Inspiration Report — Storytelling with Desert Island Discs

Telling stories is a defining characteristic of being human. We are the only animals that tell each other stories and we do so across cultures and time periods. Libraries have long recognized the power of stories and sought to collect and circulate them in the form of books and other documents. The goal of Storytelling with Desert Island Discs is to utilize the format of the long-running BBC radio program and the techniques of DIY digital storytelling to build an oral history archive that preserves the life stories and musical journeys of the library’s community members.  

Here is a link to my Inspiration Report on Storytelling with Desert Island Discs. All feedback welcome!

Practice Room Robot Strategy and Roadmap

List of Academic Programs Offered by USC’s Thornton School of Music
USC Thornton doctoral candidate Ennis Harris with students Jordan DeTiege and Nick Crane. GIBBS/Courtesy of School. From https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/best-music-schools-2023-ranked/usc-thornton-school-of-music-4/

I did my undergraduate degree at the University of Southern California from 2000–2004. I played tenor saxophone in the jazz band throughout high school and wanted to study jazz at USC. I practiced in the practice rooms on campus a lot in my first couple of years before ultimately deciding to pursue a degree in comparative literature. When I arrived at college at the turn of the twenty-first century, I had a desktop computer in my dorm room and began to use my first email address. A couple years into my college experience I got my first cellphone. I remember practicing music throughout my childhood, taking private lessons and playing in school ensembles. The main tools of the practice space were: an instrument, a music stand, sheet music, a pencil, a piano, CDs, and a CD player. A lot has changed since I was in college. In 2005, the year after I graduated, YouTube was founded. In 2013 I got my first smartphone. In 2018 Jennifer Mishra and Barbara Fast published a book on technologies in the twenty-first century music practice room that shows how students can leverage technology to enhance their practice sessions and musicianship. 

The Idea

For this Innovation and Strategy Roadmap I am going to imagine that I work at the USC Music Library and that the USC Thornton School of Music has been given the green light to build brand new practice rooms on campus. I have been brought on board to help ensure that the practice rooms are state-of-the-art. I have selected the Practice Room Robot as the cutting edge tool that I will convince the Thornton School to incorporate in their new rooms. The Practice Room Robot is an artificially intelligent virtual assistant designed to help musicians practice more cleverly and profitably. 

Action Brief

I wish to convince the Thornton School of Music at USC – including faculty, staff, and students – that regular use of the Practice Room Robots will enhance and maximize their practice sessions in innovative ways while also allowing them and their data to participate in the refinement of next generation robots. (The practice room robot therefore aligns with participatory service by having “users and their knowledge” reshape the service (Casey & Savastinuk, 2007, p. 61). )

Using the technologically integrated Practice Room Robot will allow musicians to meet their solitary and collaborative practicing needs and it will allow faculty to experiment with new teaching methods, all with increasingly sophisticated technological tools. This will become indispensable in fulfilling the School’s mission to prepare students for successful music careers in the twenty-first century, in particular because it will incorporate data from a parallel project which surveys professional classical musicians on their music technology activities.      

The Community 

In Fall 2022, the Thornton School’s 171 faculty taught over a thousand students in a wide range of undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral programs, “from early music to popular music, orchestral performance, screen scoring, jazz, composition, music industry, and more” (USC Thornton School of Music, 2024). This community is studying music at the highest levels and would therefore benefit from a textbook called iPractice: Technology in the 21st Century Music Practice Room, written by Jennifer Mishra and Barbara Fast (2018), which is part of the Prestissimo Series on Essential Music Technology from Oxford University Press. It encourages the integration of practice strategies with technology in order to enhance musicianship. The book and its companion website were the inspiration for the Practice Room Robot idea. The Practice Room Robot does not yet exist, which is what makes this pilot project so exciting: it will be a chance for the Thornton School to distinguish itself by trailblazing in the area of music technology. Some libraries like Columbia University Libraries (2021) have music labs with impressive equipment and suites of software, and AI virtual assistants are becoming more and more sophisticated (Knight, 2024). However, no such assistant yet exists which is tailored to the music practice room.          

Action Plan 

Guidelines and Policies

Guidelines and policies will be set by a vertical team consisting of all echelons of the Thornton School (Casey & Savastinuk, 2007, p. 45). They will examine existing university policies for the use of high-end technological equipment across different disciplines such as the policies of the lab and classroom facilities at the USC Cinema School. The general policy might be that students can check out a practice room and the accompanying Practice Room Robot with a student ID card. Perhaps there is a training or tutorial that orients students, which is required upon first using the practice rooms. 

Implementation Timeline  

A reasonable timeline for this project might be two years. The project flow depends on a robotics company developing such an AI virtual assistant. It is impossible to know how long it might take a firm to create a prototype or a pilot robot, however, my aim would be to have an initial prototype ready for testing within a year. It would then be trialed in (a) practice room(s) over the course of the following year and subsequently revised according to community feedback. Both the robotics company and the Dean of the Thornton School would have to greenlight this project. If the company said no to certain elements of the Practice Room Robot, the alternative would be to find an abridged version of the prototype that could be made in order to at least start testing the concept. If the Dean said no, the project team would brainstorm alternatives according to the objections raised. For example, the robot is too expensive to have one in every practice room, we might start with robots only in the ensemble rehearsal rooms.   

Marketing 

The Practice Room Robot will be marketed on the website and through a series of YouTube videos. This will promote the service both inside and outside of USC. I have already made an easily digestible 15-minute YouTube video explaining the idea, which I have sent to select university professors and librarians for feedback. One note I received was to demonstrate how it might look if a student asked the robot to write an etude that practices a particular technical difficulty. I could make a short demonstration video in which I take a bit of a Chopin etude, for example, write some melodies that are similar to it, and then simulate what it would look like to ask the robot for this kind of help, as if the robot were generating the similar melodies. This could be very convincing. YouTube videos are easy to share, for example, with colleagues one meets at a professional conference. In fact, I am attending this weekend’s Music Library Association California Chapter conference at UCLA and I will be sure to have my hyperlink handy. 

Training 

Students, faculty, and staff will need to know how to use the Practice Room Robot and can be trained by a series of video tutorials. Harvard has a playlist guide with video tutorials for training on the use of the software Scalar, for example. Such a playlist could be set up for teaching people how to make the most of the Practice Room Robot’s functionality, allowing users to train themselves at their convenience. The Thornton School and the USC Music Library could also conduct training workshops and schedule one-on-one training sessions with a librarian. The training instructor should be a faculty member who has been part of the planning and implementation process.    

Evaluation 

The Practice Room Robot will be evaluated based on how users use it. The robot will have integrated functionalities like digital metronomes, music notation, accompaniment, video recording, and so on. How much time users spend in any given practice session using any one of these functionalities provides valuable information for the team who will refine the service. It will also be important to collect data about how users toggle between robot functionalities. Interviews will also be conducted with faculty to understand what differences they may have seen, if any, after the initial semesters of Practice Room Robot deployment. After the initial trial semester surveys will be sent to all Thornton students, faculty, and staff. I imagine that users will have stories about how they have come up with ingenious new ways of practicing that they never imagined before. I also imagine stories of students staying in the practice room longer because of exciting breakthroughs that the robot facilitates. I think that instructors will have stories about new teaching techniques that result from the robot’s capabilities. Finally, I expect the robot to garner a reputation that attracts students to the Thornton School. All of the user feedback will be mined in order to refine and expand the service in subsequent iterations. (Mining user behavior is an important way of gauging progress (Stephens, 2008).)

References

babyjeff007. (2024, October 7). Practice room robot [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/50eKCNZhzSA?si=clvkPxxT_z-LsXLm

Casey, M. E., & Savastinuk, L. C. (2007). Library 2.0: A guide to participatory library service. Information Today. https://287.hyperlib.sjsu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Library2.0Text.pdf 

Columbia University Libraries. (2021). Digital music lab. https://library.columbia.edu/libraries/music/music-lab.html

Harvard. (2021, October 14). Scalar tutorial videos. Harvard Scalar Guide. https://scalar.fas.harvard.edu/scalar-users-guide-harvard/scalar-tutorial-videos

Knight, W. (2024, February 1). I tested a Next-Gen AI assistant. It will blow you away. Wired.  https://www.wired.com/story/fast-forward-tested-next-gen-ai-assistant/

Mishra, J., & Fast, B. (2018). iPractice: Technology in the 21st century music practice room. Oxford University Press. 

Music Library Association. (2024). Program 2024. Music Library Association California Chapter. https://ccmla.wp.musiclibraryassoc.org/program-2024

Stephens, M. (2008). Measuring progress. Tame the Web. https://tametheweb.com/2008/04/15/measuring-progress/  

USC Cinematic Arts. (2001–2024, 2016). Labs and classrooms.  https://cinema.usc.edu/facilities/labs_classrooms.cfm

USC Thornton School of Music. (2024). About. https://music.usc.edu/about/

Reflection on Hyperlinked Environments

My post for Hyperlinked Environments reflects on the idea of a digital sound lab at a university library. It builds on the idea of a Practice Room Robot, which I developed as a use case for how emerging technologies could help musicians practice their instruments. The first video below is about the Practice Room Robot, which I made for my final project in INFO 281: Emerging Technologies and Impacts on the Information Experience. The second video, about the Digital Sound Lab, is my reflection on Hyperlinked Environments. All feedback welcome!

Introduction to Arthur Kolat

My name is Arthur Kolat and I’m about midway through my MLIS journey. I live in Los Angeles with my wife, Alison, and dog, Beppe. My wife works at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, raising money for the wonderful programs at the Los Angeles Public Library. I work as a part time, as-needed Library Assistant II at the Santa Monica Public Library. I’m interested in academic librarianship, especially music and art librarianship. I grew up playing music (piano, clarinet, saxophone) and went on to earn a BA in literature and an MA in art history. My master’s thesis was about David Hockney’s Wagner Drives and, amazingly, it was cited in a New Yorker article in 2021. For the longer story of my interests and journey to the MLIS, please check out this recent SJSU Community Profile that was written about me!

In addition to the Hyperlinked Library course and my job with SMPL, I have several projects this fall: I am running a bilingual camera obscura workshop as part of REFORMA LA’s family program at the Los Angeles Libros Festival in September. And in November I will copyedit an experimental novel by the author James Elkins, to be published in 2025. Jim was my thesis advisor and he runs an online reading group that I have been participating in for the last four years. In December the International Panorama Council will publish an essay that I co-authored with him and two others from our reading group. The essay is entitled “Panoramas as Projections of the Unconscious in Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” It will be my first peer-reviewed publication! 

So far in my MLIS coursework I have been developing a survey study to better understand the information behaviors of professional classical musicians. I would like to know more about the information activities of this group because I think it stands to provide insight to music libraries about resources and services they might offer to students studying to become classical music performers. I am hoping to use the Hyperlinked Library as a way of exploring emerging trends and technology in music and art libraries.