What Happens Next? (An Essay)

26 November 2020

by Ian Howell

I tell my students that the best research projects arise when you discover either a gap in the literature or friction between two ideas. That in the best case, their contribution will be to explore either that which is missing or those things that do—but cannot—coexist. And so, in the waning days of both 2020 and the fall academic semester in the United States of America, I have to ask which better characterizes our struggle: that which we see is missing, or that which we are in conflict over?

The SARS-CoV-2 disease absolutely decimated American culture, artistic and otherwise. It laid bare the value of pluribus over unum, and America’s reaction leaves me seriously concerned about our ability to manage future crises. That friends think the ability to use google is the equivalent of research, and that liberty trumps public health is indicative of an issue so deep that we may not ever be whole. The next time someone suggests that they have the training to evaluate the validity of a preprint Coronavirus study, I am going to give them a Bartok string quartet and challenge them to show up twenty-four hours later to discuss its analysis. Never in my lifetime has there been such disdain for expertise and the simultaneous belief that it can be quickly acquired. I do not have hope this will change, and I am livid that such magical thinking has an impact on public policy. This has cost lives. And it has a profoundly negative effect on the lives of medical workers, including many in my immediate family.

Conflict is not hard to see in multiple layers of society. It is in the public square. It is in the solutions people have tried in reaction to the physical restrictions imposed due to the Pandemic. It is in the stories we tell ourselves to justify what we sell as a quality substitute for Life-As-It-Was-In-February. In music education specifically, all these forces exist. Multiple commercial ventures have sprung up to solve problems associated with making music under physical distancing restrictions. Those that do what they advertise are great. I, and many colleagues, send money every month to cover subscriptions for such products. Many simply overreach, oversimplify, and attempt to tear down competing solutions they do not understand. This is, perhaps what the messy logic of a marketplace looks like during a period of disruption. No one wants to start an advertisement with, “We’re not sure if this will be true in a month, or even if it is still true now—there’s just too much to try to stay on top of—But our product will solve all your problems! Probably!” So instead, the visible face of our industry is now one of competing camps tied to software, hardware, philosophies (do we teach face to face or just online?), regions of the country (where is the third wave now? who is still on their second wave?), and attitudes about the future.

Schools of higher education are, in their own way, having a meta-argument. School A must offer face to face interactions regardless of whether they are of quality. School B is completely online with no technological support beyond Microsoft Teams. School C is offering hybrid education, but technology resources are limited to what specific faculty members understand and are able to advocate for and personally support. School D invested a huge sum of money into a site specific low latency solution that is challengingly complex and does not work when they close the campus due to an outbreak. School E requires the use of the simplest low latency solution, guaranteeing both higher latencies and low audio quality. That many institutions that were 100% online for the fall are publicly planning to go hybrid in the spring is a sign, I think, that some approaches are ‘winning’ the argument. Here in Boston, several schools are attempting to plan to do just that. And NEC, which has been hybrid all fall, will continue to offer an experience prioritizing as much in person collaborative music making as is safe and possible.

What is harder to see is the gap. Almost by definition, what we do not see, and have never seen is the hardest thing to imagine. The place to start, I think, is with a sincere look at one’s values. Unmoored to values, institutions can only react. Unmoored to values, an institution makes compromises based on circumstances rather than pedagogy. In March, when the world was scattered, the collective trauma of the experience fractured the industry. Or, perhaps more accurately, showed us how fractured we already were. In our March 2020 paper on video conferencing platform audio quality, we wrote,

At the time, we did not know better. We did not yet know about existing solutions that could improve audio quality. We did not know about solutions that would improve video latency. And perhaps most importantly, we did not know about the variety of high quality solutions that could solve audio latency. Other people did, but we did not know them and they did not know us. Circumstances were dictating our available solutions. The hand of providence itself guided our options. We were reacting. We were not lead by our values.

A sense of resignation set in, especially among those in leadership positions. This is, perhaps no more clear than in the outcome of a consortium of American music schools that worked all summer to secure a 16kbps improvement in Zoom’s audio bit rate and the ability to turn off echo cancellation. It is nice to have. I’m glad to use it when it is indicated, including in a workflow I use for my weekly studio class. It should have been a footnote to an inter-institutional agenda that included addressing latency, creating educational material, exploring novel audio and video streaming options, etc. We should have inspired educators to rise to the challenge of new platforms with better features. Instead, the academy waited for a solution that bargained away our basic ability to collaborate in return for an incrementally easier deployment and a slight improvement in audio quality (that still falls below what Cleanfeed, Source Connect Now, SoundJack, and many others offer). We let concerns over a solution being hard for a percentage of a music faculty dictate whether what we ended up with was good for everyone. What’s worse, many involved spent the summer publicly spreading incorrect information about whether low latency technology worked. None of us in the music education industry, myself included, won our jobs because we were the right people for this moment. This was, for many, a sign of just how incapable of meeting this challenge most music schools are.

Those of us who believed in March that the physical restrictions would continue through the 20-21 school year began to work toward solving the larger structural challenges. How do you deploy a technology that requires an ethernet connection, for example, when most of your students do not have access to a router? How do you convince an entire department used to performing without headphones to put them on? How do you make sure everyone has a workable microphone? You level with them and tell them that without these improvements, there is no (or little) collaborative music making. You run controlled experiments to evaluate gear. You do so with enough lead time for people to plan and acquire the necessary tools and skills. These were by no means insurmountable challenges, but only made sense to pursue if one assumes the present challenges will persist for a long time. At publication time, it has been 258 days since March 13th, the day the Northeast shut down. I find it helps to amortize costs (both real and in terms of time and opportunity cost) over a longer and longer period of time.

But belief in a longer time line was only part of the issue. If we refuse to accept that providence dictates our choices, we have to take control ourselves, and those choices must be tied to and driven by our values. It is not enough to say that we want to do the best job under the circumstances. We have to say what matters and what we are willing to accept, even if we do not yet have a solution to the challenges we refuse to accept. For me, I was unwilling to put a placeholder in the next year of my teaching. If something was important pedagogically in February, it remained important in September. I was unwilling to let go of full spectrum audio quality and collaborative music making. My values dictated that something is learned in the act of making music with someone else. I suspect that most reading this would agree. I also suspect that most singers and voice teachers have been without this since March. This started me, and a group of like-minded educators off on a journey this summer that has resulted in a radical shift in our technological capacity. We now teach lessons, run rehearsals, run recording sessions, make videos, and broadcast performances, all using high quality audio and video captured in real time, without a perceptible lag between musicians as it happens. This is possible now, and would not have happened but for our willingness to follow through on a commitment to our values as musicians and educators.

But What Happens Next…?

Anyone still in a crisis mode needs to look around and notice that reality is not going to change soon. Whatever you are doing now, the distance between that and February of 2020 is insurmountable in the short term. You are not in a crisis now. You are in normal with extra anxiety. If anything, after the next one or two huge waves of the Pandemic wash over the country this winter, your solutions will be more restricted. Yes, vaccination will begin to spread in the United States, likely by next summer at the earliest. But there will be no ticker-tape parade the day we defeat this virus. We will just notice that fewer people are dying, that fewer people are being hospitalized, and that elements of life are returning to normal. This will take years from patient zero .

So, if we are to consider the future, we need to not think in terms of how quickly we can return to the past. We need to think about how the present is going to change us. Schools that offered online-only education this fall (especially those that counted on the Zoom music mode) are turning to hybrid solutions in the spring at least in part as an acknowledgment that what they provided fell short. Schools that provided high quality, lagless online solutions are able to keep them as a feature of the education, even when providing a hybrid structure. I am a huge fan of and evangelist for the SoundJack and Livelab platforms. If you look at the menu of this website, that should not come as a shock. There are other solutions out there, but none that currently match the quality and reliability of these platforms. I think that we should take some time to consider how SoundJack and Livelab, or whatever else is next, are going to remain a feature of the music industry. I would like to share just a few examples of this to spark our collective imaginations, because the present is prologue.

At NEC, we identified two areas facing existential challenges. The first, the classical voice area, literally faced restrictions limiting the number of people who could sing per room and the duration they could sing for. Following a short session, that room would then need to be aired out for an hour. This placed a huge burden on our facilities and faculty. A pianist coming to campus to coach singers for eight hours would need to switch rooms sixteen times and would still face eight hours of exposure. The other area was our Prep and Continuing Education Jazz ensemble program. These were students cut off from campus access due to the Pandemic, whose art form is defined by playing music in real time with one another. The education is in the playing. In both cases, we scaled up a SoundJack system. It took an incredible amount of effort to educate students and teachers; to assess, equip, and troubleshoot their technology. But it had to happen. It was an extension of our values. Because we share faculty, the Walnut Hill School for the Arts in Massachusetts similarly has equipped spaces on their campus and at faculty members’ homes.

If the present is, indeed, prologue, this is what I want you to consider. The big shift in our college voice area switching over to being majority on SoundJack did not take place because I mandated it. It did not take place because their voice teachers demanded it (I demanded it for my studio, but many of my colleagues were happy to deal with lag in a lesson since they do not play piano anyway). It happened when the entire coaching faculty got set up to coach from home. When the ability to actually sing along with a pianist depended on taking the time to set up your own home SoundJack set up, we saw dozens of students fall in line.

This is the important part: the life and training of a performing musician is filled with a lot of mundane musical work that requires collaboration. I used to commute two hours each way to Manhattan to coach for 50 minutes with Ted Taylor, or to have a lesson with Lynne Vardaman. If the option exists to walk into a room in my house and have that coaching in real time with better than CD quality audio… are you kidding? Of course I would have rather done that. The expense of travel, the carbon footprint burden, the wear on your body… the list of benefits is long. Participants in our Prep and Continuing education programs similarly have had to schlep into Back Bay every Saturday for years. By offering real time collaborative music making to people with busy lives and logistical challenges, we are poised to become the first truly regional community music school. Even if you are a cellist and can rehearse masked in a physically distant manner at your school because their hybrid plan protects time in a large enough room for your quartet, leveling up on technology now will help you in your post conservatory professional life. We are training a generation of students to expect this. It will not, and should not replace the important live interactions we will be able to have again in the future. If for no other reason than those are the easiest interactions to monetize. However, to ignore this is to ignore a technology that could easily become ubiquitous in the circumstances where it both saves time and expands any one musician’s regional reach.

A final, maybe not undisquieting thought…

There is a time window that will be consequential for our industry. I am Gen X. What you have to understand about us is that there are not enough of us to do anything, and that we have had to wait a long time to even begin to move into positions where we can effect change. Most of us have been happy to adapt and use the best technology possible to teach since March. Most of our young colleagues want to radically overhaul the music industry to excise deeply problematic aspects of it, and we want to help facilitate that without burning it to the ground first. We are also painfully aware that this overhaul will likely only happen if there is a terrible period where music schools fail and are reformed. No one in charge currently is going to innovate themselves out of a job. I don’t know exactly what the window is. If music schools are able to go back to business as usual in January, this change will take place on a normal generational time table. If the Pandemic continues into the fall 21 semester, I think we are going to see a sudden lurch forward. Schools will close. Faculty will retire. Students are simply not going to continue to invest money to work toward degrees at schools with teachers incapable of providing the highest quality education. This means technical competency. Or maybe everything goes back to exactly the way it was. But that’s the nut of the gamble, and only buys time. The future is coming fast. What happens next is going to be dictated by what we work toward now. It has never been more exciting. But don’t mistake how competitive it already is.