High-Tech Listening Lessons





M I C H I G A N - S C H O O L - B A N D - & - O R C H E S T R A - A S S O C I A T I O N

Barton Polot
is Assistant Professor of Music Education and Music Technology at the University of Michigan

BARTON POLOT

he directed listening lesson is an important component of any general music curriculum. To elevate students' understanding and appreciation of music, teachers play recorded musical examples in class and provide commentary — a guided tour — as the students listen. This process has been greatly enhanced with the advent of computer technology and, specifically, the CD-ROM. Current music appreciation software synchronizes music with instructional text, graphics, even the musical score. Unlike spoken instruction, the visually presented material enhances the musical experience without obtruding.

Now you can create your own computer-based listening lessons, using tools you probably have at home. Here's what you'll need:

An hour — that's approximately how long it takes experienced users to create one lesson
An audio CD of the music you want to teach
A computer with a CD-ROM drive (PC or Mac)
Microsoft PowerPoint

PowerPoint is part of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office suite of software. If your word processor is Microsoft Word, you probably have PowerPoint (and Excel and Outlook) as well. PowerPoint is tightly integrated with the other Office programs, so Word users feel at home the first time they use PowerPoint.

PowerPoint is presentation software, used primarily by the business world to generate slick, bullet chart-laden overheads. In the early '90s PowerPoint was one of several such programs on the market, but (as is Microsoft's wont) it has since obliterated its competition. Today PowerPoint is practically your only choice, and its name has become synonymous with presentation software.

One of PowerPoint's unheralded features is the ability to accompany a slide presentation with audio from a compact disc, presumably to enliven all those bar graphs and pie charts. Microsoft never intended this feature to serve the needs of music education. But it does, elegantly. Here is how to create a directed listening lesson that uses synchronized computer-based instructional slides.

Creating the Listening Lesson

irst, turn off the computer and start with pencil and paper. Listen to the piece you want to teach your students, and jot down the salient points you want to make. Good listening lessons focus on a single aspect of a piece — its form, perhaps, or dramatic elements, or musical elements such as texture and dynamics. (If there are several aspects you want to address, consider creating multiple lessons for the same piece.) Eventually you'll have a list of the important events in the piece, each of which will become a slide in your presentation. Make your text succinct; a slide shouldn't take longer to read than the event it describes. Gauge for your target audience the complexity of language and content. And, by all means, have fun: inject some of your own personality into the lesson.

Okay, it's time to launch PowerPoint and create a new presentation. At first PowerPoint presents several design options: an AutoContent wizard, a template, or none. The wizard is very helpful, but its suggestions are directed toward a different clientele. Instead, choose Template. Here you'll see thumbnail images of design layouts — dozens of them. The choice of design is an esthetic decision and is solely yours. I like to choose a background that in some way complements the music and does not distract from my message.

A few of Powerpoint's layout designs include dynamic elements, i.e., graphics that move when the slide first appears — eye candy. Avoid these dynamic designs: the extra time it takes for the graphics to move will disrupt the precise timing of your presentation. Unfortunately, the thumbnail images don't convey dynamic elements. You'll have to select a design and then try it. Fortunately, Powerpoint makes it easy to change the design of a presentation: select Apply Design from the Format menu.

After you select your design, PowerPoint presents several layout options. The layouts are merely suggestions regarding what to put where. Choose Basic and you can put anything anywhere on your slide.

Now it is time to create your slides. Generally, each slide will correspond to one of the events you listed on paper. To add slides, choose New Slide from the Insert menu. Use the Slide Sorter View if you need to rearrange the sequence of slides. Transitions between slides, such as dissolves and wipes, should not be used in this project — they disturb the precision of your timing. If you get lost or confused, PowerPoint's invaluable Help menu can probably set you straight.

The layout of each slide is another personal decision. My unsolicited advice is to keep the layout simple. Stick with one font for the whole presentation. Limit text color to two or three hues, each chosen to complement, yet stand out from, the color scheme of the background (PowerPoint will suggest complimentary colors, and will help you remember the colors you've used). Employ a hierarchy of type; vary the text's size, weight (e.g., bold vs. semibold), capitalization, indentation, bulleting, or hue to convey levels of importance or organization of material (e.g., "1st theme" subordinate to "recapitulation"). Apply the hierarchy consistently on each slide.

Another thing about type: the fonts you use when you create your file must also be installed on the computer you use for your presentation. This is especially important if you plan to shuttle between PC and Mac. Arial and Times New Roman are safe bets.

Once your slides are complete (and saved, thank you), it is time to add the music. Insert your audio CD into the computer's CD-ROM drive, and navigate PowerPoint to the first slide of your presentation. Then, in PowerPoint's Insert menu, choose Movies and Sound > Play CD Audio Track. The Play Options window (see figure 1) recognizes your CD and automatically presents the default stop time for each track of the disc. Ordinarily you would choose to play one track from start to finish. Note, however, that you could configure the window to play virtually any excerpt from the CD (say, just the second theme). Click OK, and the slide acquires an icon of a compact disc. You can resize this image and position it anywhere on the slide, but the icon's image cannot be altered.

The next two steps are a bit technical. Don't give up now, you're almost done.

First, you need to configure your presentation so that the music is continuous — otherwise, the CD will stop when you advance to the next slide. On slide one, select the CD icon; you'll see its handles appear. In PowerPoint's Slide Show menu, choose Custom Animation. In the Custom Animation window, choose the Play Settings tab (see figure 2). Then click to enable the following buttons:

Play using animation order
While Playing: Continue slide show
Stop Playing: After [ ] slides

In the Stop Playing field, type the number of slides in your presentation; or, to be safe, just type a very large number.

Second, you'll want to configure your presentation so that the music starts automatically when you start the slide show. Still in PowerPoint's Custom Animation window, choose the Timing tab (see figure 3). Then click to enable the following buttons:

Animate
Automatically

Set the automatic delay to zero seconds. Finally, click OK to dismiss the Custom Animation window.

Now comes the fun part. You are going to synchronize the slides with the music. In the Slide Show menu, choose Rehearse Timings. The first slide fills the screen, and a counter appears on the bottom. Momentarily, the music starts. Simply click on the counter whenever it is time to advance to the next slide. When your music is done, you're done. In the Slide Show menu, choose View Show and enjoy your work. Note that slide transitions are accurate only to the second; consequently, you may find that some slides change a wee bit early or late. Usually, close is close enough.

Presenting the Listening Lesson

ow do you present this listening lesson slide show to your students? Again, you will need a computer and your audio CD. It is not necessary, however, to have PowerPoint installed on your school computer. Microsoft provides PowerPoint Viewer, a small application that plays (but cannot edit) PowerPoint files. The software is free and may be distributed freely as well. PowerPoint Viewer is available for Mac and PC, and uses far less RAM than does its parent program.

The best way to present your slide show is to connect the computer to an LCD projector. Your school or district probably has one you can request. If not, you may have to hustle your administrators to invest in one. Keep in mind, these projectors are expensive — 5 to 10 thousand dollars. Not a casual purchase. The best way to justify the cost is to use it a lot.

No projector? Plan B is to connect your computer to a television. For this you'll need a device called a scan converter. Again, you may be able to request a scan converter for your room or advocate its purchase. The cost for this is in the low hundreds, not thousands. The image on television is noticeably inferior to that of a computer monitor, however. And you may have to reposition objects on your slides to compensate for what is usually a truncated image. Some enterprising readers might make a VHS recording of their presentation and play it back in class on a VCR.

No television? Plan C is low tech. Print your slide show on transparencies using a color printer, and use an overhead projector in class. You'll have to switch transparencies manually...but what classy-looking transparencies they are!

Don't forget, if you're using a computer, its audio must be amplified. Five dollars at Radio Shack should cover the cost of the cable you need to connect the computer to a stereo system.

Is it worth the time and effort? If you plan never to teach the listening lesson again, probably not. But if you teach the lesson term after term, year after year, you'll use the slide show repeatedly. And you'll be grateful that you spent 60 minutes putting it together back in the year 2000.

After you've mastered the basics of Powerpoint directed listening, try enhancing your slides — and your lessons — with some of my advanced techniques.