 |
| home > documents > A Hotbed of Learning: Handing On Tradition By Electronic Dissemination |
|
A HOTBED of learning: Handing On Tradition
By Electronic Dissemination
This paper was
delivered by Karen Marshalsay at
Crosbhealach an Cheoil 2003 The Crossroads Conference Education and
Traditional Music, in the University of Ulster, Derry, on April 26th
2003. 1.
BACKGROUND The HOTBED acronym stands for Handing On Tradition By
Electronic Dissemination, and it is a 3 year project, begun in February 2001
and funded under the JISC’s resources for learning and teaching. The overall aim of the project is to implement networked sound resources
in a specific learning and teaching context
(namely the BA degree in Scottish Music at the Royal Scottish Academy of
Music and Drama, as well as by our partner institution the Department of Celtic
and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh) 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 main purpose of the project is not to build a collection as such, or
to create a digital archive (however much we may be hoping to extend our
project and funding to just that end in the next few years!) – but to look at
the needs of performance students studying traditional Scottish music within a
conservatoire. There has been relatively little research on the effect of
digital materials on user groups working with networked digital sound resources
and how they affect learning, teaching and research, despite the increasing use
of digitisation within the various arts communities. Notable exceptions, of
course, being the Library of Congress’s 1993 evaluation survey of pilot
American Memory collections, and the current work being undertaken by SCRAN. 2.
PRACTICAL
REALITIES There are several practical realities to the project that are worth
mentioning before we view the system. We are a very small team. There is a
full-time computer specialist, Stevie Barrett, and a traditional musician
(myself) on 14 hours a week, led by an already over-committed Head of Research
Department, Celia Duffy. And we are a small team within a small institution. In an ideal world we would have
worked with an already digitised collection and had the support of a larger
university’s IT department. It has been hard to keep the focus on pedagogy and
user needs while creating a system and populating it. Of course, the upside is
that we created a custom designed system geared towards traditional music
students and digitised material that we wanted to use. The creation of metadata is, we discovered, much more problematic and
labour intensive than we anticipated. How much information we store about each
item has become a compromise, with the attitude currently being to have a lot
of material with little information rather than a richly described small number
of items. This is working well for tunes and songs, but having just spent 5
days using the system to teach at the Edinburgh International Harp Festival, I
think we need to consider describing the content of interviews in much greater
depth. One reason for this is the way the Scottish Music department is
staffed, with a large number of
part-time, hourly-paid tutors, (indeed there is no full-timer in the
department, although there are 3 core course leaders). Hourly paid tutors, who are also usually
juggling other professional performance and teaching engagements, do not have
the time to spend listening to hours of recorded interviews, no matter how
valuable the material might be, to find that one quote that might make a
difference in a lesson. But if that 40 minute interview with a piper was fully
catalogued, then our free text search could provide you with a list of
references to say, canntaireachd or the correct way to play a 2/4 march, in
seconds. Other logistical problems have included matching our current stage of
work with the particular phase and demands of the academic timetable and
calendar; the logistical nightmare of getting computers sited in practice and
teaching rooms, and once there, to dissuade certain staff members from
disassembling them in some kind of Luddite protest; and I am personally
discovering the frustrations possible of running our own Mac server and domain
within an institution’s PC network and firewall. (Hence the IP number address
on the title screen). And the only thing
worse than all that is trying to sort out copyright for all of the recordings … 3.
4
MAIN ADVANTAGES There are 4 main advantages of HOTBED: ACCESS /
MANIPULATION / COMPARISON
/ INFORMATION Access is the big advantage of digitisation. Students could use the
fieldwork material prior to the advent of HOTBED, but it was stored on cassette
tapes in the library roll stacks – hardly convenient. Out of about 60 essays
that I read in the last full academic year there was only 1 citation of an
archive tape. And the tapes themselves were only requested 7 times in the whole
year, out of a student total of 45 and a staff of over 30. Now we have access to individual searchable
items, at the click of a mouse. There is access to field recordings, mainly done by collectors from the
School of Scottish Studies in the 50s, 60s and 70s, often of people who are no
longer with us. For example, a traveller woman’s warning song in cant, Bing Abree
Barrie Gadgie, sung by Jeannie Robertson There is easy access to items recorded on outdated media, such as 78 rpm
records. Our fiddle students, for example, all study the work of James Scott
Skinner, the ‘Strathspey King’ himself.
What can be more important for students learning Skinner tunes than to
hear Skinner himself playing them? As
HOTBED is delivered over the web it is easy to link into to other sites of
interest such as the North East Folklore Archive’s biography of Skinner. A system such as
HOTBED could easily be turned into a Virtual Learning Environment – with easy
access to tutor hand-outs, images, text transcriptions, links to other web
sites of use, such as the North East Folklore Archive’s biography of Skinner we
saw a moment ago, and so on. The possibility is there, although there is some
resistance to this from tutors. There is access to
your tutor whenever you want, no matter which corner of the world he’s off
gigging in at that moment. For example we have several recordings of Niel Gow
tunes made especially for us by our fiddle tutor Iain Fraser. There is also
access to people who are important figures in today’s traditional scene but
who, for various reasons, often geographical, cannot regularly visit the
RSAMD. For example we have video
material of American wire harper Ann Heymann, recorded during workshops with
RSAMD students in 2002. Video is one of
our recent developments and something we aim to use a lot more of. Much will be
said this weekend about the oral tradition, but we should not forget that
(apart from the rather paradoxical example of blind harpers) there is a large
visual element in the oral tradition. I don’t mean looking at dots on a piece
of paper, but watching and closely observing your teacher or another player is
an important part of the learning process, and this is something that our
fiddle and harp tutors in particular feel very strongly about. Singers on the
hand, would like to see a completely blank screen, which I suppose is the
digital equivalent of shutting your eyes. There is also
access to different styles of playing or singing; to material from different
geographical areas; to different versions of a song or tune, and importantly to
other traditions than the one the students have been exposed to before arrival
at the Academy. One of the main benefits of the degree course is to give the
player access to the bigger overall picture – to give a piper an insight into
the harper’s world; to introduce a North East ballad singer to port-a-beul; to
improve a student’s Gaelic, or Scots; to let a Borders fiddler hear and learn
something of Shetland style. HOTBED also has a role to play in the historical
and analytical aspects of the course – often via the interviews with people
such as George Moss, PM Robert Nicol, Jeannie Robertson, Hamish Henderson and
so on. As one of my teachers used to say, indeed the lady you’ve just seen
playing the harp, playing traditional music is like using your rear-view mirror
when you drive – it’s not safe to go forward if you don’t keep looking out at
what’s behind you. MANIPULATION of
material is a big part of our project. At the moment it is possible for each
user to put their own index markers
into each item, and to play a continuous loop between any two markers. Our
plans include being able to slow down items without altering pitch, or to alter
pitch as well if you wish, which would be especially useful if learning tunes
from a Highland pipe recording but wanting to use the rather more sociable key
of A rather than Bb sort of. However, as our
technical officer would like me to stress, this has not yet been achieved for
material streamed over the web, which is the way HOTBED is delivered, although
the technology exists with programmes such as Slowgold working with CDs. We are in consultation with
various institutions and companies such as Apple Mac and Irqam in Paris on this
issue. The ability to
divide an item into loopable phrases is an obviously desirable learning tool,
and because each user has their own profile they can save their own indexing
for later use. The profiles also allow
the user to create their own ‘favourites lists’, and also to email that list
along with a message to any other user, in effect creating an intranet within
the system. Staff can make their lists ‘public’ – again bringing us toward the
realm of a virtual learning environment with, for example, a list of tunes
which a particular class should learn for the next week. This could be publicly
posted as well as emailed to all students, who would then only have to use two
clicks of the mouse to hear the tune. These lists make
it easy to do comparative analysis, and would be invaluable if we were to go
down the VLE road and have students submit multi-media essays electronically.
Indeed, as students all do both Folklore and
Fieldwork projects there is an opportunity for students to become not
just users of the system but also creators of primary resources. Comparisons are
important, to take just a couple of examples: singers especially like to have
as many versions of a song to compare as possible; and when looking at the
Skinner material it is illuminating to compare what Skinner actually played
with what he notated in his publications, which is not always the same thing.
For example in the strathspey we heard earlier, Bogniebrae, Skinner notates (in
the Scottish Violinist) the triplets at the end of the B part as two
semiquavers followed by a quaver, but plays them all equally, which gives quite
a different effect. Above all what
HOTBED provides is INFORMATION – about the music, the ways it used to be played
and the social context that it belongs to. Piping students especially, use the
interviews with older players for information on the way they learned pibroch,
and the way they were themselves taught. HOTBED holds a
wealth of material – information on various canntaireachds, on the faults of
present day players, and one of my personal favourites Information on the causes of bad march, strathspey and reel playing.
In fact, the oral tradition is so important to what we do that I would like to
let PM Robert Nicol have the last word with his thoughts on those who use ‘the
book’ The
book, the book, the bloody book ... I can't do with it at all. Johnny MacDonald
was 'Close the book, close the book. Use it to get the tune up and forget about
it afterwards. What HOTBED does
is to create an environment within the Academy – to use technology to create,
recreate and enhance a musical community within the students’ own world of
learning, a community which they would otherwise not find it so easy to be part
of.
|
 |
||
 |
 |
|
| |
||
|
This page last modified: 18:03, Fri 25 Jan 80 This page published by HOTBED Project at RSAMD. |
||