Those previous posts in which I’ve quoted the Intellectual Property Office’s guidelines (rules?) on fair dealing with regard to study and research don’t quite cover something I need to do in order to teach a class on Music Programming.

By ‘music programming’, incidentally, I don’t mean in the sense of programming beats or using sequencers. I mean it in the radio sense of selecting and putting together a series of songs in a particular order. That is, a playlist.

The module is part of the radio curriculum, but I encourage music industries students to study it as well. It’s about the way in which music creates meaning – not just in and of itself, but when arranged into a narrative over time.

We discuss musical genre, musicological features, instrumentation and the fact that the meanings we associate with pieces of music are frequently distinct from their author’s original intention. Jazz, for instance, is often used to conjure notions of sophistication and class, when their original contexts and meanings were often political, popularist or counter-cultural.

In order to effectively teach these concepts, it’s necessary for students to create their own compilations that respond to a brief. Assemble a short collection of music that would make sense as a soundtrack for a romantic comedy. Or that would suit being played in a bar on Broad Street. Or a skate shop. Or throughout a TV gardening programme. Or a science-fiction first person shooter computer game.

They collect pieces of music that include specific instruments and think about the connotations of the sound of those instruments. What does a banjo ‘mean’? A vibraphone? Steel drums? Pipe organ? Theremin?

The students are also challenged to research unfamiliar genres – from Zydeco to Grime, Bebop to Death Metal – and come up with playlists that would be meaningful to fans of those genres. And they’re also encouraged to think about how a selection of songs would make sense to a niche audience within a specific geographic area – as you might do if you were programming music for a radio station.

Of course, peer feedback is important – so swapping those compilations and playlists among their fellow students is important, so that what one student learns can be transferred, listened to, reflected upon and developed among classmates.

Naturally, the best way to do this is through a combination of blank CDs, filesharing websites, mp3 blogs, and other people’s record collections. This is not something that would have been quite so possible even ten years ago. And the potential for the study of musical texts in this way is quite exciting.

Sadly, none of this seems to fall within the parameters of fair dealing.

Lucky we don’t authorise or condone anything like that.