CTImusic
News

Spring 1995

The European Academic Software Awards 1994

Lisa Whistlecroft

The awards

Of the 34 European Academic Software Award finalists invited to Heidelberg in November, 15 received awards. Of these, only two were in the Humanities - one of them in Music. We would like to congratulate Michael Clarke of Huddersfield University on winning this award, the first of its kind, with his tutorial in sound synthesis, SYnthia. We hope that in future EASA competitions, more software for musicians and musicologists will gain similar recognition.

The process

1994 was the first year of the European Academic Software Award. EASA grew out of an existing German academic software award which has been organised in the past by ASK, the Akademische Software Kooperation at the University of Karlsruhe. From an all-German endeavour it has grown into a European event. The central organisation was still undertaken by ASK but each other participating country had its own internal organisation and support. In the UK this was provided by ALT, the Association for Learning Technology. One of the functions of the national organisers was to appoint jurors in each discipline. I agreed to be the UK juror for Music - the only Music juror, as it turned out.

Software authors from participating countries, working in any academic discipline, were encouraged to submit their work. A complex and comprehensive entry form provided potential jurors with as much information as possible about the academic aims of the software and the hardware requirements for using it. Authors were also asked to provided a printed version of a sample run through the software. There were over 200 entries in the competition, from 21 European nations, grouped according to discipline.

Over the summer, in the first round of the competition, each entry was evaluated by discipline jurors in several countries. Much to my delight, there was an entry in Music. The competition required each juror to evaluate a number of entries, so I also saw five other packages in the Humanities area. All the first round jurors' comments were sent to the authors, as feedback in the software development process, whether or not the software carried on into the final round.

All of the entrants were encouraged to supply their software in at least two European language versions. Despite this request, some software was only single-language. Manipulating foreign-language texts from English instructions proved reasonably straightforward but I was surprised at how alarming I found foreign language error messages! The language aspect raises interesting questions as to whether the aim of writing multilingual software is to allow a greater number of users or to encourage users to work in more than one language.

Of the 200 initial entries, 34 were selected as finalists. As SYnthia was among them, I was invited to take part in the final judging process, hosted by Springer Verlag in Heidelberg. This stage was of a different format - the authors demonstrated their software to jurors from a variety of discipline backgrounds. Each package was seen by four full and a number of advisory jurors from various countries. Each juror saw seven or eight packages - I saw software in music, sound perception, foreign language learning, Newtonian mechanics, medicine and pharmacology from Germany, Russia, Turkey and the UK. My co-jurors were from Austria, France, Germany, Holland, Ireland, Sweden and the UK. The opinions of the full jurors were then collated and discussed in detail to select the fifteen award winners.

The seminar

The EASA finals also incorporated a one-day seminar on future development of educational software in Europe. The intention was to bring developers and evaluators together to discuss routes forward, common aims and opportunities for collaboration. Each small working-group addressed the same set of questions and the combined minutes of these discussions will be published in due course. For me, there were several clear conclusions which could be drawn from the seminar discussions, from the judging process and, most of all, from the successful software itself. Small groups work most productively - neither totally isolated workers nor large collaborations seem particularly effective. After two days of work conducted entirely in English between eight nationalities in Germany, I am convinced that, whilst English is certainly a common language, it cannot be the only language of teaching materials intended for use in mainland Europe. It may not be necessary to develop software in more than one language, however. The best route may well be to build software with ease of translation in mind - keeping the subject material separate from the means by which it is presented aids this in the same way that it aids its updating and tailoring.

The ceremony

The award ceremony was the only public part of the Final, with music (from a Swiss gospel group) and invited German press reporters and photographers. The presentation of the awards was preceded by lengthy speeches from EASA's sponsors and supporters in the European Union. As a result, the announcement of the winners was a highly-charged affair - the results had been kept secret for 36 hours, the seating arrangement gave nothing away and several people were anxious to leave promptly to catch flight connections.

Citations - intended not only for the award winner but also for non-specialist press consumption and for the community of jurors - had been prepared for each winning entry. The citation for SYnthia is reprinted as follows:

SYnthia fulfils many of the highest goals of academic software. It teaches both fundamental and advanced techniques of sound synthesis. Students are thereby enabled to design and create new sounds - the building blocks of modern musical composition. Technology and education come together to produce art, which itself is partially or totally realised using computers. Maybe the hours of work which have gone into EASA 1994 will eventually be richly rewarded for, as an English poet once wrote, 'Music, for a while shall all your cares beguile'.

More information about EASA from ASK.