(Published in Viewfinder (BUFVC) December 2003)

HOTBED is a JISC funded project, begun in 2001 under the Learning and Teaching Information Environment programme. It is a unique resource. It consists of a searchable database of Scottish traditional music and fieldwork recordings that are used by students and staff on the BA Scottish Music course at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music in Glasgow. HOTBED stands for ‘handing on tradition by electronic dissemination’; the marrying together of networked resource technology with a rich cultural tradition.

The overall aim of the project is to implement networked sound resources in this specific learning and teaching context and to evaluate and disseminate our findings in such areas as user needs and actual usage patterns, the effect on the learning environment and experience, and on teaching strategies and approaches. The BA in Scottish music course offers unique and unusual opportunities for study of the use of networked sound resources (field recordings, performances and compositions) in the curriculum.

The course also offers us the opportunity to learn more about the specific needs of performance students in their interactions with digital materials. This covers such practical but vitally important matters as the location of workstations. HOTBED machines are located in practice rooms and teaching studios, i.e. where performance students work and can make music (they need to sing!), rather than in the library or "computing labs".

Traditional music is an area in which oral/aural transmission (rather than written transmission via notated scores) has been the norm; the project tests the innovative use of this networked archive as a direct learning resource in which the main mode of interaction with the music is aural, rather than visual. Quick and easy access via this networked resource to a storehouse of performances during performance teaching (and for follow-up study by the individual learner) brings benefits not only for students of traditional music, but of interest across the spectrum of music teaching. The project looks at how to maximise creative interactions with resources and increase their effective use.

The networking of archived resources provides a very wide diversity of materials that would have been difficult, if not impossible, for students to gain access to any other way. The database contains over 1200 items, with material harvested from a number of formats (CD, cassette, reel-to-reel, 78 rpm record) and recordings from 2003 right back to 1910.

The bulk of digitised materials was sourced from the School of Scottish Studies at Edinburgh University. The School holds a huge and unique archive of Scottish cultural materials, collected over decades. Before the project began staff and students at the RSAMD only had access to cassette copies of a selection of items, but much of the material now exists on HOTBED – instantly available to any student with a HOTBED login and password, and access to the internet and some speakers.

The BA Scottish Music course is unusual in a number of ways, one of which is its use of professional musicians to pass on the tradition mentioned above. As HOTBED’s digitisation phase began, interest in the project heightened, users recognised the potential such a system could offer, and we received CDs from staff of their own performances that they would use in their teaching each year.

In addition to staff’s own contributions we received a donation of some fiddle tunes recorded by Scott Skinner, considered one of the greatest and most influential Scottish fiddlers of all time – the ‘Strathspey King’. The recordings date from almost 100 years ago, so the encoding of his recordings presented its own challenges, the first of which was the sourcing of appropriate technology to play 78 records; although a player was found quickly, a stylus had to be specially ordered. Given the fact that the recordings were so old, many had been recorded at a speed that was not exactly 78 rpm, thereby altering the pitch of the piece, sometimes radically. As HOTBED allows a musician to play along with the performance, we had to ensure that the piece would play at the right pitch, so we edited many of these sound files to ensure that they were brought into the intended key.

Simply providing sound recordings on the web is useful to an extent, but we were more interested in how we could extend this to provide a much more meaningful learning tool for musicians, both in terms of the Scottish Music course and other courses taught by practising musicians. What are the real benefits in placing a stream of a recording on a website?

Of course, the initial reason for doing this is to provide a bulk of materials and allow the user to search meaningfully and gain access quickly. To this end we built a powerful search engine that allows targeted searches based on categories like instrument, composer, and tune type. Going beyond this we also felt – in response to user feedback – that a free text search would be useful, and have found that this seems to be the first port of call for users wishing to find something particular. We have also developed an ‘intelligent search’; the facility for searching by synonym: a search for ‘box’ will also return results for ‘Accordion-Piano’ or a search for ‘Bagpipes’ will yield results for ‘Pipes-Highland’.

Another area in which HOTBED scores over the provision of materials on CD is its description of each item. Each recording can be described quite richly, with information on recording date, key, background information, etc. We also take advantage of hyperlinking wherever possible; providing a link to an in depth biography of Scott Skinner from each of his performances, for example. In the same vein, HOTBED can also display the text of a song, or an appropriate image; anything, in fact that could enrich the student’s learning.

However, one of the first big areas in which we feel HOTBED really begins to offer something unique is in its provision of user profiling tools. Each user is recognised by HOTBED, and can manage their own use of the system based on their individual requirements. HOTBED allows a staff or student user the opportunity to track which items have been of interest to them by instantly recalling viewed items and recent searches. Each user also has folders – or ‘favourites lists’ – which they can create, name and remove at will and into which they can place a number of items they wish to keep together for a given project, whether academic or for a set for performance.

These lists can also be dynamically shared by users of HOTBED using a custom built email system. Everyone on HOTBED is stored in a directory and can be contacted immediately by another user, who can choose to forward any of their created lists, for shared projects, or again for collaboration on group musical sets. Members of staff can also create a list for public use, thereby allowing them to post a list of performances for an entire class to learn, for example.

All of this functionality was designed to make the sourcing and management of resources quick, easy, and powerful, but the project’s scope extends further. Musicians learning a performance by ear rarely, if ever, do so linearly; the process involves much repetition, not only to learn the performance itself, but also to pick up nuances of phrasing and technique. If HOTBED was to make a big difference to the way musicians use networked resources, it had to cater for this need.

Once the basic structure of a searchable web based database with its profiling facilities was in place we concentrated on providing the tools that would make this possible. To this end, we created a marking and looping system. Alongside the standard player for starting and stopping playback a user can now choose to ‘markup’ a track as they see fit. This simply involves pressing a ‘mark’ button during playback to demarcate sections of the performance the musician wishes to concentrate on. Clicking on the created marker will jump the player back to the section the user has selected. Each of these markers can then be named by the user as they wish, and can be saved for each and every item. Whenever a user returns to the piece their markers will be instantly displayed with the item as they were saved.

Once this system was in place we added the loop functionality. This works in conjunction with the markers to allow a user to choose a marked section to listen to, and practice with, as much as they like. Once two or more markers have been selected, pressing the loop button and selecting start and end points will continuously loop the piece between these user defined markers.

The marking and looping system has proven to be one of HOTBED’s biggest assets. Students have been delighted with the opportunity to take all the time they require to go over a phrase of their own choosing. One of the most rewarding outputs of the project has been video recording a student sitting down with their fiddle, searching on HOTBED, and learning a performnce from scratch that was recorded in 1910. In a testing session with two students using HOTBED to learn an unknown piece, an external evaluator was present and reported that ‘it was apparent from this session that HOTBED can be used easily to learn tunes and styles’.

In order to gauge how much of a difference video would make we filmed a clarsach (Scottish harp) workshop and added it to the HOTBED database. The response from users and audiences at presentations has been very positive indeed. Married with the user profiling and marking and looping systems, the provision of video in the database provides a very powerful package for performance learning and teaching. Musicians can actually watch fingering, stance, expression, and replay sections at will.

HOTBED’s facility to store and manipulate both audio and video in this way has aroused great interest from a number of disciplines across education; some far removed from the area of music specifically, and even the arts in general. This has, in turn, led us to believe that the HOTBED model has a great deal to offer to the wider education community, and especially in those areas that rely on practice based learning.

We are now concentrating on embedding HOTBED tightly into the BA curriculum and ensuring that it has the widest and most efficient use possible. One of the challenges in integrating HOTBED at the RSAMD is encouraging staff – who are all part-time with huge time commitments – to buy into the system, but already one member of staff is referring to the system as ‘our baby’. One student, when asked whether HOTBED was useful to her, said that ‘It’s supposed to hand on the tradition. It lives up to its name.’