Patrick Setzer and Alfred Blatter, Drexel University

Christopher Freitag, Brown & Benchmark Publishers

Music for a Lifetime is a prototype for a CD-based electronic text for music appreciation. It is the culmination of two and a half years of development, testing, and implementation at Drexel University. Although presented as a work in progress, it is a self-contained, essentially complete program that incorporates many of the recent trends in multimedia authoring.

The authors, supported by a grant from Drexel University, began designing interactive, CD-ROM course materials in the summer of 1992. By the following spring we had implemented a one-term music appreciation course that used HyperCard stacks to support the in-class lectures. The stacks controlled off-the-shelf, commercial audio CDs and thus allowed students to review the course material with audio demonstrations. There was one stack for each lecture topic, with different CDs for each stack.

Although the course and its format have been well received, there have been problems associated with using commercial CDs. They are expensive to maintain in multiple copies, and the large number of CDs have complicated the task of organizing and administering the computer lab. In addition, it is rare to find a commercial CD that offers the breadth of coverage that is required by our purpose; so typically, we have had to use more than one CD in many of the lectures, thus exacerbating the above difficulties. The ideal solution was obvious: to create our own CD set, with the exact repertoire we wanted on just two or three discs. In January of 1994 we received a grant from Brown & Benchmark Publishers to produce our own CD and the educational software to support it. Music for a Lifetime is the result.

Our prototype is a stand-alone application made from HyperCard 2.2. It employs CD-ROM play routines from the Voyager CD Audiostack to access and control an audio CD of our own design. In addition, the program displays high-resolution scanned images and color graphics. Although we considered using QuickTime video clips, we ultimately omitted them as being too memory-intensive for our current design.

The organization of Music for a Lifetime reflects both its multicultural coverage and its emphasis on navigational flexibility. Our intent is to make it easy and attractive to browse through the material and yet to provide a clear enough hierarchy to keep the user from getting lost. The organization passes through the following levels: unit, chapter, topic, and definition, with a definition ranging from one to four pages. The opening Table of Contents includes five Units and a set of Appendices.

As the list of units indicates, the fundamental organizing principle for the course is the various ways that music is used. Following an extensive first unit devoted to music fundamentals, the remaining units address how music is used for movement, worship, storytelling (in the broadest sense), and finally, concert-style listening. The last section is a set of appendices that gather, in one location, discussions of style, composers’ biographies, instruments and ensembles, and a time line.

This organizational approach facilitates the inclusion of musical examples from a much broader range of styles than that found in traditional, chronologically-based texts. For example, Unit 1, Music for Movement, includes a Sousa march, Brazilian samba, work songs, both big band and rock-era dance music, and ballet music by Tchaikovsky; Unit 2, Music for Worship, ranges from melismatic organum to African American gospel to Tibetan chant. While the diversity of styles represented here invites cross-cultural comparison and discussion that are worthwhile in their own right, it provides another benefit as well. Discussions of technical terms such as form, texture, and tonality can be cast in a significantly broader context, enabling one, for example, to compare the vocal timbres heard in a lied, a field holler, an Appalachian folk song, and Balinese chant.

Navigational flexibility--the means to move freely and confidently through the program’s contents - is an important component in the program design. Every level of organization from the unit to the individual page shares two features: 1) a title bar across the top of the screen identifying the user’s exact location in the program, and 2) a complete set of navigation "buttons" that allow one to move either vertically (to a higher or lower level) or horizontally (to either the previous or the next page at the same level). The navigation buttons have the same location and appearance throughout the program.

Thus, when one opens "Chapter 3 - March and Processional" the chapter page includes a list of more specific topics such as "Military March" or "Brazilian Samba;" clicking on either will take one to the topic level. There is also the ever-present "Unit Contents" button (found on every card) that returns one to the Table of Contents, as well as a "Chapters in This Unit" button that will take one to the other chapters at the same unit level.

Having made a selection, we are now at the topic level. It is here that we address a particular style and, after a discussion of pertinent terms, hear a performance of a musical work. Every topic page begins with a set of terms that are in a shaded rectangle. Those terms refer to the style, composer or performers, and ensembles associated with that topic, and are located in the Appendices. Clicking on them takes the user to that part of the program; the "Return to Topic" button allows one to return and continue in the original topic. While in any one of the Appendices, the user is free to browse around; as long as he or she stays in the Appendices section, the "Return to Topic" button will remember his or her point of origin. Thus, clicking on "John Philip Sousa" will grant the user access to the other biographical entries; or, clicking on "The American March" will enable one to explore other entries in "American Music Styles."

The advent of multimedia technology has allowed us to implement fundamental changes in both the course content and the means of delivering it. At the very least, we can start from the premise that every term or concept that we discuss will also include a "button" that triggers an immediate audio demonstration. The ability to link the language-based concept with its corresponding aural experience has potentially profound implications for the whole notion of what a music appreciation class is supposed to teach. For perhaps the first time, the nonmusician (or nonmajor) can "play" excerpts, pieces, and aural demonstrations that will enable him or her to listen for concepts with specificity and precision; and for the perhaps the first time, it is not unreasonable for teachers to expect or require that their students develop measurable aural abilities.

Accordingly, the Music Fundamentals unit is by far the largest unit in the program - even though, in the current version of this prototype, it is still unfinished. Two brief demonstrations will illustrate the manner in which this technology can meet the general student on his or her own terms. The first is a discussion of phrase structure in which a sixteen-bar period from a march by Sousa is presented in diagram form (see below). The user can click on any half or whole phrase to hear it in isolation, and then play the entire strain while watching the parts of it light up as they play.

Second, the discussion of tonality includes a number of "live" diagrams for major scales, the church modes, and modulation that provide the student with a similar means to break a process down into its isolated components for closer study and comparison.

The same interactive tools can be applied to the style discussions as well. The ubiquitous "listening charts" of modern music appreciation can now be "live" and responsive: the appropriate section of the chart is highlighted when it plays, and carefully timed commentary proceeds apace with the performance. The student can intervene at any point to repeat a section , or play from any part straight to the end.

In addition to the assistance this provides to the study of form, it can also help bridge the language barrier that students frequently encounter when studying vocal literature. The performance chart for Schubert’s "Erlking," for example, displays each verse in translation and highlights each line as it is sung. The expressive power of the German text is significantly enhanced when the student can read exactly what each phrase means - as it is being sung. Similarly, we were surprised to discover that a practice as esoteric as Renaissance cantus firmus technique can be greatly (and audibly) clarified by placing the plainchant phrases quoted in Josquin’s Pange lingua Mass right next to their polyphonic adaptations for immediate comparison.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of a "live" listening chart is the ensemble finale discussion from Chapter 13. The musical selection, "Tonight" from West Side Story, summarizes all of the important conflicts and characters from the show’s first act. In classic ensemble finale tradition, the musical contrasts reflect those of the characters. In our performance chart, a series of high resolution, scanned color images appear on the screen - one for each of the major characters. The shifting images, complemented by subtitles, provide a simulated video performance that delivers the pedagogical content in a visually effective manner. As always, the user can intervene and control the pace of the presentation.

A guiding premise of this program is that educational software must engage the student in order to be effective. One of the early lessons that we learned in the first year of implementation was that our basic model - review materials in the form of text supported by audio demonstrations - was regarded by many students as too boring to use. Our solution was to incorporate game-like exercises that were less passive in their operation, and to design HyperCard-based examinations and analysis projects as part of the course requirements.

Throughout the program there are exercises called InterActivities. They are in a variety of formats that all have two features in common: (a) they check the user’s responses and return a "score", and (b) each exercise employs a random function that reorders the audio portions of the exercise for each iteration, so that over repeated plays the exercise is always different (and challenging).

The simplest of the exercises involves three pitches, in random order, that the user must drag into ascending order. A more sophisticated exercise based on the same design is a melodic "jigsaw puzzle": the four phrases of an eight-bar melody are scrambled, and the user drags the buttons that play each phrase into the correct order. The user can "play" his or her melody with the phrases out of order, and compare it to the correct version. There is also a button that checks and scores the student’s solution.

Another design that has more uses is a multiple choice listening exercise. Four excerpts are given, and for each the user must select and click on the best description from a list of choices. We have used this exercise design to test a wide variety of concepts, including duple versus triple meter, authentic versus half cadences, and fugal subject entries versus episodes.

A final InterActivity design allows us to test a student’s ability to observe the discrete events in (for example) a sonata form movement. The exercise begins with a complete diagram of a sonata form movement (in this case, the fourth movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40) with an empty box next to each section: first theme, bridge, second theme, etc. After clicking on the "Play" button, the user listens for the beginning of each section and then clicks on the appropriate box when it begins; the elapsed time promptly appears in the box. When all the boxes have been filled, the exercise is finished. The page includes fast-forward and reverse buttons, so that the user can go back and forth to amend his or her responses. When this design is used for practice or review the user can click and hold on a designated button to see the correct times for all of the parts. When used for testing purposes, this last capability is deactivated.

This prototype is presented as a work in progress. Our intent is to share the work we have done to date and to stimulate a response. There are many issues that we have not yet settled regarding the final form of this program. Some of them are: will this product be used primarily in lab settings, or in users’ homes? How will this kind of instruction affect the role of the instructor? How and to what degree does this medium shape and determine the content of the course? What can we do to make it more effective as an educational tool? We are very interested in your responses. Thank you.