hawkins@satie.arts.usf.edu

One of the most valuable assets for a musician is to acquire a proficient level of aural skills. However, in the development of these skills, the path from concept to reality can take many circuitous routes. For educators, the path winds through a variety of procedures and pedagogical approaches in a search for more practical and realistic objectives. The path that I have chosen begins and it ends with music literature. While this path may be widened to allow a broader perspective, it may also be narrowed to permit a more detailed focus.

For the past two years, the ultimate objective for my courses in aural theory has been to develop the aural perception of sound patterns, their content and context, as they appear initially and during a process of continuous development. It is the intent of this approach to approximate a real musical situation, where the listener is presented with a rapid and continuous flow of sound patterns and is expected to capture spontaneous impressions, accompanied by informed and discernible judgments, all retained by an extensive memory.

At the University of South Florida, there is a four-semester sequence of aural theory, two of which incorporate this approach in developing aural perception. This paper provides a brief description of the instructional format, design and concepts that are used to develop the approach. It includes a theoretical construct that has generated the framework for restructuring course content. Procedures and materials will be given to illustrate the practical applications that are used in the development of aural skills. A list of advantages, disadvantages and solutions are also given as well as challenges that have been encountered during the implementation of instructional technology. In general, the computer applications and web delivered supplements have been most valuable in facilitating and developing skills and they have made the access to this information available from almost any location. In the concluding remarks, there are a few references to challenges in web development that have developed during the process of finding an appropriate balance between the educational objective, the programming language and the equipment.

There are significant perceptual challenges when one engages in a typical listening experience. A listener perceives music as a succession of aural events, essentially related to the order in which they appear. It is this contextual placement that informs the listener and provides a framework for interpreting these events. Since music unfolds in a multi-dimensional format, the listener is challenged to focus on selective features or to create a more gestalt-like perspective of the musical experience. Both perspectives can offer valuable musical insights when they are applied at appropriate stages of the listening experience.

In addition to the skills that are involved in perceiving structural elements in music, there are special features of pitch organization. For example, in tonal music it is the stability of pitches such as tonic, dominant and mediant that establish tonality and the tendency tones of the subdominant and leading tone that reinforce this process. Rhythmical and metrical placement also contribute to establishing tonal stability within a musical context. It is the components of musical structure (thematic and tonal) that have provided the conceptual framework for skill development in the two semester sequence of aural theory. Concepts such as the perception of distinct patterns, their relationships, their transformation through time and space, their placement within a metrical and tonal structure as well as the memory retention of these features have become the benchmarks by which progress has been monitored.

In my project, I began with these benchmarks as subsequent objectives and then searched for an existing theoretical construct that might make them more accessible. I selected the concepts of music perception as they were expressed by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff in their book A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1982). The authors examined similarities between musical grammar (patterns, phrases, sections, etc.) and verbal grammar (words, phrase groups and sentences). They expressed caution regarding the tendency to find exact parallels between music and linguistics, however they did recognize some advantages of exploring plausible connections. Although their generative theory is related specifically to the visual perception of music, it does acknowledge the strength of previous listening experiences to inform this visual perspective, consequently many of the concepts are applicable to aural perception as well.

Lerdahl and Jackendoff identified four concepts that might be used to enhance the visual perception of musical structure; they are grouping structure, metrical structure, time span reduction and prolongation reduction. Grouping structure refers to a hierarchical segmentation of the piece into motives, phrases and sections. Metrical structure is the intuition that the events of the piece are related to a regular alternation of strong and weak beats at a number of hierarchical levels. In time span reduction, the pitches of a piece are assigned in a hierarchy of structural importance with respect to their position in grouping and metrical structure. Prolongation reduction assigns to the pitches a hierarchy that expresses harmonic and melodic tension and relaxation, continuity and progressions.

While there are many specific rules for interpreting these concepts—referred to as "well-formed" rules—there are also provisions for a variety of interpretations based on the level of sophistication of the experienced listener (preference rules) and the variety of contexts in a constantly changing environment, all affecting what we see and hear (they are called transformational rules).

For the aural theory sequence, these concepts were modified in order to reflect skills required in a listening experience of tonal music. Concepts such as grouping, contextual relationships and reductive procedures were modified and combined with tonal concepts. Some of the original terms were adapted and redefined to reflect the skills appropriate for aural perception. Grouping referred to the segmentation of passages into gestures, patterns, phrases and sections. Metrical structure indicated the relationship of musical events to strong and weak beats. Time span reduction reflected a hierarchy of structural significance assigned to pitches by their grouping and metrical structure. Prolongational reduction referred to the process of recognizing structural pitches as they are prolonged by elaborative patterns.

In order to develop the recognition of musical features within a given context, two activities have been added to the structural format. Selective recognition involved identifying specific musical materials such as pitch, rhythm, harmony, timbre, etc, in a musical context. Processive recognition consisted of identifying musical materials as they were affected by musical processes such as continuous motion, points of interruption, motivic development, phrase relationships and levels of tension and release.

The instructional format for this aural theory learning sequence is contained in a workbook with cassette tape and weekly web quizzes (some of which are monitored by the instructor in the computer lab). For each lesson there are a series of statements about the listening activity for which the students offer a multiple choice, true/false or musical notation response. The statements appear in gradual levels of difficulty and they are cyclical in that they appear in later lessons for reinforcement. They are intended to be informative so that the student can apply them to new listening activities. Other features of the instructional materials are the variety of timbres and the emphasis on limited and guided repetitions. The format of lessons in the workbook and the on-line quizzes are the same so that the student is familiar with both the concepts and the design.

Individual lessons contain three sections, each with a different sound source and a series of statements requiring different response modes. Section one contains arrhythmic, rhythmic and melodic patterns that are synthesized sounds as MIDI files and the response mode is in a multiple choice format. Section two contains melodic excerpts from the standard literature and the response mode is in a true/false format. Section three contains partial and complete notation of musical examples that have been recorded on acoustic instruments. for this section, music notation is entered on prepared staves from the workbook. Once a week, an on-line quiz is available either in a monitored session in the computer lab or students are allowed to take it from any location.

The use of computer technology along with the internet has been a most effective and efficient instructional supplements for developing and monitoring aural skills. The most attractive features of using this medium for the quizzes has been that the student could control the delivery of information, it was possible to create a more direct correlation between sight and sound and feedback could be both evaluative and immediate. With some of these features however, there have been disadvantages for which solutions had to be found (Table 1).

The design and implementation of the web materials has required an authoring language, server, browser and web environment that would accommodate the educational demands of this project. Since a quiz format was to be used by this medium, issues such as the potential for evaluative feedback, provisions for limited repetitions of musical examples or time limitation for the quiz and access to the most acceptable sound quality were most important considerations.

During the first year of implementation (academic year 1997-98), the programmer experimented with a variety of applications in order to accommodate the course objectives. HTML was selected for the authoring language because it was cross-platform. Java applets were used to play the musical examples with a fixed number of repetitions, however they could only play an 8 - bit .au file. While this greatly reduced the size of the sound files, and speeded up the download time, it sacrificed some of the sound quality. Midi files were small but playback varied greatly depending on a variety of factors.

For evaluative feedback, we used a format that was developed with CGI script by a professor in our Center for Academic Computing. There were inconsistencies that eventually required the use of another method. Access to web quizzes from any location was sometimes limited because of the variety of computers and browsers that were involved. Initially, we used Internet Explorer for greater stability and uniformity but later found Netscape Navigator to be more dependable. At peak hours during the day, the university and college server were in great demand and were limited in their capabilities to adequately run this program. While these issues appeared to be major hurdles, in retrospect, they were only challenges for which other solutions were found.

This year I changed to WebCT, a web environment for creating sophisticated web based courses that are otherwise beyond the capabilities of the non-computer programmer. This environment, which has its own server, is available to faculty on our campus through the Center for Academic Computing. It contains a number of components for structuring course content, posting assignments, tracking grades and providing evaluative feedback. The quizzes are entered in a data bank for each lesson and made available to students at designated times. Some of the quizzes are available to take at convenient times and locations while others are monitored in a computer lab. Each quiz is given a time limit, however students may utilize that time as determined by their individual needs. After the responses have been entered and submitted, students receive their score as well as the correct answers, providing immediate feedback.1

WebCT contains other features such as a glossary and tutorial. Both are useful in this type of learning sequence. In the glossary, various terms are defined in order to clarify the subject content. The on-line glossary was not used since the students' workbooks contain a glossary. A tutorial provides additional exercises that have been designed to increase the proficiencies of certain aural skills.

It has been the intent of this author to use a pedagogical approach that would develop aural perception within a realistic (i.e., ecologically valid) musical environment. A desired outcome has been that students would be equipped with skills to recognize, retain, relate, and record rapidly changing patterns in varying timbres and contexts. In addition, they would approach each listening activity with expectations based on an informed awareness that enhances their musical understanding. In the two years that this project has been used, students have been able to retain longer patterns and refer to their context before notation. Responses have indicated that students are able to describe these patterns and other musical events in terms that indicate a knowledge of musical structure. The use of computer technology has greatly enhanced the development of these aural skills, because students can individually control the delivery of information and receive evaluative feedback. Access to these materials on the web has been an efficient tool and a convenience for both the instructor and the student.

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  A sample quiz can be made available on the web by contacting me at his address: http://hawkins@satie.arts.usf.edu.