Scott D. Lipscomb, Institute for Music Research,University of Texas at San Antonio

Listening to musical excerpts in class is a crucial part of any Music Appreciation course. However, the instructor often finds her-/himself at the compact disc (CD) or cassette player fast forwarding and rewinding in an effort to locate specific sections of a composition. Digital displays, providing readout in a minutes:seconds format, have made CD players a more user-friendly addition to the classroom. However, even with high-quality CD players, a significant amount of classtime may be lost searching for "the right place" in a composition.

These interactive software listening guides are powerful tools for class presentation of musical materials. There are, however, several drawbacks to using listening guides that have been put together by someone else. What if you want to identify significant events other than the beginnings of the large sections, illustrated in Figure 1? At a more fundamental level, what if you disagree with the author’s analysis of a given piece and would prefer to present an alternative analysis of the piece to your students. Finally, as helpful as the listening guides are, publishers often include software listening guides for only a subset of the recordings available on the CDs accompanying the text. For example, Kerman (1992) provides listening guides for only 24 of the 33 pieces on his 3 CD set. In addition, the software does not function appropriately with the larger collection of CD recordings available as a companion to any of the three Music Appreciation texts mentioned previously. This means that, not only is the instructor tied to the analysis proposed by the author, but there is a limited number of listening guides included in computer software format.

Software is now available that will allow an instructor to create her/his own listening guides using any audio CD recording. Programs are available for both Macintosh and Windows platforms. CD Time Sketch for Windows (Short, 1996) and Clip Creator for the Macintosh (Boody, 1991) provide a means of creating listening guides quickly and efficiently. Because our Division of Music at UTSA is primarily Macintosh-based, I have chosen to demonstrate Clip Creator.

Regardless of which software you use, the process of creating your own listening guide involves three main steps:

Mark points. In Clip Creator, one accomplishes the first step by entering the Clip Chart Edit Screen (Figure 2). Navigate to the Edit Screen by double-clicking on the Clip Creator 3.1 icon, click on "To Clip Chart" in the upper left-hand corner of the opening Menu Screen, select either "9-inch" or "Large" from the message box depending on how large you would like your finished analysis to appear on the computer monitor, then click on the "Add an Analysis" button at the bottom of the Clip Chart screen. You will then be asked to provide several pieces of necessary information. You must decide whether you want to use the audio CD currently in the drive or replace it with another. Once that determination is made, the program will ask you to select the starting and ending tracks to be used in your analysis, allowing you to provide either a detailed analysis of a single track (e.g., one movement) or a larger-scale analysis that incorporates multiple tracks on the CD (e.g., all four movements of a symphonic movement).

Once you have saved, named, and edited the points to your satisfaction, it is a wise precaution to save this information to the computer’s hard disk by clicking on the "Save" button in the lower left-hand corner of the Edit Screen. This allows the timing information to be loaded at a later time (by clicking on the "Load" button and selecting the file).

Figure 2. Clip Creator 3.1 Edit Screen.

Draw the Analysis. Once all points have been marked, click on the "Draw Analysis" button. Clip Creator will then proceed to divide the horizontal time line representing your excerpt into sections based on the marked points entered in the previous step. Once the calculation is complete, you may add up to four "upper sections" (i.e., higher-level analyses) to the graphic representation of your excerpt. An analysis of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 is provided in Figure 3. This particular analysis makes use of all four upper sections representing (from top to bottom): a) the entire piece, b) the four major sections (i.e., Exposition, Development, Recapitulation, and Coda), c) subsections within each of the major sections (e.g., primary theme, bridge, second theme group, etc.), and d) important events within each of these smaller sections (e.g., opening motive, second theme, cadence theme, etc.). When the Clip Chart is complete, the user may click on any of these rectangular areas to start the CD playback at the point represented by the beginning of that section. This simplifies the navigation between various sections of a piece exponentially and affords an opportunity for easy comparisons between these sections. For example, it is easy to aurally compare the change in key between the second theme group of a sonata form as presented in the exposition and the recapitulation, multiple occurrences of a fugue subject, or the relationship between a theme and its variations.

Figure 3. Clip Creator 3.1 Clip Chart for the first movement of Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, created by the author.

Attach Text. To add textual commentary to an analysis, one simply clicks on the "Add Comments" button. Two types of text may be added to the analysis in Clip Creator. General comments are contained in the text box on the right side of the Edit Screen and remain visible at all times. This text may contain "hot words," represented in bold type. When the user clicks on one of these "hot words," a definition supplied by the instructor will appear. The other type of commentary is attached to the various marked points, as identified above. To add this type of commentary, simply click on the section to which you wish to add text and begin typing in the left-hand textbox. During playback, this text will change at the beginning of each section, so that the listeners’ attention may be drawn to aspects of the musical sound that are considered most important.

Once the three steps outlined above have been completed, clicking on the "Use" button (next to the "Pause" button on the Edit Screen; as seen in Fig. 2) allows immediate use of the analysis that you have just created. To illustrate the simplicity of creating a Clip Chart, the author created a usable analysis of the first movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 5 within the 25-minute time frame of this presentation. In addition to providing analyses utilizing audio CDs, Clip Creator may be used similarly with a laserdisc player connected to the computer via a serial cable. The program also affords instructors the opportunity to create their own MIDI examples and Study Drills. I have found this program to be flexible and extremely easy to use. The Clip Chart facility alone has made my Music Appreciation lecture presentations more organized and efficient.