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:
The ultimate goal is to help students take the lead in their education and gain ownership of technical concepts.
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 written 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.
This book was inspired by and partially adapted from 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. HPP seeks to do more than simply reproduce print publishing in digital form. Rather, we ask, what can a digital “book” do that a print book cannot? As we state on our website,
Writing and reading are social acts. Hybrid Pedagogy Publishing seeks to encourage active public discourse by publishing works that are born out of, or facilitate, community (inter)action — works that are crowd-sourced or collaboratively authored, openly accessible, encourage remixing and republishing, and/or blur the lines between author and reader.
This textbook is meant to support active student engagement with music in the theory classroom. That means that this text is meant to take a back seat to student music making (and breaking). It is not the center of the course.
The three original authors use this textbook in the context of “inverted” or “flipped” courses, often following an inquiry-based model.
As a result, most of the pages in this textbook do not read like a typical twentieth-century textbook. They are somewhere in between prosy lecture notes and reference material, with minimal graphical or audio examples. Also, unlike many resources for “flipped” classes, there are few resources in this textbook where the core information is presented in video. We made these decisions consciously, so that this would not simply be a multimedia, web-based version of an industrial-era textbook. Rather, we wanted to create a textbook that could serve as a quick reference in the context of active musical engagement.
In our classes, student activity takes pride of place, and it often precedes engagement with the textbook. The information contained in this text is secondary to that activity, and thus this text is meant to play only a supporting role in our classes.
For more information about the inverted music class, see Engaging Students: Essays in Music Pedagogy, Volume 1 (2013) and Volume 2 (2014).
This “textbook” is an open-source textbook. That means that you are free to use, modify, distribute, even sell its contents provided that you 1) attribute the original to us, and 2) pass on the same rights to others (which includes us!) by licensing your derivative work the same way we license this one. (See the Creative Commons license deed linked on each page of this textbook.) In fact, we highly encourage others to “hack” this book: supplement it, reword it, add examples, drop chapters, mash it up with another one. Not only will that mean a greater diversity of material available, but if you improve your version of this work with your hacks, we can use those improvements to make this resource better, too.
If you want to “fork” this textbook, either to deploy it for your own course or to use it as the basis for your own derived work, please visit the GitHub project page, log in (or sign up), and click “fork.” From there, you can edit, add, or remove the text, graphics, and videos (all text is in the very user-friendly Markdown format), or the theme (HTML and CSS). You can also send us a “pull request,” if you’ve made a change you think would be beneficial to add to this textbook. You can even download an individual file to convert into a handout to distribute in class. For more details on the open-source ideology behind this textbook or the process of using it for your own purposes, please read Kris Shaffer’s articles in Hybrid Pedagogy: “Open-Source Scholarship” and “Push, Pull, Fork: GitHub for Academics.”
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.” We hope this textbook can “facilitate student access to existing knowledge, and empower them to critique it, dismantle it, and create new knowledge.”
This means that at times (and increasingly as more contribute to the text), multiple perspectives will be provided on a single issue. Also, the license (and to the greatest extent possible, the technology) permits an instructor—and even a student—to tweak and rewrite the text. And rather than arbitrate standards across institutional boundaries, we hope that the online nature of the text, and the accompanying hashtag #OpenMusicTheory, will help build community across institutional boundaries, rather than uniformity.
While there are three authors and an editor listed on this text as of first “publication,” we hope that the technology and the license encourage otherss to contribute new material to this volume. Though Kris, Bryn, Brian, and Robin are the original authors and editors, we have chosen a license and platform that essentially give the community of music scholars and students ownership over the textbook.