About Inquiry-Based Music Theory

Course structure and textbook layout

Instead of a traditional lecture structure or the newer model of flipped-instruction, inquiry-based class structure asks the students to explore concepts from given exemplars and extrapolate their own conclusions regarding the rules and logic for a given topic. The instructor’s role is meant to guide them through this process while providing non-intuitive knowledge such as terminology and historical context.

As you can see from the navigation sidebar, this online textbook is divided into a simple hierarchy: Chapter - Topics - Parts

Each chapter of this textbook highlights a conceptual grouping and is divided into any number of topics. These topics provide the instructional foundation for the inquiry-based model and are therefore divided into three parts:

• Overview - A short explanation meant to provide a starting point in the students’ exploration of the topic.
• Examples - A number of exemplars demonstrating ideal implementation of the topic. From these, the student will attempt to outline the rules and foundations of the topic.
  • For this textbook, the examples are almost always created using an interactive, web-based, music-notation software rather than static images. This allows students to experiment and alter the examples and receive instant audio feedback on their changes. To explore this software, please visit our tutorial on ABC notation and its implementation.
• Lesson - As the final part of each topic, the lesson will act as the repository for all of the students findings as well as the instructor’s guidance and corrections.
  • This will be the section of this website that most closely resembles a traditional textbook, but rather than being a static, pre-determined knowledge, it will reflect the students’ explanations. After the students have explored the examples and attempted to create the rules of a given topic – either individually or as a group – the instructor leads a class discussion in which the students share their findings to be transcribed on the board. Once a suggested rule has been listed, the instructor takes an initial count of how many other students had the same rule and then allows other students to suggest alterations to refine the rule. As a final step in this iterative process, the instructor provides missing nuances, standard terminology, further reading if necessary.
  • This entire discussion including their rules and explanations is transcribed by a teaching assistant directly into the pre-created lesson page of this website, so that students can instantly access their findings and begin their assignments on the topic. Ideally, the instructor will later update the shorthand notes to create easy-to-read prose and context. It is through this process, that the students create a textbook that best reflects their learning-styles and logic while still meeting the instructor’s desired standards and curriculum.

The ultimate goal is to help students take the lead in their education and gain ownership of technical concepts.

Technical

The source code for Inquiry-Based Music Theory is hosted in a GitHub repository. This allows the textbook to be easily shared, adapted, and modified by anyone, an Open Educational Resource.

The website is built using Jekyll static site generator and is hosted on GitHub Pages. The content is created in Markdown, a simple mark up language written in plain text.

Interactive musical notation and midi play back is added to the site using abcjs to render ABC Music Notation.

About Open Music Theory

This book was inspired by Open Music Theory.

Kris Shaffer, Bryn Hughes, and Brian Moseley, Open Music Theory, Hybrid Pedagogy 2014+ (github repository).

Open Music Theory was built on resources authored by Kris Shaffer, Bryn Hughes, and Brian Moseley. It is edited by Kris Shaffer and Robin Wharton, and is published by Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing.

Rather than create “a fixed tome of knowledge, shared across institutional boundaries, with the authority to dictate pedagogical decisions and arbitrate student success,” OMT strives to be a critical textbook: “multi-authored, physically hackable, and legally alterable.”

For more details on the pedagogy and open-source ideology behind OMT, please see About Open Music Theory and Kris Shaffer’s articles “Open-Source Scholarship” and “Push, Pull, Fork: GitHub for Academics.”