I’m actually less interested in the validity of Garageband discussion that I’m getting us started on and far more curious about other disciplines that may have had similar experiences. Let me reconfigure my question so as to better relate it to ThatCamp LAC: are there programs in your own disciplines that your students use to facilitate their work that perhaps aren’t as well-suited for the task as something either potentially more complicated or less familiar? And if so, how do you work around the initial hiccup “why should I learn your less-user-friendly program when my simpler version *seems* to work too?

I won’t go into too much detail here since we may have the opportunity to discuss this a bit today, but Michelle I think you’ve actually highlighted my concern: is Garageband ACTUALLY a tool for composition just because that’s how it markets itself?

Composition has been hip to technology since at least the early 90’s. I personally have only once composed a work using pencil and paper…and that was during undergrad for a notation course (ha!). So I’m not sure this is quite the same thing as “let them use technology that helps them” as much as it is “by using THIS technology, is it still composition? And if not, what is it? Musical synthesis?” I relate programs like Finale or Sibelius more easily to an accountant’s calculator, and Garageband to a chef using a boxed cake mix. But if the results are the same (at least in theory) and if people are using the program out in “the real world” (Nine Inch Nails does their music on Garageband now), does it really matter?

Of course, the process between composing from notes vs. composing from loops is quite different. Maybe that’s where we want to pay the most attention?

Hmm… I know it’s my post, but I REALLY don’t have an answer on this one.

Dick, I love your question about how digital humanities should be evaluated for tenure and promotion.

As far as the Garage-Band challenge, I have to ask . . . how much should we be gate-keeping and requiring students to know something they can substitute with technology?

I get into a lot of conflict with my colleagues about whether or not we should be demanding pencil and paper tests to determine whether or not our students are capable of writing, or if we should be using technology and demanding our students know those tools (You can probably guess which side I am on).

This seems like the same question of Garage Band, the question of whether math students should be able to use calculators, and whether English students can use grammar and spell-check.

Do we want students to learn to use the tools we have, or use the tools that people used to have when technology didn’t exist? How much is this legitimate concern and how much of it is trying to keep our fields “elite”?

For another example in another field altogether: In the 1970s, two mathematicians proved a famous theorem that had been an unsolved problem for about 100 years. Their method was new: they divided the problem into thousands of special cases, and used a computer to check most of those cases, leaving only a few dozen cases to check by hand. This created a disciplinary controversy at the time. Did this first computer-assisted verification of the theorem constitute a legitimate proof? Mathematicians have long since accepted computer-assisted proofs, but it was a live question at the time.

This issue of whether to accept technology-assisted methods has concrete implications when it comes to scholarly evaluation, as you indicate. I’m in no position to say how to count things in music composition. But we all need to think carefully about how to advise and evaluate digital humanists (and digital artists) for tenure and promotion, especially in the light of this issue.

I think a great element of this session might be to encourage anyone with a laptop to bring it and spend 15-30 minutes playing in Garageband (or equivalent) to see for themselves how easy it is to assemble raw materials into original work.

I hadn’t even thought about this aspect of DH, Blake. I should have, though. I have one son who is heavily into dubStep, and classes full of students majoring in Mass Communication or Technology instead of Music because their “instrument” is digital sampling + rap and hiphop.

I have often wondered to myself whether Philip Glass would have been a music major if he had been going to college today.

I think this question is bigger than music. It is a question of how we define “art” these days–whether that art is creative writing, music, sculpture, or graphic. The edges are really fraying.

One of my students asked me, “Why can’t you call what I do as a DJ a ‘composition,’ but you can call a bunch of found objects arranged a certain way ‘sculpture.'”

The answer may lie in the “gatekeeping” of art. Those from less privileged backgrounds, whose parents couldn’t afford music lessons or instruments, but who made their music out of what they had–old LPs on a turntable, samplings from their iPod, and their voice and experience–are told they aren’t “musicians” the same way folk artists who painted with housepaint on wood or who quilted were told they weren’t “artists.”

“What is art?” is as central to the making of art as its materials and subjects. Your question is wonderful. This would be a great session–even for those who haven’t played a gig in years!