Stephen R. Miller
University of the South

This project aims to take recent computer and music technologies and to deploy them in a way that can facilitate students’ learning to read music. Since developing the ability to read music is the goal, the project primarily impinges on general college students, not those who are already musically inclined and may have spent many years practicing an instrument or singing. The importance of this goal arises out of the problems that musical illiteracy creates in the music classroom. Moreover, the use of these techniques in computer-equipped classrooms makes it possible to reach far more students than was ever possible before with conventional, one-on-one private lessons or small-class situations.

In poetry, literature, or even mathematics classes, there is a graphic language that the students and instructor share, and which provides for an open dialogue as particular words, phrases, or elements in an equation can be referenced easily. Music classes with advanced students enjoy this same advantage, as all of the participants have the ability to hear a piece, relate its sounds to the notes in a musical score, and then point to particular passages within it, allowing for detailed discussion of the piece. In most introductory music classes at liberal-arts colleges, however, this kind of analytical discussion fails, because students have encountered the music only through the ephemeral medium of sound and not through the visual medium of musical notation—the way the composer set down the work in the first place. The exciting point of departure for this project is that recently developed technologies make possible, for the first time, a way for general students quickly to pick up the ability to read music—and to learn some simple aspects of music theory and history at the same time.

The basic premise of the project is that if it is reasonably easy for students to keep their place in written notation while hearing the music played, they will soon learn to follow along with the music and in doing so will experience the kind of satisfaction that "cognoscenti" have all the time in reading a score. The focus of the project, then, is to coordinate the various materials and technologies to enable students to experience a conjunction of music as sound and music as written notation. To encourage students’ active engagement with the material, the project also involves methods allowing for students to produce musical notes at an electronic keyboard that correspond with that notation, and eventually to compose intelligent melodies themselves. Hence, in its complete conception the project comprises three parts:

a) the preparation and coordination of music and notation that will provide the basic materials for the course that the project will support,

b) the integration of an active-learning component through the medium of the keyboard, and

c) the development of mechanisms for assessment of student progress.

The preliminary work for this project has been underway for some time, as I have been assessing various software options that would support this new pedagogical approach to music. FINALE and OVERTURE, for instance, represent well-established, flexible products that process music notation, while other types of software go a step further and allow a user to combine sound and visual elements (e.g., CAP-MEDIA TOOLS and some products from Zane Publishing). The completion of this preliminary stage will come with the selection of whichever software product best facilitates the pairing of musical recordings with notation on the computer screen. The selection will be important, in part, because of its implications for the project itself but also because it will ultimately impact the way that students encounter this method, whether as a software package that they purchase or, perhaps preferably, as a licensed product that would be either site-specific or Web-based. An important source of support as I conclude this preliminary work during the academic year 1998-99 will be the Instructional Technology Workshop (ITW), an initiative of the Center for Teaching at the University of the South. Its director, Sherwood Ebey, has committed the resources necessary to wrap up this preliminary stage of the project, both in terms of software acquisition and technical support.

As the project proper gets underway during the Summer, 1999, my first objective will be to select about a dozen musical works that will serve as the focus for a course in the following semester, and to get the notation entered in the chosen software package. These will be masterworks of the Western tradition and in some cases quite lengthy, but the burden of mechanically entering the notation will be eased considerably by the help of a student intern (supplied thanks to the ITW), and by the fact that in some cases the processed notation may already be available commercially (such is the case, for instance, with some works in the FINALE format). Next, recordings will be correlated with the notation—again, a quite laborious, second-by-second process. This part of the project will require meticulous, detail-oriented data entry, but once the wrinkles have been ironed out of the process, we will have created a basic technique available for use in music classes at a variety of levels. This first stage should take about six weeks.

The remainder of the fellowship period will be occupied with developing active-learning components and mechanisms for student assessment. The interactive assignments will pertain in particular to students’ use of an electronic keyboard to create particular pitches, melodies, and harmonies. One such assignment that I envision will grow out of our encounter with Gregorian chant, a type of music that consists of a melodic line but no definite rhythm. Students will get to write their own "Gregorian" chant, experimenting at the keyboard and ultimately writing the notation that reflects their melodic creation. Since the keyboards will be linked via a MIDI connection to the networked computers, it will be possible to bring up any student’s work for consideration by the entire class on the projector. The mechanisms for assessment associated with this class will make use of recent software for developing and testing basic knowledge of musical notation and keyboard skills. I have seen some of the materials generated out of an earlier ACS/Mellon Technology Fellowship, Daniel Koppelman’s "Introduction to Music Technology" (Furman Univ.; see www.furman.edu/~dkoppelm/Tech/17/mus17.html), and it is clear that several components of his project would contribute to this aspect of my proposal. In particular, his work with PRACTICA MUSICA appears to have potential for evaluating students’ knowledge in fun yet diagnostically useful ways.

The short-term result of this project will be a course that I will teach at the University of the South in the Fall, 1999. But the implications of the project are far broader. Not only could the techniques developed in this project serve in many other music courses aimed at general students, but I also believe that these techniques could revolutionize the way that music instruction of general liberal-arts students has been pursued at many institutions. If the results of the project and class are as successful as I envision, I would be pleased to lead one of the ACS technology workshops here at Sewanee in a future summer. Few music professors want music notation to be arcane—a kind of mysterious modern-day hieroglyphics. The new technologies greatly increase our ability to develop music literacy and sweep away this cloud of mystery. I suspect that many music teachers of general liberal-arts students would be interested to examine this potential for themselves.

Stephen R. Miller
Department of Music
University of the South
735 University Ave.
Sewanee, TN 37385
(931) 598-1874
smiller@seraph1.sewanee.edu