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How Did I Get Here?

When I was a kid, I was a pretty good student. I was always good at taking tests, and that carried me through even though my study habits were not that great. (Actually, that didn’t work so well in college Calculus, but that’s no big surprise.) Anyway, it’s kind of funny, considering my current career in education. Or perhaps its not so funny, when you consider that government officials, educators, and even parents are more obsessed with test scores than ever. Come to think of it, maybe this IS where I’m supposed to be. Who knows…

Anyway, the one thing I did consistently work hard at throughout my childhood was music. I started on the Piano at the age of five (six?), and continued studying, performing, and composing music in one form or another until this very day. In those days, the arts were considered an enrichment activity and not essential to success in life. And I find it somewhat unbelievable that this general attitude towards the arts continues today. Even after study after study shows that exposure to the arts is beneficial to children, arts programs are always the first to go when money gets tight. Well, it’s either the arts or physical education, which in my humble opinion is almost but not quite as appalling.

In hindsight, I can see a couple of things that very clearly influenced my decision to pursue music and audio engineering (and eventually education) as a career. First, my parents were both musicians, so in our household everyone played music and it was really no big deal. Growing up in that kind of environment pretty much guaranteed that I would be something of a musician no matter what else I chose to pursue. I’m pretty sure that’s what kept bringing me back to music on the few occasions when I got burnt out on a particular instrument or style of music. As I got older I would just bounce around to another instrument or style of music (or some new piece of music technology that my mother, bless her, was willing to pay for) and continue on.

And there was a second event, this one much more specific, that led me down this path. My mother was a psychologist and worked with medical students from one of the local medical schools. As a result, she developed a close personal relationship with the dean of that medical school. (I believe she was Greek, like my mother, which was probably a factor as well.) One day, when I was about sixteen, my mother decided that I should have lunch with the dean to talk about medical school. I can’t remember much about the conversation, but there was one tidbit that stuck with me: She told me to major in music in college. Now, I know what you think I’m about to say; that she thought I should pursue my one true passion and career be damned, right? Wrong. She told me that music majors had the highest rate of acceptance into medical school. What? No, not that most doctors were music majors. But that music majors were accepted at a higher rate than any other major (including classic pre-med majors like biology and chemistry). So, I went of to college and majored in music. I gave up on pre-med a couple of years later, but that’s another story.

So if med schools (whom we’ll assume know something about choosing strong applicants) are desperate to get more music majors, why do we still consider arts education to be a luxury as opposed to a necessity? If I had to venture a guess, I’d guess that it’s because of the current cost of education. If education were cheaper (or free?), I believe more parents would be supportive of their children who show an interest in the arts. But in the current reactionary education climate, even parents who innately understand the value of arts education are willing to throw the arts out the window when school budgets (and student loans) enter the conversation. Hey, we’re falling behind much of the rest of the world in math and science education, right? Everyone, FREAK OUT! My question is, where do we rank in arts education?

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Contract Grading

Many of my colleagues have moved to what is considered a “modern” grading model in their online and face-to-face courses. Typically, they make a large number of points available that embrace various learning modalities, and then use some fraction of those points to determine the student’s final grade. For example, a course might make available 3000 points distributed across modalities (traditional quizzes and exams, individual and group projects, writing assignments, etc.), with 2000 points required to achieve an “A” grade. While other instructors seem satisfied with this model, I’ve never been willing to make the leap without the addition of one other component: a grade contract. While the grade contract seems to be common in K-12 (especially for students deemed “gifted and talented”) , I haven’t personally witnessed its implementation in my field (Music Technology). Before we jump into that, let’s rewind and talk about my teaching background for a minute.

Before I began teaching at the college level, I spent many years as a technical trainer in the private sector (and I still pick up those gigs occasionally as my schedule permits). The subject matter was audio hardware and software, and the students were typically professionals looking to obtain an industry certification. Aside from the type of student, there was one major difference between those classes and the classes I teach at my college: no grades. As a result, I had never failed ANYONE in a decade of classroom instruction. That’s not to say that every single student passed the relevant certification exam(s), but the vast majority did.

Next, let’s jump ahead to my first college teaching gig; I was hired to teach at a large state university where my students were a mix of degree students and certificate students. The dichotomy between the two groups of students was stark. The degree students were typically younger and more academically skilled, with limited industry experience. The certificate students were typically older and not very strong academically, but frequently possessed work experience (or life experience) that was helpful in these particular courses. For the first time, I had students who aced the class but weren’t really prepared for professional work, and students who achieved a failing grade but definitely gained useful skills that could be immediately applied to their current occupation or could help them to make a move to an adjacent field. At the time, it never occurred to me that I wasn’t being fair to to the certificate students! In hindsight, I feel that the certificate students would’ve benefited from a more flexible grading structure that more accurately assessed their success. But I was coming from a world where grades didn’t exist, and so obviously hadn’t been exposed to other grading models.

So, what about my current role? As I mentioned above, I’ve had a chance to watch some of my colleagues implement other grading models. And I have a fundamental problem with the implementation. You see, without a contract that determines exactly which assessments will be graded, students will tend to complete all of the available assessments. Now, of course, some students will put in the effort to do very well across all of the assessments. But common sense tells us that other students will recognize that mediocre or even poor performance is sufficient to achieve a good grade and will therefore put in a minimum of effort. (I’m continually amazed at how students who don’t don’t apply themselves in the traditional fashion can become incredibly resourceful when it comes to gaming the system!) So, in the example above, that means that a score of 66.6% on every assessment will result in a 100% grade for the class. This idea drives me nuts! From the first time I became aware of this model, I knew more-or-less intuitively that some sort of contact was needed. And, after doing a bit or research, I discovered that a Grade Contract (sometimes known as a “Contract Activity Package”) is almost always used when this grading model is implemented in K-12 programs.

There’s no doubt that implementing Grade Contracts creates more work for the instructor. It falls to the instructor to figure out how contracts will be structured and then assess student success based on the contract. In our online learning management system (which I use as the gradebook for face-to-face classes as well) there is no easy way to manage such contracts and generate an automatic grade for multiple pathways through the available assessments. Regardless, I’m planning to restructure at least one of my courses next year to embrace Grade Contracts. In our LMS, I’ll need to figure out if doing the pre-work to limit access to assessments is more efficient than overlaying the contract on completed assessments at the end of the course. But I do believe that the results will be worth it, and that a more diverse group of students will be able to successfully complete my classes. Wish me luck!

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The Bleeding Edge, Pt. 2

So, I’ve previously mentioned several new game audio courses that I’ve developed for the Music Tech program at Foothill College. (Actually, one of them is still just an outline that needs to be developed for next quarter, but I digress…) These classes are as cutting edge as we get in our industry, and there are some serious complications that come with exploring uncharted territory. When I wrote the very first edition of Avid’s Pro Tools for Game Audio textbook back in 2010, I had to figure out how to demonstrate the implementation of audio assets into an actual playable game. (The Pro Tools aspect of the book was no problem.) This required a great deal of research into available game development “engines,” of which only one was truly viable at the time: Unity. Unity was great because it had some decent audio capabilities, offered a number of demonstration game levels that could be used for the class, and especially because it’s free to use for game projects that generate less than $10,000 in revenue. (Ding! Ding! That’s definitely our situation…)

So we started down the path of using Unity for Avid’s book. We grabbed a couple of game levels, and spent a few thousand dollars having a programmer customize them for the book exercises. It mostly worked well, with a few back-and-forth development cycles and no major issues. Then, just as we were going to press with the book, Unity released a new version of their engine that broke some aspects of our game levels. Yikes! Nothing like that had ever happened with previous textbooks that I edited or authored. We scrambled to make some quick changes and went to press with about 98% functionality. In other words, I shipped a book that featured a software component that had KNOWN BUGS. All of a sudden, I was in the software development business in a way I hadn’t ever imagined. Anyway, we’re on the third edition of that book now. And there have been hiccups with the game levels that shipped with every edition.

Fast forward to Fall 2014. With the Winter Quarter quickly approaching, I found myself in a familiar position; I needed to put the final touches on the course materials for my Advanced Sound Design for Games course (which I’m currently teaching.) I had always planned for this course to use FMOD Studio (see below ad nauseum), but I needed to decide on a game engine (yet again). I really wanted to try something new after having used Unity for the past few years. Fortunately, the Unreal Engine from Epic Games had just added both a Mac OS version and FMOD Studio support a few months earlier(!). Now any logical, non-masochistic course developer would probably have run screaming in the other direction at the thought of building a course around an application that was effectively brand new. I am not that person. I jumped in head first and scrambled to make things work. And would you believe, it’s actually going pretty well. But not perfectly well.

The first major issue occurred when I built the course exercises around a “First Person Shooter” game template. I put in several weeks of work preparing the game, which put me at about the 75% completion point. Then, one day, I loaded up the game and got a bunch of errors. Showstopping errors. And because I was working in completely uncharted territory no one at Epic or FMOD could provide the assistance I needed quickly enough. Did I mention I was pretty much working on Christmas day? So I scrapped the “First Person Shooter” template and found a much more simple template. This one was missing a lot of the cool stuff that I hoped would impress students, but it was much easier to adapt to my course exercises. And everything went off without a hitch (at the eleventh hour of course). I packaged up all the files, uploaded everything to my Google Drive, and started teaching the class.

Ah, you probably guessed that wasn’t the end of the story, right? So, things went pretty well until about the third week of class. For a variety of reasons, several of my students were running the very latest Mac OS (“Yosemite”). Sidebar–Industry Pros know to NEVER update their OS unless they have a very good reason to make the move, and they certainly never upgrade in the middle of a project. But these aren’t Industry Pros.–End Sidebar. And they quickly discovered that some basic functionality in FMOD Studio was not working. To their credit, FMOD quickly released an update that addressed the issue, but the deadline for the exercise had already passed. So, I was forced to extend the project deadline to accommodate those students. No big deal, really. But did I mention that the new version of FMOD Studio fixed the Yosemite problem but broke the functionality with Unreal? For a few more days anyway.

Yeah, that’s my life… I do it to myself. My wife always jokes that “college professor” is supposed to be the world’s least stressful job. And I always respond, “Not if you’re doing it properly.” And sure, I could back away from trying to keep students right up there on the cutting edge. But I just can’t help myself.

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Do Industry Certifications Matter?

I teach in the Music Technology program at Foothill College, and I really enjoy the duality of teaching both academic and vocational courses. It gives me a flexibility in course creation that simply wouldn’t exist at a four-year university where career training (if it even exists) takes a backseat to ivory tower academic pursuits.

Many of our vocational courses are focused on software training for a number of important audio applications including Avid’s Pro Tools, Apple’s Logic Pro, and Ableton Live. These are some of our most popular courses at Foothill, and in the case of the Pro Tools courses they are even required for the degree and certificate in Music Tech.

One of the questions I frequently get from the students in my vocational classes is, “Do Industry Certifications Matter?” Unfortunately, my response is often something like, “Well, that depends…” And it does depend on a lot of factors. For someone who already has credits in the industry, an industry certification (IC) is somewhat meaningless; there’s no question that real-world credits trump theoretical expertise every time. I often joke with my students that you won’t find many Grammy winners with a bunch of certificates posted next to the gold records on their studio wall. (The fact that many famous producers and engineers often work in a manner that is anything but efficient is a topic for another time…)

On the other hand, for someone looking to make a career change, the IC can provide a clear training path resulting in significant expertise in an industry-standard application. For example, I often have older students that are successful in a field such as video editing, but wish to add sound design or audio mixing to their CV. In this case, the certificate can impart the necessary confidence to present themselves as an expert in the adjacent field.

Finally, for students with no industry experience, the IC can help to differentiate them from other job candidates applying for internships or entry-level positions. I’ve worked in several organizations where ICs where required to make it through the first phase of job application screening for an internship. While it is true that creative industry ICs like ours are not valued as highly as something like a CISCO or MSCE certification in the IT industry, they do have significant value. Many creative organizations build their entire workflow around one software application (like Pro Tools or Adobe Creative Suite) and our certified students can typically demonstrate much deeper expertise in that application than a senior designer. Does this mean they can do the job better than that person? Absolutely not. But junior personnel in creative fields are often EXPECTED to possess deep knowledge of applications so that they can impart that knowledge to more established colleagues who simply don’t have the time to stay on top of every new feature. Sharing this knowledge in a humble, un-selfish fashion has been a key to advancement in our industry for decades.

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The Bleeding Edge

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the difficulty of keeping up with the latest technology in my classes. In my field, Music Technology, there’s an interesting split between foundation courses and electives. The foundation courses typically deal with basic concepts in audio engineering, as well as the fundamentals of using a digital audio workstation. In the case of the former, the basic concepts haven’t changed much in decades; the signal path from microphone to pre-amp to recorder was more or less perfected by the Germans during World War II. In the case of the latter, I’ve been working with our primary software platform (Avid’s Pro Tools) since the 1990s. These are subjects in which I possess a wealth of both academic knowledge and professional experience; both can be leveraged when developing, maintaining, and delivering courses. So far so good, right?

The core courses do remain relevant and will for the foreseeable future. (I guess that’s what makes them “core.”) But the core courses don’t reflect the current direction of the department or our industry. In this case, the most logical direction is audio for video games and other interactive media. (I’ll get into the employment statistics supporting that case in a future post…) I’ve written a group of new courses that push us in that direction. But, due to the lengthy process of updating degree and certificate requirements, all of these new courses are currently electives.

So the problem here is two-fold: first, game audio is a relatively new field, so not many comprehensive textbooks exist; second, the industry changes so rapidly that the relevant hardware and software is constantly in flux. As a result, I not only need to write my own curriculum for each of these courses, but I’m aiming at a moving target as far as which technologies to explore. Sure, there are core concepts that remain constant just as they do in any field. But in this field even the core concepts must be taught on recent technology; the way the industry moves, a computer/operating system/software configuration from as little as two years ago can be hopelessly obsolete! And that’s not even taking into account the type of computer, console, or handheld device that the consumer will use to play the resulting game.

The most challenging aspect of this situation is that I can no longer expect that I will be an absolute expert on the subject matter at hand. (A very uncomfortable position for someone who has always had subject matter expertise as a reliable crutch upon which to prop courses.) For example, I’m currently teaching a brand new course on advanced game sound design that uses a software application called FMOD Studio (see post below). But I didn’t truly begin learning the software until last month! (The application itself is only about a year old…) For the first time in my professional career, I find myself hoping that no one deviates too far from the lecture agenda and uncovers my ruse! Just kidding. Mostly.

But it’s actually working out beautifully. I’ve found that an essential aspect of teaching college students, which I’ve had the good fortune to do for the last several years, is letting go of the ego that you acquired through working successfully in the private sector. And now I’m going a step further and letting go of my need to know everything about a subject (or a piece of software) before I feel confident in my ability to teach it to students. I’m incredibly excited to teach this new material because its new and fresh to me. (Perhaps it’s the adrenaline?) And students are definitely picking up on that and getting excited, too. Perhaps exploring a subject together with my students is the only realistic way to maintain the kind of agility that developing relevant courses requires.

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FMOD Studio

FMOD Studio was released last year, and it is quite an amazing tool for game audio design and implementation. Just the fact that it looks like a DAW and supports standard control surfaces is enough to raise some eyebrows. Training materials have been steadily rolling out, and I can definitely say that now is an excellent time to jump in. Sound recordist and FMOD guru Stephan Schütze of Sound Librarian has created the official FMOD 101 curriculum, which features a game project which integrates FMOD Studio and Unity.

And the FMOD team have also just released a video training series by Sally Kellaway that offers a deep dive into integration with the Unreal Engine (including some useful lessons on audio programming using UE’s Blueprint technology). There’s even an excellent vehicle engine design lesson, which appears to be incredibly easy using UE’s vehicle template.

I just completed the FMOD 101 online certification in preparation for teaching FMOD Studio in two new classes at Foothill College (MUS84B Advanced Sound Design for Games and MUS84C Music Composition for Games). I’m really looking forward to it.

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Modular Love

I spent an enjoyable Friday night with my 3-year-old son watching I Dream Of Wires, a documentary about the modular analog synth. The recently released “Hard Core Edition” clocks in at 4 hours! Highlights include a complete history of Moog and Buchla modulars, interviews with electronic music icons including Vince Clarke (of Depeche Mode, Yaz, and Erasure fame) and Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails), and a glimpse into the current state of Eurorack modulars. Also, happy to hear everyone in the film pronounce Moog correctly! (It rhymes with “vogue.”)

I was pleasantly surprised to find that my son was interested in the sights and sounds of these electronic beasts. We’ve got a Moog Voyager at home, which is basically a digitally-controlled Mini Moog, and he loves pressing the keys and twiddling the knobs and listening to the results. There was one humorous moment when he turned to me and asked, “Are these guys talking to us?” I suppose it’s an appropriate question for a kid who never watches anything but cartoons! A word of warning–there are quite a few f-bombs in there, so parental guide is definitely suggested.

Anyway, this was timely viewing for me because we’re currently shopping for an analog modular for the Music Tech Department at Foothill. We’re leaning toward a basic Doepfer starter system with a sequencer. Doepfer is the company that started the Eurorack movement and they’re still the 800-pound gorilla of the modular scene. You can check out Doepfer here.

Doepfer Standard System 2 with MIDI
Doepfer A-100 Basic System 2
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Sanken CSS-5

CSS-51

Foothill Music Tech just got the Sanken CSS-5 I’ve been wanting for years.  I used one for an SCEA title a few years back and loved the sound and the ease of use.  Coupled with our Sound Devices 702 it makes for the ultimate stereo field recording rig.  It’s definitely at the high end price-wise of stereo field recording solutions, but not that much more than the Sennheiser MKH418S (which requires separate MS decoding) or the two-mic M/S configurations (like the MKH416/30 setup) that are fairly common.

One neat thing about the CSS-5 is that you can adjust the stereo width between mono, normal stereo (120-degrees) and wide stereo (~140-degrees).  However, a number of top field recordists claim that they find the wide mode noticeably noisier than the normal stereo mode.  I guess I’ll finally get a chance to have a listen and see if that’s the case.