The Anatomy of Music: A Learning Tool for Listening

David Sonnenschein

Northeastern University

The Anatomy of Music is a multimedia, interactive educational program for use with a Macintosh II computer and a CD-ROM drive. The purpose of the program is to serve as a learning tool for the instruction of non-music majors in music listening. Assuming that the learner lacks the skills needed to make use of a musical score, the program relies mainly on ostensive definitions. Musical forms are seen as abstract prototypes of whole classes of compositions. The program allows the learner to interact with the music by clicking on graphically presented form-charts. The purpose for learning to relate the music with elements of the form-charts is to have the student conceptualize chunks of music and use these to create mental scaffolding to facilitate transferability. The graphics are designed to "move" in sync with the music provided by CDs in the CD-ROM drive. For the past two years, the program has been used successfully as an introduction to music course at Northeastern University in Boston. Offered as a self-paced course, I use a course management and testing module which is not yet available on the market.

All introduction to music courses share one primary objective: providing the learner with information that relates directly to music. This truism remains valid even if the stated objective concerns more esoteric concepts as for example love for music, aesthetic discrimination, music and social issues, and so forth.

This musical information is commonly drawn from many different sub-disciplines and includes such diverse subjects as history, fundamentals of music, biographies and above all samples of music literature. Of all the above, only samples of music literature cannot be conveyed verbally.1 This fact underlies a main difficulty in designing a pedagogically meaningful introduction to music course. By pedagogically meaningful I mean a process that causes the learner to increase his/her musical cognition with the underlying hope of finding some observable indication that this increment in musical cognition will be lasting and perhaps even continue to expand in the future.

Because of the vastness and diversity of music and musical information, a detailed study of this subject becomes utterly impossible and thus presents us with a two part problem. Not only must our sights be raised from details to a higher level of more general governing principles, but these general principles have to be presented to a group of learners who we must assume have had no musical preparation, who are musically illiterate. The questions become 1) what are some general governing principles of music and 2) how can we make a learner, who has no recourse to the musical score, cognizant of specific musical events during real-time listening to a composition. Obviously, it matters little how enlightening our discussion of a composition's salient features might be if we cannot enable the learner to observe auditorily those salient features so he/she can relate them to what has been discussed.2

Before I attempt to answer these questions, I wish to define and delimit my use of the term music itself. I do not teach music in the abstract. My main concern is with musical works of art. Further, the musical works of art that I use exist in notated form (rather than in performance only). This may require some further clarification. I confess to being eurocentric in my education and in my artistic tastes. Therefore I draw the works of art I present in my classes from the music literature of Western civilization. This literature represents the basis of my experiences and knowledge. Let me hasten to add here that I don't think that "my" kind of music should be the only music studied or that we should force it on anyone who does not wish to hear it. But neither should we deprive anyone who does want to hear it or would if properly and meaningfully introduced to it.

A further delimitation concerns the selection criteria for the music literature in question. This discussion applies mainly to music composed between the mid- eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. I will explain later the reason for this delimitation.

What then is a general governing principle of music? All music has to be composed, i.e., put together. This statement is valid even if the music does not exist in notated form. Although most music contains both vertical and horizontal aspects, it is the horizontal - linear - aspect that is sine qua non. The reason for selecting musical works of art from the periods stated earlier is that in this music, the linear factor is of principal importance.

Through a long process of trial and error, a number of conventions for linear arrangements have emerged. Various periods produced their own conventional arrangements. This linear ordering of musical ideas is one of the various meanings for the term musical form. Even though it is quite possible that a composition's genesis may have been spawned by a harmonic progression or a rhythmic figure in the composer's mind, the completed composition had ultimately to be in some linearly ordered form. The various ensuing forms were given names probably for practical reasons. Often these names were attached after the form had existed for some time. For example, the sonata form existed long before G.J. Vogler, H.C. Koch or A.F.C. Kollmann first named it in their writings in the 1780's and 1790's.

Granted that there are many compositions that do not fit the mold of any conventional musical form, I maintain that musical forms are abstract prototypes of whole classes of compositions. These prototypes incorporate the necessary and essential conditions needed for a composition to be recognized as belonging to a certain class. For example, what determines a composition to belong to the class rondo is the recurrence of a recognizable musical sequence (the A) alternating with other musical sequences, the episodes (B C D . . . ). The number of the different sequences is not fixed and therefore not an essential condition. But there have to be at least three statements of the A separated by two different episodes for a composition to be classifiable as a rondo [essential condition].

Since in the music selected for this course form is an essential element, I suggest that musical form is a general governing principle and that it can be used advantageously for the design of a pedagogical meaningful introductory course. By confronting form we are moving the learner away from the particular and toward the general.

But form in itself as a general principle is only part of the answer. The difficulty is not in conveying to the student the concept of musical form but in enabling the student to observe the unfolding form auditorily as it happens. We have to teach our students to track a composition's form through proactive listening, anticipating formal events even in compositions not heard before. Just as the composers of the selected periods adhered to generally accepted compositional rules, the learner can be made to auditorily observe these as they are manipulated by the composer. Having attained the skill to follow auditorily a composition's form, the learner has been empowered to locate musical events under discussion and thus to coordinate the verbal with the non-verbal in a meaningful manner.

This leads up directly to the second part of the question. How can we make a learner, who has no recourse to the musical score, cognizant of specific musical events during real-time listening to a composition.

We musicians all went at some point in our development through ear-training. At first, it seemed like an impossible task to accomplish. Then slowly(very slowly) things began to make sense and ultimately some of us actually enjoyed taking four-part dictation!?.

The point I am trying to make is that listening skills can in most cases be developed. The listening skills needed to succeed in a bona fide ear-training class are very technical and detailed and require a solid grasp of much music theory. This is of course way beyond what we can expect to accomplish in an appreciation class. The kind of listening skills I expect of my students is much more modest in its demands and much more global in its orientation.

When we musicians listen to music we make use of a full array of accumulated past experiences that include our professional training as well as our constant involvement in the world of music. Over the years, we have amassed a tremendous body of sound patterns of every kind. It may take us just a brief moment, for instance, to classify an unknown composition as being classical. How do we do it? It would probably take a considerable amount of time and theoretical knowledge to explain how we classified the music as classical. Our students are limited in their musical training and in their involvement in the world of music. They need guidance and constant coaching to steer through the limitless sound complexes they encounter while listening to what to many is "new" music.

Surely what most listeners remember or recognize of a musical composition they have heard a number of times are several "tunes" or melodic fragments or some thematic material. Remember when recognizing the beginnings of a number of compositions was considered to be musically educated? Still, I have come to believe that remembering thematic materials or chunks of music is the key to proactive listening.

Like most music instructors involved with the teaching of "appreciation" kinds of courses, I have struggled for many years with the problem of how to help my students become better music listeners. How to make them become aware of all the wonderful things that permeate all great music or, in more general terms, how to share with them my own listening experiences.

Again, like most instructors I have gone through many different approaches and I have used many different texts. Despite their obvious value as sources for solid and valid historical and biographical scholarship, none of these texts assisted the musically illiterate students in their auditory cognition of music.

I designed The Anatomy of Music as a multimedia interactive learning tool for listening. Roughly, the term multimedia means using a computer to integrate audio and visual presentations. This technology enabled me for the first time to show my students (in graphics and sound) what it was that I wanted them to observe and the results were quite dramatic.

Once I had decided on an array of forms to be representative of a large segment of music literature of the selected period, I analyzed the music intended to be used with the program. In my analyses, I emphasized those formal elements that showed up in most of the examples. In other words, I tried to point out what is common to the largest number of compositions rather than what is unusual in a specific composition.

Further, the chunks of music had to be large enough not to overwhelm the uninitiated learner while at the same time detailed enough to provide a good generalization of the form.

The next stage was to represent the analyses graphically in a consistent and easy to follow manner and to label the various form elements. I used HyperCard to create the program that allows the student to listen to the music performed on a CD-ROM drive while watching "moving" graphics that track the music along the form charts. I also designed the program to be interactive so the student can listen to any particular chunk of music at any given time and in any given order. This allows the user to verify his/her understanding of a particular form element.

With The Anatomy of Music , students can develop mental scaffolding by conceptualizing chunks of music as elements of musical form and thus relate what is heard to the abstract prototype. It clearly has transferability and can be done without requiring an understanding of theory or harmony. It is obviously easier for the kind of student discussed here to recognize that the A and the B of a minuet are different than to explain what the differences are. Eventually, A and B become conceptualized as elements of form. I neither expect nor require a verbalization of these concepts. On the contrary, the main purpose of this program is to provide the student with a tool that facilitates ostensive definitions.

I have been using the program for the past two years at Northeastern University in Boston. It is the main content of a self-paced introduction to music course named Music: A Listening Experience. At the beginning of each term, I present an orientation class to explain the mechanics and the procedures. Thereafter, the students are free to work on the program in a computer lab of our Media Center located in the main library. The version I use differs from the commercially available version by containing a course management and test module as well as an Instructor's Disk. This module requires the students to use a key disk. The disk is needed to access the program and to collect the test scores. Once a week, students present their key disk to me so I can update their records with the Instructor's Disk I installed on my computer. Three periods a week I am available in the Computer Lab to assist students who may need help. Although I have not yet undertaken a controlled study to determine the effectiveness of The Anatomy of Music, the program is praised by the students. Not only do they enjoy working with the program, but they demonstrate their comprehension by being able to pose insightful questions concerning the music itself. I have just received a site license for the commercial version. This will make the program available to anyone interested and to students in other music classes for assigned listening.

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1 It is assumed that the attending population of these kinds of classes are functionally illiterate in musical notation.