Music and the Creative Human
Dr Jane Pettegree
Facing the challenge of AI, HE searches for frameworks as a drowning man clutches at a floating log. LLMs mean that ‘teaching people to write clearly about stuff’ is no longer enough. What do employers want from an arts and humanities degree?
In a weekend away with school friends whose careers have taken them to upper management levels of law, civil engineering, television news production, tourism, sport and school teaching, I asked them what they might be looking for in a new graduate trainee. Here’s what they said:
- ‘Being curious, agility of thought, being able to articulate a viewpoint or opinion or propose a solution, problem solving, and actually being comfortable speaking to people’ (the civil engineer);
- Teamwork and people skills; time and people management; if an undergraduate has staged an event alongside doing their degree, I’m always impressed’ (the journalist);
- ‘I need to know they can communicate with clients and be a team player with their colleagues; broader outlooks, passions and talents usually makes them more confident, well-rounded people’ (the solicitor);
- ‘musicians are great communicators, who are also excellent at listening to others; they are team players but know when it is important to step up and take responsibility; they can concentrate and focus, as well as multi-task’ (the primary school teacher);
The EU patent lawyer sent me a 2022 EU funded report on ‘Softskills for Knowledge Transfer’ which said similar things.[i] This (see footnote) has many suggestions for training sessions, including a slide listing ‘soft skills’ necessary for effective knowledge transfer, including ‘love for creative solutions and learning’.[ii] I like that word: creative.
My colleagues who teach practical music can speak for themselves about the educational value of playing your clarinet in real time, but I imagine resilience, listening, practice-based problem solving and (particularly in ensemble playing) people skills will all feature in their reports.
I, however, teach more traditional arts and humanities courses on music history and culture which are in the frontline for LLM redundancy. It is no longer enough to ask students to write an essay which organises facts into 3 paragraphs with an introduction and a conclusion, peppering this with citations. AI can do this better and faster than most early-stage undergraduates. We have to find ways to encourage mental agility, willingness to communicate a new idea, and the courage to tackle open ended problems with potentially different solutions: in short, to encourage, creativity instead of simply focussing on producing a perfectly polished piece of writing that collates what is already known.
MU1005 Words and Music is a first-year module with an enrolment that spans people with advanced school music qualifications and those who like songs but have never studied music before. It looks at songs and asks, how does language and sound collaborate to affect listeners meaningfully? It has three pieces of assessment: the first asks students to listen and describe what they hear using words and works they have been taught; the second asks students to think about how music tells stories; so far, these are essay based assignments prime by ‘what is known’. However, throughout the module, weekly tutorial tasks include creative play, encouraging students to use ideas from the weekly listening to create new sounds. This culminates in the final piece of assessment, which is to create a short 2 to 3 minute audio file (some do a song, many others do something much more exploratory with fragments of sound), explained by a commentary that tells the listener what they are hearing, explains the creative decisions that have made this possible, and suggests how the material they have studied this term might relate to what they have done. We like to think that it gives students some agency to express their ‘take aways’ from the course.
That final assignment is one of my favourite things to mark out all year. Using the “knowledge transfer” soft skill terminology provided by my EU lawyer friend, it involves empathy (making sense of what another creative was trying to communicate in what they have studied); problem solving (working out how to make sounds and combine them in an audio file); communication (how to explain a new sound clearly to the listening marker); thinking outside of the box (there is no one set solution); and, simply, encouraging love for creating solutions and learning.
Final projects have communicated environmental issues (climate change, deforestation, sea mammal sounds, etc), wellbeing and neurodiversity (the sound of calm, how it feels to have an autism spectrum or ADD brain), the value of friendship (making dinner, shared sounds with a friendship network), and much more. The early parts of the course which encourage close listening to shorter songs encourage students to be more attentive listeners to small details. The later parts of the course, which centre on music and narrative, help students to think about the structure of the listening experience and imagine the listening journey.
There are marking criteria, which are – as is inevitable for all arts and humanities course – a mix of subjective and objective elements. It would, I think, be rather lovely if elective sub-honours modules were simply marked pass or fail, encouraging risk taking. I acknowledge, however, that some students are incentivised by grades, and study-abroad students need to carry these nuggets home with them,
MU1005 Words and Music has received a ‘Dandelion Award’ for engaging with the education for sustainability framework.[iii] Amongst the many different frameworks we currently work with, this one – which encourages a future-orientated mindset committed to human and more-than-human flourishing seems to me to set an ethical standard. Helpfully, there is a convergence of many of the skills needed to achieve both sustainability and employability. Music, we think in the Laidlaw Music Centre, helps to put creative human experience at the heart of both frameworks.
[i] SoftSkills for Knowledge Transfer, see outcome pack https://www.ktsoftskills.eu/results
[ii] Soft Skills for Knowledge Transfer, KT Soft Skills Programme Handout, Work Page 3, slides 11 and 12https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/64648d54c2147f5cb4e82d62/67f3965a708e9800da35c799_KT%20SoftSkills%20Skill%20Investigation%20Report%20presentation%20.pdf
[iii] QAA Education for Sustainable Development https://www.qaa.ac.uk/the-quality-code/education-for-sustainable-development