Electronic Instrumentalist Dafna Naphtali on Navigating Sound Education Online

2020 has been the year of reflection for communities across the board. Most notably, the education system has had to restructure its methods and surroundings, affecting hundreds of thousands of teachers and students internationally. Looking at our community specifically, this Sunday, December 13th, via our Year End Education Convention in partnership with our friends at Eto Ano, we’ll be sharing the stories and anecdotes of NYC based educators, education administrators & students who have been navigating working under the confines of school shutdowns due to COVID-19, messy re-openings and the education agenda of Betsy Devos under the Trump administration over the past four years.

Below, Dafna Naphtali, electronic instrumentalist and adjunct professor at New York University and The New School, speaks with Spurge Carter from Eto Ano on learning about the new soundscape that teaching online has brought and creating within its limitations.

POND: How's your weekend?

Dafna: I think I had a dream about working on spreadsheets last night. So old fashioned phone calls like this are cool. This is week is my last week of teaching. So it’s like when a big wave is about to come. And there's a low? Yeah. So I'm about to get hit.

POND: What's your background in teaching? When did you start teaching?

Dafna: I've been a musician since I was a teenager and did a whole lot of different kinds of music and performing until I was about 30. Then I sent myself back to school. First, City College, where they kept telling me I should do music technology, because my work was always in technology but I was always a performer. Then I ended up at NYU. Robert Rowe arrived there from MIT in 1992, and introduced me to electronic music and interactive music which I found were super interesting. It was very natural to start teaching. My parents both had doctorates and taught as adjuncts too. My mother (a sociologist) was at NYU for a long time. So it felt very natural, in my family that you teach what you know. Yes, it’s a way to make sure you can pay the bills, but it's also a way to learn.You solidify what you're learning by having to explain it to somebody else. 

I guess, I never left because I'm still teaching in the same place at NYU after 25 years. I had other jobs there too (Chief Engineer, academic advisor), and as an adjunct, I have taught at lots of other places besides New York University, but I like it there, so I’m still in the same department at NYU Music Technology as well as at New School. I started teaching private voice lessons as an outgrowth of my own voice lessons (my undergrad degree was in jazz vocal performance, and I studied bel canto for years). It made sense that I should learn the methods of my teachers and be explaining it to other people, also as a way to solidify my own knowledge. 

POND: Roles or responsibilities that you're doing day to day?

Dafna: When I worked as an advisor for seven years I was auditioning students and working with incoming ones. But I stopped advising years ago because I wanted to do more teaching. However much I like teaching though, it is not an easy life to balance with being a musician, and making my own work. The way we take care of our adjunct faculty is not great in this country. I don't know if it's better elsewhere. Adjunct teachers around the country face many of the same issues as other “gig” workers. We work hard and most are not paid well, and work by seasonal contract. We often do not have job security. To improve my situation I left some jobs, and eventually began to choose the teaching jobs based on how far I had to commute and what was interesting for me to teach. So, gradually, I got classes that were closer and only things I'm interested in.   

Under COVID my schedule is the same as it was day to day, minus the commuting. I usually teach three classes a semester in various music technology concepts at one school or another, sometimes four, and with some private composition or programming students as well.

I most enjoy when I’m teaching electronic music performance classes.  But this was an enormous, enormous challenge back in March to figure out how to move online. Everything about what I was teaching my ensemble students was about being in a room with your equipment, and the acoustics of what is coming out of that speaker and what is sounding in that room, and most importantly, the physicality of playing and performing electronic music.

That element of my teaching practice was entirely taken away when we went online.  So ever since March, I've been trying to find ways to effectively teach my concepts that I developed over all these years for my teaching, and get them across in spite of that distance, lack of physicality, and acoustics. Now we don't all hear the same thing when I do a listening exercise. Now we have to find ways to make music in spite of latency and delays. Now I can’t walk around and see with my eyes what a student is doing, or help them adjust something on their equipment and hear the difference together in a shared acoustic space.

POND: Have you found any specific ways that you feel are pretty good?

Dafna: The thing that I've been thinking a lot about lately is how important empathy is. If I can imagine what it's like for the person on the other end of the camera, for a minute, then I can do the same listening exercises by asking them to describe something I can't hear. Break out rooms and small groups are really helpful for this level of communication and empathy.

I'm also teaching straight up music technology, in one class “Sound and Technology”. And the most successful assignments in my opinion, was when I asked these students to go back into the physical world and get off their computers. Telling students, “walk through your house and find spaces that sound a certain way”, almost like a treasure hunt. Just go find something that's super resonant, describe it, and then record it with your phone, which is already a better experience than sitting at your computer the whole time. 

I also aim to keep as little technology between me and people I'm talking to because there's already so much distance and I don’t think the problems are necessarily solved by adding more technology.  

POND: Anything else that's popped up to the fact that you're in such specific personal spaces?

Dafna: Usually near the end of the semester, I make my ensemble students physically stand up to play. Some of them never sit down again once they’ve experienced how much of a difference that makes and how much more engaged they are overall. I want them to be more physically involved with their instruments. This is something I haven’t been able to figure out how to do yet teaching online, because of camera angles and how important cameras and presentation have become (and are now the responsibility of individual performers). So we end up spending time talking about camera angles and the visual aspect of how are we going to present this music. They all are performing this Wednesday in a Zoom concert I put together for them, and I don't want to see their backs or just their heads because it's not interesting for the audience. 

When I taught the class in person, pre-COVID, I used to try to get students to turn off their reverb and really consider every sound they made, including reverbs, delays, and sounds they're making in that room is part of their sound. Now they're all in their own little sound separated virtual cubicles, the conversations about their sound are a little bit different. We have to think about how to sound good over low-bandwidth, bad connections into someone’s headphones somewhere else, using technology everyone is learning about at the same time, and with many technical and aesthetic challenges. So the challenges with teaching online are with the communication with students, but and also with the content of the classes as well.

One thing I do know is if you've already met somebody, and then you teach them online it's that much easier. When I was at NYU in grad school in the 90s, a fellow student, Susan Jacobson, who was at ITP, did an experiment with distance learning (it was around 1994-95). As part of her experiment, she put me in a studio, and then had one of our voice faculty teach me a voice lesson over a video connection (remotely) from a different building on campus. The information and experience that I got from what happened that day has been useful to me right now. The main thing that made the voice lesson work was the fact that we had already met.  Just a little prior knowledge was helpful to me and the teacher.  

So today, under COVID, if I have already met a student in person, I now just have to ask a lot of questions to try to bridge that gap. Because I need to know what I can't see, touch, or see. My own teachers used to say, “put your hand here on my stomach, feel when I do this,” as a way to explain a breathing technique or posture. And now we can't do that. I found that if I do breakout groups with my students, or somehow meet with them individually, at some point, that is a huge amount of positive energy going forward from there.

POND: How has this been specifically for adjunct teachers?

Dafna: My husband is also an adjunct professor. He’s currently working at three different schools. It's like everything else in COVID, you know, if it was good, it's been revealed that it's a good situation, because they take care of their people. And if it's a bad situation, that's also been revealed. Some universities and colleges are not doing well and now they have to cut some jobs, some schools have just cut some full-time professors too.

Personally, I was a little angry about how things were handled in the Spring, even with a union in place. We all worked enormous number of extra hours to make our classes work. And we weren’t paid anything extra or even really thanked. They tried to give us a kind of a freebie, like, here, we're going to train you with an “online teaching camp” in the summer, which I felt was almost insulting. But truth be told, the people who work at NYU tried to work really hard to get us lots of information about teaching online. And individually, the people I work with and for are great, because they understand that it's a lot of work. But I think institutionally, there were already problems with how adjuncts are being handled, because we all have a lot of instability, we're not paid all that much. And those problems were, like many other things, seriously amplified by COVID.

POND: It's kind of crazy how that's so universal.

Dafna: Yes, but I also was so moved from going to many Zoom meetings at both schools I teach at, that my fellow adjuncts deeply care about their students. And it's really clear. And sometimes that's emotionally taxing too because the students have many personal, social, economic problems, that were also amplified by the pandemic. This has not been an easy time for them. And I can't turn that off. I just somehow have to listen to them, and just deal with how to help them finish their work, semester, and degrees, in spite of all that is going on. We have to be much more flexible and empathetic than under normal circumstances. I didn't necessarily have to go that far before, just in order to be able to teach and in order to be able to keep my students from dropping out because they can't take it anymore. There are always a few troubled students, but there are more now and the overall stress is heightened too.

I'm hoping that my classes will be in addition to an academic experience, also something fun for each of my students, and a distraction from things that have been going on. Around the election, New School, and NYU asked us to be flexible with the students, that week was extraordinary, and we cancelled classes or gave special work and just tried to make space for the students to process what was happening and for everyone to have time to vote. We were given the option to cancel classes or meet and just talk to students. So I found that's been awesome. It’s also been nice and good for me personally to have regular communication with people outside my household during that time.

POND: Have you found any good practices to find balance, or to not be overwhelmed?

Dafna: I try to get out of the house and get off the computer. Recognizing that, like so many other things, there's extreme change, and some of its good and some of it’s bad. I also spend 10 hours less commuting within a week, so I'm not missing the subway that much.  

Some things may not go back to the way they were. Some things are actually better with the option of online teaching. Now I can work with a student who's home in North Carolina. Five of my students, in one of my classes, out of nine people, are in the Far East (China, Korea and Singapore), getting up at 5:30am to take my ensemble class at 6:45pm-8:30pm New York time. So half the students are kind of at the end of their long Zoom day, this is their last class, they're tired, and the other half got up super early, and they're playing music together; it’s marvelous really.

I make my students go see concerts, and now they have to go see them online. So I had to be more flexible about what that means. I tried to find things in all different time zones and see if there was anything local, something in a better time zone for them, and expand my ideas about what I wanted them to experience.The way I'm coping is I have to stay up on the technology, I have to be empathetic and figure out how much technology is necessary to do the best job I can do.

POND: How has it been collectively? 

Dafna: I have a daughter who is a senior in high school, so I'm still going to PTA meetings. We had a meeting that was actually really cathartic and interesting— much better than our usual meetings in person really. We did breakout groups to talk about a very specific topic that affects all teachers: “What do you do when your students don’t want to put the camera on?”

The meeting changed my feelings about that subject, and changed how I teach. When I say be empathetic it is hard to do when the camera is off. I'm always thinking about my students, my students, my students.  But it's super hard, and draining emotionally to speak on Zoom when their microphones and cameras are off. It feels like I’m speaking into a dark closet, when I can't see half the people, and I can't hear anything but my own voice.

But at this PTA meeting, a parent said he was very disturbed, why isn't my kid dressed and sitting at a desk to learn? So many kids are learning from their beds or in pajamas or whatever and he was worried that his kid was not taking the learning seriously, was not sitting still, and wanted the camera off. And I could relate — I’d had a situation where one of my college students had the camera on, and I could see that she was working on her art project, and walking around her studio, and I felt bad and was thinking to myself, I'm not podcast! If you're going do that, turn the camera off!. As a teacher, I want my students to make me feel like they're paying attention. 

But at this PTA meeting with that dad, there was a parent who was a social worker and she said something really awesome that affected all of us both parents and teachers— she thought the camera on/off issue was not so important, and in a way it was really good for some kids to have it off — kids who can't sit still in school and learn better while moving around, who would never be allowed to walk around during class, maybe they learn better that way. So she viewed the possibilities of the new medium as an opportunity to address multiple learning styles.  

So after that meeting I told my students (in the non-performance classes) that its ok if they can't be on camera and that they need only to respond immediately either with a microphone or through the chat so that I get instant feedback and I know they're really there. That's the way I'm getting through it and being inclusive too.

POND: Future of music learning?

Dafna: When we return to regular in person teaching, for some aspects of teaching we may realize wow, this was better when we were online. So we'll probably continue those classes online. And there are classes that only came about because of our current situation.  All of our classes are online.  But I’m also teaching one hybrid class with an in-person class once a month, for students with F-1 visas, who needed that. We needed a course like this and so I suggested a sound walking field recording class and ended up teaching it. This time I only had a couple of students, but the class was really fun to do, and my department likes it and is going to run it again this Spring. It will probably continue after the pandemic. 

POND: Anything else?

Dafna: I really think that empathy is the most important, understanding what it is like for your students (and also finding ways for them to understand what it is like for you as a teacher. 

The students need to also help teachers to teach effectively, by asking questions, not being passive and most of my students are really trying.

I want people to be engaged with sound. And usually, the whole point of my classes, has been to get people to be more physically engaged with the sounds they are making, and not just think about electronic music as a bunch of knobs that they press and twist, that they build their playing setup so that they can have immediate physical feedback. I think the most important thing is finding ways to have as many activities that are not on the screen and are asynchronous and when we are together on screen to do everything I can to keep people doing things together and engaging with each other.  

Tune in to our Year End Education Convention this Sunday, December 13th on Baby TV.