Customer Reviews

Computers in Music Education: Amplifying Musicality

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This book provides a creative production approach to technology in music education and a clear philosophy for music practice that weaves technology into creative music making for 21st century musicians and educators. The book layout is clear and covers technology from the mundane use of spreadsheets for timetabling instrumental music lessons through to the exciting generative and algorithmic music of computer composition. The approach has strong roots in music education theory and philosophy but at the same time provides constructivist/pragmatist approaches to understanding and applying technology to music practice. This book is a must for music teachers in schools and tertiary music educators. Of particular use are the chapter summaries that give a clear and concise outline of each chapter's content which will be extremely useful for pre service teacher education students. Dr Brown's background as a computer music composer, software designer and experienced music teacher in both secondary and tertiary contexts have shaped this book into an extremely useful and practical book.

In a field that changes every year, Andrew Brown's book is the most comprehensive and current that I know. I am using it as the backbone of an MTeach music tech course I'm lecturing in this year and it has at least one chapter to cover every topic the course does. It's important to understand that what this book does best is introduce technologies and ways of using them rather than spoon-feed ready-made lessons to a music teacher. There is, of course, plenty of use for the latter, but this book is for teachers who already know how they best teach music, know their repertoire and resources well, but are finding it hard to find pedagogically beneficial ways of integrating technology into the music classroom. This book will give you literally hundreds of approaches.