Keyboards Strike A Rich Note
The Age
Monday April 3, 1995
Michael Putzel writes about a program that ensures no one need ever sing out of tune.
LIKE Professor Harold Hill, the super-salesman of band instruments and uniforms in the hit musical, The Music Man, Roger McRea has a gimmick: a computer program that can listen to students' voices, tell them whether they are sharp, flat or in tune and drill them to sing on key.
``No one should ever have the stigma of singing out of tune," McRea said. All it takes to teach children and adults to read, write and sing music is a personal computer and his $150 sound-receiving device and software, he said.
``Give me 10 minutes a day for 200 days and I will teach any child to sight-read music and sing in tune," he says.
McRea's system is just one of a growing number of programs being used to teach music with computers. From elementary schools with tiny music education budgets to advanced programs, the computer is becoming a helpful, sometimes even essential, teaching tool.
``Part of the reason we are moving so far towards integrating technology into our curriculum is, it has become clear we can use technology as an assistant," said David Mash, an assistant dean for academic technology at Berklee College.
The college uses a variety of programs to help students with ear training, music dictation, notation, accompaniment, composition and conducting.
Electronic music synthesisers have been around for years, stirring controversy about whether the sounds they make constitute true music.
But only recently have educators and software developers come to view the personal computer as a tool for teaching the fundamentals and theory of music.
There is no argument about the physics. Computers can ``hear" sounds, translate them into digital form and identify them by pitch, timing, rhythm and harmonics. Configuring older IBM-compatible machines to receive and produce music can be devilishly difficult, but the technology is getting easier to use with the tremendous growth in multimedia computing.
Mash attributed the recent growth in teaching programs to the decline in the cost of random access memory, the ``brain" of a computer.
As memory costs have come down, makers of personal computers have installed millions of bytes of memory in even modest machines, making possible the rapid processing of digital sounds.
In one relatively inexpensive system by Lyrrus Incorporated, a guitarist can strum a chord on an ordinary instrument equipped with a special sound pickup and the notes of the chord instantly appear on the computer screen.
Until recently, the equipment to do that cost from $US1000 to several thousand dollars and was generally available only to professionals.
As one indication of how advancing technology is changing the market, Lyrrus sells its pickup a device that attaches with suction cups to practically any acoustic or electric guitar and plugs into a computer for about $US250, with software.
Fender, the leading US maker of electric guitars, announced plans in January to make 100,000 Stratocaster models with practically invisible fittings for attaching the Lyrrus pickup.
Beginners or advanced musicians can connect their instruments to Apple Macintosh or Windows-type computers and analyse their playing or compositions, study and replicate the techniques of others or record and print their own work.
Berklee's Mash said a student used to go to classes, listen to a lecture, review scores and write a paper about a piece of music without ever having heard the piece.
``Today, the student goes to class, listens to a teacher discuss a technique that can be demonstrated in class with a computer and synthesiser. The student then goes to the lab and works on a composition while listening to the music as it is being written on the computer," he said.
Although computer music programs are generally for advanced students, software for beginners is arriving in many music and computer stores.
Opcode Interactive, which produces some of the most sophisticated programs for professional musicians, also publishes CD-ROM titles for multimedia Macintosh and Windows machines.
Allie's Playhouse is aimed at children three to eight years old, and the Musical World of Professor Piccolo covers about a year's worth of music theory for older children and adults.
Harmonic Vision, a small company based in Illinois, produces Music Ace, an introductory course that teaches the fundamentals such as pitch, note reading and scales by using cheerful faces for musical notes and rewarding correct answers with a roar of applause.
Some of the best evidence that technology can help students learn music and, through music, achieve success in other academic endeavors come from a public elementary school in a disadvantaged district of Austin, Texas.
The children at Ortega Elementary School received early and intensive musical education assisted by computers and synthesisers as part of a three-year program to enrich and accelerate learning among children considered most at risk.
The project exceeded the goals set for it by the end of its second year. Joyce Forest, the school's music teacher, said all of the children learnt to play simple melodies they could not have learnt otherwise without private lessons. Some, she added, learnt to transpose melodies into five keys and even to improvise, ``something I never taught in elementary school". -- New York Times.
© 1995 The Age