Technology strikes a chord
Electronic music classes help students visualize the songs swirling in their heads

By CHRIS WITKOWSKY
Collegian Staff Writer

With the dawning of the 21st century, more music will be created by engineers and computer geeks.

As music technology evolves, computers are becoming increasingly integrated with musical production and performance.

To keep up with the technology, Penn State is offering two new courses this semester, Music 297E (Technology for Musicians) and Music 497F (Technology for Musicians, graduate level). About 84 students are enrolled in the classes.

The magic happens in the basement of Music Building I, where students sit in front of a keyboard and a monitor, use the keyboard to play music they have conceptualized in their heads and use the technology at their fingertips to edit the notes and make their creations perfect.

With this technology, anyone can become a great musician -- or at least fake it.

"You don't have to have musical training to create songs with these tools," Darci Halloran (senior-music education) said.

"You can explore the keyboard slowly. You sit in front of your monitor and play your keyboard, creating your own instrumental sounds," she said.

The best results come with patience. With a slow, careful process, even tone-deaf people and those without a sense of musical harmony can end up creating a great song.

"If you use a step-by-step process, you can slowly build your creation, edit out the bad parts right from your keyboard and end up with the perfect song -- and do it all without much musical training," Halloran said.

The students, whether they are music majors or people looking for a challenge, learn the complex workings of three main software programs.

"Finale 97" is used for musical notation and publishing, so students can actually see the notes onscreen and get printouts of songs. Another program records, edits and processes MIDI, a digital music format. A third program creates and patches sounds together.

"For example, you take a piano sound and patch it with an organ sound, combining the two, and then you have a new sound that you can use in other applications," Kathleen Kent (senior-integrative arts) said.

This may sound simple, but to students with no formal computer training, the technical aspects of the course can be daunting.

"We've actually learned binary. I had no idea what binary was before this class and now I work with it regularly," Halloran said. "Computer majors are so many steps ahead of the music majors in this class -- with a computer background, you have no fear of the commands and software.

"With this class, the music is the easy part."

Before this semester, the only students who had access to the music technology lab were 16 composition majors per semester, said Barry Atticks, instructor for Music 297E and 497F.

"This semester there's students from 19 different majors attending my classes," Atticks said.

"I wanted to cater to the music education people because this technology is integral to music in the years to come. I also want to cater to the local musicians who play for fun. I want them to know this is another side of the creative spectrum."

Now that access has expanded, the course has attracted students from non-classical backgrounds. Even a musician like Tim McKenna, who is used to playing in smoky fraternity houses, can use the technology to better his artistic creations.

"I'm in a band and music is my life," McKenna (sophomore-telecommunications) said. "This is one aspect of the music business I had never thought about. Now that I'm learning (it), I think this class is extremely important."

"These programs definitely enhance creativity because if I can't play something, I can just program it in and play it."

The courses also are useful because they teach studio production techniques, McKenna said.

"If you're recording for a CD, it's a lot more difficult to keep splicing and editing from the cassette reel," he said. "There's a lot of moving around and delaying. If you have a computer in front of you, you just have to cut and paste notes, listen if they sound right in your head phones, and you're set."

Though the courses have a lot to offer, technology grows quickly, Atticks said, and Penn State needs to use all its resources to stay competitive with other universities.

Funding is hard to come by because the university tends to send money elsewhere before it reaches the music department, he said.

For instance, the science department receives external grants from federally funded organizations, said Richard D. Green, director of the school of music. The music department has a harder time getting external grants.

"People will give more money to research where they'll see an immediate positive result for society," Green said. "Obviously a lab researching the cure for AIDS will receive more money than a piano teacher wanting to perform for a select group of people."

Arts funding is important because music students need to be prepared to face the world when they graduate, Green said. And to be prepared, they need technology.

"That's the challenge for music education -- to assure our incoming students that the school of music won't become a museum," Green said.

Penn State's first step into the future has been taken with Atticks' courses on music technology. From here, the music department hopes to add these courses to the general education curriculum.

"In the future we'll have a choice: Do we purchase a computer or a new Steinway? The computer will be obsolete in two years, while the Steinway will just improve with age," Green said.

"Which one will make us more competitive, though, the computer or the piano? The new thought is a mixture of both."