In December 2012, Beck Hansen released an album called Song Reader in an extremely traditional way: on sheet music. Best known for genre-bending songs such as Loser and Where It’s At, Beck is going blazing another new trail by reaching back to a format that predates recorded audio. But, why?
Well, in an age of Instructables, MakerBots, and GarageBand, making things has never seemed less intimidating. And with YouTube, you’ve got a way to share your creations whether you’ve played a song on your piano or mashed up a couple of hit songs into something new.
Beck talks about the audience involvement aspect of this album in an interview on the publisher’s website:
These songs are meant to be pulled apart and reshaped. The idea of them being played by choirs, brass bands, string ensembles, anything outside of traditional rock-band constructs—it’s interesting because it’s outside of where my songs normally exist. I thought a lot about making these songs playable and approachable, but still musically interesting. I think some of the best covers will reimagine the chord structure, take liberties with the melodies, the phrasing, even the lyrics themselves. There are no rules in interpretation.
In education, we talk about Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Beck has released an album that is completely open to interpretation and assembly by the user. By trusting and empowering his listeners to participate in his music, Beck has created something much larger than just twenty songs. He has created a community.
Anyone can post their version of one of these songs to Song Reader.net via YouTube or Soundcloud. As more songs are performed and uploaded, each work will form a kind of dialog and interaction with each one influencing the next.
Why mention this on ESL Technology.com? There are some parallels between this open approach to making an album and the open education movement. Trusting your students and empowering them to make decisions can be very scary — for both teachers and students. Letting students choose their own projects and then working with them to make sure the projects fit the curriculum is more difficult and time consuming, but it’s a process that can really infuse students with a sense of ownership over their work. Being responsible for their own learning is an important lesson for all students.
Opening your classroom to the real world (by making student videos and blog posts public, for example) can also be a scary, but rewarding, opportunity. Teaching in an open environment also means preparing students for the challenges in that real world — teaching strategies for dealing with griefers and phishing attacks, for example — which is probably some of the most useful learning they can carry forward from your classroom. They all have to join the real world eventually.
Is Song Reader a model that can guide your teaching? Not directly. But the novel way that this album has been conceptualized relates to some interesting ideas that relate to how many are re-thinking traditional approaches to teaching.
For more on Beck’s album, visit Song Reader.net. Some of my favorite interpretations of “Old Shanghai”, the single that was released before the rest of the album was available, are below. If you’ve played “Old Shanghai” or anything else from Song Reader, please post a link to your work in the comments.
Piano only, with a beautiful video:
Ukulele only:
The staff of the New Yorker:
A more fully-produced trio, Contramano:
Two guys named Dave and Ted:
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