Anderson, N. (1997b). Cymbal clashes / Software clashes: Harnessing the power of technology for music education. QUICK - Journal of the Queensland Society for Information Technology in Education, 64, 10-26.

By integrating the use computers across all curriculum areas and providing students with authentic, useful tasks, we can enhance the learning of students in schools. This has been a philosophy that I have adopted and implemented in my classroom for many years and has proven to be very successful. Lately opportunities have arisen for me to investigate the value of leading edge technology in music education in two areas :- a) in my classroom as part of the ‘inventions’ theme undertaken this semester and b) in setting up a computer assisted learning environment for a private music teacher. In some respects the activities in the two environments overlap, but in other areas the music studio enables more advanced activities due to less budgetary restraints.

My Year Five classroom computing equipment consists of one Pentium 75 with 6 x CD-ROM drive, 2 x 586 -133 with 8x CDS. The machines have sound cards and peripherals include a colour inkjet printer, a hand scanner and a 28.8 modem attached to phone line which has been recently installed in my classroom. When I am planning a theme, I look for activities where technology will naturally enhance the development of the unit, rather than add-ons. I want the students to understand that computer activities are not isolated ‘technology’ activities but form a natural part of all curriculum tasks. Previous activities which used technology in this theme included a section on movie making where students wrote scripts and created animated movies using their own voices for the characters; published posters and invitations to the movie premiere.

In the music section of this theme, I have included group rotations where one group worked on the Internet to find information on set composers, another group investigated composers by using two multimedia CD-ROM based programs :- ‘Composer Quest’ and ‘An Introduction to Classical Music’ and another investigated musical instruments through the multimedia CD-ROM, ‘Musical Instruments’. As most of the children in the class enjoy rock music, our theme has built on this prior knowledge. A bias against classical music as ‘old hat’ is offset by integrating this component of the theme using new technology. Discoveries of composer’s portraits and history on the Internet provided interest and down-loading and playing midi files of the composer’s work was a totally new experience for most students. After using one work station for 30 minutes the groups rotate through five activities (Two activities are not computer based and include reading on the theme and completing other related tasks. All of the activities form an integrated unit which also includes maths, science, studies of society and art. Content needed to complete the set worksheets was extremely easy to locate on the Internet, with all groups reporting success at finding the necessary information. Apart from satisfying the set task, students gained new and unexpected knowledge and listened to down loaded midi and .wav files. Some students work outside with the supervision of a teacher aide and the computers are separated enough to avoid a total clash of conflicting sounds, although the students (not the teacher) seem to be immune to this.

Copyright is an issue which must be considered when downloading any type of music file from the Internet and this provides an ideal opportunity to discuss these issues with students. The use of midi files on the Internet has been a controversial issue during the 1990's as different countries struggle to keep their laws abreast of emerging technologies. Higgs (1993) published various articles outlining the grey areas concerning different means of mechanically recording and diffusing music via the Internet and how various service providers in the United States ignored the infringement of copyright with impunity due to perceived loopholes in their copyright laws. Higgs (1993, p.5) argued that court cases were needed to help stop the more obvious breaches of copyright but did not favour over- restricting access to midi files on the net and that he believed, "that the long term solution to this problem is not to rush out and ban the distribution of all midi files by BBS and other computer services. It would be unhealthy both morally and culturally, to destroy the educational benefits that midi files allow us and it would be a mistake to place ourselves in an electronic dark age out of ignorance." In regard to the specific use of these files by my students, I contacted Richard Mallett, Broadcast and New Technology Manager of APRA. APRA is the Australian authority set up to protect the rights of recording artists and to collect licence payments. Richard’s response was understandably guarded and compiled with the help of APRA solicitors. It seems that three were three separate issues involved in the classroom work :-

Diffusion (the transmission of a musical work from the Internet site to the school PC)

Mechanical reproduction (copying of work on the school PC)

Public Performance (performing the work to the group audience)

In the opinion of APRA, the diffusion of the work was legal, the mechanical reproduction of the work is legal if the work falls in the category of ‘public domain’ (as is the case for most classical composer’s music) and the public performance is legal (even if copyrighted) , "unless the performance is given to a wider audience than the teacher, pupils and those directly involved in the instruction in the course of giving classroom instruction (both instances subject to the work being in copyright " (Mallett, 1997, p2). Richard cautions that teachers still need to be aware that special arrangements of composer’s works or work published long after the composer’s death may still be subject to copyright. Richard’ E-mail address is rmallett@apra.com.au or teachers may seek advice from AMCOS (Australasian Mechanical Copyright Owners Society) @ URL www.amcos.com.au

Apart from building up music knowledge and appreciation, an ideal opportunity for critical literacy arose when students discovered web pages with many spelling mistakes or those with less than adequate sentence structure or dubious factual information. Cross referencing of facts was made possible by our CD-ROM resources and children were encouraged to reflect critically about the new genres and forms of presentation found on the web. The web also allowed us to download an excellent shareware music conversion utility called ‘Goldwave’ which allows the students to play sound files in many different formats and to experiment with the addition of many different effects. In the Shareware edition students are limited to a certain number of steps in editing the music, so it would be well worth registering and using the full version. This program also includes a very handy undo button which allows students to try functions and then restore the original music. Graphical representations of the sound waves are professionally displayed in the program and conversion capabilities are excellent. I was particularly impressed by the conversion capabilities of the software as the students will need to convert sound files to a format acceptable to ‘Microsoft Powerpoint’ for a later stage of the unit where they will use the resources of the Web and our CD’s to produce a multimedia slide show on a composer of their choice. The final display to the whole class would be greatly enhanced by projection facilities but for now we’ll only have to dream about that!

At the same time as these activities were progressing in the classroom, I set up a computer assisted learning environment for a music teacher who teaches students privately on an individual basis. A bigger budget meant that a sophisticated synthesizer was attached to a 586-133 with 8x CD-ROM and a page scanner. Software packages installed included :- ‘Band in a Box’; ‘Auralia’; ‘Piano Scan’; ‘Midi Scan’ and ‘Encore’. Once the software was correctly set up and conflicts resolved (more of that later) the activities undertaken by the students were amazing. With less complex pieces, sheet music can be scanned and automatically recognised by a musical form of OCR. After this very quick and easy process, the music can then be played through the synthesizer with excellent quality. This means that students can preview music that they haven’t heard before or play along and add extra tracks to the music. Another interesting function is to change the music to a different style or transpose the music. If the music is more complex, then the same things are possible by using ‘Midi Scan’. Once again copyright issues need to be considered when scanning music as saving these files on the computer’s hard disk could constitute mechanical reproduction whereas if the music was stored temporarily in RAM, it would be unlikely to be considered as mechanical reproduction.

With ‘Band in a Box’ students can compose by playing the synthesizer and have the notes appear on the computer screen as they play. They can then play back their piece or print the score. When midi files are downloaded from the Internet, they can be played through the synthesizer with amazing quality. I was astounded at the difference between the files played in the classroom through the 16 bit soundcard and the same files played through the synthesizer. Another great feature is that when the midi files are loaded into the program they are displayed on the screen as a musical score for a range of various instruments.

These programs enable a fantastic degree of easy manipulation of music by students. Experimentation with the music has proven to be very popular with the students and has added a new dimension to music which did not exist before this technology was available.

Like all new software and hardware there is a potential for problems to occur that few people know how to solve - including the distributers of the software and this has been a source of frustration to me. After a while ‘Band in a Box’ would often come up with the dreaded ‘illegal instruction’ and would crash and then to make matters worse the scanner began to have problems. At first, I put this down to hardware problems and replaced the motherboard and other components. When this failed to fix the problem, I looked for more obscure software conflicts. I discovered that a publishing program for Windows 95 had added three new Twain files which conflicted with the scanner’s Twain files. The Publisher Twain files could be safely deleted, allowing the scanner to work well once again. Secondly the scanner software includes a program called ‘Zerox Colour Manager’ which automatically loads and was conflicting with ‘Band in a Box’. As this program is sometimes needed with the scanner and loads automatically, one solution was to use Control/ALT/Del and disable the colour manager when using ‘Band in a Box’. Software designers need to think about the effect that their programs may have on other programs running on the computer and operating systems need to be smarter when telling users why faults are occurring.

Regardless of losing even more hair due to these problems and wrestling with them, I believe that technology has incredible potential in the area of music education, particularly when students are involved in authentic tasks which they consider to be useful.

References

Higgs, S. , "MIDI Song File Distribution and Computer Bulletin Boards" Keyboard, June, 1993

Mallett, R., "Unpublished E-Mail", 1997