Imagine a world much like our own, except that this world cares a great deal more about accordions. In fact, accordions are so important that they’re one of the primary means by which people express themselves, communicate, store information, and relate to one another. They’re not the only way to do any of these things, but in this world, accordions play an indispensable role in the culture. Not only is there a significant industry devoted solely to the broadcast and circulation of accordion music of all sorts, but leaders across a range of industry routinely talk about how important accordions (and music more broadly) are to the success of their own businesses.
As important as accordions are, learning to play them isn’t something that most people go to college to study. Rather, it’s something that is infrastructural, a subject that cuts across a great deal of their education, from learning fingerings and phrasings early on to practicing short polkas in high school. There might be a course or two devoted specifically to the accordion in college; while it’s a general skill, applicable to a wide range of human endeavor, it’s not a generic one. Mastering the accordion is something that happens in specific contexts, as players learn to adapt to circumstances, tasks, audiences, etc.
In some ways, the accordion’s universality is also its biggest issue when it comes to supporting student learning at college or university. Most schools rely on a gradually increasing population of underpaid accordionists to teach those courses, and the courses themselves don’t receive a great deal of institutional respect, as a consequence. “I wish my students could just complete a simple scale,” one professor complains, while another bemoans the fact that his students’ polkas aren’t stately enough. Most of these students submit recordings of themselves for their final projects, and this creates a whole separate issue: how can professors know for sure that the students themselves are doing the recording? Or that they haven’t spliced in passages from Polkapedia? Making it worse is that there are all sorts of websites out there that will record something for them, tape mills!
And now, if that weren’t bad enough, they’re starting to hear about these accordion simulators, powered by artificial intelligence, that will take a prompt, and spit out recordings that are impossible to distinguish from actual, human accordionists? You can even ask them to generate music in the style of Pauline Oliveros, Nick Ariondo, or any of a hundred other notable accordionists. Rather than lauding these simulators as potential aids for accordion instruction, commentators appear to see them as the death knell for accordion instruction on the college level. Why learn to play at all, if you can dial up a perfectly competent polka on WelkGPT?
I think part of the issue is that, for too many both in and outside of the academy, the default notion of education, where students listen to recordings at home, and then file into a large lecture hall to listen to an expert talk about those recordings, is a remarkably poor way to learn how to play. And if those professors turn around and ask for polka recordings at the end of the course, then WelkGPT may indeed be the disruptive force that some seem to think it will be. Some students will still learn to play, others will still find ways around learning to play, and professors will still complain about keyboarding errors or mispressed buttons.
The problem is that you don’t learn to play accordion in a lecture hall, and the truth is that there’s a lot more accordion instruction happening than in those lecture courses. Students learn through experimentation, frequent and recursive feedback, and by engaging with a broad range of genres, situations, and audiences. There is certainly some value in being exposed to the greats (although our definition of great could stand to include a much broader swath of performers, not to mention ongoing interrogation of “great”), but it’s more important to have the time and space to try things out, to fail without catastrophic consequence, and there’s even room for the thoughtful deployment of WelkGPT. That some see AI as the death of any sort of instruction says more about their own understanding of said instruction (and about a culture that still hasn’t given up on the dubious virtues of clickbait) than it does about AI.
My name’s Collin and on that world, I teach accordion, with a particular fondness for zydeco, believe it or not.