Monday, June 22, 2009

First Try Using Tables

It is a big challenge for me to use tables to design my homepage although I want to use it to beautify my website. It took me so long to get the right way to make my homepage look like the way I wanted. Now, it is still not the way I want. I will continue fixing it.

I now appreciate the web designers more. I had no ideas it needed so much creativity to design a web page. Because I have seen the web pages everyday, I am so used to seeing these website designing without thinking how much effort the creators need to put into.

First Video

Last Saturday, I video recorded one of my students, Jenny Li, who played the first movement of the Sonatina in C, Op.55 No.1 by F. Kuhlau. Then, I uploaded this video clip to the my homepage under "Works by My Students."

You can take a look here:
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~ssf270/studentworks.html

I will continue this project by putting up more materials.

My Role of Group Project

Last week, Dr.Gilbert assigned each student in class in one of the three groups. The groups were named after the RGB colors, red, green and blue. I am in the Red Team with two other classmates, Oscar Alejandro Baez Gonzalez and Aurora Dreger. Alejandro and I are in the music education program while Aurora is in the dance education program.

My role in this project is to create a website that can link all my piano students together. The reason why I had this idea is because I always thought it was unfortunate that my own students and parents do not have many chances to engage with each other. I would like this website to be a small music community for my students and parents.

This page will contain three main parts. First, the part where I will upload audio and video clips of many professional musicians' performance. I know that learning music instruments costs a lot of money as well as buying CD's and going to live ocncerts. Not every person can afford buying expensive CD's. But, I find that observing from the professional musicians is one of the best ways to motivate students and learn from. Therefore, I would like to offer my students this opportunity to watch the performers through this page.

The second part of this website will contain my students' recording works. I find it very important that my students can share and learn from each other. I like the idea that they are learning piano and music together. No one is learning music by themselves. This music community should help them develop their music learning interests.

The last part will be the comment page. I will have to figure out a way to make this page because I have not learned how to make posting comments yet.

Life without Computer Functioning Normal

Starting from last week, my laptop has experienced some technical difficulties. It may be because of the virus attack so it kept shutting down the computer. I spent the whole week fixing and thanked my friend who helped me to re-install the Window XP during the weekend.

It was a horrible week because I could not use my laptop to do my homework. I was trying to imagine what if my laptop did not get fixed by the last week of this session. It got me into thinking about life without technologies. It could be very scary.

Now, my laptop runs fine now and I can continue working on the homepage and the blog.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Music and Technology

So, music and technology are related? I have never thought about that question deeply before the first class of Technological Resources for Performing Arts taught by Dr. John Gilbert. I never thought about that the invention of piano was an important and successful experiment of music technology during the early eighteenth century. The class made me start thinking about how closely music and technology are related.

Without new technologies, music in this world would not be the same. Without the microphones and recording devices, singers and musicians would not be able to record their works, producers would not be able to produce albums. Without selling albums, music would not be promoted and spread to everywhere in the world. Recently, filming music videos became a popular technique to promote artists. It includes the audio and visual aids that catch audiences' attention more. When we go to concerts by popular singers, we see a lot of fantastic scenes, including the lighting. It is the technologies make it happen.

In asian areas, including Taiwan and Japan, singing karaoke became one of the most popular activities during the leisure time. The invention of the karaoke machines was also a success and helped the businessmen to make a lot of money. People do not have to be professional musicians to use music technologies. Moreover, internet became one of the popular approaches to music. We often download music and songs from the internet and often go to websites for watching music videos. I always share the music and songs with my friends online.

In conclusion, I became more appreciated. Because of the new technologies, music became the core of many people's life. Because of the music, people came closer to each other. Music and technologies have brought most people together and helped people to share the music more easily.