Brett Terry and Carlos Maldonado, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

CASPAR is a software package developed to supplement the aural skills program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and to fill a need in aural skills curricula not being addressed by other currently available ear training software. Playback is implemented through a MIDI keyboard. CASPAR is written in Hypercard 2.1 and uses the HyperMIDI XCMD’s written by Nigel Redmon of EarLevel Engineering.

CASPAR began with two initial guiding propositions; namely, (a) that the experience during dictation should closely model the circumstances of an actual dictation session, and (b) that the purpose of the program should not be to give the answer but rather to allow the student to address their own particular weaknesses and obtain incremental chunks of information while working towards a solution. This instructional strategy also allows students to refine their metacognitive processes.

In order to realize proposition (a), it was decided to avoid using the computer screen as an answer board. Students in dictation work with pen and paper. It was felt, therefore, that maintaining this relationship would better prepare the student for actual dictation experience. This decision allows CASPAR to get away from the common "drill-and-practice" paradigm, and focus on individually tailored solutions to student's aural problems. Many other software programs expend a considerable amount of interface design and screen real-estate in creating an answer board. By getting away from this computer-assisted aural skills pedagogical paradigm, CASPAR is freed from being an "evaluator" and instead, is able to expand the horizons of a computer-assisted aural skills tutor, providing information other than answer–information that makes it explicit what students should be listening for.

During initial requirements analysis for CASPAR, discrimination problems and structural listening problems were identified as the most common problems for beginning aural skills students. Discrimination problems include the ability to discern rhythmic patterns, to discriminate between up and down motion, and to discriminate between skips and stepwise motion. Structural listening problems include the ability to hear underlying progressions and the ability to hear a tonic-based tonality as an implicit referential framework. CASPAR was designed to allow the user to become incrementally aware of his/her own difficulties in these areas, and to provide the means for self-correction at a level that other currently available software is unable to address.

Since many other quality programs were already in existence that tested intervals and chord qualities adequately, CASPAR is comprised only of Melodic Dictation and Harmonic Dictation stacks.

After listening to a melody, students may obtain information in problem areas. Most information is given away on a measure-by-measure, need-to-know basis. For example, if a student has rhythmic perception problems in the third measure of a five-measure melody, s/he can quickly navigate to a place where the third measure’s rhythm can be revealed, using the Show Rhythm card. For melodic dictation, there are nine different types of cards, each containing different aspects of information about the melody. This distinction enables students to obtain very specific and detailed information as a means of checking specific information about their answer–such as whether they have the correct rhythm for measure 2 and the correct overall contour for measure 3–as well as a means of providing hints to overcome about "blocks" without giving away the entire melody.

Several cards deal with hearing reference pitches. The student can chose to see all occurences of tonic pitches in the melody with the Show Tonic card, or more detailed information with the Show 1-3-5 or Show 5-7-2-4, which each show particular scale degrees in the melody associated with Tonic or Dominant harmony. Since the ability to discern these pitches is an important tenement in melodic dictation, CASPAR provides the ability, unlike most other aural skills programs, for the student to check whether s/he is developing this particular skill and provides a opportunity for isolated testing of this ability.

In addition to providing information about rhythm, CASPAR allows the user to see measure-by-measure harmonic analysis of the melody with the Implied Harmony card, so the student may verify if s/he is correctly inferring this kind of information. The Hints card is a place to start when a student is having trouble getting any information about the melody, and includes between one and three hints about several aspects of the melody.

The Contour card contains two kinds of information. Clicking on the measures reveals the overall contour of the melody, without accidentals or exact pitches (it does disclose the rhythm, however). Clicking just below the measure (independently of the contour), indicates, for each measure, whether adjacent pitches move by step or leap, by indicating all leaps with an "L".

The melody stacks also include a metronome which supports an optional measure-for-nothing. Another feature of the Melodic dictation stacks is the provision for playback-by-measure. CASPAR provides the flexibility to hear any combination of measures, so the listener need not always begin from the first measure and can explore similarities between measures directly.

Unlike the Melodic stacks, the Harmony stacks consist of only one card per progression. On each card, the student can obtain any pitch of any chord by clicking on the approximate location of the desired pitch. Entire voices can be toggled on and off by clicking to the left of the staff. Underneath the staff is an area where, for each chord, one can see the Roman numeral analysis, inversion symbol, and function symbol, each independently of each other. These can be toggled on and off for the entire progression also by clicking to the left of the first chord on the appropriate word.

In addition, the relative volume of each voice (and MIDI channel) can be assigned using the Balance control, which can be kept on-screen during the harmonic dictation. By option-clicking on the chord or regular clicking above the top staff, any combination of chords can be selected for playback.

In both melodies and progressions, the tempo can be controlled and playback controls are provided to play, pause, and stop playback. Both cards utilize on-card balloon help, easily accessed from the ballon on the lower left of the card, to provide concise descriptions of all buttons and information areas on the card. A comprehensive on-line help system is also available which includes examples of the Melodic dictation cards.

CASPAR .95 is currently available via a one-year distribution license with EarLevel Engineering. The beta-release has 8 of 12 modules and a few features missing from what will be CASPAR 1.0 For information send e-mail to bterry@cmp-nxt1.music.uiuc.edu or elund@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu. CASPAR should be available via anonymous FTP from sumex-aim.stanford.edu in info-mac’s /card folder and from ftp.cso.uiuc.edu