Music class begins at James Blake High School near Washington, D.C.: "Go ahead, boot up your computers." That's Shirley Letcher, calling out instructions from the teacher's workstation, an imposing wired matrix that links a synthesizer, computer keyboard, and monitor.

"This time I want you to save your work on the computer so I can hear it," Letcher says. "You're going to vary the velocity and the tempo, and you're going to use different instruments for each track. And you're going to use the mixer window to balance the dynamics."

For a music room, it's remarkably quiet -- just the whir of computers warming up, the buzz of florescent lights, and later, the faint strains of a Bach two-part invention, pulsating through the students' headsets. The students use the prerecorded music to experiment on their own with volume and tempo and timbre, substituting the electronic piano with the sounds of any one of 1,200 instruments in their computer files. What would Bach sound like on a dulcimer and steel drums? The kids can find out.

Some of Letcher's students have taken a few piano lessons, but most come in knowing little more than what they've heard on MTV. Now they are learning the basics of music by working with it, manipulating the building blocks of sound and time, and making the music their own.

Letcher is a new kind of music teacher, and her classes at this arts- intensive high school in Montgomery County, Md., are part of the new wave of music instruction for the millennial generation. She uses technology that didn't exist some 20 years ago to tap into her students' creative minds.

Even 10 years ago Letcher would have been considered something of a pioneer, and today she remains one of relatively few K-12 music teachers who are exploring the limits of computer technology. But their number is growing as more teachers learn about electronic music making. With the enormous interest in computer-assisted instruction -- and especially in those applications that promote creativity and critical thinking -- music teachers, and those who train them, see a strong link emerging between music classes and computer technology.

"This fits seamlessly into the overall goals that schools have for their students -- thinking skills, skills for using technology," says Michael Blakeslee, associate executive director of the National Association for Music Education in Reston, Va.

Music and learning

Much has been written recently about the impact of music on cognitive development. In a well-publicized California study, college students who listened to a Mozart two-piano sonata outperformed their peers on tests of spatial reasoning. A popular book, The Mozart Effect, seized on this research and other analysis to suggest that music could have cognitive, and other, benefits. Since then, scientists have questioned whether merely listening to music can make children smarter. But there is growing evidence that active involvement in music making can have significant intellectual benefits.

In 1999, for example, researchers at the University of California's Berkeley and Irvine campuses found that second-graders performed better on tests involving fractions and proportional math after a regimen of piano keyboard training and computerized math puzzles.

There are other, less utilitarian reasons to study music, as well. One is to develop music literacy in a society that is saturated -- some would say bombarded -- with musical sounds. We try to teach kids to be critical readers and critical thinkers; shouldn't we want them to be critical listeners as well?

Finally, music has intrinsic value as an expression of human emotions and ideas. But while the vast majority of students are fascinated with music outside school, few actually pursue those interests in school. And this is one area in which technology can help, music educators say.

"If you survey kids, 99 percent are interested in music," Blakeslee says. "And this is a challenge for us -- only 12 percent are interested in the school music program."

Letcher is especially interested in what compositional software can offer students who don't have much musical background.

"The high schools are set up for performance students, but very little is available for the kid who doesn't want to perform or maybe doesn't even want to play an instrument," Letcher says. "For the children who don't want to perform but have this creativity, computers just give them a new opportunity."

Letcher's piano lab has 25 student workstations and a station for herself. The stations are equipped with computer keyboards, monitors, and synthesizers that resemble a piano keyboard. In labs such as these, the dynamics of sound production is vastly different than with an acoustical instrument, according to Technology Strategies for Music Education, by Thomas Rudolph, Floyd Richmond, David Mash, and David Williams.

"With acoustical instruments, the generation of sound is linked to the control of that sound," the authors write. "For example, a piano makes a sound when a key is depressed with force; a violin produces a sound when the bow is drawn across a string. The physical action is directly linked to the sound production. This is not always true with electronic musical instruments."

In an electronic lab, the authors explain, a student plays what's called a controller -- perhaps an electric guitar or piano keyboard -- that makes no sound itself but produces a control signal that is transmitted to a sound-generating device via a Musical Instrument Digital Interface or MIDI. A MIDI sequencer records the notes and their relative loudness or softness. This musical sequence can then be stored and played back. Students can edit the musical sequences and write or record other tracks to lay against the original (much as Bach did 300 years go -- but with a quill, not a controller -- to write those two-part inventions).

Musical notation software enables students to create compositions quickly, either by writing notes on a computerized score, using all the word processing functions of cutting and pasting and editing, or by "real-time" performance -- that is, simply playing the keyboard, guitar, or other instrument while the sequencer records the notes. As a result, students can get immediate feedback on their compositions. "Students are more engaged, they think at higher levels, they're more likely to create unique or individual products when they have direct control over the materials they're working with," says Sam Reese, an expert on music technology who trains music teachers at the University of Illinois. "Music technology is such a natural medium today for so many adolescents, middle school, and high school kids. It gives them the tools for direct control over sound, which they don't have in any other way."

Young composers

With music technology, students who have more creativity than musical experience can begin composing without having to know musical notation. One of those students, Ryan Keach, is especially taken with the technology. A junior at Montgomery Blair High School, also in Montgomery County, Md., Ryan started in Sara Josey's piano class last spring and is now composing fairly complicated pieces on the keyboard. Working with a software program called Overture, Ryan has begun to learn about notation while composing dreamy-sounding motifs that he uses for various projects. "

This is actually a piece I'm writing for my friend who's making a video game -- it's background music," Ryan explains, calling up a three-track composition he wrote for digital strings, harp, and piano. "This class has taught me a lot about reading music as well."

Josey's class is an eclectic bunch that includes novice piano students, intermediates like Ryan, and students who take lessons privately (and practice their Beethoven sonatas on the keyboards in the next row of desks). Certainly, Ryan has years to go before approaching the knowledge level of the private piano students; but then, he hasn't had the advantage of years of practice and one-on-one training. Working in the piano lab has sparked his interest and enabled him to approach a creative level that would have been impossible for a beginning student a few years ago.

"I don't see [electronic music] as closing the door or preventing students from learning traditional musical skills," Reese says. "It's not 'either-or.' What we say, of course, is that it needs to be 'both-and.'"

Mary Hochkeppel, an elementary school music teacher in Northern Virginia, agrees.

"I wouldn't want to use it solely," says Hochkeppel, who teaches at Buzz Aldrin Elementary School in Reston. "I think it's important to have the traditional instruments as well as the technology. This is an enhancement to learning. It's important to go from the concrete to the abstract."

In her afternoon classes, Hochkeppel turns on the classroom speakers and shows groups of second-graders some of the sounds a synthesizer can imitate. The children often guess which classroom acoustical instrument the computer is imitating, such as the vibraharp, temple blocks, triangle, bongos, and cabaca, rattling gourds from Africa and Brazil. Then they discuss the difference between the electronic and the acoustical sounds. "

It's much better to see [and hear] the real instrument than the electronic," Hochkeppel tells the class. "But it's getting better and better. They're doing much better at copying the real thing."

The students then take turns coming up to the synthesizer, picking out a digital sound they like, and trying to tap on the synthesizer's keyboard to a rhythm Hochkeppel makes up using "walking notes" (quarter notes) and "jogging notes" (eighth notes).

Earlier in the day, during a fourth-grade class, Hochkeppel taught the majority of the class a medieval sword dance while about eight children gathered around the classroom's four synthesizers and experimented with the early pentatonic scale. Hochkeppel had marked the appropriate notes up and down the synthesizer's keyboard with blue stickers. The children were supposed to use a software program called Musicshop to call up a drumbeat on the computer, then improvise in time using the five "safe" notes. Few of the children stuck to the five notes, and many had trouble matching the rhythm, but some beamed when they listened through the headphones to the music they had just recorded. "

It's quite cool," says 10-year-old Saum Salehi. "It's cool that you can use technology to plug a keyboard into your computer and actually play and hear the sound.

"Technology's just growing and growing," he continues. "That's what I keep telling my dad. I don't know what's going to happen next. ... I don't know how Bill Gates made this."

Many of the music teachers who are now committed to using technology in their classrooms knew little about it just a few years ago. Josey recalls being introduced to synthesizers at a 1996 training session taught by Rudolph, one of the authors of the music technology text and a high school music director in Haverford, Pa.

Josey went to the workshop expecting to get tips on teaching piano. She came out determined to get a piano lab for her school. "I lobbied for it," she says. "I lobbied for it for two years, not sure of what I was getting into."

In a collaboration with English classes, Josey's students have created music to use as writing "prompts" for student poetry, essays, and short stories. Noting the child development class down the hall, Josey once asked her students to write background music to accompany a short story reading for a hypothetical blind preschooler.

Immigrant students -- 69 languages are spoken at Blair -- have transcribed some of the unrecorded songs from their home countries. For students who are working to learn English, the software is especially powerful, Josey says. "The ESL students will have so much success. They don't have to know a whole lot of English in order to play a song using the computer."

Beginning piano students in Josey's class also work on basic music concepts like rhythm and tempo using a software program called Band in a Box.

Barriers to adoption

Shirley Letcher, the music teacher at James Blake High School, has been writing songs since she was in elementary school. In the early 1980s, while teaching in Princeton, N.J., she decided to record some of her songs, but it proved to be an expensive undertaking: Hiring musician friends to play the various parts and renting a recording studio cost her $600.

"I can do this for nothing now," Letcher says. "I can do all of that on my computer."

Letcher got interested in music technology a few years after that recording session, when her husband gave her some computer software for composing. Now she and Josey are spreading the word about music technology. Recently, they led a session at the National School Boards Association's Technology and Learning Conference in Denver.

But most music teachers haven't embraced the new technology. In a recent national survey by Florida State University, 61 percent of K-12 music teachers said they didn't integrate technology into their curriculum, although almost 90 percent of those said they would like to use it.

Why don't they? The answers are simple: cost and lack of training.

"It's a very steep learning curve," Letcher says. "It is really a very difficult thing to pick up. If you don't have a desire to pick it up yourself, this is daunting."

Reese, of the University of Illinois, says schools often concentrate on computer hardware and software before considering the most important issue: training their staff. Indeed, Reese says, choosing the hardware and software is the least important consideration when developing a music technology program -- much less important than training teachers, specifying the exact purpose of the program, and deciding what type of data the computers will be expected to handle.

Cost is also an issue; music technology doesn't come cheap. Reese estimates that each classroom music station -- including a computer and some kind of MIDI keyboard -- costs between $1,300 and $2,000. Labs such as Letcher's, in which a teacher can listen in on students' workstations, add more costs, as does music software.

Letcher's 25-station classroom cost $125,000. "We're an arts school, so we had money from a grant," she says.

The expense is "no doubt a big problem," Reese adds. "Cost is still a big barrier for any district that doesn't have at least a little discretionary spending."

However, districts and individual teachers can find creative ways to get around some of the expenses. Many districts have programs that help parents buy books and software. Why not spend some of that money on music software? Reese asks.

In addition, some students might already have music software in their homes -- something that would enable music teachers to assign them home projects. Equal access would be an issue, Reese says, but "if we wait until everyone can do it, we'll probably be waiting forever."

Teachers can also be creative about using software that isn't strictly designed for music making. One of Hochkeppel's favorites is a visual arts program called Kid Pix, which lets elementary school students make slide shows using computer slides they create themselves. With the computer's microphone, students can make soundtracks for their presentations by recording themselves playing various instruments. Though not as high-tech as the synthesizer, the program gives students the same immediate feedback on their compositions.

Integrating theory and technology

So is music technology the answer for the music classes of the new century? Peter Webster, a researcher at Northwestern University, says it certainly shows promise, but he offers some caveats. In a handbook for music teachers to be published later this year, Webster reviews 97 studies of music technology. Although the research shows that older, drill-and-practice software can yield modest achievement gains, much more needs to be learned about the creative uses of music technology, Webster says.

In one of the more intriguing studies, researchers from the University of Illinois analyzed the thought processes of various novice high school composers who used a MIDI keyboard. The researchers identified four types of young composers: the archetypal, a student who "possesses the 'gift' of imaginative ideas but without much experience and knowledge"; the style emulator, a student who is mainly influenced by contemporary styles but has few original ideas; the technician, a student who understands the surface details but not the underlying musical meaning; and the super composer, a student with the "gift" and the training and experience to make the best use of it.

Webster says that this and other studies are promising ground for further research. "There are certainly indications that, if it is used properly, [music technology] can make an extraordinary difference," he concludes.

But he is no cheerleader. In his book, Webster makes a point of quoting technology skeptics such as Jane Healy and Clifford Stoll, both of whom have questioned the educational value of technology -- at least as it is used by many schools today.

"Perhaps the most important concern," Webster writes, "is that both our research and practice integrate technology with a strong theory of instruction behind the reasons for doing so."

Technology is changing our lives, Webster writes, and teachers, "as seekers of new ways to explain difficult ideas," are going to explore it. The issue, he says, "is not if technology is effective as much as how we can make technology more effective."

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