Wiltshire’s music education hub is inviting ‘individuals and organisations responsible for shaping music provision in the UK’ to a series of online seminars on the opportunities and pitfalls offered by emerging music technologies.
The four seminars will take place between now and late March with an internationally renowned panel of speakers. Each will last between 60-80 minutes with some time to stay on and discuss the subjects with speakers and colleagues. The events cost £5.50 each with a season ticket for all four events offered at a discount rate of £16.50.
The Over the Digital Horizon webinar series is curated by Ben Sellers, co-founder of the Transformance Music collective of musicians, teachers and technologists, and author of the ‘Teaching Music with Garageband for iPad’ textbook. The series aims to escape the hype around technology to bring teachers, schools and organisations the best forward-thinking approaches from around the world, meeting the needs of music educators. Themes for each webinar will be Instrumental Tuition, Music for Video Games, Composition and Production and long-term planning for the music education sector as a whole.
The discussions will introduce teachers to augmented and virtual realities and the ways they can enhance singing, instrumental teaching and musical inclusion. They will help teachers get a clearer idea of the technologies available and how they might be incorporated into instrumental teaching, music theory and practice.
This will include showing how, for example, virtual reality equipment can help students overcome performance anxiety and experience playing in a full orchestra or sing, latency-free, with global choirs. It will show how aspects formerly impossible outside face-to-face lessons, can be overcome, such as using smartwatches to monitor playing posture.
As Sellers points out, ‘The big question is how do we not just respond to these developments, but become partners in their development?’ This will be familiar to the many teachers who have had to grapple with the challenge of remote learning using available and often old technology. So, the subject of suitable platforms for composition, production, podcasting and learning from home will be covered in one part of the series.
In the fourth and final seminar, the subject of composing for the gaming industry will be investigated. As one of the fastest-expanding new markets for young composers, this will offer insight into the needs of the industry and ways in which teachers can help students into a new career.
The speakers will include such luminaries as Stefania Serafin, Professor in Sonic Interaction Design at Aalborg University, Denmark and President of the Sound and Music Computing Association; Jeanine Cowen, Acting Assistant Chair and former Vice President for Curriculum at Berklee College of Music; Luke Crook, Kent Music’s Inclusion Development Manager; Phi Pham, Executive Director of Brooklyn-based non-profit Building Beats; and Dr George Waddell, Lecturer in Performance Science at the Royal College of Music.
For further information and bookings, please visit the Wiltshire Music Connect website.
