If music educators of 30 years ago had tried to predict the status of technology in the profession today, it is doubtful that they would have foreseen the growing prominence of personal computers in school classrooms and the ease of use of today's computers through graphical user interfaces. Also, they probably would not have anticipated the existence of MIDI, a standard protocol (one of the few) specifically designed to communicate musical performance information among computers and other electronic music equipment. Finally, it is unlikely that they would have predicted the vast improvement in sound quality of digital audio recording technology and the presence of compact disc players in music classrooms. Yet, there is striking similarity between technologically-versed music educators today and the practitioners with "technical outlook7' 30 years ago, who were also concerned with adapting technology for use in music instruction and making it subservient to their educational goals (e.g., Choate & Kaplan, 1967). This may cause us to consider today what new technologies will emerge tomorrow and think about how we can adapt it for our educational purposes. This process of adapting from other areas outside music may be a key to maintaining the professionalism of music education in the "computer age."
    In this paper, we will begin by briefly illustrating how some past transfers of technology and scientific discoveries have proven to be very important for our society in general and for music education in particular. Next, we will discuss some recently developed computer-based research tools that could eventually be shaped to fit the needs of the music classroom. The presented programs merely serve as examples for the great potential of adaptation rather than being readily applicable in their current form. Furthermore, these specific programs will surely be outdated soon (if they are not already), but the underlying issues they address will be of lasting interest. We will conclude by emphasizing cross-fertilization of fields of knowledge, and by suggesting how future adaptations for music instruction may be promoted.

Importance of Technology in Music Education
    Judging from publications in past issues of educational journals, music educators have seemingly always been interested in technology (Wyman, 1966; Choate & Kaplan, 1967). Our past colleagues-of whom some are still in service-have seemed to recognize technology's potential to improve and enhance music instruction. In this, their outlook and expectations are no different than ours today. Consider the following statements, both from issues of the Music Educators Journal, but published 30 years apart, in the mid 60s and mid 90s:

There is considerable agreement that students learn best when they are ready, motivated, and interested. Learning is facilitated when presentations are multisensory, life-like, meaningful, and related to basic needs. Technology has provided the teacher with a tremendous range of devices for presenting stimuli to the eyes and ears of students. (Wyman, 1966, p. 105) A more recent solution to the problem of engaging students' attention during listening exercises incorporates the latest developments in technology. Perhaps the greatest advantage of multimedia is its ability to grab and hold students' attention. Multimedia presentations are inherently motivating for students. (Baltzer, 1996, p. 34)

    If one were to substitute the term "multimedia" with "technology" in the latter quote, the statements become virtually interchangeable, demonstrating the similarity in educators' goals and aspirations across time. It should be noted, however, that despite this similarity, the articles from which they were drawn attest to how far music education has come technologically. While the article by Wyman features record players, Baltzer discusses multimedia projection systems.

Transfer of Technology Between Domains
    To understand current developments in music, we have to broaden the discussion beyond just the field of music. Often, the significance of past technological inventions was not fully realized until long after the initial point of discovery. In fact technology often finds its greatest success, be it economically and socially, in areas for which the product was not initially intended (Rosenberg, 1995). Perhaps the most well-known example is the material Teflon. After its 1938 discovery, it was initially used by the United States military as a corrosion resistant material in uranium production. It was not until decades later that consumers learned of Teflon as a non-stick coating on cookware. Similar stories can also be told about nylon, Styrofoam, and silicone (Taras, 1995).
    A little closer to home for musicians is the example of the phonograph. The earliest sound recording technology was primarily developed for documenting only the spoken word. "Speech has become, as it were, immortal," proclaimed the Scientific American over a hundred years ago, upon learning of Thomas Edison's invention of the phonograph; "music," it added, almost as an afterthought, "may be crystallized as well" (cited in Music Educators Journal, 1977, p. 52). Today, three decades after the invention of the first laser, digital laser technology, in the form of compact discs, is the standard in the music recording industry; accordingly, CD players are becoming commonplace in music classrooms. Originally, laser technology was first used for precision measurement needed for installing sewage lines. Finally, owing to its wide use in the recording industry, NMI sequencing technology is now commonly available as a software application-- as opposed to its expensive rack-mounted hardware ancestors. Commercially available for any desktop computer platform, software sequencers have become accessible to musicians of all levels. They are also gaining popularity in music education and can be very useful in teaching certain musical concepts (Rudolph, 1996), including timbre and ensemble playing.

Music Education and Music Research
    The above examples of technological adaptations represent a wide variety of origins. In order to successfully predict our current uses of this technology, music educators of the past would have had to look to early mechanical research, industrial science, and the commercial music business. For the purpose of addressing our future use of technology, we propose to look also at how technology is being used in today's music research, specifically expertise research in music performance. Many of the computer tools used in this type of research are potentially transferable to music instruction. This is largely due to an important similarity between expertise research (in music) and music education, namely the need to assess and evaluate how people produce music, interact in musical settings, and what they think about music. In expertise research, we try to describe and explain individual differences in performance and skill acquisition (Lehmann, in press, for a review). It is easy to see the parallels with music education, where music teachers try to identify individual differences in students' musical abilities, and then choose the most effective method for improving a student's performance. This brings up another premise and contribution of expertise research. By studying the biographical background, training, and practice procedures of expert musicians (e.g. Ericsson, Krampe, Tesch-Romer, 1993), researchers can provide insights into the optimal conditions for musical learning.
    In short, research in music performance and learning examines several issues, which also represent areas of need in music education: (a) observation and tracking of musical behavior, (b) objective evaluation of musical performance, and (c) identifying and diagnosing conditions and strategies for musical learning. The following computer program tools, of which future forms could eventually be useful in music education, have been used in music research at Florida State University's Center for Music Research.

Adapting Technology from Music Research
ChronoLog.
    Created with Asymetrix Multimedia ToolBook authoring system, ChronoLog was originally designed for registering observable behaviors that musicians' may exhibit during practice. The researcher typically watches a video-tape of a practice session or rehearsal and uses the mouse pointer to click on-screen buttons that correspond to the respective behavior. Before the session, the observer determines how many activities will be tracked (up to 15) and how the buttons representing them will be labeled. Each time an activity button is clicked during observation, ChronoLog registers and displays the starting time for that activity and calculates the duration of the preceding activity. When the user terminates the observation session, ChronoLog writes the displayed information (activity names, start times, and durations) to a file. In addition, it also calculates for each activity the number of occurrences, cumulative duration of all occurrences, and the average duration per occurrence. This output is formatted such that it can immediately be imported into a statistical analysis software application.
    Duke and Farra (1997) developed and implemented a program called SCRIBE which has similar features to ChronoLog. SCRIBE is used by undergraduate music education majors while observing videotapes of themselves teaching in order to track effective and ineffective teaching behaviors (Duke, 1996). This is an example of how a research-oriented tool is already being used in music education. In the future, tracking programs like ChronoLog and SCRIBE could be adapted for a palmtop computer (a "personal digital assistant" like Pilot, by U.S. Robotics) such that elementary and secondary school music teachers, as well as studio instructors, could use them for immediate observations in their classrooms. In addition to tracking behavioral indicators of students' musical learning, such applications could be used for programs of behavior modification and classroom discipline. Teachers might also consider monitoring their own teaching behaviors, in order to ensure that they are spending the desired amounts of time on various class activities. If provided with the right structure and guidance, students themselves might be able to track their own activities, helping them to better allocate time and developing better practice habits.
MidiScore and Midi-to-Text Converter.
    Also created with Multimedia ToolBook, MidiScore compares the musical performance information of two MIDI files. Its main purpose is to objectively evaluate performance accuracy. MidiScore has been used in music performance research to objectively measure technical accuracy in piano sight-reading (i.e., pitches and rhythms), by comparing MIDI files of an actual performance by a student ("subject files") to a MIDI files which contained the rhythmically and note-perfect target performance ("standard files"). To score an actual performance file, MIDI files are first converted to text files (i.e., a text display of the captured musical events), using the Midi-to-Text Converter program (Kawaguchi, 1995). MidiScore allows the researcher to specify different levels of tolerance for timing accuracy. This tolerance levels defines a time "window" during which a note may be played and still be considered correct. For example, it is possible to allow a note to be 200 milliseconds early, which would be useful when a performer rushes a little bit and tends to play notes slightly before their prescribed onset. After comparing each note of the subject file with the standard file, MidiScore gives three final statistics: a) the number of matches (correctly played notes) between the subject and standard files, b) the number of notes in the standard file that were not played correctly (or at all) by the subject, and c) the number of extra notes (i.e., not in the standard file) played by the subject.
    While the current version of MidiScore only scores the pitch and rhythmic accuracy of notes, it can easily be adapted to evaluate loudness, articulation (note duration), or tempo. As pitch-to-MIDI conversion becomes more accurate, a tool like MidiScore could be used with wind and string instruments, as well as voice. This could lead to systems for performance assessment that replace older performance measures such as the Watkins-Farnum scale. An added benefit would be that teachers can test music students with musical material of their choice by either playing a "correct" performance themselves or by going through a music notation program and generating a MIDI file from the notation. Students themselves could score their own performances to monitor their improvement on pieces of music they are studying. Finally, the technology of MidiScore may someday be the answer to questions many music teachers receive regarding valid assessment and grading procedures.
MPAS. Multiple Protocol Analysis System.
    Some research in expert performance and skill acquisition has utilized a verbal reports methodology to find out what people are thinking while they perform a task or just after performing it (Ericsson & Simon, 1993). The basic procedure involves that participants in an experiment "think aloud" as they perform a task or give retrospective reports of their thoughts immediately after the task. Over the years, guidelines for eliciting and collecting verbal reports-also called "protocols"-have been refined to make it a more objective process, whereas many traditional introspective methods tend to be more subjective. Many studies in cognitive psychology have demonstrated that people can learn quickly to verbally report their thoughts without hindering performance outcomes or changing their cognitive strategies (Ericsson & Simon, 1993). This methodology can give researchers access to people's thought processes and learning mechanisms.
    MPAS is a computer-based tool for objectively categorizing and analyzing transcribed verbal protocols (Crutcher, Ericsson, & Wichura, 1994). Before using MPAS, the researcher transcribes all verbal protocols into a text file segmenting off individual idea statements. MPAS then takes the text file, draws randomly from the entire pool of segments, and presents the segments to a coder (or multiple coders to facilitate computation of inter-coder reliability). The randomness eliminates contextual information that might bias the interpretation of individual verbal reports. The coder assigns each segment a letter or digit code corresponding to a predetermined coding scheme. Once the coding is done, MPAS generates a data file indicating frequencies and sequences of codings, suitable for quantitative analysis by statistics software.
    The main purpose of MPAS is to accomplish more objectively what all music teachers try to do when they informally talk to their students about how they practice or what they think about when they play their instruments. With MPAS, we can objectively assess what students say and draw conclusions about their musical learning strategies. In the future of music education, it might be possible for young music students to go through a standardized series of performance tasks during which they give verbal reports throughout. Voice recognition technology could quickly transcribe their protocols and segment them according to speech bursts (pauses most likely signaling a new discrete thought). A more automated version of MPAS could then apply a standardized coding scheme developed specifically for the learning domain being examined. Such technology could be used to objectively diagnose music students' problems with practice strategies and musical learning in general. For instance, it might identify deficiencies in goal setting, undeveloped error detection, and even perceptual deficiencies.

Promoting Future Adaptations of Technological Innovations
    As we have pointed out in the beginning of this paper, music educators have in the past been successful in adapting technology for use in the classroom. The three software applications from music research discussed above may be a starting point for thinking about general issues in music education such as objective evaluation of performance, optimization of practice and teaching time, and finally the assessment of good and faulty learning strategies. Technology may hold a key to achieving our goals, and music educators can take advantage of emerging technology by adapting it to the needs of our profession. There are several ways of contributing to this process.
    As individuals interested in computer technology and its applications in instruction, we can continue to be involved in the technology training of music educators. In our function as technology educators, we can encourage others to keep abreast of developments in music technology and "non-music" technology. Through workshops, conference clinics, and in-service presentations those music educators can be reached who have so far managed to avoid the computer age. Required classes in technology for undergraduate music majors are currently being piloted at Florida State University and probably at other universities.
    As researchers, we can conduct research that is externally valid and accessible to music teachers. Too often, research findings with real-life generalizability cannot reach teachers in the field if they never hear about it, or if teachers who try to read about it cannot understand the scientific jargon. By trying to lessen the gap between research and practice, developments in technology will be more easily adapted for instructional purposes.
    As educators in the age of information and multimedia, we can use our computers to keep up with relevant research conducted on the outer bounds of music education. Such areas as educational research and cognitive psychology often undertake studies with relevance to music; certainly we can borrow from their findings, experimental methodologies, and uses of technology.
    To be sure, being open to innovations has to go along with a clear focus on our educational goals. The emergence of fascinating technology easily encourages the search for opportunities within education to apply the "neat new toys" (cf. Stoll, 1995, for examples). Instead, we should seek out and adapt those technological tools that will most likely improve music education, and thus make music in the schools an indispensable part of future students' learning experiences.

References
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