Brenda Neece
Curator, Duke University Musical Instrument Collections

During the 2008-2009 academic year, Brenda Neece, title, participated in the CIT’s Student Video Fellows program.  This Fellows track offered a group of faculty from a range of disciplines the opportunity to investigate how to effectively design student video assignments, assess video work in the courses, and technology and support options available at Duke for them and their students.  Neece developed two assignments for her course.

The first video assignment, a Video Musical Instrument Dictionary Definition, was designed to get students familiar with the process of making and video and to become more familiar with the history and function of particular instruments.  Students chose one instrument and produced a short video that defined the instrument, how the instrument is used in contemporary music, and how the instrument works – parts of the instrument, its range, and so on.  They turned in a written draft script before shooting the video and their grade was based on the quality of their definition.  The videos allowed the students to use multimedia to show how the instruments sounds and how it is played – key aspects in their understanding of the course materials.

Neece was pleased with the results.  The students were able to either demonstrate the instruments themselves or find someone in the local community to play the instrument and became familiar with using the technology to present stories and information.  In addition, the students had a session with a librarian and learned how to cite video and audio excerpts in the work they produced.  In the video clip below, Neece discusses the results of the assignment in depth.

The second assignment, a group activity, was creating a video tour of their ideal musical instrument museum.  In the past, this museum tour was done as a written piece with illustrations.  With this new approach, using video for the students’s work, they were able to bring in interviews, demonstrations, outside sources into a compelling piece that mirrors a “virtual” exhibit or informational video they might be called on to produce when working in a museum.  Students were given clear guidelines and steps for producing the video and how it would be assessed.  In this video, Neece discusses how the assignment was constructed and graded.

Neece plans to continue using video assignments in the course in the future.  The assignments did have some glitches – an online video editing service she planned on using was taken down during the course and, with consulting from the CIT, came up with alternative for the students to use to complete their work.  So, she plans on being better prepared with specific software for the students to use when she teaches the course again.

Neece believes that video and multimedia are important in the student experience – the technology is allowing scholars to communicate in new ways and students need to be prepared to use this way of presenting their work and lets faculty and students bring the work of experts into the classroom.

Elizabeth Linnartz, Lecturer, Department of Music

Project Description:

Five Duke faculty teach voice lessons at Duke and requested hard-drive based camcorders to explore the impact of recording audio and video of voice lessons, classes and performances for immediate or later review by the student and faculty. The voice faculty currently use iPods to record lessons so that students can hear their work for evaluation, but the addition of video would allow faculty to discuss performance problems that have to do with body mechanics, performance, language and communication skills that are manifested in both aural and visual form.

The CIT loaned three hard-drive based camcorders to the faculty to use in voice lessons and preparations for Spring student recitals in courses Music 95, Voice Lessons (50 students); Music 79B, Class Voice (12 students); and Music 179, Advanced Study: Vocal Performance (12 students). The hard-drive based camcorder allowed faculty to randomly access material for playback for discussions with students, in contrast to a traditional tape-based camcorder that would be more cumbersome for these purposes.

Linnartz said that using the camcorder for feedback saved time during lessons, allowing the students to directly see performance issues and how they could improve. “Having video feedback available for immediate student viewing during lessons drastically increased the students’ receptivity to instruction, speeded up their ownership of both the problem and solutions, and created a quicker and more long-lasting change in both technique and performance,” Linnartz noted.

Since the test use of the camcorders proved successful and promising for future work, the faculty are exploring how to obtain a set of camcorders through their department for permanent use in their courses.

Project start date: 2/27/2008
Funding awarded: equipment loan

Brenda S. Neece, Adjunct Assistant Professor and Curator of the Duke University Musical Instrument Collection
Department of Music

Project Description

For Brenda Neece’s course on Musicology, a requirement of all incoming PhD candidates in the Music Department, Neece and her students experimented with the use of small form factor Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPCs) for field research. Neece, during her own research, used a handheld Psion in her work to take notes, dictation, keep track of sources and even make sketches as she travelled in many locations researching musical instruments. With this project, Neece introduced the students to new methods of integrating technology with field research.

The UMPC is a new form factor computer – essentially a small tablet PC – giving the students access to a full Windows Vista computer in a small package. The project allowed the CIT to gain an understanding of ways that students and faculty might use this novel new portable computer.

The CIT loaned Neece and her two students Sony UMPCs during the Fall semester. The UMPCs have a stylus and could be used much like a tablet to create quick sketches and music notation. The computer includes a built-in webcam and digital still/video camera, as well as wireless capabilities, built-in microphone and other features. The computers were pre-loaded with productivity software, such as MS Office, and Endnote for creating and using citations. The Music Department provided licenses for the music notation software Sibelius for use on the computers during the project.

Neece and her students used the UMPC’s for common tasks, such as web browsing and editing of Word documents, but focused primarily on using the devices for research.  They used library electronic resources using WiFi access, made notes using the writing input-based Windows Journal, created and edited short musical examples with the stylus in Sibelius, and used the built-in camera to take quick images of sheet music or instruments for reference.

Despite some technical problems due to the emerging nature of the UMPC platform, the reaction was positive.  “It is fantastic to have the power of a full computer in one’s pocket,” Neece said at the end of the project.  “This is exactly what I would have loved to have had when I did all of my fieldwork and library research for my doctorate instead of my little Psion.”

Project Started: 8/30/2007
Funding: $5,400

Students in Professor Anthony Kelley’s music theory and practice class carry around J. S. Bach’s “Saint Matthew Passion” on their iPods. They listen to the song at the gym, on the bus, in the bathroom, in the car — sometimes singing along.

“They’re going to hear Bach-style [music] the way they hear their own music,” Kelley says about integrating the iPods into his course. “You sing along to the radio, why don’t you sing along to Bach?”

Absorbing Bach’s musical style, particularly his chorales and “Saint Matthew Passion,” is the foundation for the course, in which students learn to recognize, sing and emulate his compositions.

Junior Geoff Lorenz says Bach’s music is “so well textured” with many layers of melodic lines.

“If you take [Bach music] around and listen to it constantly then eventually you’re going to hear all the different layers,” he says.

Kelley says when he plays musical phrases in class that depart from Bach’s style, his students are often quick to notice the incongruity. “I’ve never seen a class so sensitive to error detection,” he says, although it is hard to determine how much of the class’s proficiency to attribute to introducing the iPods.

The next step the class is taking with digital music technology is to a kind of eighteenth-century karaoke.

The students are asked to input the notes for all four parts of a Bach chorale into a musical notation software program. Then, each student is supposed to remove the part — bass, tenor, alto or soprano — that he sings. With this missing-voice version of the song loaded on their iPods, the students have an assignment: play the song and practice singing your part, karaoke style.

“I want you on the bus singing with your iPod,” Kelley told the class. “I want you over Thanksgiving with turkey in your mouth, singing with your iPod.”

At one class, with a CBS News TV crew filming for a story about iPods, freshman Stephen Clark won a class competition to best sing one part in a Bach chorale. Clark sang his part, tenor, as the other three parts played off his iPod, which was attached to the classroom stereo system. Clark says he practices his part, listening to his iPod, mostly on the bus — “humming, not singing loudly, but humming.”

Not everyone has taken to the digital music technology as readily as Clark.