Goal:

In the summer of 2000, I received a ACS technology fellowship for the creation of Flash animations to illustrate the evolution of forms in music before 1800. The resulting animations have been used by several music departments within the ACS. In addition, the project received national attention when it was highlighted in the educational technology journal Syllabus (September, 2000, vol. 14, no. 2). In October, 2000, the animations were also a part of a poster session at Educause2000, a conference attended by over 6500 delegates. The goal of the proposal for summer, 2001 is to create more Flash animations, this time focusing on the chorales of J.S. Bach. A new part of this proposal is the creation of some digital video movies documenting actual performances of some of the works analyzed in the animations. These two types of multimedia will be made available to the public over the web. It will also be possible to store them on CDs for students to use offline.

Proposal:

ACS summer technology workshops have provided the ground work for the creation of the multimedia project proposed here. The Flash 4.0 workshop in summer, 2000, led to the creation of the early music animations. The workshop in July, 2000 explored the possibilities of using the ACS video streaming capability to serve Quicktime movies. I hope to combine these techniques to create an online Bach chorale project that will contain the following:

1. animations illustrating the various ways chorale tunes were performed in the Lutheran service
2. animations illustrating harmonic analysis
3. interactive quizzes testing students' knowledge of the most famous Bach chorales
4. Quicktime movies containing the performance of certain chorales and interviews with conductors and performers

Application at Other Institutions
Because the works of Bach are studied in all music history surveys, these projects should be of value to any music student. They are Web-based and only require the installation of a Flash plug-in to the web browser.

They will be available to the public from two Rhodes College sites:
Flash Animations for Teaching Music History
Music 227: European Musical Heritage
They will also be linked to the resources page at the ACS site.



Schedule:
The project will be completed by August 2001 so it will be available for use during the 2000-2001 academic year.

Budget:
The only expense is the $2500 stipend to the author.

Patricia Gray
gray@rhodes.edu