As I write I’m just on the way back from the Soundhouse conference which took place at the Australian Music Association Conference 2009. For those who don’t know, the Soundhouse Association is an international not-for-profit alliance of institutions with an interest in music technology and education. Soundhouses are in schools, colleges, museums, theatres and other funny places. At MLC School, where I teach composition, we have a Soundhouse. There we offer training in software like Sibelius and GarageBand.
The Soundhouse conference was fantastic. There were some amazing people doing amazing things and I tweeted about these regularly over the last two days – just search Twitter for the hashtag #soundhouse.
As mentioned, the Soundhouse conference took place alongside AMAC 2009. This gave us a chance to look at what new music products are available in Australia, especially on the Roland stand – they are one of the two sponsors of Soundhouse. I was interested to see that they are encouraging the adoption of drum classes using their V-Drum electronic drum kits. I was suspicious of this at first, but it worked really well and I think is a great way of teaching engaging percussion lessons. I’ve put two videos on my YouTube page and here’s one of them:
There were many other things to report, but I’m rather tired so I’m going to go and find a quiet corner at the airport while I wait for my plane. More anon…
James Humberstone 