Dear all,

Apologies for cross-posting.

Please find below the details of next week's CeRch seminar:

Date: Tuesday, 18th February 2014, from 6.15pm to 7.30pm (GMT)

Location: Anatomy Museum Space, 6th Floor, King's College London (Strand Campus)

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/campuslife/campuses/strand/Strand.aspx

Attendance is free and open to all, but registration is requested:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/cerch-seminar-lets-consider-some-new-technologi...

The seminar will be followed by wine and nibbles.

All the best,

Valentina Asciutti

Abstract: New music technologies, or apps, have the potential to be of considerable value to musicians, particularly to learners and teachers in classrooms or during private teaching. The quantity and range of these technologies is now considerable, such that, for instance, musicians have access to a wide range of sophisticated notation software that provides almost as many ways of writing and editing music as are available in word processing. The apps can be classified as pertaining to (a) the learning of content about music (b) the learning of the skills of performance (c) sharing performance and (d) creativity in music - with many sub-divisions in each section.

The presentation will focus on the website - musicappsforlearning.weebly.com - in which the author has set out the apps according to the above classification, and will briefly explain the most important features of some examples in each category. The value of most of these new technologies is very similar to the value of much of the newest software in the general: to give musicians tools through which they can work more quickly and easily, and from which they can receive automated assistance. For instance, there are apps that enable transposition from one musical style to another, or that will flag up errors in playing a specific piece, or that exploit the power of multimedia.

The general impact of these technologies is likely to be towards independence of learning, performance, and creativity. This in turn would enhance motivation among people - young or old - who might otherwise not expect to be able to learn or perform or compose music.

This will be an interactive seminar with audience participation encouraged, i.e. rather than talk followed by questions, we hope for an ongoing dialogue between speaker and audience members.

Speaker bio: Anita Pincas is Visiting Fellow, formerly Senior lecturer, at the Institute of Education, University of London. Though not a musician, she takes an active interest in music learning and creativity, having a singer-songwriter son. She has published on the comparison between language and music as different modes of communication. Her professional fields embrace most areas of education, with a special focus on language learning, which, she feels, is not a million miles away from music learning. Her major academic fields, in a long career, have been English language and literature, new technologies especially those relevant to learning and online and/or distance education. She has taught and supervised at all levels from bachelors, through masters and doctoral work.