Hello! I am pleased to say I am presenting at the Texas Music Educators Association conference next month. Will you be there? If so, I hope you will check out one of my two sessions.
Digital Organization Tips for Music Teachers - Wednesday, February 8 @ 4:15 pm, Room CC 214B
Teaching Intonation with Tonal Energy - Friday, February 10 @ 11:30 am, Room CC 216
Stay tuned to the blog for complementary session notes and links.
New YouTube video. Links to all apps below.
Ever since NPR started putting these playlists on Apple Music and Spotify, I haven't been compiling them. I guess there was some value in that process, because I almost forgot to check out the list this year!
Read more, and find music streaming links below.
The 50 Best Albums Of 2022 (50-41) : NPR
A year like this one makes hand-wringing about the death of the album seem silly (if anything we should be concerned about the single). Musicians gave us experiences in 2022. Immersive, ambitious, focused, sprawling, explosive, swerving albums expressed their power in any number of ways: Vibes to make summer stretch on into the year's cold months. Bottomless layers of invention. History lessons that sparkled like the best party you could imagine. There were too many great albums to count, let alone narrow down to a round number. But here are 50 that made us feel awe, ache or adoration, selected and ranked by the contributors, public radio partners and staff of NPR Music. (Oh, and we also ranked the 100 Best Songs of 2022.)
I do a lot of automation. I have always felt like the tools for automating basic computer productivity are more vast and varied than those for the more advanced creative professional software.
Pro Tools has a new update, and while I have not used it in many years, I took note of this particular addition, which will allow third parties to create their own scripting tools, which could improve and streamline cumbersome workflows in the DAW.
It would be very cool to see some other DAWs do something like this. I wonder, often, why Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro do not have any support for Shortcuts, Apple's new and cross-platform system for automation. Shortcuts has eliminated countless hours of work and stress from my email, calendar, writing, and task workflows. Why should their creative pro software be any different?
What's New in Pro Tools - Avid Technology:
Scripting SDK
The Pro Tools 2022.12 software release includes support for a new Scripting SDK (software development kit) that enables high-end facilities and application developers for scripting Pro Tools to help automate repetitive tasks and create whole new workflows. This new free Pro Tools Scripting SDK provides developers with everything they need to get up and running.
Frequent Music Ed Tech Talk guest and pal David MacDonald was recently on my Holiday Gift Guide episode of the show and mentioned the book Critique Is Creative, a book about Liz Lerman's Critical Response Process.
From the book's description page:
Devised by choreographer Liz Lerman in 1990, Critical Response Process® (CRP) is an internationally recognized method for giving and getting feedback on creative works in progress. In this first in-depth study of CRP, Lerman and her long-term collaborator John Borstel describe in detail the four-step process, its origins and principles. The book also includes essays on CRP from a wide range of contributors. With insight, ingenuity, and the occasional challenge, these practitioners shed light on the applications and variations of CRP in the contexts of art, education, and community life. Critique Is Creative examines the challenges we face in an era of reckoning and how CRP can aid in change-making of various kinds.
David and I got to talk about this process when he recently visited me while presenting on this very subject at the Teaching Composition Symposium at UMBC.
I really liked the idea of a methodical approach to providing more empathetic and consistent feedback to students, with detachment from emotion and ego. I picked up a copy and am eagerly reading for ideas I can integrate into my own teaching practices.
I encourage you to read David's blog post about the book which includes the text of his presentation.
This is the text of a presentation I gave at the inaugural Teaching Composition Symposium at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County on 21 October 2022. I’m told presentations were video-recorded, so I’ll update this post later with that recording.
I’m sure you’ve had the experience of getting feedback on a composition that was well-meaning, but ultimately unhelpful. Even someone telling you how great your music was or how much they loved it is often frustrating because it’s hard to know what they heard that made them love it. Feedback that your music was mind-blowing and that your music was stomach-turning are equally unhelpful, because without more information, it’s impossible to learn something from this feedback.
In this presentation, I’ll talk about some of the common limitations of informal, unstructured feedback like this; and I’ll describe how I have used Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process (CRP) to better support and motivate composers in my studio, and how you might implement it in yours.
In my previous experiences with critique sessions in studio classes, I found that the feedback offered usually said a lot more about the person offering it than it did about the music they were nominally responding to. Rather than suggesting how the composer might have written a work differently, this feedback often seems to answer the question “How would this piece have gone if I had written it, rather than you.” While I do think there should be space for composers to respectfully challenge one another’s creative intent, it is worth starting by identifying what that intent was to begin with. A better feedback system should assume that each composer in the room has a different set of musical goals and experiences.
The Freeform app from Apple is now out with the iOS 16.2 update. It is an infinite whiteboard/canvas kind of app that combines...
Like many of Apple's apps, it is nice for most people but if open canvas apps are something you need particular features from, I wouldn't count on Apple's version to do everything you want.
MacStories has a good review of it (see below).
Freeform Leverages the Freedom and Flexibility of a Blank Canvas - MacStories:
Freeform is a brand new iPhone, iPad, and Mac app from Apple that lets users create multimedia boards on an infinite canvas that include text, images, drawings, links, files, and more. It’s an ambitious entry into a crowded category of apps that take overlapping approaches, emphasizing everything from note-taking to collaborative design to whiteboarding.
As is so often the case with Apple’s system apps, Freeform falls squarely in the middle of the landscape of existing apps. Freeform isn’t going to replace apps that are deeply focused on a narrow segment of apps in the blank canvas category. Instead, Freeform is targeted at a broader audience, many of whom have probably never even considered using this sort of app. For them, and for anyone who has felt constrained by more linear, text-based ways of exploring ideas, Freeform is a perfect solution.
At first blush, Freeform’s spare interface may give the impression that it’s a bare-bones 1.0 release, but that’s not the case. The app is easy to use and impressively feature-rich for a new release. So, let’s dig into the details to see what it can do.
On the most recent episode of my podcast, I mentioned that my Mac feels broken if CleanShot isn't installed on it. Another app I feel that way about is Alfred. It is a replacement for the Spotlight feature of macOS that adds a whole lot of intuition and power for free, but which allows the installation of user-created workflows on the paid version.
Installing these workflows is about to get way easier with their new gallery which you can browse through here.
It is the best feeling to be invited on to a podcast that I already consider to be one of my favorites.
I was recently a guest on The Omni Show Podcast, a show dedicated to the OmniGroup’s award-winning products, many of which I have written about here (and also here).
I had so much fun talking with Andrew about using OmniFocus to manage my tasks, OmniGraffle to design ensemble seating charts, and OmniOutliner to outline everything (including lessons, curriculum, books, and presentations).
You can listen below and see a transcript of the entire conversation here:
If you like hearing me talk about OmniFocus, you can also catch me on Learn OmniFocus where I go into more detail about managing tasks:
Some interesting changes coming to FileMaker, including a new name, and most notably, a freemium version!
I have talked at length about using FileMaker and relational databases to assess mastery-based learning in the band environment. Listen to the embedded podcast episode below for more.
I updated podcast listeners on how I am revamping this workflow and building it upon PKM software in another recent episode about building a second brain. I hope to go into more detail about this here later in the school year.
Read about the updates to FileMaker below.
Claris’s Plans for FileMaker Bode Well for Individual Users - TidBITS
The more important change for longtime individual FileMaker users is that there will be a freemium version of Claris Pro with free access to Claris Studio (and presumably Claris Go). Its only restriction is that databases created with the freemium version are restricted to a single user—but there are no size or time constraints. The apps are also free for professional developers, who will pay a single, as-yet-unspecified Claris Platform licensing fee only when they wish to deploy a solution to additional users. Since Claris is wholly owned by Apple, deployment could even mean putting an app on the Mac App Store. Those with existing licenses can continue to rely on them but won’t get access to Claris Studio without switching to a Claris Platform subscription.
One of my favorite sources for tech news, MacStories.net, held an automation contest last April called Automation April. I thought it would be fun to submit an automation I have been working on that sets up all of my necessary tech at the beginning of band class, simply by plugging my computer in. Now that the competition is over, I thought I would write about the automation here.
The first minutes of a middle school band rehearsal define chaos. 40-70 students enter, setup in a confined space, ask questions all at once, all while I have my own equipment and procedural responsibilities. Any part of this that can be automated goes a long way towards saving time and mental bandwidth.
My “Rehearsal Focus Automation” Shortcut automates my classroom setup on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch in one (or zero) keystrokes.
This automation is made using the Shortcuts app on Apple platforms. It strings together multiple system and app actions that I do every class period into one workflow.
Note: This Shortcut is intented for reference and will not automatically work on your devices without the same hardware and software.
See it in action below...
In Rehearsal Focus, my iPhone homescreen shows me education apps, an OmniFocus Perspective widget including school-related tasks, and a music widget to see the current playing track.
See it in action below. One of the benefits of writing my daily agenda in plain text is that the same data can be viewed as a beautifully formatted note in Obsidian on the iPad, while looking like a presentation on the Mac using Deckset.
I can trigger this Shortcut in the menu bar, by a keystroke, a button in my Obsidian Daily Note (using the Buttons and Obsidian Shortcuts Launcher community plugins).
My current preference is to use Keyboard Maestro, another great automation tool for the Mac. I have created a macro that runs the Shortcut when it connects to my audio interface, something I already do when plugging into the USB C dock at the front of the room.
This Shortcut perfectly balances the amount of time I have spent building it with the amount of time it saves, but more importantly, the amount of mental overhead that it preserves during a stressful part of my day.
Keyboard Maestro macros are created with a similar user interface as Shortcuts, but there are a lot more available actions, and some of them are more are deeply tied into the operating system. In a recent update, Keyboard Maestro macros can run as steps inside Shortcuts, and Shortcuts can also be actions inside of Keyboard Maestro macros.
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