What are the differences between same-room and remote instrumental music lessons?

Background

I studied for a doctorate in remote music education and technology during 2010-2015, my research question emerging from a Masters project in collaboration with British Telecom Research and Development and Aldeburgh Music, in Suffolk. During a PhD you continuously refine your research question over several years. By the end, it can feel as though your topic is so narrow that you are working on a pinhead. You feel so far down a rabbit hole, it can be difficult to reconnect your expertise back to the real world. Now, 5 years after finishing, as music education organisations close mid-term at short notice, due to COVID19, my PhD subject has sadly become very relevant. In this piece I will introduce the background and context to my research, and some of my findings. I will expand on some of them in more detail in following articles.

Shaping musical performance through conversation

During 2010-2015 I examined the practice of one-to-one instrumental music teaching in fine-grained detail (Duffy, 2015). My motivation was initially technical - kick-started by a project to evaluate user experience with protype hardware and software designed for use with a commercial video-conferencing unit, in remote music lessons (Duffy et al., 2012). However early studies highlighted some fascinating observations when I compared what we might call ‘traditional’ same-room or co-present lessons to those carried out with geographically separated students and tutors, connected through technology. My PhD question was transformed from a technical study of latency, microphones, camera angles and equipment set-up, to something else - how student-tutor interaction changes when a lesson takes place remotely, through a medium incorporating video. This seemed to be at least as important as the technical concerns, but had received far less scrutiny. I also realised that ‘interaction’ meant many things in this context, including spoken word (Duffy & Healey, 2014b), communication through performance of music (Duffy & Healey, 2014a, 2018) and non-verbal interaction such as gaze, spatiality and shared access to tools such as the musical score being studied (Duffy & Healey, 2012). 

Performance vs. teaching context

A key factor to understanding whether this was a technical or a communication problem, was correctly identifying the motivation for the musical interaction being analysed. It may seem obvious, but a one-to-one instrumental music lesson is not the same as an ensemble performance - the aim, content and way of working together is entirely different. The ways that the participants organise themselves in space and communicate is also different. As a result, the effect of changing the medium of communication impacts each type of interaction in a different way, and analysis and recommendations for solutions need to consider this. 

Both groups of people have probably worked together before, probably in the same room, and know each other’s working styles and the music, but their objectives are different. A music lesson is motivated by learning – it is a pedagogical interaction, a step along the way to improving a student’s performance through working with a more experienced musician. An ensemble rehearsal or performance is motivated by a group of musicians coming together to play a piece of music together in a coordinated way. As we will see, one of the challenges of coming together remotely for music engagement is the delay that often occurs in the transmission of the signal. So the degree of coordinated playing together at the same time required for the activity taking place is very important, and this also depends on the motivation and context of the musical interaction. 

A performance by more than one musician usually includes a high level of synchronous playing i.e. people producing musical sound together at the same time in a coordinated way. If the performers are geographically separated and using software to facilitate the performance, a delay between performers known as latency will always impact this. Players need to perform to a coordinated click, and usually prerecord tracks alone in their location, which are collated and edited together subsequently. Rehearsal, where part of the reason for coming together is to experience playing the parts together, and responding to each other’s unique approach is very challenging (more on this in my next article). 

Through my research, I found that a music lesson is more akin to a conversation: student and tutor interchangeably exchanging fragments of music and fragments of speech as they refine the student’s performance and unpack the fine-grained detail of a piece. As with conversation, there is some overlap between the end of one person talking or playing, and the start of the next person’s turn, but there is a much lower proportion of deliberate, coordinated, synchronous activity than there would be in a rehearsal or performance. As a result, the key effect of latency is on conversational and musical turn-taking, rather than the student and tutor’s ability to play together (Duffy & Healey, 2013). It is the interactional differences between face-to-face and video-mediated remote interaction that present the greatest challenges. This is more than a technological problem, this requires consideration of the problem through a music psychology and cognitive science frame. Technology can help with this, but not necessarily by addressing the holy grail of latency free remote communication (Duffy & Healey, 2017). 

Knowledge exchange 

An instrumental lesson is the transfer of a physical skill – at one level there is a right and wrong way to play an instrument and render the written music into sound, however the outcome is open to interpretation and subjective assessment, especially as a student advances. Part of what they learn is being able to make these subjective assessments for themselves. The way that technology was being used to ‘improve’ things often failed because it didn’t fully consider the different types of knowledge that are shared at different stages in a musician’s training. 

Non-verbal communication

Another thing that was often overlooked was the importance of non-verbal interaction during a lesson. My work found that non-verbal actions by both participants were fundamental to the student’s understanding of the tutor’s assessment of their playing. This determined whether the student continued to play the phrase they had been asked to present, or recognised that there was a problem and stopped for the problem to be diagnosed. This determined how long a student might play for before being interrupted, and whether they were expecting the interjection or not. If this mutual understanding of what is happening breaks down, the experience becomes much more stressful for the student. During a video-mediated lesson, many of the non-verbal interactions that work when student and tutor share the same space, can no longer operate. For example, the ability to monitor two things in different places, using direct and peripheral gaze, such as the student reading music as they play whilst monitoring the tutor for encouragement or signs that there is a problem.    

The importance of sharing music

Image: The challenge of monitoring the music and each other during a video-mediated lesson (Figure 6: Duffy & Healey, 2017)

The shared music score plays a fundamental role in coordinating lesson interaction. Both participants were found to spend a large part of the lesson time looking directly at the score, whilst peripherally monitoring the other person; to the extent that the they rarely looked directly at each other, and not for long sustained periods. Video-mediated lessons forced student and tutor into a face-to-face arrangement, significantly reducing their ability to monitor the music and each other at the same time.

During the same-room lessons, the tutor often gestured over a relevant part of the music as they explained something or gave feedback (see header image above). The student could see this, linking the talk directly to the music, providing a convenient conversational shortcut. In remote lessons, the student no longer had the same access to these gestures, their spatial location relative to the score represented through a camera onto a small flat screen. This led to the need for more talk dedicated to locating the feedback in the music e.g. “at bar 6, the second crotchet, the D…”. 

Another impact of no longer sharing the same physical score was that participants no longer had equal access to pencil markings such as annotations from previous lessons or home working. Where the remote lesson was a stand in for a temporary separation this was less of a problem, but over a number of lessons this could reduce the score’s value as an artifact, documenting the knowledge transferred or solutions derived for problems. 

Technology designed to share the same musical score digitally between student and tutor location, incorporating the shared transactions on and over the music, and recording annotations as they consolidate lesson-by-lesson, could be at least as important as the number of camera angles or microphones available to facilitate the remote lesson (Duffy & Healey, 2017).  

So what is possible?

At the time of my initial work in 2010, there was a focus on improving remote teaching facilitated by video-conference. Online teaching was happening through other more accessible technologies such as Skype, but this didn’t seem to be where the focus of research attention was. This put emphasis on the need to spend money on large, commercial video-conferencing units to ensure a ‘successful’ lesson. The technology companies that made this equipment had plenty of expensive add-ons that could, in theory, improve the quality of a remote music lesson. This was in addition to the basic video-conference units themselves, which were already prohibitively expensive for many organisations, and certainly not accessible to individuals, who could only access them through affiliation with an organisation that already had one. 

However, I also read many encouraging case studies of small, often geographically isolated, communities who found creative work arounds. For them, remote tuition was the only way to provide regular instrumental music lessons. Something was better than nothing – it enabled children to explore their potential, even if they had no local access to an experienced tutor, and communities to preserve traditional musical cultures that were dying out as people with knowledge moved away, rather than stayed in their community and passed it down. The way they modified and applied the basic technology they had, despite often having poor quality connectivity, often succeeded because they saw beyond the technology and focused on what was important during the teaching interaction. This is what seems to be happening now, during this unprecedented lock-down and social isolation. People are pioneering, driven by passion to keep teaching and for students to keep learning. I am excited and look forward to seeing how this changes the way that remote music tuition is delivered and used going forward. At the end of the day it is making music tuition more accessible, and this can only be a good thing. 

Bibliography

Duffy, S. (2015). Shaping Musical Performance Through Conversation. Queen Mary University of London.

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2012). Spatial Co-ordination in Music Tuition. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1512–1517). Sapporo: Cognitive Science Society.

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2013). Using Music as a Turn in Conversation in a Lesson. In Proceedings of the 35th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2231–2236). Berlin: Cognitive Science Society.

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2014a). The Conversational Organisation of Musical Contributions. Psychology of Music,42(6), 888–893. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305735614545501

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2014b). The Organisation of Repair in Musical Contributions. In 4th International Conference on Conversation Analysis (ICCA). Los Angeles.

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2017). A New Medium for Remote Music Tuition. Journal of Music, Technology and Education,10(1), 5–29. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1386/jmte.10.1.5_1

Duffy, S., & Healey, P. G. T. (2018). Refining Musical Performance through Overlap. Hacettepe University Journal of Education, 33(Special Issue), 316–333. https://doi.org/10.16986/HUJE.2018038809

Duffy, S., Williams, D., Stevens, T., Kegel, I., Jansen, J., Cesar, P., & Healey, P. G. T. (2012). Remote Music Tuition. In Proceedings of 9th Sound and Music Computing Conference (SMC ’12) (pp. 333–338). Copenhagen.