The new Music Computer Lab with all the bells and whistles is almost perfect. It can play the notes. It can notate the music. It can play the orchestration. As a chant plays, it can even pull up a copy of the illuminated music manuscript from the Vatican Library.

But in the eyes of the Lab's creator, Assistant Professor of Music Cristle Collins Judd, there's a mote in the perfection. Her doubts are not about the quality of the Lab, which does indeed do everything she had hoped. Her doubts are about hard choices -- whether to allocate money to the Lab or to acoustic instruments.

"We don't have funding for tuning pianos," Judd said, while showing off a few of the Lab's tricks. "So we get the newest technology, but if we can't maintain our current technology ... . It means money not spent on pianos."

But when Judd explains the new technology, she's proud and excited.

"This doubles the number of keyboards available to students in the music department," she said.

Because the new tool does things no acoustic instrument can do, and because it does a far more efficient job at some things than a teacher can do, it's a boon to undergraduate music education.

With the new technology, a student reading along in a textbook can hear the bars of music printed on the page. Just click on the example number and presto, the music comes to life. Students who can't sight read can hear each example without fumbling with a CD or tape.

The computer also allows students to drill on their own, a far more efficient process than class or even human-run labs can provide. The computer screen presents some notes, starts a metronome ticking, and the students can either sing the notes into a microphone or play them on the attached keyboard. The computer corrects the pitch and timing, and then gives a grade. The computer can also play a sound and ask the students to recognize it and enter the notation. Again, the answer is checked and graded.

The drilling allows ear training in first-year music classes, even for students with little or no music background. It allows students to learn important basics normally given short shrift in a three-day-a-week, one-hour class. And teaching assistants can be redeployed to teaching their own classes instead of running the labs for faculty.

The computer also plays and prints out student compositions and makes orchestration easier.

Judd started her music career as a performer. "I played the oboe," she said. When she switched to academia, music theory was her specialty. She describes her computer skills before she began designing Penn's lab as "basic."

But upon her arrival at Penn in 1993, when she saw the department computer lab -- "ten IBM double-floppy-drive dinosaurs and one up-to-date computer with a keyboard"-- she knew she had a mission.

"We were not teaching our students efficiently some very basic skills," she said.

Aware of the possibilities -- she came from Cal State Fresno where her husband, Robert Judd, had just set up a music lab -- she was convinced the department needed to set up a lab.

"I had no idea what I was getting into," she said.

She designed the lab (with some pro bono advice from her husband), made all the decisions on all the equipment (even how long the cables needed to be), wrote grant proposals, and after getting the money from the the School of Arts and Sciences and the Pew Charitable Trusts, she ordered the hardware and the software.

"What I didn't expect was that I'd be sitting on the floor setting up cables," she said. "I literally sat on the floor for two days, setting up this [teacher's] station."

Because she had to install everything, from peripherals to software, she learned how everything worked.

Although she's proud of her computer work, Judd is a professor of music first.

"The computers are tools, not an end point," she said. "I wouldn't describe myself as a techy. What I know about computers is to do certain kinds of things that allow me to teach music efficiently."

Gravely, she considered the trade-offs of the tried and true for the newest toy, of excellent pianos for computers.

"There's obviously a different sound quality to an acoustic instrument," she said. "And we're using the Music Lab synthesizers primarily to imitate acoustic instrumental sounds."

Students who compose scores on the computer and listen to the synthetic playback may get instant feedback, but they are not hearing the work as it would be performed.

"The lab cannot replace acoustic music making," Judd said.

Return to Compass Features for October 1, 1996