“The Maker Movement” is a recent social phenomenon that had garnered wide-spread attention from students, institutions, and businesses. It first emerged somewhat as an underground counter-culture movement. According to Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make magazine, “the maker movement has come about in part because of people’s need to engage passionately with objects in ways that make them more than just consumers.” (Dougherty, 2012, p. 12). Indeed, the community typically consists of enthusiasts in robotics and electronics who, usually self-motivated, design and manufacture innovative technologies and objects, with the help of increasingly available electronic components, digital fabrication tools, and open-source code sharing platforms. These include microcontrollers, PCI boards, 3D-printers, CNC machines and GitHub. Physical communal spaces that provide access to more comprehensive tools are often referred to as ‘makerspace’, or ‘hackerspace’, where people come together to make unconventional physical products and share ideas. ‘Makers’ can also connect via the internet, which offers a vibrant swarm of educational information and shared resources for potential projects.
The movement’s emergence can be traced to Seymour Papert’s theory of constructivism, which asserts learning is done “by constructing knowledge through the act of making something shareable” (Martinez & Stager, 2013, p.21, as cited in Halverson & Sheridan, 2014). This is significant because it aligns the movement with the pedagogies of many progressive educational institutions. MIT, for example, created the FabLabs in 2005 as “pedagogical environments that allow everyday people to solve their own problems by producing (rather than purchasing or outsourcing) the tools they need” (Halverson & Sheridan, 2014, p. 499). Nowadays, many prominent higher education institutions offer a makerspace, or digital fabrication facilities for students interested in rapid prototyping ideas, typically in disciplines that involve engineering and electronics. NYU, for example, provides a makerspace at its Tandon School of Engineering, a fabrication lab at Tisch’s ITP, as well as a Fab Lab in the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development.
In Music Technology, especially in the field of electronic music, the idea of making new innovative technologies independently has always been prominent. Don Buchla and Robert Moog are two prime examples who, in the 60s, driven by two distinct visions of what electronic music is and should be, invented the Buchla music box and the keyboard-controlled synthesizers, respectively (Garud & Karnoe, 2013). In the same philosophical vein of constructivist theory, the term ‘Maker Education’ was first introduced by Dougherty, who asserts that “by harnessing the power of making, Maker Education allows us to create engaging and motivating learning experiences” (Dougherty, 2012, as cited in Hughes, 2018, p. 292). Under this belief, current ‘maker’ projects within music technology include a) using microcontrollers, such as Arduino, to rapid prototype new midi controllers, musical instruments, audio effect processors, and other audio-visual performance devices; b) creating wearable technologies; c) designing for music production in virtual reality and games, and others (Hughes, 2018).
In the realm of Higher Education, however, many Music Technology programs surveyed in the US, UK, and Europe, remains to be centered around the field of recording and mixing, with few exceptions such as NYU, Berklee, and Carnegie Mellon University, who offers a more inter-disciplinary approach (Hughes, 2018). Alayna Hughes is a strong proponent of integrating maker education philosophy in Higher Education. She argues that such curriculums could provide students with a more diverse set of skills that broaden their employment opportunities. In addition to various engineering positions in recording studios and live sound, the maker education framework enables students to be employable in areas such as digital fabrication, wearable creation, game audio design, controller design, app design, C programming careers, et cetera (Hughes, 2018). The validity of this argument, however, remains to be examined.
In my view, the idea of maker education in Music Technology is a powerful learning paradigm that encourages innovation at the forefront of the field, where ideas from other disciplines start to converge. However, it can also potentially backfire at learners if they don’t have a strong foundation in the discipline they are innovating in. I am a firm believer in knowing the rules before breaking them. In my opinion, one drawback of the maker movement, which is also embedded in its nature, is that the maker creates the value and direction of their creations. While this is certainly liberating and democratizing for some, for others without a solid foundation in a particular discipline, this self-deterministic ideal of learning can sometimes become an easy way out, as there are no pre-established hierarchies of value that validate their projects. We see examples of this more often in the artistic realm, performance to be exact. Coming from an acting background educated in a maker education inspired program, I have seen numerous performance projects fail, unable to connect with its audience, for this particular reason. Thus, I believe, only after students have gained a firm foundational understanding of a particular discipline, can this educational paradigm be most effective. The same should be taken into consideration when approaching the increasingly diverse landscape of music technology education.
Citations
Dougherty, D. (2012). The maker movement. Innovations: Technology, governance, globalization, 7(3), 11-14.
Pinch, T. J. (2001). Why do you go to a music store to buy a synthesizer: path dependence and the social construction of technology. Path dependence and creation, 381-400.
Hughes, A. (2018). Maker music: Incorporating the maker and hacker community into music technology education. Journal of Music, Technology & Education, 11(3), 287-300.
Halverson, E. R., & Sheridan, K. (2014). The maker movement in education. Harvard educational review, 84(4), 495-504.
Martinez, S. L., & Stager, G. S. (2013). Invent to learn: Making. Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom.