This article is from the March 2011 issue of KC Stage
It is certain that today’s children will be living in an incredibly different world than that of their parents. Technology is progressing at an astounding rate, so fast that it is often difficult to keep up with the latest innovations. For those in the performing arts and performing arts education, there is an entirely new world of resources that were not available just a few short years ago. For a truly comprehensive education in performing arts, it is vital for educators and students to become familiar with the ample resources instantly available at their fingertips.
Audio and video recordings have both existed since the late 19th century. The development of radio and the growing popularity of motion pictures in the early 20th century made it possible for a single musical or dramatic performance to be experienced by a much broader audience than ever before would have been possible. Audio and video recordings have been available in a variety of formats throughout the 20th century, but with the introduction of CDs and DVDs in the latter part of the century, home audiences were able to experience audio and video recordings with incredible clarity. Both CDs and DVDs use digital recording technology to encode audio and video as binary data. With the advent of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, the exchange of information, including audio and video files, multiplied to an unprecedented degree.
Unfortunately, the ease with which the internet facilitates file-sharing led to a general disregard for the copyright laws meant to protect the works of writers and artists of all kinds. The Recording Industry Association of America has sued numerous individuals alleged of file-sharing as well the developers of file-sharing software and websites. The public’s unwillingness to pay $20-30 for a new release CD led to the development of websites and software such as iTunes that are designed to sell digital music over the internet either by song or by album. The end result is that music of all kinds is available for download at the usual price of 99 cents per song (which inevitably drove down the cost of CDs over time). While streaming video sharing sites such as the incredibly popular YouTube still lie under the looming cloud of liability for the copyright infringement of their users, many in the entertainment industry are now realizing that offering good quality streaming media for free can be extremely lucrative. Monty Python profited from this revolutionary concept when, after numerous users had uploaded low quality clips of their comic sketches to YouTube, they chose not to enforce their right to have the illegally shared files removed, but instead responded by opening their own YouTube channel and legally sharing high definition videos of many of their sketches, with a link to their website where users can purchase their DVDs. What was the result of this crazy idea? A whopping 23,000% increase in DVD sales.
From an educational standpoint, the access to a variety of free or very inexpensive audio and video recordings makes it possible to use a much greater amount of multimedia in instruction and research. In addition to recordings, there are numerous books that can be acquired online. Google is revolutionizing research with its “Google books” search engine (books.google.com). Entering a search term will yield text snippets from every book in the online database. Material that is in the public domain may be viewed and downloaded for free. Some copyrighted material may offer preview excerpts, which at times offer a considerable portion of the book to be viewed for free. If one discovers material and wishes to view it in its entirety, many of the copyrighted books have links to purchase online. Of course, poor students can always resort to the tried and true method of finding these materials in the library or using interlibrary loan (to search library collections around the world, visit www.worldcat.org).
Today’s musicians have the great privilege of accessing musical scores from hundreds of years of music history for free at the Petrucci Music Library (http://imslp.org/wiki). The Petrucci Music Library offers more than 70,000 public domain musical scores, including everything from the “Seikilos Epitaph” from ancient Greece to the great composers of the Romantic period and of the early 20th century. Most of the music composed in the 20th century and beyond is under copyright protection, but some modern composers have chosen to allow certain works to be freely shared on this website.
In addition to the growing number of free resources available, there are also a number of extremely valuable subscription sites available. However, before paying for an individual subscription, check to see whether your school or library already has a subscription, as you may be able to access them either at your library or via remote access with a user name and password. Among these are Oxford Music Online and Oxford Art Online – encyclopedia of music and art, respectively; Naxos Music Library – a collection of over 250,000 audio tracks; Theatre in Video – which contains hundreds of play performances and documentaries; and JSTOR – a database of scholarly journals.
There are so many resources available, it is not possible for me to touch on each one, but I should mention the usefulness of online forums and e-mail lists, both of which are designed to connect people with similar interests, including a plethora of different performing arts organizations. Virtually all professional membership groups have forums for discussion and knowledge sharing.
With a world of resources at our fingertips, one might ask, “what will they think of next?” Someday there will surely be musical search engines that will help users figure out the name of that song whose title eludes them by humming a few notes into a microphone and waiting for the search engine to comb through a database of centuries of music in order to find a match. Science and technology are progressing so quickly, that fantastic ideas of twenty years ago are the realities of today. It is important as students and teachers to seek out these technologies and find out how to use them to enrich the educational experience, giving today’s students the comprehensive education that current and future technology can provide.
Find out more about Samuel Stokes at http://stokesmusic.tripod.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment