The Metrics of Revolution

I'll be leading a panel discussion on the topic "The Metrics of Revolution" at the College Music Society's 2008 National Conference, in Atlanta. The panel is to be held from 8am-9am on Saturday, 27th September, in room Marriott L504-505.

The CMS is said to be quite conservative, so its conference committee is to be commended for being willing to accept a panel proposal from a potentially-revolutionary outsider.

Here's the official blurb for the panel session:

This conference’s Call for Papers described music education as being desperately willing to consider revolutionary ideas; it even dared to state that ideas which served us well in the past might now be holding us back. Let’s presume that in response to this call, a flurry of new approaches to music education will be proposed.

By what criteria and metrics will these new approaches be compared and contrasted with the status quo and with each other? For example, all else being equal, would it be a good thing to increase the rate at which students attained a given level of skill and knowledge (i.e., reduce the amount of time it took)? How about reducing the cost of music education? Increasing the success rate? Broadening and/or deepening the level of knowledge and/or skill attained?

It is unlikely that any – let alone all – of these metrics can be dramatically improved when using traditional instruments & notation. What core knowledge and skills of music-making exist independently of traditional instruments & notation? How can these core abilities be reflected in the criteria and metrics by which novel approaches to music education are measured? Or is it all just too hard, so that we’d all rather fail with traditional approaches than succeed with non-traditional ones?

The conference's version of my bio reads as follows:

Jim Plamondon – an outsider to music education, self-taught in music theory – is the co-author of papers in the peer-reviewed Computer Music Journal and the Journal of Mathematics and Music. Nearly all successful revolutionary ideas come from outsiders, and although insiders to tend to reflexively dismiss revolutionary ideas (the Semmelweis Reflex), it behooves them to consider such ideas objectively. Jim is interested in facilitating the identification of the criteria, metrics, and benchmarks by which alternative approaches to the status quo of music education – such as his proposed ThumMusic System – can be objectively compared and contrasted.

The session's confirmed panelists are:
Thomas Rudolph, President of TI:ME
Monty Cole, Mercer University
Maud Hickey, Northwestern University
Colby Leider, University of Miami
Gil Weinberg, Georgia Institute of Technology
Carlos Xavier Rodriguez, University of South Florida

I expect to hand out a ballot at the start of the session. Each attendee will have 100 votes, which they will distribute across a number of potential metrics to indicate the weight that they would like to see each mettic have in a combined metric for comparing and contrasting the effectiveness of alternative methods of music education.

• Percentage of Test-takers who pass The Test after studying The Method's Student Materials for a given number of hours
• Average number of hours of study invested in studying The Method's Student Materials by those who pass The Test
• Percentage of those who begin to study for The Test using The Method but drop out before passing it (per week)
• Average amount spent acquiring The Method's Student Materials by those who pass The Test
• Average amount spent acquiring instruction by those who pass The Test
• Sum of "Cost of Acquisition," "Cost of Instruction," and any other Method-specific costs (excluding the value of the student's time)
• Same as Cost of Competence, but for those who Drop Out before passing The Test
  Percentage of legally-disabled persons whose disabilities do not preclude passing The Test using The Method
• Percentage of performance gestures required by The Test that are ergonomically risky, weighted by frequency and degree of risk
• Percentage of target population that can afford the Method's Cost of Competence
• Of the music used in The Method's Student Materials, the percentage written by composers who were alive when The Materials were assembled
• Of the music used in The Method's Student Materials, the percentage that is based on compositions that have been in Billboard's Top 40
• Of the music used in The Method's Student Materials, the percentage recognized by first-lesson students (on average)
• Using Normalized metrics: [Pass Rate] / ( [Ergonomic Risk] * [Time to Competence] * [Cost of Competence] )
• Percentage of those who pass The Test using The Method who, without any additional study or practice, also pass equally-standardized Tests on other musical topics

Here are some definitions for terms used in the above proposed metrics:

• The Test: a standardized test of musical competence. There are many possible tests – GCE, AMEB, ABRSM – each with its own strengths and weaknesses. Selection of a particular Test, and debate over the value and consequences of teaching to such a Test, is outside the scope of this discussion. Primary, secondary, and tertiary music education are likely to target different tests. It is presumed for the sake of simplicity that The Test is pass/fail.
• The Method: any given potentially-revolutionary method of music education.
• The Student Materials: the tools a student must acquire in order to use The Method to gain the knowledge and skills necessary to pass The Test. Can include lesson books, DVDs, online materials, instruments, sheet music, metronomes, software, etc.
• The Traditional Method: By default is assumed to use of the piano keyboard and traditional staff notation, aimed at passing The Test.

Project BarBQ

I spent last weekend (October 19-21) at Proejct BarBQ, billed as “The World’s Premiere Interactive Think-Tank.” As in all eleven previous annual incarnations, its sole topic was “Influencing music hardware & software over the next five years.”

Proejct BarBQ was, without a doubt, the coolest conference I have ever attended. Ever notice how the best part of every conference happens outside of the session rooms? It’s the informal exchange of ideas and the networking that makes conferences so productive – the actual sessions are usually pretty boring. Project BarBQ has no sessions, aside from a couple of introductory keynote sessions. Instead, the attendees – limited to 50 per year – decide for themselves what the top four problems facing the audio/music technology industry are, and split up into groups to work out solutions to those problems. Many significant advances in technology & business models have come out of these sessions. Sound boring? Hardly! Not only is it a gas to engage really smart people in heated debate, but it’s even MORE fun to do so when exchanging volleys from rubber-band guns or toasts from seemingly-bottomless margarita pitchers. These ancillary activities loosen people up to approach their shared problems in a fun and creative way.

I had hoped to get the attendees to agree that one of the top four problems to be solved was “increasing the success rate of music education,” but I was unable to attend the first day of the conference, and therefore was not able to make my case. Rats! The closest topic agreed upon was “user interface” – a rather broad topic! – and that topic’s members decided to focus on the needs of the prosumer audio engineer rather than the novice musician, so I was not able to contribute as much as I would have liked.

I got two main benefits from attending Project BarBQ. First, I got a lot of excellent feedback from its attendees on ways that I could make the Thummer even better (the top request: including an old-fashioned “MIDI Out” jack, even if the Thummer’s expressive power is clipped to worthlessness due to the MIDI cable’s anachronistic 31.25 kBaud data rate). Second, I made some excellent connections, some of whom agreed to help me make some connections to move Thumtronics forward. For example,

• George “The Fat Man” Sanger, organizer of Project BarBQ and music technology legend, agreed to introduce me to some top-flight engineers once Thumtronics gets funded, and
• Tom White, head of the MIDI Manufacturer’s Association, agreed to introduce me to some OEM manufacturers who might be interested in partnering with Thumtronics.

All in all, well worth attending.