First on the agenda was The Virtual Sound Project of the Edison Studio in Rome, Italy, presented by Alessandro Cipriani on behalf of himself and Riccardo Bianchini. This effort addresses the lack of educational materials on electroacoustic music in the Italian language, and intends to eventually include a series of textbooks, Internet courses, and CD-ROMs under the name Cinema per l'Orecchio (Ear Theatre). As of this writing, they have produced Il Suono Virtuale (Virtual Sound), the first Italian textbook on sound synthesis and audio processing. Published by ConTempo in May 1998, Il Suono Virtuale combines theory and practice by integrating lessons in synthesis and signal processing with extensive tutorials using Csound. The idea is that students will gain an understanding of electroacoustic music techniques as well as acquire specific hands-on knowledge of how to implement those techniques. The fundamentals of synthesis are covered, including additive, subtractive, granular, amplitude modulation, frequency modulation, waveshaping, FOF, physical modeling, and analysis/resynthesis. Many sound processing basics are also covered, including delay, echo, reverb, chorus, flanging, phasing, and convolution. Il Suono Virtuale attempts to guide the novice through all these techniques, with optional sections on advanced topics for more experienced or ambitious students. Appendices detail the mathematical knowledge required for a rational approach to Csound, and the WCShell application, a graphical front-end interface to Csound, written by Mr. Bianchini.
WCShell is based around a spreadsheet metaphor for organizing orchestra and score data, as well as providing drawing tools for envelope shaping and modification. The spreadsheet allows standard cell operations, including multiple copy/paste, data fills, and mathematical operators. I have precious little experience with Csound, so I don't feel qualified to judge the usefulness of WCShell, but the interface seemed straightforward, well-designed, and unusually polished for an early version. On the other hand, Richard Boulanger, now self-proclaimed Csound guru, arrived midway through the demonstration to interrupt with several curiously specific questions. I thought for a moment I might witness another mugging like Mr. Boulanger had perpetrated on Dr. Kia Ng during the Leeds Studio Report the day before. However, Mr. Cipriani's unflustered answers seemed to prove satisfactory, as Mr. Boulanger soon departed, allowing the demonstration to continue in a civilized fashion. If WCShell can stand up to such an assault, it's good enough for me.
Il Suono Virtuale is only the first step in The Virtual Sound Project. An English translation of the textbook is underway, due to be completed in mid-1999. Further textbooks dependent on additional funding will cover topics of acoustics, psychoacoustics, ear-training, spectromorphological comparison of acoustic and electronic sounds, studio techniques, multimedia practice, history of electroacoustic music, etc. An Internet component based on Il Suono Virtuale is also currently under development. Please check http://www.axnet.it/edison for further information.
The next presentation was given by Peter J. Raschke from the Center for Music Technology at Northwestern University, on Music Technology as a Tool for Exploring the Creative Aspects of Music. Mr. Raschke has developed several interactive music education applications for the Internet. First is "Exploring MIDI", a Web site which uses Java applets, embedded MIDI files, and MaxPlay patches to teach the basic concepts and practical implementation issues of MIDI. Exercises include routing MIDI cables in several virtual studios, converting MIDI note numbers to standard pitch names, and how to use MIDI on the Web. For the record, I could not get the Java applets to work with Netscape Navigator 4.07 under either Mac OS or Windows NT, but non-interactive alternatives are provided also. "Score Scan" is a Web site that facilitates tonal analysis and annotation of a visual score. A Java applet enables students to mark up music with accidentals, chord symbols, Roman numerals, etc., and then compare their markings to the instructor's. Unfortunately, "Score Scan" cannot be demonstrated without installing custom Java classes. Presumably the class libraries are available upon request, as is a separate application for instructors with additional features. A third site, "Gregorian Chant, Christmas Mass", uses Voyager CD Link to play music examples from a local audio CD upon command from the Web site, circumventing the usual Internet trade-off between audio quality and available bandwidth. While the latter two sites are not currently usable by the general public, these three applications demonstrate some interesting possibilities for teaching music over the Internet. Even though technologies such as Java and Web audio are still moving targets, Mr. Raschke is clearly pursuing important objectives by exploring their educational potential. During the discussion period, there arose some concern that existing Web sites, lacking the dialogue of a traditional classroom, do not sufficiently encourage an inquiring attitude, nor motivate students to move beyond Internet-based materials towards more in-depth resources. Of course, a Web site cannot replace an enthusiastic instructor, and all sites should provide references to textbooks and as many other information sources as possible. By integrating such sites into a well-designed curriculum, teachers can balance traditionally directed instruction with this more exploratory self-guided learning. For more information on this project, please check http://nuinfo.nwu.edu/musicschool/links/projects/projects.html.
The third presentation was given by Juan Reyes, from the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota, Colombia, on Education with Computer Music in Colombia. This paper was less about pushing the technological envelope and more about overcoming socio-cultural and economic obstacles to computer music education. Mr. Reyes painted a somber picture of musical aspiration in Colombia--music education through high school is neither mandatory nor even offered at many schools, instrumental virtuosity is not emphasized, and music in general is seen as unnecessary, a luxury. He has witnessed a growing schism between the poor, who embrace a folk tradition of music as a component of everyday life, and the "managers", who believe music is useful only as a marketing tool. Obviously, in order to advance the progress of musical thought and practice, the former approach is too naive, the latter too cynical. In order to address these myriad issues, Mr. Reyes has developed and taught an extensive curriculum in computer music at the Universidad de Los Andes since 1992. By introducing students to the principles and techniques of electroacoustic music, he has successfully ignited their latent musical interest and talent, in addition to inspiring the collaboration between artists and engineers crucial to a vigorous computer music atmosphere. The curriculum reflects most of the common-practice approaches to computer music taught in the United States, starting with MIDI as the most accessible and easily understood musical abstraction, and moving through the physics of sound, mathematical analysis, algorithmic composition, psychoacoustics, interactive performance, etc. While Mr. Reyes suggested the application of his approach to nascent electroacoustic music programs in other countries with similar obstacles as Colombia, I gather the real magic lies in convincing university administrators to fund such initiatives. To this end, Mr. Reyes suggested emphasizing the usefulness of computers as "teaching assistants". For example, computers are excellent tools for ear training, providing "music-minus-one" accompaniment, recording and editing performances, and other obviously useful labor-saving tasks. Once in the classroom, a little extra hardware here and some extra software there can create a pretty decent environment for teaching computer music. If you are reading this and wondering how you might get started with such a program, I suggest you get in touch with Mr. Reyes at jreyes@uniandes.edu.co. And we here in the States, perhaps a little complacent in our Moore's law universe, should reach out to our colleagues in less privileged socio-cultural environments, with ideas, collaboration, and whatever other support we can offer.
The final presentation, on MusicWeb Den Haag--Developing New Tools for Higher Music Education, Using Wide-Area Networks and Hypermedia Technology, was delivered by Karst de Jong, from the Royal Conservatory in The Hague, The Netherlands, on behalf of himself and Carola Boehm. Unfortunately, the presentation was hampered by technical difficulties, yet another reinforcement of the fact that technology is certain to betray us in our most vulnerable moments. However, even despite the problems, the demonstration was quite impressive, with a sophisticated interface design and rich functional depth beyond any Web-based musical resource I have seen. The MusicWeb project was started three and a half years ago as an international collaboration between the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and the Musikhochschule in Hannover, Germany. The project infrastructure is distributed, with primary technical responsibility at Glasgow, research and theoretical investigation at Hannover, and content development at The Hague. I won't delve into the technical details of the wide-area client/server database, other than to note that their implementation strategies seem consistent with high-end industry practices for storing and manipulating various media data types with maximum flexibility. Using this powerful back-end, the project team at The Hague has developed a very intuitive interface for interacting with musical information. The main screen consists of a three-pane frame set: the left pane shows a standard Finder-like hierarchical menu for navigation, the large center pane displays the current module including text, graphics, musical examples, etc., and the right pane shows footnotes, annotations, and other pertinent references. In addition, the center pane can be split in two to accommodate comparison between separate modules, such as two different musical passages. This interface allows linear progression through each module while still taking advantage of contextual supplemental material and inter-module links. A set of publishing tools has also been developed, providing templates and wizards for relatively painless conversion of courses into the system's format. MusicWeb is still a work in progress, with testing and evaluation of students in beta during the current academic year. Also, the somewhat proprietary nature of the database limits its use to properly configured clients. Right now, it can be fully accessed only internally at The Hague, but the plan is to ultimately form an international consortium of institutions to share resources and responsibilities for continued development, presumably including an open client that would function with a standard browser. One possible direction under consideration would be a central "service bureau" that would facilitate the conversion of curricula for teachers without the time or technical inclination to publish their own Web-based materials. While it's always exciting to witness well-executed application of new technology, I can only hope MusicWeb quickly expands its scope to include more than the lucky few at The Hague. If I were a music teacher at this moment, I would be desperate to get my hands on such an elegant resource with so much potential. For more information, and to ask these folks to let the rest of us into the loop, please go to http://sun1.rrzn.uni-hannover.de/musicweb/.
© John Paul Young 1998