CTImusic
News

Spring 1996

Computer-Assisted Music Teaching in the USA

Celia Duffy

At the end of October, I returned from an 8-week trip to the USA, funded by a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Travel Fellowship. The purpose of the trip was to look at multimedia in higher education in Music - all kinds of multimedia from instructional CAL (my main interest), to multimedia archiving, to 'creative' multimedia. I visited about twelve institutions across the country. Some are leaders in the field, others are at about the same stage as we are in the UK - it is certainly not the case that all US university Music departments are avid users of technology.

In general, developments are along similar lines as we are taking here (with a few notable and extremely well-funded exceptions). This is no surprise, as we all have access to more-or-less the same software and hardware, and are under similar academic and financial pressures - too many students and too few teachers, little credit given for teaching innovations, the tyranny of RAE/tenure exercises, etc.

Library Use

One of these notable exceptions is the futuristic 'Variations' project at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, set to transform the conventional music library by eventually holding all audio materials on-line. Under the new system, scheduled to go live in January, users will be able to use a Web browser to call up the recording of their choice from the library's digitised audio holdings, have it delivered to their terminal, decompressed 'on the fly' and played at CD quality. The system is built to cope with simultaneous calls, so as many as 30 users can listen to the same track at the same time.

Lecture Use

At the University of Delaware* and Virginia Tech, I saw the most thoroughgoing, creative use and integration of multimedia into teaching. In the UK we think primarily of instructional multimedia as being used for independent, self-paced, solitary study; one of the most pleasant surprises for me in the US was to see how effectively multimedia can be used as a teaching aid in a lecture-hall.

For example, I sat in on a large music analysis class at Virginia Tech in a networked lecture theatre with state-of-the-art projection and presentation facilities. The 'faff' factor usually associated with these sorts of classes will, no doubt, be familiar - doling out multiple scores and handouts, having students fish around in the scores (if they can read them in the first place) to make comparisons between expositions and recapitulations, scribbling up harmonic events on a lined board, trying to find the exact section to play on the CD or, worse, cassette (or, even worse, winging it on the piano)...

All this was entirely absent. Instead, all the media elements were present and quickly retrievable from the one 'box' - a networked computer with the multimedia presentation containing the music, synchronised a la Voyager to the full score, clickable maps of the structure of the piece, detailed treatment of certain harmonic events and quick retrieval, in both sound and score, of their occurrences in the movement, and so on. The students at that 9 a.m. lecture were engaged and attentive; they could also call up the package later, in private, to review the material before embarking on their assignment.

A Different Ethos

In this country we have a problem with integrating technology into traditional patterns of teaching and learning. When I asked faculty members in the US about this (as I did repeatedly), I invariably got the same answer - 'Well, it's not really an issue with us...' No wonder: if you show the students what you can do with technology in your own teaching (e.g. in the lecture hall) and show them that you are making good use of it, then you are more than likely to galvanise the students into using it themselves and incorporating technology into their own work and study routines.

More Information

I hope to be publishing a full account of my trip in due course; meanwhile, if anyone would like to hear more about my experiences in the US, please contact me.

Celia Duffy
Department of Music
University of Glasgow
14 University Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QH
Scotland
UK

E-mail: celia@music.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)141 330 6065
Fax: +44 (0)141 307 8018

* For a detailed account of Larry Peterson's work developing computer tools for classroom access to Videodisc resources, see his article 'Music Literature Instruction and Multimedia: a Delaware Perspective' in Musicus, 4, 53-60.