Over the past couple of years, we’ve touched on a wide range of technology uses in our field: rehearsal management, choral operations, delivering music and feedback to our musicians, recording and performing. With a few exceptions such as our series on creating a web site, these have all been solely from my perspective as a high school choral teacher and educational technologist. While that wouldn’t be a limitation in a more traditional academic field, using technology is inherently a personal strategy (whether it’s a microphone or Twitter): what works great for one person may not for the next. To give us the broadest sense of how technology is used in the choral world today, and where it’s going and taking us in the next few years, we require more voices: more perspectives, different expertise and diverse experiences throughout our field.
Starting in a couple of weeks, you’ll see many more guest contributors to ChoralTech. I hope that you’ll be one of them. Whether you are an early adopter with tales from the front line to share, or a baby-stepper who can share experience learning and adapting to a new tool or workflow (whether reluctantly or no), your perspective and reflections could be hugely valuable to someone with the same questions or issues. I’ll work with any contributors to help turn ideas into a post and handle the “mechanics.” In addition to those of us within the ChoralNet community, I’ll be bringing in guest articles from elsewhere in music technology in an effort to make sure that we get the broadest range of experience possible.
While it’s been an honor to have an open forum from which to lecture (and I do love giving a good lecture!), we know that in the end our field is one of ensembles and collaboration. To torture the analogy, it’s time to move ChoralTech from a soloist to an ensemble performance. I’m excited to bring out as many voices through this process as possible. Again, if you have experience as a learner or seasoned vet in any area of music technology (live sound, recording/publising, management, professional development, etc.), I hope that you’ll let me know what you’d like to share. Feel free to share in the comments below, or send me a message by clicking on the mail icon next to my name above.
Brandon Miller says