Music

Chris Benham

My capstone project takes the form of a “Multimedia Rubric System,” a web-based platform designed to assist educators and students in effectively and fairly assessing multimodal projects like podcasts, video essays, and story maps. The system features detailed rubrics for each project type, incorporating interactive grading for various rhetorical, technical, and creative aspects of each project type. Each category is explained through dedicated pages that help to bridge the gap between multimodal workshop and final project, cementing practitioners’ understanding of the evaluation. The aim of this project is to provide a structured, accessible method for critiquing and improving multimedia assignments.

View Chris's capstone project.

Lee Cannon-Brown

Calling on students in class can be fraught for at least two reasons: for teachers, it can entail burdensome logistics and politics, sometimes even distracting from classroom activity; and for students, it can feel unfair, or possibly even personally motivated. I attempt to solve for both of these difficulties with my WarmCaller app. With its simple user interface, WarmCaller randomizes the order in which all students in a class are called on, exhaustively and with no student repeated. The app is designed to introduce a fun, non-human agency into the classroom, and to facilitate easy, democratic, and non-personal student participation. Download a compressed (zipped) version of WarmCaller, which should run on any Mac machine.

View Lee's capstone project.

Payam Yousefi

This music worksheet is my preliminary attempt at proposing a concept of Phenomenological Learning as Transformative Pedagogy.  It is designed to introduce university music students to new musical concepts within Classical Persian music. The primary intent of this worksheet is to provide an example of how we can take seriously the non-western musics that are presented in music departments using the example of Iranian music. 

I believe undergraduates in the music department possess the musicality and musicianship to successfully embody and perform the music of different cultures. It is worth noting that the main intent of such an endeavor is not to create performers of music from other cultures. Rather, the main goal of such teaching is to create more intimate levels of knowing that are informed by the process of learning to perform. Different musics possess varying aesthetics, meanings, philosophical foundations, sentiments, and histories that are ingrained in the music. As such, the process of learning how to perform within the correct idioms and context creates a heightened intimate form of knowing underlined by experience. 

View Payam's capstone project.

Alex Cowan

As a capstone, I have prepared a resource guide for teaching music history and theory online, focusing on techniques I observed from the experiences of our TFs this year. It covers technical aspects of teaching music over zoom, as well as some bespoke software solutions, and general pedagogical technique. It is set up as a Google Doc, and my intention is that it will be a living document to be edited by future TFs.

Andrew Friedman

I started my Music Example Repository Project a couple years back so I could always have a few great examples of many music theory concepts at hand when teaching. Pamela Pollock had the wonderful idea of sharing it with the music department's TFs as a capstone project. My hope is that present and future TFs might find it useful, perhaps add to it, maybe begin repositories for musicology, ethnomusicology, composition, and possibly make it interactive with links to scores and sound files. Think of how encyclopedically knowledgeable we'll all look to our students when we can furnish off the top of our head 6 examples of French-augmented 6ths chords resolving to Cadential V4-3 suspensions!

View Andrew's capstone project.