I’m so glad we’ve all been back in classrooms together since Fall 2021. I think it’s the best way to learn together and be effective for the majority of our work. However, three terms of being online have also brought some important innovations.
A few things worked better online than they did in person. When we collaborate on a project, jumping into a random breakout room is much faster than rearranging chairs (and less distracting). Chat messages provided a great intraclass communication method (e.g., Question: “Did Cuthbert really say ‘swordfight?’” Answer: “No, he said ‘chordify!’”).
One thing that I found very effective that I wanted to keep is for lectures to be more integrated with the process of self-learning in preparation for problem sets. Sometimes, an 80-minute in-person class followed by 6–8 hours of working on a PSet is the best way to learn. That’s what I used to do pre-pandemic. But other times, hearing me explain something for 5 minutes and then having as much time as you need to ensure you have fully digested the concept, and repeating until there’s been 30 minutes of lecture and 6 hours of reflection broken up is even better. So while we’ll do much of our learning in classes, we’ll do a substantial chunk this way, too.
The videos in these lectures were recorded (a) in haste in Somerville in Spring 2020, (b) during Fall 2020 when I was teaching remotely from Honolulu, where my wife is a professor, (c) on an iPad in various places, and, especially as the semester goes on, (d) newly recorded from Fall 2021—now at MIT; depending on if I got it right the first time or the world of computational music theory has changed.
So the backgrounds will vary (as will the length of my hair, etc.), but they’ve almost all been re-edited and re-annotated for this class. You might see a purple box correcting something wrong I said earlier. Always believe the purple box.
