This semester, I have taught a new course at the Department of Musicology at the University of Oslo: MUS2640 – Sensing Sound and Music. Since I have been “bought out” to run RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion since 2018, I haven’t taught a regular class in many years. However, all my colleagues were busy with other things, and I thought it would be fun to engage with bachelor’s students again on a regular basis, so I took the challenge.
The course
The course is set up as the first mandatory course in a new “line” called “music psychology and technology” within our musicology bachelor’s program. The idea is that students should take this course first, and then move on to either MUS2133 – Music Psychology or MUS2850 – Computer Music.
This is the course description:
You will be introduced to some fundamental principles of acoustics, psychoacoustics, and perception, including knowledge about how sound is produced in instruments, reflected in space, and perceived by humans. This is the foundation for how we experience pitch, timbre, harmony, and rhythm in music. You will also learn about computer-based representations of sound and music and get an overview of digital audio, sound synthesis, and analysis. The course provides theoretical knowledge and practical skills for further studies of music psychology and technology.
It is a new course, but we have been teaching much of the same content in other courses in the past. The new thing now is to more clearly combine perspectives from both music psychology and music technology in one course. That is relatively new, even by international standards. As far as I know, most universities still teach these disciplines separately.
Need for flexibility
Given that the course was new and I hadn’t taught bachelor’s students in many years, I had no idea what their current knowledge and interests were. Hence, I didn’t want to limit myself to making fixed slides for each “lecture”. I give many presentations using regular slide decks, which are very efficient when you have a clear story to tell in a linear form, such as in a conference lecture or when presenting at the RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion. Then, the slides keep me on track, and I manage to say what I want to say in the allocated time.
However, teaching is not lecturing, or it shouldn’t be lecturing in my opinion. I have long advocated flipped classroom approaches, where class time is spent showing students and discussing with them rather than lecturing. That requires flexibility, which a linear slide deck cannot provide.
I was pondering whether I should go entirely barebones, not using any teaching tools at all. That would have been fun to try out, but impractical for this course, where it is necessary to explain things using both visual and auditory elements. I could have gone with a drawing-on-a-whiteboard approach and making analog sounds. However, I wanted to show some videos and a bit of coding, so I needed to bring in a computer. Finally, I settled on using mind maps as a teaching tool.
Teaching with mindmaps
I think visually, but I rarely use mind maps in daily life. However, I had used mind maps as a tool in some presentations when I didn’t know exactly what to cover, so I thought it would be interesting to try it with my students.
I tested various mind-mapping apps in the Ubuntu Software Centre, but didn’t really find anything I liked. They were functional, but the visual look was less appealing. Instead, I ended up using an online service called Mindomo to create the mind maps. It didn’t have as many advanced features as some of the standalone apps I had tested, but it looked good on screen and allowed embedding audio and video files, as well as links to interesting pages.
Here is an example of how one of the mind maps looked:
As can be seen, there isn’t much content there. That is deliberate; I wanted to use the mind map to structure my thoughts and guide my teaching. I also provided the students with a link to the online mind map (and an exported PDF) in our learning management system, but that was more for them to remember what we did in class than for them to “read”.
Reflections
I enjoyed teaching with mind maps this semester. For each class, I made one—and only one—mindmap to structure the content of that particular session. There, I included the most important topics I wanted to cover and linked to relevant media I wanted to show.
Sometimes we went through everything I had planned. Other times, I skipped a few things because I didn’t have time or ended up adding extra branches and more content to a mind map because the in-class discussions took an unexpected turn. As such, the mindmaps gave me the flexibility I wanted for the class.
Will I teach with mind maps again? Yes, I think so, but as with everything, you need to choose the right tool for the job. This was the first time I taught MUS2640. I think I succeeded in teaching the students what they were supposed to learn, at least from what I can see in their exams. However, I underestimated the complexity of merging perspectives from music psychology and technology to undergraduate musicology students. That is something to ponder for next year’s run of the course.