Matthew Thibeault

You might enjoy my latest column for General Music Today, “Learning from looking at sound: Using multimedia spectrograms to explore world music.” The column details the use of multimedia spectrogram displays for visualizing and understanding music.

Here’s the video that accompanies the column:

If you don’t know how to view the spectrum in Audacity, check out this short video.

Also, for a related presentation of mine from last year, contextualized by Nick Jaworski, see this great post on his blog, “Seeing is Hearing: Visualizations, Music Education, and You.”

A special welcome to anyone coming here after reading “Assessing Your Curriculum with the Creative Rights Pyramid.” (September 2011 issue of Music Educators Journal, in print or free online to NAfME/MENC folks and through most university networks).

Here are links to the freely available resources mentioned in the piece:

• The Creative Rights Pyramid and a Creative Work Permission Form are here to use and share to your hearts’ content: http://www.archive.org/details/CreativeWorkReleaseForm
• Download The Public Domain and check out chapter 6, “I Got a Mashup”: http://www.thepublicdomain.org/
• Learn about copyright and the Creative Commons through Free Culture: http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/
• For a richer portrait of my views on creativity in context, here’s a 20-minute public talk, “Digital Culture as a Catalyst for Change: Arts Education and Creative Rights.”

Finally, here’s a short related talk from the 2009 SMTE conference (given via Skype):

Working at a school where research is prized, it’s still always refreshing to have students who think deeply, work hard, and take the time to share the fruits of their efforts. Here’s three recent efforts I’m happy to promote:

Terry Solomonson successfully defended his dissertation, which looks at retirement through case study, “Segue: Circular Rites of Passage”. His committee consisted of Liora Bresler, myself, and the research was directed by Bob Stake. Coming soon to ProQuest!

Nick Jaworski has helped to steward the second issue of the phenomenally-successful Leading Notes into the world, this one focused on Connections: http://leadingnotes.org/

Congratulations to Chris Cayari, whose MA project at Illinois was just published in the International Journal of Education and the Arts! I was happy to supervise Chris, whose project was derived from a case study he did while working with Bob Stake. “The YouTube Effect: How YouTube Has Provided New Ways to Consume, Create, and Share Music” is waiting for you right here, but you can get a sense of the content through the article’s tag cloud:

Not sure whether a Keynote presentation via YouTube is valuable, but I am drawn to the idea that I can fix a lecture in time and archive it. I also mostly use Keynote to present media. Here’s one on visualizations for musical understanding (best viewed full screen and higher quality). I’ve also posted some copies of the Mozart visualization I use at archive.org: http://www.archive.org/details/MozartVisualizationsK.545ForClassroomTeachers

Leading Notes is a new media venture in music education, kind of a curated blog/magazine. It is the creation of two graduate students: Justine Dolorfino (from Columbia University) and Nick Jaworski (from the University of Illinois). The first issue has a “state of music education” theme, and is well worth checking out. There’s pieces from many areas of music education (administration, strings, etc.). Nick’s is a thoughtful and a spot-on impression of an actual SOTU (down to a, “you lie!” exhortation), and there’s a short piece I was invited to contribute, “The Necessity of Openness for Music Education.”

I write the “Secondary Scene” column for General Music Today. Just up, a column I co-wrote with undergraduate general music student Julianne Evoy, “Building Your Own Musical Community: How YouTube, Miley Cyrus, and the Ukulele Can Create a New Kind of Ensemble.” The article lives behind a pay wall (free to MENC members and through most university libraries). The piece includes sheet music, plenty of links, and a picture with my little buddy Elliot, and is waiting for you right here.

You can also see the podcast that accompanies the article right now:

For years, I’ve had students read Mark Katz’s wonderful book, Capturing Sound: How Technology has Changed Music. About a year ago, I emailed him a visualization I had made to use in my class when we were reading the book, a spectrogram that represents the recorded violin examples. Mark liked it enough to include it in the revised edition (it appears on page 97). The full-color version of the visualization I made is freely available at archive.org.

I’m glad to be even a minuscule part of the book, and won’t deny getting a little lift in my step when I was thanked in the introduction alongside writers who’ve changed my life: Alex Ross, Jonathan Sterne, Anthony Tommasini and others.

Here’s a talk I gave last fall to incoming graduate music students, which was recorded as part of the “micro-lecture initiative” by the CITES folks at the University of Illinois. It is posted there, or just watch it on YouTube below: