Music education through innovation: The Concordia Laptop Orchestra as a model for transformational education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Concordia Laptop Orchestra (CLOrk) is an ensemble of 20-25 laptop performers, which operates in the framework of a university course in Live Digital Practices—an advanced undergraduate course for electroacoustic studies (EaSt) majors at Concordia University’s Music Department in Montreal. The curriculum is built around highly participatory planning, production, and realization of innovative interdisciplinary and networked laptop orchestra performances, which take place in professional, academic, and cyber settings. In its three years, CLOrk has collaborated with a symphonic orchestra, jazz and chamber ensembles, laptop orchestras, soloists, dancers, and VJs, among others. The innovativeness of CLOrk’s performances has encompassed artistic (new forms of creation, collaborative composition), sonic (sound design, space, aural perception), technological (tools, network), and social (listening culture, encounter, interaction, collaboration, audience) facets. These innovations constantly introduced new, and often unique, practical and philosophical challenges to the creative process, but also opportunities to apply innovative educational approaches. Due to its adaptability to quickly evolving processes, action research has served as a useful transformational inquiry method for supporting and developing a better understanding of CLOrk’s creative and educational evolution. Action research involves participants as co-researchers to promote a better understanding of a social process in the group most involved in it. It is structured in cycles of observation, critical reflection, and action designed to allow improving a process while studying it— metaphorically “designing the plane while flying it” [1]. In CLOrk’s context, the “plane” being designed is its body of performance work and its educational structure, while each performance functions as a research cycle. Qualitative data are collected from recorded (pre- and post-event) discussions, email communications among all stakeholders (students, teacher, and collaborators), and anonymous questionnaires regarding efficacy and emerging problems related to all aspects of the performance’s planning and realization. The structure of each performance and the roles of every student (creative, technical, managerial) emerge democratically through this process of transformational inquiry. All data are coded, categorized, and analysed using responsive evaluation methods, considered through a process of critical reflection, and used to design further actions. While at times, this process may yield (social, artistic, technological) hierarchies related to the performances, the action research study remains open to equal impact from all participants, due to its openness to all emerging issues. This article provides context for the ongoing creative and educational research conducted with CLOrk and demonstrates this research’s process through an account of CLOrk’s telematic performance with the McMaster Cybernetic Orchestra as part of the Musicacoustica 2013 festival at the Beijing Conservatory [2].
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".