Though I have apparently lost the link, I read the other day about a study demonstrating that listening to music helps some students learn. No real surprise there, I know. However, this is the kind of quantitative data that I need to help validate the allowance of music in an otherwise electronically intolerant campus. Now if only I can locate the study … I’ve yet to pin it down for myself, but I’ve been thinking about this electronics policy in terms of Henry Jenkin’s definition of the Participation Gap. As the Black Cloud has had me thinking about online literacy in the past few months, I’ve been meaning to get something more concrete up here, to least help me sift through the pedagogical flotsam I keep thinking about (there have been a couple mentions at the Homeroom, but not in the depth I want to explore).
As I’ve been experimenting with Twitter, I like the musical idea of the Lyric of the Day twitter. I even felt foolhardy enough to throw out the song I was listening to earlier (and the song you should be listening to immediately, if you haven’t heard it).
In related news, on Sunday Rhea and I saw the first Los Angeles performance of the New Orleans group the Hot 8 Brass Band at the REDCAT. If you’ve listened to samples of the group’s sound you get an accurate picture of the general vivacious tone of the evening; as with most concerts the effervescent (dare I say more-than-human?) bigness of live music made the show that much more compelling. Shuffling along the dance floor, I started thinking about the communal cultural practices typically invoked in concerts. In some sense, the call-and-response vernacular of the show suggests the kinds of developmental un-blank slate behavior that Steven Pinker is pointing to in the opening chapters of the current reading group book.
The other big (non-music) news of the evening is that Manual will be getting its official iDivision vote in May. This has been a very long struggle, and while the vote is anything but certain, I’m enthused that it will be happening. I’ll be writing about this both here and at the Manual Arts blog.
We had a fantastic time with fantastic people at Red Cat! Hope to see everyone back next year.
is there a difference between the cultural practices one experiences at a concert and the practice of plugging into an i pod? does one have more educational value than the other? are they both indeed cultural practices and/or exchanges?
some questions that came to mind… last but not least… WHY WAS I NOT AT THE RED CAT???