What can be done and how can computer technology come to our aid when students have no way of organizing what they hear even in the broadest sense and no understanding that musical sounds are for the most part logically organized in certain configurations? Last fall, one of my best music appreciation students asked how she could improve her work on listening identification: "It all sounds alike to me," she complained. I suggested listening to the music several times over, while trying to conceal the alarm I felt at hearing that that ifor her, at least, a Palestrina mass, Chopin piano prelude, and the finale of Stravinsky’s Firebird "sound alike." It was obvious that whatever had happened in course so far had done little to improve her listening skills. Then again, once I remarked to my father (a graduate of a 1940s-era college music appreciation course) that the piano music we had just heard was in sonata form. He disagreed: did not consider that the music might have any consistent underlying structure at all. I guess he believed, as I did in the days before become a music major, that musical art was a succession of discrete sound events that had been strung together in a pleasant and sometimes even moving way, by means of trial and error, or through genius akin to a miracle.

My music history students these days understand the process of composition somewhat, and do a respectable job of differentiating between musical sounds, but when it comes to getting very specific about the contents of their listening examples, or really finding their way in a piece they have never heard before, the going gets rough. It is so much easier for them (as it was for me) to memorize and reproduce facts- dates, names, lists of style traits, and definitions. I maintain nevertheless that however useful memorizing information clustered around a work may be, it cannot substitute for understanding how the music is put together in sound. After all, that is what separates musical training from other kinds--memorization of facts is required in many subjects and is not a skill particular to musical training. We’re the ones who are concerned with the art of organizing sounds in time. ~

Musicians, music educators, and researchers understand different musical sounds--whether they are intervals, scales, chord sonorities, motets, organa, symphonic movements, or music dramas--as specific, known entities that tend to behave in certain ways. Many listeners and our students do not. They are hard pressed to describe what they hear: "it all sounds alike" to them. Students often fail to embed musical sounds in sufficient contextual knowledge to make the sounds meaningful; they are thus at a loss to describe what they hear in music notation or in words.

As music educators, we attempt to train students to listen attentively and interactively, developing the web of connections that gives aural experience shape, enabling students to make sense of the sounds they hear. The process is broadly the same, whether the task is performing a rhythmic pattern accurately--being able to discern aurally when it is performed correctly and when it is wrong; doing ear training: yes, I wrote down what I heard--I know that those sounds and these symbols go together; sight singing--I am singing the pitches notated here, this is the way they should sound (more or less)--or recognizing the components of a sonata movement or concerto--aha! a double exposition! We try to structure students’ exposure to music so they will build listening skills that provoke thought, enable them to organize their aural experiences, and describe, imitate, or notate what they hear.

Recorded sound and the ability to generate sound electronically has revolutionized the manner in which these skills are taught in the past two decades. I clearly remember having a long-suffering friend (and at one point even a tutor) pound out intervals and dictation examples on the piano until I finally got it down, and nights of "drop the needle" listening quizzes with my peers in music historny class.

Those rather crude methods can be bypassed with software that indexes sounds on CD with precision and presents visual clues to aural events. We can truly help students--music majors or non-majors- understand what they hear without resorting to exhortations to "practice, practice, practice" or making facility in reading music notation a prerequisite.

Technology that is advanced but not hopelessly complex can be a powerful ally in fostering productive, thoughtful listening by providing students with interactive programs, making musical structures visible and supplying the necessary tools for facile aural comparison of works, sections, or discrete musical events such as intervals. In combination with digital sound on compact discs, computer interfaces can make a significant and vital difference in the way we expose students to sounds, providing them with a network of associations in which to embed them.

Computer programs that use ordinary audio compact discs in new ways via graphic user interfaces are ideal for this type of work: they can provide students with streamlined analyses and verbal context, intuitive manipulation of audio output, and the means to apply what they have learned directly to other works. Through CD-plus-software programs, students can create their own aural analyses by ear instead of or in addition to using notated music to implement what they have learned. CD Time Sketch is one such software program; it enables teachers and students to precisely index music heard on compact discs, marking very pspecific spots, such as the beginnings of themes, and providing charts and textual commentary describing how the sections of a musical work function.

A sample time sketch of Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor illustrates how this type of system works. The user is presented with three paragraphs introducing the symphony at hand; the next screen shows a table of contents. In the case of this work, a summary of the symphony, its four movements and the exposition of the first movement are listed. Moving into the contents of the program, a graphic representation or chart which uses arches or "bubbles" to represent different sections of each movement is provided. The area under each arch is colored to help differentiate between musical content. For example, the chart for the first movement shows arches for the first (yellow) and second (blue) themes, the development is in pink. A static screen text supplies general information about the movement. Starting the CD, we see that as the music plays, short texts synchronized with musical events appear describing them directly below the "bubble" chart. A red triangle cursor moves along to show exactly where we are in the course of the movement. Students may start or stop the music at will, and are able to compare events such as first and second themes, keys, and movements whenever they choose.

Among the most effective aspects of the graphic interface is the possibility of comparing sections aurally. By moving the mouse and clicking on different part of the chart (bubbles) one can directly compare the sound of the second theme in the exposition versus the same theme in the recapitulation, a nearly impossible task using conventional equipment. Also useful is the possibility of comparing key areas, helping students to develop a better sense of key relationships between sections. A teacher is finally relieved of the task of trying to explain what is going on while the music is playing. I for one never got much out of what I call "voice overs": it was usually impossible to hear the teacher’s words and make sense of how they related to the music while it was playing. A music appreciation student sitting in a class is not likely to learn much from such a demonstration, and given the limits on class time, one cannot realistically go over and over the same point until everyone in the class truly does recognize the development section when it comes along. In contrast, a graphic image of a Mozart symphony or a Vivaldi concerto sticks in students’ minds. Those colored bumps make a lasting impression.

One may argue that the analysis presented is rather simplistic, and it is in the sense that it passes over details and doesn’t involve much in the way of technical vocabulary. However, an advanced music history or analysis class might be interested in looking at the chart for the exposition of the first movement, which breaks the themes down phrase by phrase and shows the transition or bridge and codetta. Given this information, a student could listen to a similar work and (it is hoped) find parallel structures.

Using the authoring software, students and teachers can make charts of their own: the basic trick is to indicate (with a mouse "click") where sections start and stop; then synchronized "pop-up" texts are added and displayed at a readable pace. CD Time Sketch can be used with any audio CD to prepare a similar graphic user interface for any recorded work; MIDI sound samples and a glossary can also be added. Commerical CDs--here an inexpensive digital remastering of an old George Szell/Cleveland Orchestra performance--are CD Time Sketch’s usual fuel, the disc is included in the package. It must be remembered that a sketch is tied to a specific performance (down to a split second). Any old CD of Mozart’s 40th symphony won’t do. New CDs could be mastered to cover other subjects. Charts could be made covering intervals, chord sonorities, harmonic progressions, dictation or any other aspect of musical sound, given that one has the necessary sounds on an audio CD. This is not as difficult as one might think. In my home city of Clarksville, Tennessee, a new software company has begun to advertise CD-ROM mastering. For fifty dollars, an hour’s worth of MIDI or wave files can be mastered onto an audio CD. What a relief for theory and analysis teachers to have sets of intervals, modes, sonorities, chord progressions, chorales or whole movements infinitely repeatable and labelled simultaneously with their sound! And what a boon for music history students to have a series of test listening examples heard and identified for practice purposes.

Currently, prefabricated Time Sketch analyses for several works by Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, and others have been published by Electronic Courseware Systems, and more are under development. Initially developed in DOS for IBM machinery, Macintosh versions are also being generated. I’m using a prototype of the Mozart for Macintosh today. Although the sketch authoring software was written for DOS-IBM machinery and "there is no push for a Mac version," with the exception of Windows for Macintosh (kind of like translating a translation back into the original) the publisher tells me, my hunch is that a Mac version could and should be made. The program is not as complex as some of the CD-ROM hypercard materials which show notation and pictures and branch out to all kinds of things. The idea here is to concentrate on a fairly basic analysis of the music that draws the listener into its structure rather than providing extensive contextual material which can become confusing or unwieldy and may limit the integration of the piece into a course or curriculum.

In all cases, the graphic image showing a cursor moving synchronically with the sound and texts popping up to explain events as they are heard is constantly before the user and enables him or her to effectively tailor listening to personal needs. Working at a comfortable pace, movements, sections, or events can be repeated or skipped at will. Linked with assessment of students’ aural skills, such as quizzes and games--on computer or in off--CD-plus-software programs can result in more efficient, attentive listening. The precise indexing of sounds shown by graphic representation gives students more control over what they hear; thus it is far easier to repeat specific sections or sounds than with a conventional CD player. Because the system uses an ordinary commercially produced CD, one still has the option of using the CD in a conventional player. With the Mozart, one can say to students, "You have heard and seen the analysis for Symphony No. 40, now see what you can make of Symphony No. 35 on the same disc."

Music sounds on compact discs can be accessed, portrayed, and heard with extreme precision by using graphic interfaces. It is time to put this advance in linking digital sound and digital computing to work in educating music lovers and musicians.