Today, we are proud to announce that Jordan Hochenbaum will be stepping into his new role as Chief Creative Officer, while remaining Vice President of Engineering at Kadenze. In honor of this promotion, I sat down with him to chat about his work at Kadenze and what it is like to teach a MOOC.
The drive to create is huge for Jordan Hochenbaum. In many ways, it has been the defining force in his life. “No matter how tired from everything I am, I always try to make time for music,” says Hochenbaum. “It’s important—at least for my own well being.”
The child of a pianist and an electrical engineer, Jordan grew up in a house of creative people. His older brother bought him his first musical instrument (a guitar), and at the age of nine Jordan began a lifelong relationship with music. Like many teenagers, he played in his fair share of garage bands, but even then he felt the draw of electronic music and the possibilities contained within.
These days Jordan releases music regularly as Natan H (his most recent album came out on Nov. 27, 2015), but I know him as the Vice President of Engineering at Kadenze. When I ask him how he came to work in online higher ed, he smiles and with a chuckle says, “That’s a really good question.”
But in truth, it’s no question at all. Jordan is an eternally curious guy. Just last week he called me over to his desk because he wanted to tell me about some new music production trick that he had been working on the night before. As he explained the complicated physics behind the music he played me, I couldn’t help but admire his gumption. Because, gumption is probably the best word to describe Jordan Hochenbaum.
As a Ph.D. student at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, Jordan’s research combined audio and sensor-based analysis with machine learning algorithms to monitor and report on musician performance. Not only was the work groundbreaking for involving computer algorithms in artistic pedagogy, but at the time he began his research, Jordan had never before created a machine learning algorithm in his life. After graduating, Jordan would go on to work at Twitter, analyzing big data streams using principles of composition and musical construction. This, all before ‘big data’ had fully taken its place in the zeitgeist of social media and popular culture.
As Jordan walks me through his past work, he glances repeatedly into his quickly cooling cup of coffee, sometimes the artist and sometimes the engineer, but always passionate. It isn’t until I bring up his Kadenze course “Sound Production in Ableton Live”, and his students at CalArts, that he glances up from his introspection and launches, with renewed fervor, into an animated discussion on pedagogy and technology at Kadenze.
When I question the effectiveness of online learning in subjects like art and music, he is quick to take up the challenge.
“The human component is super important. No one is going to say that it’s not. That being said, I offer a course like my Kadenze course at Calarts, and I have started incorporating some of what we do at Kadenze into that class. And that’s because the computer is really good at certain things. For example: I might tell a student that their musical submission is a bit bright and that they might want to reduce some of the high frequencies to make the submission a little darker. I might even recommend a general range of frequencies to start at. But the computer can be much more specific. It’s a certain level of analysis that I can never do as a human. It’s just a question of using the machine for what it’s good at. That doesn’t mean it’s trying to solve every aesthetic problem ever, but it can do these other things that sometimes a human can’t.”
After this, he goes on to tell me about what he has learned from running his class on Kadenze: That students tend to prefer public conversation on the student coursework galleries to the more formalized and private peer assessments that is the norm online; that he has been excited to see students of all levels coming together on the discussion forums to help each other on homework and projects; and how humbled he has been by the overwhelming positive response from students after the course finished its first run this December.
When I ask him what he thinks we could do better next time, he pauses.
“To be honest, I think it takes you at least four times teaching a course before you get it right. When you’re teaching in person, you look out at a classroom and you see three people nodding their head in agreement while one person’s eyes are glazed over and you’re trying to reach everybody. But it’s really difficult. You have to figure out two or three different ways to say the same thing; ways that still engage the people who got it the first time, while also re-explaining things to the people who didn’t connect to what you said the first time. So, it was the scariest thing to put this online. Because you start questioning how effective everything is going to be there. I mean, there are all these things you feel like you have to start thinking about. For this course, I’m really trying to tell a story. It’s about a lot more than just teaching a skill. There are historical and cultural factors to consider and they are all a part of it. And when you offer something thing like this, you have to think about how you’re telling that story at every step, because you can’t check in with the people you’re teaching after you record yourself. To be honest, it’s really scary. Now that it’s done, I’m super proud of how it all came out. Still, I feel like there is so much more to talk about—so much more I want to explore. But I guess that’s the thing about art, at some point you need to put it out in the world, and see what happens.”
For “Sound Production in Ableton Live,” Jordan also got the chance to sit down with Ableton co-creator, musician, and installation artist, Robert Henke.
“Robert is just an amazing artist. Whether we’re talking about his long-time musical project Monolake or his installation work, he has a whole career behind him that continuously pushes the boundaries of electronic-based arts, and so it was a big honor to have him join the course. Before we filmed his lectures we sat down to do an interview. I had originally intended to go through a bunch of questions I prepared, but after a few moments I realized they weren’t needed. His years of experience and insights came off almost effortlessly, and about an hour later we had covered so much ground from the birth of Ableton Live to being part of the emergent underground electronic music scene in Berlin after the fall of the wall. His lessons in the course follow a similar path: expert knowledge shared at a level a level anyone can understand.
As I reached down to turn off my recorder, Jordan stopped me. I hadn’t asked him about what he really wanted to talk about yet.
“Here at Kadenze, we’re trying to help people tap into their creativity whether or not they work in fine arts, music, creative coding, traditional engineering, or whatever. We believe that people need to be creative thinkers in order to truly innovate. That’s why we’re doing what we do. It’s super important to me personally, and it’s also super important that we never lose that value as a company or as a society. It’s who we are.”
Sign up for Jordan’s course, “Sound Production in Ableton Live” and all other Kadenze courses on Kadenze.com. To keep up-to-date on future Kadenze announcements please like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter via @KadenzeOfficial.
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