By Paulo Camacho
As social media — and the apps that facilitate it — become ever more present in everyday life, music education would do well to utilize them as part of the music classroom.
Social media has been the lifeblood of the internet ever since the advent of its modern incarnation in the mid-1990s. Sites like Friendster, MySpace, and Six Degrees (no, I don’t remember that site, either) were the predecessors to popular social media like Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. For better or worse, social media makes up a large portion of our society’s lives. From keeping in touch with friends and family, to being informed about the goings-on of the day, social media serves a plethora of functions for the average internet user.
But, there’s probably one thing you wouldn’t expect social media to do: aid in teaching music.
Technology, and the social media that accompany it, has advanced in recent years — and the education community has done all it can to adapt. In the realm of music education, things are even more specialized. Here are a few examples of unlikely social media apps that can likely be utilized in the music classroom:
As one of the most popular social media platforms on the market, with more than 500 million users (as of March 2017), Instagram is considered one of the more ideal apps for engagement. Millions spend countless hours contributing to the platform, with billions of pictures and innumerable minutes of video content to interact with friends, family, and audiences, alike.
While the platform is more known for a subculture of celebrities, selfies, and filters, Instagram can be utilized in many more ways — especially in the vein of music education. For instance, Elon University graduate Addison Horner did his honor’s thesis in 2016, on a project entitled Hashtag Music: an experimental merging of music education and social media that harnesses the accessibility of Instagram Video. It was meant as a series of videos that served as a 10-month course, teaching young people how to play the piano. While the course was originally targeted for the 18- to 25-year-old demographic, Horner believed that it could be accessed by social media users of all ages.
Horner used a combination of Final Cut Express and a program called MuseScore in order to make the piano lessons more user-friendly and easy to understand. Each of Hashtag Music’s 15-second videos focuses on individual lessons for students to watch on Instagram, and take in on their own time. In five weeks time, students should be able to play a couple of simple piano pieces. Based on this format, alone, music instructors can glean many different methods to use in their own classrooms: from using Instagram accounts as supplements for their own music performance classes, to interactive video projects shared among entire music classes.
Instagram’s extensive use of hashtags could also be appropriated by various music education communities. Hashtags have been an invaluable way of connecting people, and those related to music education — for example, #musedchat, #musicclassroom and #iteachmusic — can cultivate kinship with fellow music educators.
These are but a couple of examples. The possible applications for Instagram — both as a video hub and its classic photography functions — are seemingly endless.
Founded in 2010, Pinterest has grown a following of more than 175 million unique active users for the platform, with over 50 billion unique posts. Simply put, Pinterest is a specifically-gathered selection of media, or “Pins” — the vast majority being images — that represents interests for the individual user. In other words, it’s an online pinboard that allows you to gather, organize, and save your favorite media from around the internet. It’s a social engine designed to create, share, and inspire for the millions of users on the site.
With that in mind, Pinterest can serve a multitude of functions for a burgeoning music education community. Considering the internet’s penchant for visually representing ideas in immeasurable ways, using Pinterest for the purpose of music education is not only a possibility, but a potentially valuable option. Take this rudimentary Pinboard I constructed for the purposes of this article — even with just those 12 pins, there is some valuable basic knowledge to be gleaned.
Think of the applications this social media hub could provide in the classroom — not only would this encourage arts students to create representations for foundational musical ideas, like rhythm, pitch, scale, and timbre; but it could legitimately help music students understand basic theory through artistic visual expression.
Assignments, class periods, and entire syllabi could be built based on the basic interface of Pinterest. Pins can connect you to websites containing music lectures, lessons, and projects; students can create Pinboards as class projects, based on music theory; they can even create Pins that could be shared on the Pinterest website for all to see. With a site like Pinterest that encourages artistic license, music instructors can find any number of ways to take advantage of the platform.
Musical.ly
According to the app’s website, Musical.ly is a “a social media platform for creating, sharing and discovering short music videos.” It goes on to say the following:
Every day, millions of people use musical.ly as an outlet to express themselves through singing, dancing, comedy, and lip-syncing. The app celebrates creativity with videos recorded in 15 seconds or less and shared across the musical.ly community.
Created in China by Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang in 2014, Musical.ly mainly serves as an outlet for creative individuals of a very specific sub-demographic — statistics show that the vast majority of Musical.ly users are young women, ages 13–24. A cursory search of Musical.ly compilations on YouTube will bear this out. Much like Instagram, Musical.ly’s growth in the past two or three years has been astronomical, as the platform boasts more than 200 million users.
It should be noted, however that there have been — and still are — genuine concerns about inappropriate content on the platform; especially as a potential resource for music education. Another cursory search for the app’s more popular “Musers” and their videos will attest to that. Nonetheless, Musical.ly’s potential as a music education tool remains largely untapped.
However, there are some interesting applications for the platform in the classroom: First, Musical.ly can be used in music classes as a tool for short video projects. After all, the app’s interface allows for duets, filming in slow- and fast-motion, Instagram- and Snapchat-like after-effects, and the use of a vast library of music. Students can get creative with their assignments, and present them in subsequent class sessions.
Music students can also use Musical.ly as an original music showcase. Musical.ly is primarily used as a way to creatively lip-sync their favorite songs. However, as the basic premise for Musical.ly is the same as other social media apps like Instagram Video, it can also be used to record original music. Music students can easily take advantage of this function, presenting their original music to both private servers in the classroom, as well as the more public forums of the internet.
Musical.ly can also be used as an incentive. Say, if students successfully complete a particularly difficult assignment, Musers in the class will have an opportunity to possibly receive extra credit by participating in a Musical.ly battle with fellow classmates, and will be judged by the rest of the group. These are only a couple of perfunctory ideas — music education instructors and students around the world have every opportunity to collaborate with more plans to incorporate Musical.ly into the classroom.