Materials will be chosen to demonstrate how technologies can offer students new opportunities to dissect and reassemble textures and structures, to explore and rework harmonic processes and to develop idiomatic instrumental writing and effective scoring through direct interaction and simulation. In particular the project aims to counter the misapprehensions caused by students working with synthesized and sampled surrogates of acoustic instruments.
The choice of audio-visual materials and the design of prototype courseware will support the acquisition of musical skills and judgements, rather than treating students as 'Gradgrind's Children', merely accessing facts about music. Simulations will enable students' imaginations to come into play, just as counterfactuals enable historians to understand the processes of history through the creation of alternative realities. The users of these materials will be enabled to interrogate the subject at hand.
Audio-visual materials and prototype courseware will be made available to user-groups* beyond the consortium for the purposes of classroom testing and feedback to developers. Following revisions and further development, materials will then be available to UK HE at nominal cost. Products will be licensed in such a way that they may be edited and adapted to local needs. The emphasis is very much on re-usability of materials by others.
The project will also report on the financial, copyright and other professional issues raised by the origination and exploitation of such materials within HE.
This is the only Music project to be funded under TLTP3, and one of only four successful bids across the sector to develop new materials, the majority of funds having been earmarked for implementation of products and methods developed under TLTP phases 1 and 2. There are 32 Phase 3 projects in all, and TLTP is emphasising the link between these and the Fund for the Development of Teaching and Learning, seven projects of which involve Music.
For further details please contact the Project Director, David Burnand, at the Royal College of Music (dburnand@rcm.ac.uk).
*University of York, Dartington College of Arts, Trinity College London, University of Leeds, University of Lancaster, Salford University, Imperial College
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