Systemic Racism and Whiteness in Music Education, with Dr. Juliet Hess and co-host Ethan Hein

06/13/19 • 53 min

Music Education doctoral candidate Ethan Hein recommends “Equity and Music Education: Euphemisms, Terminal Naivety, and Whiteness” by Juliet Hess, published in Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 2017. Ethan and Finn interview Dr. Juliet Hess about this study and whiteness in music education, and addressing systemic racism from within our areas of academia.

Time Stamps

[0:00:10] Intro with Ethan Hein
[0:08:29] Interview: Dr. Juliet Hess, Background and Case Studies
[0:18:50] Interview: Multiculturalism and Music
[0:29:31] Interview: Whiteness in the Conservatory
[0:36:19] Interview: Context and Implications
[0:44:06] Interview: Future work
[0:51:50] Closing with Ethan Hein

Show notes

Recommended article:
- Hess, J. (2017). Equity and Music Education: Euphemisms, Terminal Naivety, and Whiteness. Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 16(3). (HTML, PDF)
Interviewee: Dr. Juliet Hess, Assistant Professor of Music Education at Michigan State University
Co-host: Ethan Hein, Doctoral Candidate in Music Education at New York University (website, twitter)
Sources cited in the discussion:
- Kendrick Lamar’s Alright (youtube)
- Chris Thile’s performance on Prairie Home companion is no longer available
- Emma Stevens – Blackbird by The Beatles sung in Mi’kmaq (youtube)
  - Correction: this performance is from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, not Newfoundland where there has been controversy around seal hunting. Both provinces are within the ancestral territory of Mi’kmaq People.
- Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2006. Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. 2nd edition. Toronto, ON: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (Publisher page)
- Juliet Hess (2018) Interrupting the symphony: unpacking the importance placed on classical concert experiences, Music Education Research, 20:1, 11-21, DOI: 10.1080/14613808.2016.1202224 (HTML)
- Juliet Hess’ new book:
  - Hess, Juliet. (2019) Music Education for Social Change: Constructing an Activist Music Education, Routledge (Publisher page)

Credits

The So Strangely Podcast is produced by Finn Upham, 2019. The closing music includes a sample of Diana Deutsch’s Speech-Song Illusion sound demo 1.

Time Stamps

[0:00:10] Intro with Ethan Hein
[0:08:29] Interview: Dr. Juliet Hess, Background and Case Studies
[0:18:50] Interview: Multiculturalism and Music
[0:29:31] Interview: Whiteness in the Conservatory
[0:36:19] Interview: Context and Implications
[0:44:06] Interview: Future work
[0:51:50] Closing with Ethan Hein

Show notes

Recommended article:
- Hess, J. (2017). Equity and Music Education: Euphemisms, Terminal Naivety, and Whiteness. Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education, 16(3). (HTML, PDF)
Interviewee: Dr. Juliet Hess, Assistant Professor of Music Education at Michigan State University
Co-host: Ethan Hein, Doctoral Candidate in Music Education at New York University (website, twitter)
Sources cited in the discussion:
- Kendrick Lamar’s Alright (youtube)
- Chris Thile’s performance on Prairie Home companion is no longer available
- Emma Stevens – Blackbird by The Beatles sung in Mi’kmaq (youtube)
  - Correction: this performance is from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, not Newfoundland where there has been controversy around seal hunting. Both provinces are within the ancestral territory of Mi’kmaq People.
- Bonilla-Silva, Eduardo. 2006. Racism without racists: Color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the United States. 2nd edition. Toronto, ON: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. (Publisher page)
- Juliet Hess (2018) Interrupting the symphony: unpacking the importance placed on classical concert experiences, Music Education Research, 20:1, 11-21, DOI: 10.1080/14613808.2016.1202224 (HTML)
- Juliet Hess’ new book:
  - Hess, Juliet. (2019) Music Education for Social Change: Constructing an Activist Music Education, Routledge (Publisher page)

Credits

The So Strangely Podcast is produced by Finn Upham, 2019. The closing music includes a sample of Diana Deutsch’s Speech-Song Illusion sound demo 1.

Previous Episode

Capturing the alignment between the movements of musicians and listeners with Dr. Alexander Demos

Host Finn Upham recommends “How Music Moves Us: Entraining to Musicians’ Movements” by Alexander Demos and Roger Chaffin, published in Music Perception, 2017. They interview Dr Demos about this study and adjacent issues.

Note: This interview goes fairly deep into the challenges of time series data analysis. Feel free to use the time stamps listed in the show notes to skip ahead if this is not your cup of tea.

Time Stamps

[0:00:10] Intro to article and Alex
[0:03:20] Design of Air Conducting experiment
[0:11:15] Capturing movements of performers and listeners
[0:15:40] Assessing alignment between motion time series
[0:25:26] Non-linearity in these time series
[0:31:18] False negatives and intermittent alignment
[0:38:32] Theories of Music and Ancillary motion
[0:45:04] Closing Summary and Implications

Show notes

Recommended article:
- Demos, A. P., & Chaffin, R. (2018). How Music Moves Us: Entraining to Musicians’ Movements. Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 35(4), 405-424. (pdf)
Interviewee: Dr. Alexander Demos, Clinical assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago (website)
Some publications cited in the discussion:
- Schreiber, T., & Schmitz, A. (1996). Improved surrogate data for nonlinearity tests. Physical Review Letters, 77(4), 635–638.
- Cook, N. (2013). Beyond the score: Music as performance. Oxford University Press.
- Theiler, J., Eubank, S., Longtin, A., Galdrikian, B. & Farmer, J. D. (1992). Testing for nonlinearity in time series: The method of surrogate data. Physica D, 58, 77–94.
- Dean, R. T., Bailes, F., & Dunsmuir, W. T. (2014). Time series analysis of real-time music perception: Approaches to the assessment of individual and expertise differences in perception of expressed affect. Journal of Mathematics and Music, 8(3), 183-205.
- Wanderley, M. M., Vines, B. W., Middleton, N., Mckay, C., & Hatch, W. (2005). The musical significance of clarinetists’ ancillary gestures: An exploration of the field. Journal of New Music Research, 34(1), 97–113. DOI: 10.1080/092982105 00124208

Credits

The So Strangely Podcast is produced by Finn Upham, 2019. The closing music includes a sample of Diana Deutsch’s Speech-Song Illusion sound demo 1.

Next Episode

Music Transformer and Machine Learning for Composition with Dr. Anna Huang

Finn interviews Composer and Machine Learning specialist Dr. Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang about the Music Transformer project at Google’s Magenta Labs. They discuss representations of music for machine learning, algorithmic music generation as a compositional aid, the JS Bach Google Doodle, how self-reference defines structure in music, and compare the musicality of different systems with example outputs.

Time Stamps

[0:01:05] Introducing Dr. Anna Huang
[0:03:43] JS Bach Google Doodle
[0:12:52] Representations of musical information for machine learning
[0:16:26] Music Transformer project
- [0:25:15] RNN algorithm music sample
[0:25:45] ABA structure challenge for generative systems
- [0:30:30] Vanilla Transformer algorithm music sample
- [0:32:07] Music Transformer algorithm music sample
[0:36:30] Self Reference Visualisation (see blog post)
[0:43:27] Everyday music implications
[0:48:10] What this work says about music
- [0:50:01] Music Transformer trained on Jazz Piano

Show notes

Recommended project:
- Blog post: Huang, C.Z.A., Simon, I., & Dinculescu, M. (2018, Dec 12). Music Transformer: Generating Music with Long-Term Structure [Blog Post]
- Paper: Huang, C.Z.A., Vaswani, A., Uszkoreit, J., Shazeer, N., Simon, I., Hawthorne, C., Dai, A.M., Hoffman, M.D., Dinculescu, M., & Eck, D. (2018) MUSIC TRANSFORMER: GENERATING MUSIC WITH LONG-TERM STRUCTURE on arXiv.org
Interviewee: Dr. Cheng-Zhi Huang at Google AI, on twitter @huangcza
Google Doodle Celebrating JS Bach with AI harmonising melodies
Related papers:
- Huang, C.Z.A., Cooijmans, T., Roberts, A., Courville, A., Eck, D. (2017). Coconet: Counterpoint by Convolution. ISMIR.
- Huang, C.Z.A., Cooijmans, T., Dinculescu, M., Roberts, A., & Hawthorne, C. (2019, Mar 20). Coconet: the ML model behind today’s Bach Doodle.
- Huang, C.Z.A., Hawthorne, C., Roberts, A., Dinculescu, M., Wexler, J., Hong, L., Howcroft, J. (2019). The Bach Doodle: Approachable music composition with machine learning at scale. ISMIR.

Credits

The So Strangely Podcast is produced by Finn Upham, 2018. Algorithmic music samples from the blog post Music Transformer: Generating Music with Long-Term Structure, and included under the principles of fair dealing. The closing music includes a sample of Diana Deutsch’s Speech-Song Illusion sound demo 1.