Vol. 17, No. 28	April 23, 1998

Music courses score with innovative methods

Part of the time they're interacting with music, which also happens to be the title of the computer/videodisc program. Peterson, who teaches music history and literature, has been developing since the 1980s.

To use Interacting with Music- Introduction to the Voice, students go to the music resource center, face a monitor fed by a videodisc player and computer with compact disc.

In each of the lessons, like the one on vocal timbre, a mouse is used to click from screen to screen, as they display cartoons of opera singers in performance. On some of the screens, next to the cartoon, is a button board. Students may click on each button to hear examples of soprano, alto, tenor and bass voices. Next to that the buttons, definitions of each voice type appear.

For instance, on the screen entitled Examples of Soprano Category, students can click on the button marked "Boy 1" and hear a pre-puberty male voice singing oratorio; click on "Castrato" and it's the voice of a male singer castrated before puberty; or go to the "DramHeld" buttons and hear a "big, Verdi-style voice that can sing over large orchestras."

Throughout the process, the student in is control. He or she can click slowly and listen to the entire excerpt or click on one, then the other, and hear the subtle differences in vocal timbre. At the bottom of each page, as the excerpt is being played, appears the name of the singer and the composition being performed. There's even a button that allows for note-taking.

When the student is finished, she or he can go to a screen with a test that plays masked excerpts that the student must try to identify.

It's fun and challenging. "It's part of my concept of what the American university should be," Peterson said.

Peterson began exploring new ways of teaching in the early 1980s, when he became a member of the team that developed the award-winning University of Delaware Music Videodisc Series. He used the discs to teach his music courses as soon as they were available. Students could listen to a musical score while the sheet music scrolled across the screen depicting each instrument as a moving line. That way students could see what they were hearing.

"With a laserdisc, you can isolate tiny moments; you can't do that on VHS," Peterson said.

The technology was still in its infancy when Peterson, Fred Hofstetter, instructional technology, and other team members produced the videodisc series after being contacted by the director of research for the National Endowment for the Humanities.

By 1985, the videodiscs were ready to be used in the classroom, and they became a tool for UD music lecturers, teaching seven to nine music appreciation and two opera classes.

Peterson continued developing videodisc technology for the classroom by creating a program called The Opera Index Series. In this, he wanted to be able to isolate excerpts from significant operas and string them together for comparison purposes.

He used the Metropolitan Opera's version of La Bohème and filmmaker Ingmar Bergman's version of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte.

For example, watching and listening to La Bohème, the student would see and hear, side-by-side, some of the opera's 33 recurring themes in a connected sequence. Along with each sequence is its location in time (by minute and second).

In the next segment, there is a bar-by-bar list of the entire opera with relevant information, such as the name of each theme, entrances, exits and the beginnings of arias or ensembles.

Die Zauberflöte works the same way, only, instead of themes, it includes such symbolic items as Masonic icons, different types of love and historical symbols.

"The... goal was to heighten students' ability to perceive details of subtlety," Peterson wrote.

As computer technology advanced and became more user-friendly, Peterson began experimenting with hypermedia or combining videodisc technology with new computer hardware and software.

Using an IBM touch-sensitive screen, called InfoWindow, he created Interacting with Music-Style, a multimedia program that isolates and illustrates moments in the composition demonstrating selections made by the artist that define the composition.

Using a poem interpreted musically by three composers and a motet or a capella choral arrangement by Brahms, the program combined video performances of each piece with a scroll analyzing the music the student was hearing. It also presented slides of the composers manuscript, with comparisons of the work in English, as well as comparisons of short excerpts of each piece to explore the creative choices made by the various composers.

Peterson's next hypermedia teaching tool allowed him to program the computer himself. Microsoft Windows 3.0 Toolbook authoring software made it possible for him to create a teaching program in six weeks, as opposed to the two years it took to develop Style. As part of the Interacting with Music series, Introduction to Opera was to be a series of lessons, simple and very interactive that would teach the rudiments of opera.

Using a videodisc player and Toolbook, Peterson took excerpts from La Bohème and Die Zauberflöte to demonstrate vocal timbre. One lesson compares three versions of the German poem, Erlkönig, and another demonstrates the elements of music. The New York City Opera is using Peterson's Introduction to Opera as part of its high school education program.

Peterson's next project is to teach "Music Appreciation 101" over the Internet and to encourage his students to write their own computer programs analyzing their course work.

-Barbara Garrison
Photo by Jack Buxbaum