Getting Smart with SmartMusic

SmartMusic is a music rehearsal tool. It is one of the best examples of the use of computers for education, illustrating some major advantages of computers for education which are:

• Provide graduated exercises according to level of ability.
• Evaluate the student and provide very specific feedback about the student's performance.
• Assist the student by providing some form of active coaching.
• Plot a direction for student growth and improvement.

SmartMusic "listens" to the student's performance via a microphone connected from the instrument to your computer. The piece's musical notation is displayed on the screen as you play. Then, at the end of the piece, SmartMusic displays note-by-note feedback about whether the note was at pitch and whether it was played on tempo. Furthermore, SmartMusic will accompany the student and, like a good human accompanist, will modify its own playing to adjust for the speed at which the student is playing.

SmartMusic contains exercises with feedback for almost any level of play for classical music, popular tunes, and even jazz. It supports over 30 musical instruments, including voice.

SmartMusic is activated as a subscription service but the software is downloaded to your computer, so constant Internet access is not required to play. The Internet is used to verify the subscription, though, and SmartMusic automatically downloads any sheet music you have requested.

Although an excellent program, SmartMusic does lack a tutorial feature. It assumes, I suppose, that the student is receiving theoretical and basic instruction from a human instructor. This is not the best assumption to make particularly since theory can sometimes be ignored in lieu of practice time. A future tutorial feature, would, I think, be welcome both by institutional students as well as lifelong learners such as myself.

Pandora Radio in music education

Every so often I find something that is just absolutely remarkable. My current find is Pandora Radio. This is more than just another online radio. Pandora Radio finds music that you like according to the characteristics of music that you listen to. It learns your preferences and it delivers music based on a complex musical DNA.

The developers of Pandora Radio (Music Genome Project®) have analyzed thousands of songs and rated them on up to 500 different attributes. This genome defines the specific characteristics of the music. In Pandora Radio you create your own "stations." The station may be the name of an artist, a musical genre, an album, a composer, etc. The station will play that artist and other artists whose music has similar characteristics. The result is an uncannily accurate and custom radio station. This is what Artificial Intelligence was meant to be. It is a great way to discover new music (There are convenient links to online stores where you can buy the music. I use Pandora Radio on an iPhone which links to iTunes, of course).

Educators can use Pandora Radio by having students listen to different music and try to determine what characteristics certain songs have in common. I do not know if the people who run the Music Genome Project® would share the characteristics that they use, but perhaps they would be willing to share just enough for educational purposes. Learn more about the Music Genome Project® in WikiPedia.

Next, I have another music project to talk about.