FIG. 1(a): In this trumpet excerpt from “Frère Jacques,” a quick look at the waveform reveals the differences between a staccato phrase (a) and a legato phrase (b).

There are lots of cool uses for technology in the music-education curriculum, but many applications require that a person have special training and a yen for adventure. A few years ago, however, I stumbled on something so easy to implement and yet so effective that I share it with music educators every chance I get. Most colleagues find that they can apply this approach immediately, using software they already have, and experience positive results.

This little gem of technology is a novel application of the old adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” The “thousand words” in this analogy are the verbal explanations you routinely deliver to convey musical concepts to your students in classes, lessons, and rehearsals. The “picture” that makes most of those words unnecessary is the waveform displayed in most typical audio-editing programs, including digital audio sequencers and stereo and multitrack waveform editors.

FIG. 1(b)

A waveform display is a graphical representation of an audio signal, such as a clarinet performing an exercise or a chorus singing a phrase. We know the value of recording our students so they can assess their performance; that benefit is magnified when students can also see what they've played.

I started using a waveform editor because it helped my band students to understand the concept of playing legato. I verbally described the idea of smoothly connecting successive notes, and I demonstrated the technique in passages we were working on in their method books or concert music, but I wasn't satisfied with that approach.

Then I started recording my band students using the freeware audio editor SoundHandle for Macintosh (apparently, that software is no longer available), which allowed them to see what legato looked like and to compare their performance with a model. I played a passage, and we looked at the onscreen waveform; then I asked the students to duplicate my effort. As we analyzed their attempts, they could see on the waveform display that they had indeed left too much space between notes. In one lesson, I had students accomplishing what often took weeks using the old method.

Fig. 1 shows the first four notes of “Frère Jacques” (do-re-mi-do), performed on trumpet and recorded with Felt Tip Software's Sound Studio 2.2.4 (CD $50; download $40, from www.felttip.com/products/soundstudio). Students can see the difference between staccato and legato passages almost intuitively (Figs. 1a and 1b). Since these are actual recorded performances, students can follow the graphic representation while the file is playing.

Viewing the waveform isn't as confusing as it might first seem. The y axis (the height of the waveform) corresponds to amplitude, meaning the strength of the signal. The x axis (the width of each section) corresponds to time. The higher the spike, the louder the note; the wider the black area, the longer the note. The spaces between the black areas confirm how detached or connected the notes are. Some programs even let you print out the waveform so you'll have a hard copy to display or to give to students, but you can use a screen shot if your software doesn't have that feature.

FIG. 2: It’s easy to recognize this crescendo once you understand that the height of the waveform indicates the volume of the sound.

Since realizing the pedagogical power of visualizing sound, I've used Sound Studio to convey a number of things in instrumental lessons. Dynamics, and especially crescendos and decrescendos, are easy to track in a waveform display (see Fig. 2).

One error that is frequently encountered in both vocal and instrumental performance is the failure to hold longer durations for their full value. You can use audio-editing software to train your students by having them play consecutive whole notes in 4/4 time. If they perform typically, show them the place in the waveform display where they've cheated the ends of each note. I've also found that approach profitable when working on attacks; you can show your kids that there is usually a spike at the onset of their sound, but if their attack is too harsh, have them record repeated attempts to bring that spike down.

Many types of software include a waveform window to display the sound signal. Although you could use an audio track in a professional digital-audio program, I recommend you keep things simple and find an entry-level waveform editor because it will be less expensive, simpler to look at onscreen, and easier to understand and use than high-end programs. Also, high-end applications take longer to launch than simpler programs, and you'll generally want to launch the program quickly in class.

You can easily locate a suitable program with a Web search or by visiting a shareware music Web site. For instance, at Shareware Music Machine (www.hitsquad.com/smm) you can find Sound Studio (Mac), the freeware Audacity 1.2.3 (Mac/Win/Linux; also available at http://audacity.sourceforge.net), and numerous other low-cost music applications.

Most digital audio applications include an emulation of a tape recorder's transport controls. Familiar buttons such as Record, Play, and Pause function as you would expect. Many programs provide a timeline along the top; clicking a point in the file specifies where playback will begin. In most cases, you can click-and-drag over a section to play an excerpt.

The built-in microphone on your computer should do nicely for the sorts of demonstrations I've described, although you could use whatever audio configuration (interface, microphone, mixer, and so on) you already have in place. Be sure your computer's sound preferences are set accordingly.

Before making your first recording, set the level of the signal coming from the microphone. For instance, in Sound Studio, select Show Input Levels from the Window menu. That will bring up a small window in which you can check the sound while using the sliders to make the signal as strong as possible (green to yellow) without distorting (red).

It's best to use a monaural (as opposed to stereo) recording for analyzing and discussing examples with students. Recording to just one channel means you'll have only one waveform in the window capturing the attention of your kids. When you create a new file in most programs, you can specify several parameters, including mono or stereo. Settings such as file type (for example, AIFF and WAV), sampling rate (in bits), and sampling resolution (in kilohertz) are a matter of preference and will affect the quality and size of the file. If you are recording something that you want to burn on a CD, choose 44.1 kHz, 16-bit, stereo WAV files.

Creating a visual demonstration of sound, of course, is just a byproduct of these audio programs. Their intended use — recording and editing sound — also holds many benefits for music educators.

A digital-audio portfolio can be extremely useful for analyzing and evaluating music with your students (National Standards 6 and 7). Recordings of required scales, method-book exercises, and concert-music excerpts can be documented and used for evaluation. Challenges include having sufficient disk space to store a student's work, and finding efficient ways to pass the records on to other teachers. By adjusting the settings described above, a student's performance may take only a few kilobytes of disk storage space, and — like all files — can be organized neatly in folders for easy retrieval. You can pass along your files on disk or electronically (email, file sharing, and so on.)

Hearing one's self perform is often a revelation for the young musician. When I play back a recording I've just made of an individual instrumentalist or of a lesson group, I usually get responses such as “We sounded like that?” or “Wow, we have a lot of work to do!” At the end of the lesson, we record the exercise (or concert-music excerpt) again and critique our progress. Chorus members can hear how successful their enunciation has been. A middle school general-music class might be interested in hearing (and seeing) how tight their rhythmic clapping was. And try letting your concert band hear what their seemingly innocent chatter sounds like each time you stop to work on something.

Kids love hearing themselves! My young band students love revisiting an exercise recorded weeks earlier to revel in how much they've grown as players. Older theory students enjoy analyzing sight-singing examples to see if musical expression accompanied correct syllables. If discouraged students are thinking about quitting, why not let them hear the progress they've made? Also, the idea of being recorded maximizes student effort, since students know they will hear their performances played back. The novelty of being recorded and getting a clean “take” makes repetition (that necessary but despised part of rehearsals) less boring.

If you use student or adult accompanists with your chorus, you may want to record their accompaniments to use on days when they can't be there. If a student is working on a solo that requires piano accompaniment, have his or her accompanist record the piano part. You can burn audio files to CD using either the audio editor's CD-burning feature or a separate program. Apple's iTunes can burn audio tracks to CD, as can a variety of simple freeware and shareware CD-burning programs for Mac and Windows.

It's easy to prepare sound clips with an audio editor. Say you want a sound clip with the opening 15 seconds of the first movement of Mozart's Symphony no. 40, followed by a 3-second fade out. Insert the Mozart CD recording in your computer's CD drive (unless the recording is already on your hard drive). Open the file in your audio editor, select the track you want, and click OK, if needed. The track will become active. Highlight everything after the first 18 seconds and hit Delete. Now highlight the final three seconds of the remaining excerpt, and if you are using Sound Studio, choose Fade Out from the Filter menu. (Most programs have a comparable Fade feature.) Finally, save this new clip to your hard drive.

If your source is a vinyl record or tape recording, you can record it into the computer in real time as it plays back from the turntable or tape deck. To do that, route the audio outputs of the source to the audio inputs of your computer. (If your source is a phono-graph record, the requirements are slightly different, so be sure to read the sidebar “Capturing Audio from Vinyl Records.”) You can find the cables at Radio Shack or other home-electronics stores.

Again using Sound Studio as an example (most audio editors have comparable features), choose Sound Input/Output Setup from the Audio menu. A window will open; choose Line In under Source, and click OK. Click the Record button, and then begin playback on the external device. If necessary, adjust the input levels. When you've captured what you want, hit the Stop button, and then edit and save the clip.

A simple audio-editing program can do wonders for your music program; it's on the short list of applications I find most useful for teaching. The benefits include effective demonstration of sound concepts, student's heightened carefulness of execution when recording, student enthusiasm for using the technology, and the ability to record examples for digital portfolios and other purposes. And best of all, entry-level sound applications are simple to use.

Scott Watson teaches band and music theory in the Parkland School District, Allentown, Pennsylvania. His music for band is published by Alfred Publications, C.L. Barnhouse, and Shawnee Press. Contact him at watsons@parklandsd.org.