Welcome!

Did you come to tell me a little bit about who you are, and the story of how you are learning music on your own? The form below will allow you to share your thoughts with me.

If you came to learn a little more about my research project, scroll down to read a brief research statement, a general timeline for this project, and a little about myself and the research team.

Disclaimer: All information collected on this recruitment page will be considered confidential and will not be released to a third party. Through this general recruitment stage, I will be seeking three primary research subjects for my research in early 2011. Once that selection has occur, all digital and virtual forms of the information collected through the form below will be permenantly deleted. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me directly at marge.lam@utoronto.ca.

I look forward to hearing your stories!

Sincerely, Margaret Lam

I'm interested in your story.

Research Statement

This research is motivated by a personal interest to explore the practice of music knowledge seekers and music knowledge producers as members of an online knowledge community or network. In particular, the world of socially-based online media as a context tor the pursuit of music knowledge by individuals who have not engaged with conventional institutions of music knowledge is of particular interest.

This research agenda is inspired by my experience in music history and ethnomusicology as well as information science, and reflects an eflort on my part to integrate the best of both disciplines in an exploratory study. Furthermore, as a student in the Knowledge Media Design collaborative program (KMD CP), I have an interest in the design of online knowledge platforms, specifically within the domain of music. The findings of this exploratory will inform in a variety of ways my design projects in that context.

Three case studies of such individuals in Toronto will be conducted as an exploratory study of this social world. The case of individuals who self-identifies as having no musical training provides a much richer sample with which to conduct case studies, compared to those who are already engaged with conventional musical institutions. The self-identified non-musicians' conceptualization of music and related knowledge will not be heavily influenced by the western European paradigm of music, which will allow the personal patterns of interaction the subjects have with the world of online music knowledge to emerge without being tinged or informed by socio-cultural norms and convention within that paradigm.

Research Timeline

About the Researcher

I am currently a master's candidate at the Faculty of Information, exploring the intersection of music knowledge, information science, and system design. I was inspired by a friend who couldn't keep a beat or tell the difference between an E minor chord from an E major chord. I watched him overcoming his own perceived limits as he tried to learn the guitar, struggling to co-ordinate counting and strumming and chord switching at first, to being able to play the first few phrases of Fur Elise that was arranged for guitar. I want to learn more about how people are learning how to make music on there own, so that we can design knowledge platforms that can help people learn music on their own.

This project is supervised by Prof. Matt Ratto at the faculty of Information and Director of the Critical Making Lab, with support with Prof. Rhonda McEwen. Prof. Jenna Hartel supervised a related pilot study in 2009.

This research has been made possible with the support of the Social Science and Humanities Research Council.