save to DISC: Documenting Innovation in Music Learning

The paper discusses an approach to determining the worth and value of innovation in music education and measuring it’s capacity for meaning and engagement. It also aims to identify new examples of innovation across a broad range of music learning contexts and establish a rigorous digital process for documenting, evaluating and distributing innovative cases and resources for present and future contexts. It discusses specifically a pilot project that seeks to document innovation in sound curriculum (DISC). save to DISC is an exploratory study in an Australasian CRC for Interaction Design (ACID) project that proposes to establish flexible and effective procedures for the sourcing, evaluating, refereeing, editing, producing, validating, storing, publishing, and distributing of a wide range of media and content types. It involves documenting innovative and successful practice in music education, creating and evaluating programs in difficult/challenging school contexts and commissioning and encouraging the production of resource materials for 21 st century contexts

Forty Years of Fellowships: A Study of Orchestras' Efforts to Include African American and Latino Musicians

This report, commissioned by the League of American Orchestras, is the first systematic effort to review the record of those fellowships from the perspectives of the orchestras and the musicians who have participated in them. Until now there has been no single source for information about which orchestras conducted fellowships, when they were conducted, and how many musicians were fellows. This report answers important questions about what happened to fellows across all the programs after their fellowships were completed: Did they successfully compete for orchestra jobs? Did their careers take other paths? It also provides a view of their experiences as fellows: How did they benefit from the experience? What kinds of problems did they experience? Until now, no data has been collected that reflects the judgment of orchestra leaders and other experts about the dynamics of launching and managing a fellowship program. Through the frame of these fellowship programs, what can be learned about broader diversity issues for orchestras? For the first time, we are able to present the following information and analysis:* The first section of this report, "Forty Years of Fellowships," presents all available program and impact data relating to orchestra fellowships, from 1976 to the present day. It reflects documentation supplied by orchestras themselves, following a scoping survey of League members, and the results of supplemental web research. It identifies the orchestras that have had fellowships, counts the fellows, and reviews the elements that are characteristic of fellowship programs. It defines the fundamental characteristics of fellowship programs, notes three different basic models, tracks career outcomes for fellows, and explores the cost and financing of fellowship programs.* The second section, "Forty Years of Fellows," explores the perspectives of musicians who have been fellows over the years. Interviews with 21 fellowship program alumni were conducted, including one or more fellows from every fellowship program.* The third section, "Fellowship/Leadership: Voices of Experience," examines the perspectives of orchestra leaders, program managers, and a few outside experts as they reflect on the dynamics of fellowship programs, their value for orchestras, and the place of fellowships within the larger challenge of making orchestras more inclusive and diverse institutions

Research to Practice: Issues of Relevance for Massachusetts Music Educators

Accepted manuscrip

The Relationship between Musical Ability and the Perception and Production of L2 Prosodic Features

Studies in L2 acquisition have indicated that musically trained individuals are apt to demonstrate better L2 pronunciation skills. As for music, it was recently clarified that some amusiacs demonstrate selective impairment in L1 prosody discrimination. The purpose of this study was to investigate a relationship between amusical L2 learners and their perception and production of L2 prosody. To investigate this, 24 native-Japanese learners of English either in EFL (n=22) or ESL context (n=2) were examined in terms of their musical ability and L2 intonation perception and production. The musical test indicated that there was one amusiac and 10 low-level musical sufferers in the EFL group. Based on a contrastive analysis between amusical and non-amusical participants, as well as between participant groups with and without musical difficulty, it was found that any level of musical difficulty was correlated with lower auditory processing ability in L2 intonation for these English-language learners. However, the contrastive analysis pertaining to the productive skill indicated that musical difficulty was not associated with their production of accurate L2 intonation patterns. According to these findings, the present study concluded that musical difficulty is only related to these learners\u27 L2 intonation processing. Conversely, the present research found that the ESL learners\u27 learning context appeared to be less associated with their aural performance than with their intonation production. In addition, it was found that the level of previous musical training was related to both better L2 intonation perception and production

The Relationship between Musical Ability and the Perception and Production of L2 Prosodic Features

Studies in L2 acquisition have indicated that musically trained individuals are apt to demonstrate better L2 pronunciation skills. As for music, it was recently clarified that some amusiacs demonstrate selective impairment in L1 prosody discrimination. The purpose of this study was to investigate a relationship between amusical L2 learners and their perception and production of L2 prosody. To investigate this, 24 native-Japanese learners of English either in EFL (n=22) or ESL context (n=2) were examined in terms of their musical ability and L2 intonation perception and production. The musical test indicated that there was one amusiac and 10 low-level musical sufferers in the EFL group. Based on a contrastive analysis between amusical and non-amusical participants, as well as between participant groups with and without musical difficulty, it was found that any level of musical difficulty was correlated with lower auditory processing ability in L2 intonation for these English-language learners. However, the contrastive analysis pertaining to the productive skill indicated that musical difficulty was not associated with their production of accurate L2 intonation patterns. According to these findings, the present study concluded that musical difficulty is only related to these learners\u27 L2 intonation processing. Conversely, the present research found that the ESL learners\u27 learning context appeared to be less associated with their aural performance than with their intonation production. In addition, it was found that the level of previous musical training was related to both better L2 intonation perception and production

A curriculum for excellence review of research literature

Research suggests that the arts play significant part in the education of all pupils. The findings of numerous, wide-ranging studies indicate that the Expressive Arts fulfil a vital function in the development learners, meeting many of the outcomes described in the "Purposes of the Curriculum 3-18" diagram outlined on page 15 of "A Curriculum for Excellence". In the following review of recent research, it is evident that the arts provide meaningful contexts through which learners can actively participate in a wide range of learning experiences. It is evident that learning should take place in the arts: each separate discipline has its own knowledge and skills base. But learning also takes place through the arts. Because of the high level of active engagement and enjoyment experienced during good Expressive Arts lessons, learners gain a sense of achievement and increased self-esteem. Across the arts areas, learners are offered a very wide and varied range of experiences, enabling them to communicate in a number of ways, for example, orally, visually, through body language and through music. The collaborative nature of many arts activities enables learners to develop skills in working cooperatively with others, often in problem-solving, creative situations. The arts also offer many opportunities for learners to be pro-active and enterprising within meaningful and relevant contexts

Data-Driven Sound Track Generation

Background music is often used to generate a specific atmosphere or to draw our attention to specific events. For example in movies or computer games it is often the accompanying music that conveys the emotional state of a scene and plays an important role for immersing the viewer or player into the virtual environment. In view of home-made videos, slide shows, and other consumer-generated visual media streams, there is a need for computer-assisted tools that allow users to generate aesthetically appealing music tracks in an easy and intuitive way. In this contribution, we consider a data-driven scenario where the musical raw material is given in form of a database containing a variety of audio recordings. Then, for a given visual media stream, the task consists in identifying, manipulating, overlaying, concatenating, and blending suitable music clips to generate a music stream that satisfies certain constraints imposed by the visual data stream and by user specifications. It is our main goal to give an overview of various content-based music processing and retrieval techniques that become important in data-driven sound track generation. In particular, we sketch a general pipeline that highlights how the various techniques act together and come into play when generating musically plausible transitions between subsequent music clips