David Brian Williams and Peter Richard Webster have partnered for more than 30 years providing leadership to the music profession in technology applications; workshops on the integration of technology to music and music education; and presentations for state, national, and international conferences, including ATMI, CMS, ISME, NAfME, NASM, and TI:ME. Their textbook, Experiencing Music Technology, a leading textbook for tertiary music education, has gone through five revisions since first published in the late 1990s, with the latest 4th Edition with Oxford University Press in print and ebook form.
Peter Webster is an independent scholar of music teaching and learning sciences and resides in Marina del Rey, California. He offers two online courses (Creative Thinking in Music and Techology Assisted Music Learning) for the Online Masters Program in Music Education at the University of Florida at Gainesville. He was most recently a Scholar-in-Residence at the Thornton School of Music at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles for 8 years. He is Professor Emeritus of Music Education at the Bienen School of Music, Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois where he taught for 23 years. He has also taught at Case Western Reserve University for 13 years, following junior and senior high school teaching in Maine, Massacusetts and New York state schools. He holds degrees in music education from the University of Southern Maine (BS) and the Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester (MM, PhD). Webster was the 2014 recipient of the Senior Researcher Award from the Society of Research in Music Education of the National Association for Music Education. He is co-author of Experiencing Music Technology, 4th edition (Oxford University Press, 2022), a standard textbook used in introductory college courses in music technology. He is the author of Measures of Creative Thinking in Music, an exploratory tool for assessing music thinking using quasi-improvisational tasks. He has presented at many state, national, and international meetings and is a frequent keynote speaker. His published work includes over 100 articles and book chapters on technology, music education practice, and creative thinking in music which have appeared in journals and handbooks in and outside of music. He has been the major advisor for 36 dissertations completed at 3 universities.
David Williams is Emeritus Professor of Music and Arts Technology at Illinois State University. Dr. Williams founded one of the first nationally recognized integrated arts technology programs (now the Creative Technologies program). He has enjoyed experimenting with new hardware and software in support of music teaching and learning since designing programmed instruction drills with a tape recording for ear training in the late 1960s, programming an AI simulation for music concept formation on a CDC 6400 mainframe, developing the first DAC card and music composing software for the Apple II computer, designing various multimedia solutions for the Macintosh through and beyond Hypercard, and most recently designing websites for music and other applications.
He is currently a consultant on computer and music technology (coach4technology.net), provides leadership for the Music Technology Leadership Academy project (musiccreativity.org), and is active as a composer and instrumentalist in community organizations. In the late 1970s, he cofounded Micro Music, Inc., and developed numerous music-education titles for the Apple II and the MMI DAC sound card. He has written extensively in the areas of music education, music psychology, music and arts technology, and instructional development and is published in such journals as the Campus Wide Information Systems, CAUSE/EFFECT Journal, EDUCAUSE, Educational Quarterly, International Schools Journal, Music Educators Journal, Journal of Research in Music Education, CRME Bulletin, Psychomusicology, Psychology of Music, and Journal of Music, Technology and Education. His recent interest is promoting music technology in support of "The Other 80%" of secondary school students (musiccreativity.org) who are non-participants in traditional school music ensembles.
Dr. Williams is the founding editor of the journal, Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, and Brain, and has served on the boards of ATMI, CMS, Illinois Music Educators Association, NAfME, TI:ME, and is a past-president of The College Music Society. He chaired the NAfME task force for developing Opportunity-to-Learn Standards for Music Technology and, in 2001, received the Illinois Music Educators Association Distinguished Service Award for his work in music technology. Williams has a BMEd degree in instrumental music and a Master of Music Theory and Composition from Northwestern State University of Louisiana and a PhD in Systematic Musicology from the University of Washington, Seattle.
