Fluency in General Music and Arts Technologies
Is the future of music a garage band mentality?
Marshall McLuhan’s global village may increasingly appear to be evolving into a digital information network, but arts-based media remain equally pervasive — and arguably more influential. Human interactions with computers extend well beyond word processing and Internet searches. In artists’ hands, computers and other digital tools function as creative instruments, much like paintbrushes, canvas, musical instruments, and stage sets have served creators throughout history. Arts-based technologies surround us, and they are saturated with artistic content. The arts lie at the core of all forms of new media, including learning and teaching technologies, because traditional modes of artistic expression provide the foundations for new creative tools.
In today’s economy, the creative sector has become critically important. John Howkins observed that the creative economy will be the dominant economic force of the twenty-first century. Scholar Shalini Venturelli argued even earlier that wealth creation depends on a nation’s capacity to continually generate content. She stressed that a country without a dynamic creative workforce — encompassing artists, writers, designers, playwrights, musicians, filmmakers, actors, dancers, choreographers, as well as engineers, scientists, and researchers — lacks the knowledge base to thrive in the Information Economy and must rely on ideas produced elsewhere.
According to the Intellectual Property Association, intellectual property sectors in the United States are valued at 360 billion dollars annually, surpassing automobiles, agriculture, and aerospace. Such perspectives provide clear evidence that the arts must occupy a primary role across all levels of education, particularly in the implementation of new technologies.
Culture is deeply rooted in the arts. While some may argue that public policy debates revolve around information technology, public policies are equally shaped by the sounds and images that constitute the content of broadcast and print media. Contrary to the reductionist viewpoint of some information technologists, animation and image creation involve far more than merely moving bits and bytes. With arts-based technologies, content and media depend entirely on the creative abilities that artists acquire through varied traditional and contemporary learning contexts. If illustrating books and composing music were as straightforward as using an ATM machine, teaching the fundamentals of arts-based technologies would be simple.
I embrace the concept of fluency to describe the capacity all humans possess for creating arts media — whether composing, producing, or performing. Fluency is defined by creative expression. While the National Research Council’s Committee on Information Technology Literacy advocates for FITness (fluency within information technology), I promote FATness (fluency within arts technologies) as a label for the broad, arts-based understanding essential for using emerging arts technologies.
FATness encompasses several interrelated dimensions: capabilities, artistic abilities, artistic skills, conceptual understanding, artistic expression, aesthetic understanding, and intellectual capabilities. Individuals who develop these qualities and pursue corresponding skills and knowledge can become highly fluent in arts technologies. FAT individuals can employ various traditional and new arts-based technologies across diverse content areas. The more fluent we become, the richer our traditional and digital expressions can turn out to be.
Learning within the arts and within arts-based technologies is a lifelong, multifaceted, and multi-modal endeavor. Animators learn to draw and paint with traditional media before they tackle animation. Traditional skills precede the use of a mouse or digital pen for composing animation sequences. Music technologies, however, seem to push traditional boundaries, challenging our concepts of composition and the skills needed for musical creation and performance. A recent example is Apple’s GarageBand software, which is promoted as a solution for musically and non-musically inclined people who wish to compose music. The promotional material states that one does not need to play piano, read music, or even have rhythm — simply knowing what sounds good is enough. Apple claims GarageBand turns a Mac into a digital recording studio and that anyone can make their own music, describing it as the easiest way for pros and novices alike to perform, record, and create music using instruments, pre-recorded loops, amps, effects, and editing tools.
With apparent self-awareness, Apple’s promotional team adds that musically inclined users can accomplish even more with GarageBand. If iMovie and Final Cut Pro have profoundly influenced filmmaking, GarageBand could begin transforming the way humans create and perform music.
This discussion aims to develop a critical discourse on fluency with arts-based technologies, especially in music, examine the relationship between FITness and FATness using National Research Council criteria, and explore the dilemma music education faces in a society where applications like GarageBand enable virtually anyone to compose music without traditional musical knowledge or literacy.
What is Meant by Fluency?
See, if you put a musician in a place where he has to do something different from what he does all the time, then he can do that – but got to think differently in order to do it. He has to use his imagination, be more creative, more innovative; he's got to take more risks. He's got to play above what he knows – far above it – and what that might lead to might take him above the place where he's been playing all along, to the new place where he finds himself right now – and to the next place he's going and even above that! So then he'll be freer, will expect things differently, will anticipate and know something different is coming down. I've always told the musicians in my band to play what they know and then play above that. Because then anything can happen, and that's where great music happens.
In 1962, J. P. Guilford wrote about ingenuity, inventiveness, and originality in thinking, which he termed IIO. For Guilford, IQ and IIO are unrelated, but ingenuity, inventiveness, and originality are central to divergent thinking. Fluency of thinking and originality form the core of Guilford’s model, with fluency, facility, and originality considered abilities. In that these involve multiple aspects, Guilford’s notion of intellectual abilities may be seen as precursors to Gardner’s concept of multiple intelligences.
Guilford proposed four fluency constructs. Word fluency refers to the ability to think of words rapidly in specific contexts, such as words containing a particular letter. Ideational fluency involves quickly listing words in specific categories or organizing ideas. Associational fluency concerns making connections among words within the same category. Expressional fluency involves organizing words into phrases and sentences. While interesting in a linguistic context, these concepts are limited by their focus on text-only representation. In traditional and new media, where multiple forms of expression can combine in various ways, Guilford’s ideas become richer and more multidimensional.
One might extend the concept of words in new media contexts to visual fluency and aural fluency. Visual fluency could be the ability to rapidly think about, cognitively organize, and manipulate visual patterns in animation and digital video. Aural fluency could involve quickly thinking about, organizing, and manipulating aural patterns in music and audio contexts. In new media, ideational fluency might describe scanning, editing, and pulling together multiple related images to create a slide show or iMovie. Speed is essential and relies on generating many viable ideas in a short span. Using traditional concept maps, mind maps, or software like Kidspiration and Inspiration for brainstorming illustrates ideational fluency with digital media. Creating invented notation to represent sounds and silence demonstrates ideational fluency in soundscape composition.
Associational fluency in digital media may involve recognizing similar structures, menus, tools, and functions across music software applications, or across all arts software. In traditional music contexts, it might mean making inferential connections between aural and visual patterns, or rapidly identifying and editing MIDI and AIFF patterns. In the twenty-first century, expressional fluency can encompass the ability to combine words, still images, film, music, and sound effects in varied combinations across traditional and new media.
Guilford also identified two flexibility abilities. Spontaneous flexibility involves being flexible without pressure, including making inferential leaps across categories. For example, using Flash instead of a traditional slide show application to create richer presentations. Adaptive flexibility concerns problem solving, where inflexibility leads to failure. Individuals may impose restrictions on themselves, like using iMovie for a basic slide show instead of something more dynamic. Flexibility also relates to facility, the ease and speed with which a composer shifts between blending and manipulating MIDI and AIF files in GarageBand.
Guilford also examined originality, though assessing it remains questionable. Rubrics might range from commonplace to truly novel compositions. Yet for experienced, media-fluent educators working in familiar instructional contexts, originality is clearly apparent and involves an element of surprise. For instance, one pair of pre-service teachers created a beautifully illustrated children’s book to explain the music research concept of audiation, while another pair produced the film “1-900-AUDIATE,” which humorously and accurately portrayed the same concept.
Guilford viewed divergent thinking and transformations as the keys to creativity. He believed there was no unitary ability to analyze or synthesize across all situations and materials, finding this result surprising. That finding likely reflected the simplistic, one-dimensional content and contexts he used. In arts-based, technology-enriched environments, opportunities for multiple ways of knowing and expressing novel ideas from varied traditional and digital experiences are limitless. The complex fabric of multimedia allows composers to explore the boundaries of fluency and flexibility.
Are We FIT to be FAT?
Yasmin Kafai states that fluency implies the ability to reformulate knowledge, express oneself creatively and appropriately, and generate information rather than merely comprehend it. This understanding grounds the FITness model, contrasting fluency with literacy or multiliteracies. Taking fluency further, FATness seems to enable not only knowledge reformulation but also the creation of new knowledge in ways that allow people to see, hear, think, and express themselves differently. The arts arguably enable expression and creativity more than other knowledge domains. Artists push boundaries with both appropriate and often more interesting inappropriate expressions. Artistic creations can be incomprehensible to audiences; they are more than informational artifacts, serving as physical presentations of art and could be considered the facts of art.
Paradoxically, some information technologists have attempted a reductionist perspective that challenges artistic creativity and the definition of art. In arguing that educational technology and technology education are essentially the same, one protagonist denounces their separation and relegates digital audio and MIDI to minor roles. However, such voices fail to recognize the fundamental difference between content and technology, a distinction that even industry leaders have recently emphasized.
In an attempt to defend Kazaa—the successful peer-to-peer (P2P) file‑sharing technology—from litigation with Universal Music (Australia), Kazaa’s lawyers recently argued that MP3 music files are no more “music” than player‑piano rolls, citing an 1899 British legal decision (Boosey v. Whight) that allowed reproduction of perforated piano rolls because they did not infringe copyright on sheet music (Kohler, 2004). The 1899 brief claimed the rolls were part of the player piano’s mechanism. Now, lawyers in Australia argue that an MP3 on a hard drive is not music or a sound file, merely a segment of the computer drive’s information.
The player piano was invented and patented as the “Pianista” in 1863 by Forneaux and appeared at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876 (AMICA, 2004). Interestingly,
The concept may have derived from the automatic weaving loom, invented in 1804 by Joseph‑Marie Jacquard, which wove silk patterns using holes in a card. George Kelly developed the slide‑valve wind motor, a design that became universally adopted for rotating the drive spool of player‑piano paper rolls. In 1887, Edwin Welte introduced perforated paper rolls in Germany. Between 1917 and 1962, piano rolls were marked in pencil mechanically by a recording pianola, but a master worker cut them by hand.
One could question the analogies among perforations in a piano roll, the computer punch cards of Babbage and Hollerith, and the digital (binary, ones and zeros) character of information on a compact disc. Copyright statutes as early as 1831 protected the reproduction of written music but not the reproduction of sound itself (Fessenden, 2002). Ironically, Philips Electronics, the company that invented compact disc technology in 1979, had also manufactured mechanical musical instruments at the turn of the 20th century. Today, pianorolls.com[ES
Peter Gouzouasis serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Curriculum Studies at The University of British Columbia. Previously, he served as music director of WRTI/JAZZ 90 in Philadelphia—the most listened to 24-hour jazz radio station in North America during the 1980s—and is also recognized for his television and radio commercial writing and production work broadcast across the continent. His neo-organicist views on how music is acquired and learned prompted him, in the early 1990s, to investigate research within both traditional and New Media contexts. Gouzouasis became the first Authorized Trainer for Macromedia’s multimedia products in Western Canada (1993–1998) and the first person to teach interactive multimedia courses in British Columbia and Australia. He describes himself as a lifelong student of music and media, continuing serious study of guitar and other fretted instruments, and performing in jazz, North American folk, Celtic, and Greek music settings. Currently, he coordinates the Fine Arts and new Media in Education (FAME) cohort—the initial group of students at UBC to go fully laptop-equipped 24/7 with wireless technologies. In 2003, he was awarded the Sam Black Award for Excellence in Education and Development in the Visual and Performing Arts.
For accompanying multimedia files, please visit the following URL: http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca:16080/Artography/aera.htm
In a note from the author, Gouzouasis explains that he entered the score of Vivaldi’s Summer Concerto from The Four Seasons using Finale’s scanning features. He then imported standard MIDI files into GarageBand and reorchestrated the score using plucked string instruments. For the second movement, he performed the solo violin part on his Peavey Eddie Van Halen Custom Shop guitar through a Roland Mini Cube plugged into a USB input device to his PowerBook G4. He selected the Rectifier amplifier model on the Roland, adjusting echo, reverb, and sustain in the Basic Track setting within GarageBand to obtain the desired tonal quality. This performing approach to classical music was motivated by many past musicians who adapted classical repertoire into popular settings, with Bela Fleck’s recording of “Moto Perpetuo” serving as a particularly strong recent inspiration.