Institute for Music Research, The University of Texas at San Antonio
lipscomb@utsa.edu
http://imr.utsa.edu/lipscomb/
Teaching fundamental musical concepts to non-musicians in the context of music appreciation (MUS 2673 – Masterpieces of Music) or rock history (MUS 2673 – History & Styles of Rock) courses has proven quite challenging. Though students who read the text and retain the salient points contained therein are quite capable of restating specific political events from a given period or providing basic biographical facts about composers and performers, the less-tangible aspects of the musical sound itself often elude students who truly want to learn about music. Basic musical concepts that have proven particularly difficult for the non-musician include identification of beats & beat subdivisions, determining the meter of a musical excerpt, and confidently identifying the musical form of a given piece of music.
When introducing students to these concepts, a number of pedagogical alternatives might be used. In many cases, a brief verbal description or a definition is initially provided by the instructor. This verbal description is frequently followed by an audio example. To confirm the students’ understanding of a given concept, the instructor is likely to provide a series of additional audio examples with explanation and further demonstration, when necessary.
Following such in-class demonstrations, students seem to have a clear understanding of these concepts, but when they attempt to recreate the experience outside of class—without the instructor’s guidance—students often meet with little success.
In an attempt to provide a "virtual" professor to guide students outside the classroom, the author has created a series of animations using Macromedia’s Director Studio to illustrate—and re-illustrate—basic concepts in music (see Figure 1). These materials are available to students seven days a week, 24 hours a day via the internet. After much experimentation with such animations, master templates were created to aid other instructors in the process of creating their own animations to demonstrate these fundamental concepts. All an instructor needs in order to make use of these templates is a copy of Director and an internet browser with the Shockwave plug-in. Copies of the templates are available at http://imr.utsa.edu/lipscomb/ for free download.
Using the templates
In order to make effective use of the templates in the creation of multimedia demonstrations, the instructor will need several items:
Figure 1. Examples of demonstrations of quadruple ("Layla") and triple ("I Never Loved a Man") meters
"Ripping" Audio from an Audio CD
The first step in the process of using the templates involves making a digital recording of a musical excerpt and saving it on your computer hard drive. It is quite possible to acquire music from any sound source (e.g., phonograph, cassette player, CD player, etc.) by using the 1/8" mini-pin audio input available on most multimedia PCs. In the case of the CD player, however, using this method requires that the data on the CD be converted from digital format to analog in order to enter the audio input. Then the signal must be resampled via your computer’s analog-to-digital converter to be saved in digital format on your hard drive. At each of these steps, the resulting signal is altered (i.e., distorted) in the conversion process. As a result, the quality of the musical sound is degraded.
Using a piece of audio extraction software (often called a "ripper"), however, it is possible to simply take the digital information contained on a compact disc and transfer it directly to a sound file on your computer, retaining the sound quality of the original recording. In order to acquire audio from a compact disc once a "ripper" has been downloaded and installed, you must follow the general steps provided below:
Setting Markers
Once you have copied the sound file to your hard drive, significant points in the digitized audio file must be identified. This process is done by placing "markers" in the sound file, using either Sonic Foundry’s Sound Forge (Windows) or Macromedia’s Peak (Mac). Though the exact actions may vary slightly depending on the software used, the process involves the following basic steps:
In order to function properly with the templates provided by the author, the final marker must be named "End." Other markers can remain at the default values assigned by the sound editing software.
Using Director to Create the Final Product
Once the audio sound file has been extracted and the markers placed, it is time to turn this file into an animated demonstration using the Director templates. To create your own multimedia demonstration, follow these final steps
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Figure 2. Example of the 12-bar blues template
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Making Your Opus Available on the Internet
After creating the Director movie, as described above, only three simple steps are required to make your work available to students on the internet:
That’s all there is to it! Evaluating data from surveys completed by students who were exposed to multimedia demonstrations as a requirement of their music courses have confirmed that students believe that the multimedia demonstrations have positively impacted their learning experience. It is the hope of the present author that these templates will prove useful to others teaching these basic musical concepts to non-musicians.
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Figure 3. Import sound file into movie cast.
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Figure 4. The startMovie script from "MeterSubdivisionTemplate.dir" template file.
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The instructor must have version 7.0 (or later) of Director and a recent
version of either Internet Explorer or Netscape Communicator.
Simply click on the graphic image labeled "Other Stuff" and select
the template you wish to acquire.
Whenever extracting audio in this way, it is important that you keep in mind
the issue of copyright infringement and whether your particular application
of this technology fits securely under the "Fair Use" provision.
Useful resources for this determination are the US Copyright Office Home Page
(http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/), Indiana University’s info about Fair
Use (http://www.indiana.edu/~ccumc/mmfairuse.html), and the UT System Policy
Page concerning Fair Use (http://www.utsystem.edu/OGC/Intellectualproperty/cprtpol.htm)
In each of the template files, the prepareMovie script is heavily "commented"
so that the user will know what information must be provided.
Please feel free to use (and adapt) these files as you wish. If you do use
the templates to create your own Director movies or Shockwave animations,
the author requests only that you 1) acknowledge their use on your web site
and 2) let the author know that you are using them. Email any comments and/or
suggestions for improvement to lipscomb@utsa.edu.
