product). Finally, preliminary results of an enquiry carried out in England with six teachers are presented for consideration. A qualitative research design was used to allow teachers to reflect on their ideas. Selected videotaped extracts of their own lessons on composition and improvisation where used for the purpose of discussion with participants during later interviews. The process of analysis was assisted by a software package for qualitative research (i.e. NUDIST). The conclusions drawn from the interviews indicated to some new categories and subcategories that supported the initial framework. The focus in this paper is on the teachers' definitions of creativity, their role in teaching composing skills and the positive influence of teaching in developing their own creativity. The teachers' comments revealed some of the complexities embraced within the concept of creativity and its use in music education

RACOFI: A Rule-Applying Collaborative Filtering System

In this paper we give an overview of the RACOFI (Rule-Applying Collaborative Filtering) multidimensional rating system and its related technologies. This will be exemplified with RACOFI Music, an implemented collaboration agent that assists on-line users in the rating and recommendation of audio (Learning) Objects. It lets users rate contemporary Canadian music in the five dimensions of impression, lyrics, music, originality, and production. The collaborative filtering algorithms STI Pearson, STIN2, and the Per Item Average algorithms are then employed together with RuleML-based rules to recommend music objects that best match user queries. RACOFI has been on-line since August 2003 at http://racofi.elg.ca.

Narrative music: towards an understanding of musical narrative functions in multimedia

As the computer screen is replacing the book as the dominant medium for communication (Kress, 2003), questions about how meaning is constituted by the multimodal interaction of different media (including music) is becoming increasingly important in contemporary research of pedagogy, sociology and media studies. The overall aim with this licentiate thesis is to explore musical narrative functions as they appear in multimedia such as film and computer games. The thesis is based on three publications. Publication 1 proposes a classification of musical narrative functions, with 6 narrative classes(the Emotive, Informative, Descriptive, Guiding, Temporal and Rhetorical classes) and 11 categories. The relational interplay of music with contextual factors is emphasized. Publication 2 describes the design of a software tool, REMUPP (Relations Between Musical Parameters and Perceived Properties), to be used for experimental studies of musical expression. REMUPP is used for real time alteration of musical expression, by the manipulation of musical parameters such as tempo, harmony, rhythm, articulation, etc. Publication 3 describes a quasi-experiment using REMUPP, where a group of young participants (12-13 years old) were given the task of adapting musical expression – by manipulating 7 parameters – to make it fit 3 visual scenes shown on a computer screen. They also answered a questionnaire asking about their musical backgrounds and habits of listening to music, watching movies and playing computer games. Numerical data from the manipulations were analyzed statistically with regards to the preferred values of the musical parameters in relation to the different visual scenes. The results indicated awareness and knowledge about codes and conventions of musical narrative functions, and were to some degree affected by the participants’ gender, musical backgrounds and media habits

Dynamical systems theory for music dynamics

We show that, when music pieces are cast in the form of time series of pitch variations, the concepts and tools of dynamical systems theory can be applied to the analysis of {\it temporal dynamics} in music. (i) Phase space portraits are constructed from the time series wherefrom the dimensionality is evaluated as a measure of the {\pit global} dynamics of each piece. (ii) Spectral analysis of the time series yields power spectra ($\sim f^{-\nu}$) close to {\pit red noise} ($\nu \sim 2$) in the low frequency range. (iii) We define an information entropy which provides a measure of the {\pit local} dynamics in the musical piece; the entropy can be interpreted as an evaluation of the degree of {\it complexity} in the music, but there is no evidence of an analytical relation between local and global dynamics. These findings are based on computations performed on eighty sequences sampled in the music literature from the 18th to the 20th century.Comment: To appear in CHAOS. Figures and Tables (not included) can be obtained from [email protected]