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| From i.t.link (Thomson Course Technology), Spring/Summer 2003 Harmonic Convergence Powerful software and a receptive climate are combining to transform music education . . . . . . . . . . . . . By David Brittan AFTER YEARS OF slow progress, classroom music technology is on the verge of shedding its reputation as a problem child. Its potential, like that of all underachievers, is enormous. MIDI and other digital technologies—sound synthesis, recording, sampling, editing, and mixing—can help young people explore music even if they don't play an instrument. With the right tools, instructors can bring concepts like harmony and form to life, and students can become creators—not just consumers—of the culture they live and breathe. The trick is getting the technology into the hands of educators and students. While most four-year colleges teach some form of digital music-making, a casual Web survey finds that under half of two-year institutions do. In K–12 just 40 percent of music teachers use technology with their students, and then mostly in small doses, according to a nationwide survey conducted in 2000. Other studies suggest that college music education programs are turning out too many teachers who don't know music technology. Not surprisingly, educators with well-equipped music labs count themselves lucky. The barriers are the familiar ones—cost, curriculum, training, resistance to change. But those barriers are gradually coming down. Over the past few years, the music industry has undergone what might be termed a soft revolution: work that was once done by expensive hardware is now being done faster and cheaper by software running on ever more powerful desktop computers. At the same time, information sources for teachers have been multiplying, and young people have gotten hooked on music technology on their own. Thanks to this convergence of technology and opportunity, the new tools may soon live up to their considerable academic promise. Soft Music The music technology program at Northeastern University in Boston epitomizes the changes going on in the industry. There, sixty music technology majors are learning the gamut of skills expected of today's electronic musicians: sound design, composition for electronic and acoustic instruments, interactive real-time performance, MIDI sequencing (using a musical instrument to create strings of digital commands on a computer), digital editing, and recording, and more. Begun in 1998, it is a practical program, requiring students to work professionally for 18 months out of their five-year enrollment, and as such it is keenly attuned to trends in the music industry. Those trends are reflected in Northeastern's extensive music laboratories, which house rack upon rack of hardware: E-MU E-Synth synthesizer/sampler/workstations, Kurzweil and Capybara synthesizers, Sony digital audio recorders, Yamaha digital mixers, and much more. To hold it all, certain walls had to be specially reinforced. What else could students possibly need now that Northeastern has spent $250,000 on state-of-the-art equipment? "Ironically, we plan to move more and more of the operation onto the personal computer," says Dennis Miller, the program's founder. "That is certainly the way the industry is moving. With fast enough computers"—Northeastern uses high-end Macs and Dell PCs—"you can do almost anything on the desktop that once required pounds and pounds of hardware. With our next round of computer upgrades, expected this summer, I believe that we could accomplish all of our goals using just software." Miller finds it especially telling that Akai, which makes top-of-the-line samplers (systems that record snippets of sound for use as building blocks), is coming out with software-only versions of the same products, and that soft versions of Moog, Yamaha, and Sequential Circuits synthesizers are already on the market. Miller's colleague, Jim Anderson, who teaches recording, points to another killer ap: Digidesign's Pro Tools. The software and its many plug-ins allow Macs or PCs to do the work of professional recorders, mixers, and mastering consoles. "Pro Tools has probably had the most profound impact of any single brand-name technology that I can remember," says Anderson, "and I've been in the recording business for 25 years." Plus the price is hard to beat. While a premium version of Pro Tools, with processors on PCI cards, costs upwards of $10,000, a stripped-down version called Pro Tools Free is…free. "The free version might limit the size of your projects," says Anderson, "but you're still able to produce literally professional-quality work, every bit as high-quality as someone who's invested $40,000 or more." Not all the software that is transforming music technology is so specialized. Anthony Paul De Ritis, a composer who chairs the multimedia department and has helped design the music technology program, swears by Mark of the Unicorn's versatile Digital Performer. "I started with Performer back in 1987, when it came out. It's still extremely widely used on the Mac side for doing digital audio editing and recording and MIDI sequencing all in the same environment. I find it to be a truly magnificent tool, an incredibly wonderful creative environment for both acoustic and electronic sound sources." He's using it to compose his Devolution: Concerto for DJ and Orchestra, which the Oakland Symphony will premiere in March 2004. That Swiss Army knife approach is proliferating in music software, allowing students to accomplish more with a single application. MIDI sequencers do recording and mixing, recording software comes with virtual instruments, and a host of programs—Sonic Foundry's Sound Forge and Acid Pro, Emagic's Logic, Cakewalk's Sonar, and others—provide too many sequencing, looping, and editing functions to list. Many such applications can also play video, allowing you to write a soundtrack in synchrony with it. Good Timing The industry's soft revolution, with its promise of falling costs and greater usability, couldn't have come at a better time for music education. A few years ago, teachers might not have been ready. Just ask Wayne Splettstoeszer, who runs the thriving music technology program at Torrington (CT) High School, with its 20 fully equipped workstations. When he arrived at the school in 1996, the program was embryonic. So were his computer skills. "I couldn't even turn the Mac on," he says. Getting up to speed on notation software and MIDI sequencing required "many, many, many hours" of late-night tinkering. To design a curriculum, he had to download college syllabuses and water them down to the level of the school's technology. "There was just nothing for high schools back then," he says. If he had started out today, Splettstoeszer would have found a wealth of resources. How to teach music technology is now the subject of numerous books, Web sites, and online forums, including the very useful Technology Open Forum of MENC, the National Association for Music Education. Companies like SoundTree (Melville, NY) are available to build music labs to order. And teachers flock to training workshops that the nonprofit Technology Institute for Music Educators (TI:ME) holds at campuses around the country and online. Guidance on funding is part of the workshops' draw, according to Beth Pickard, a TI:ME instructor in Indiana: "We talk about the best sources of grants, and then write sample grants." A required text is Finding Funds for Music Technology, by TI:ME's president, Tom Rudolph, a music educator and activist who has also written books on curriculum. But as hard as educators work to introduce music technology, the real drivers are often the students. Downloading, ripping, mixing, and burning have become part of the skill set of being a teen. "Students learn more with technology because they're using it in their everyday lives," says Splettstoeszer. "Some of them even have the same software we use." Same at Northeastern: "They teach me about different applications," De Ritis says. Music technology classes are so resonant with youth culture, in fact, that they appeal to a huge new population of students. Nontraditional music kids, Splettstoeszer calls them. These are the students who get the most excited in Christine Micu's Music Technology and Application courses at Hillsborough (NJ) High School. "The students who have not studied an instrument get to the MIDI keyboard and are delighted by all the sounds they can make just by pressing buttons," she says. "The great thing about the sequencing program"—Emagic's MicroLogic—"is that they can look at music graphically. They don't have to be able to read notes to compose, arrange, and edit." Micu taps into students' enthusiasm by having them compose in genres they can relate to: music for computer games, video soundtracks, or commercial jingles. Receptive students, along with more accessible tools and better resources for educators, can only speed the adoption of music technology. But is there any evidence that this is actually happening? Among the scant data available, a study by Sam Reese of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign offers a sign. In 1998 only 10 percent of Illinois music teachers used computers in music theory classes, and only 9 percent used them in music appreciation classes. By 2002, these figures had jumped to 29 percent and 21 percent respectively. In the same period, the percentage of teachers who used music software, during class time or otherwise, grew from about 25 to more than 50. So, yes, there appears to have been progress. TI:ME's Beth Pickard is hopeful that music technology will thrive, even in the current epidemic of music budget cuts, because "administrators realize that students must learn about technology to be productive citizens." But in case they need further encouragement, De Ritis at Northeastern presents school officials with this broad challenge: "You need to ask, what is the mission of the institution? If it's to instill excitement in education, we must speak to students in a language that they're speaking every day, or we're not in tune." db |