Music Education With Linux Sound Tools

I lead a rather odd lifestyle, working at
home then suddenly taking off for a Linux conference somewhere in
the world, and I'm frequently asked just what it is I do for a
living. I enjoy the question, because it gives me a chance to
expound on how I use Linux to earn my daily bread. My livelihood
consists of three major involvements: writing (books and articles),
performing (blues and classical music), and teaching (guitar, bass,
and music theory and composition). I'm an Old School performer, so
you won't see a computer on my stage, but I do use Linux for all my
writing activities (vi rules!), and in this edition of my monthly
musings I'll describe how I use Linux software for music
instruction.Teaching music requires a number of disparate skills,
including the ability to read and write music in various clefs and
notation formats, a firm grasp of harmony and counterpoint theory,
a demonstrable measure of instrumental skill, and the knack for
successfully imparting these abilities and skills to another
person. Obviously none of these skills require the use of a
computer when teaching, but the machine can make many tasks easier
and more enjoyable for both the teacher and the student.I have quite a crowd of students with a variety of skill
levels. They range in age from 10 to 60, some are beginners while
others are advanced performers, but all are enthusiastic about
their lessons and many have been with me for three or more years.
Most of them are guitar and bass students, but I also teach
songwriting and composition to a few students. Their musical
interests include every genre from AC/DC to Arnold Schoenberg, and
I must be flexible towards those interests. One student needs the
bass part to a Mudvayne song, the next student wants classical
guitar fingering exercises, and the next one is focused on learning
chords and accompinaments for playing in a Christian praise and
worship group. As I said, I have to stay flexible, and I need good
flexible tools to help me do the best job possible. I'm sure no-one
reading this article will be surprised when I say that Linux
software provides exactly the tools I need.Linux ResourcesStudents sometimes forget their music and tablature paper, so
I keep some music manuscript templates around for printing blank
staff paper and tab sheets. My aging HP DeskJet 660C printer is an
indispensable component of my studio, useful for printing lyrics,
chords, and tablature pages found on the Web. Typically I print
from OpenOffice, Mozilla, or Acroread, and thanks to the CUPS
system printing in Linux is as easy and efficient as printing from
a Windows machine.
Figure 1: Tab sheets in OpenOffice.org [tab-blank.tiff]

My students often bring in home-burned CDs and MP3
collections containing tunes they want to learn. Some students
bring in their portable MP3 players that I can easily jack into the
studio sound system. For MP3 play I use the outstanding XMMS, while
for playing CDs I prefer Ti Kan's Xmcd. I also have occasion to
burn discs for students, which is no problem with the Gcombust
front-end for the fantastic cdrecord program.
Figure 2: XMMS, Xmcd, GRip, and Gcombust

I'm frequently asked to figure out a difficult passage from
music that has no available tab. If the part is on a CD track I can
use Mike Oliphant's GRip software to grab the needed track and
convert it to WAV. Then I can load the WAV file into the Snd
soundfile editor and use its realtime time-stretching and looping
capabilities to help me through the tough passage. With Snd I can
quickly excise only the section I want from the WAV, slow down the
section without changing its pitch (using the Expand control), and
then loop-play the slowed part until I learn it.
Figure 3: Snd with opened controls

Ear-training is a discipline designed to improve aural
recognition and identification skills. With the ability to
recognize musical intervals (i.e., the distance between two
pitches, measured in semitones) you can learn new songs from
recordings more quickly, you can improve your improvisational
skills, and you can hear more of what's going on in complex musical
structures. Ear-training is often considered a boring but necessary
part of a complete music education, but there are ways to make it
less of a chore. Tom Cato Amundsen's great Solfege actually turns
ear-training exercises into an enjoyable game, though I must be
quick to add that Solfege is a very serious tool. Exercises are
provided to work on the recoginition of intervals, chords, and
progressions, and the student may explore any of the exercises in
any order. Although I use no Windows in my studio, most of my
students have it on their computers, and happily Tom provides
Solfege even for users forced to use a Microsoft system.
Figure 4: Solfege

Improving aural skills also involves sharpening the ability
to recognize rhythm patterns. Solfege includes a variety of rhythm
pattern recognition exercises, but my favorite tool for this job is
Aaron Lav's RhythmLab. If a student has problems playing a
difficult rhythm I can program RhythmLab to play the rhythm at a
slower tempo until the student can comprehend and play it in time.
Then I can raise the play speed until the student can play the
passage at tempo. I also use RhythmLab as a simple programmable
metronome, but its capabilities range far beyond merely keeping
time. The program is especially well-designed for learning
difficult tuplet rhythms, such as five notes played in the space of
four notes, or seven played in the space of three. These tuplets
are hard to count aloud, but RhythmLab will define and play the
rhythm with absolute accuracy.
Figure 5: RhythmLab

Instrument tuners abound for Linux, but I use the extremely
minimal xtune, a guitar-only tuner. Xtune provides a simple sine
wave playback at the pitch for each string, making it very quick
and easy to tune the guitar. I simply select the pitch for the
string I want to tune, then the program sounds that note until I
toggle it off. Xtune is truly minimal: its features include only a
waveform selector (sine, square, ramp, and triangle) and a toggle
for 8-bit and 16-bit audio output resolution, and it provides no
facilities for retuning to non-standard pitch referents. See the
listing at http://www.linux-sound.org/mut.html for
Figure 6: Xtune

I use all of these tools during lessons. I also give a
hand-out to new students that describes how they can acquire
similar tools and utilities for their own systems (usually Windows
and the occasional Mac) via the wonderful Harmony Central site.
Harmony Central provides an array of connections to software,
on-line lessons, lyrics and tab collections, and other tools and
utilities for musicians at all levels.My hand-out is of course written in and printed from Linux,
and I occasionally suggest to a student that he or she might want
to consider switching to Linux. Thanks to the new generation of
"live" CDs it is possible to check out a complete Linux system on
your own hardware without having to install it, i.e., your base
system remains untouched. Some "live" CDs are dedicated to Linux
multimedia, making it possible to give a student an entire system
such as AGNULA/Demudi, Dynebolic, or Apodio. In this way interested
students can check out Linux and get a taste of what it offers them
as musicians and as a general-purpose operating system.As well as the daily use described above I sometimes present
advanced topics such as software synthesis and algorithmic
composition using software running under Linux such as Csound or
Common Music. Students bound for university or college music
programs also receive an introduction to modern music production
software by way of applications such as Ardour and Rosegarden.
Perhaps I'll describe my use of those applications in a future
article.Final CommentsTeaching is great fun for me, and I like being able to use
Linux as an aid in my profession. However, teaching is also a
business, and I need software to help manage my schedules and
accounts. At this time I make my own simple schedule and payment
templates, but I plan to incorporate as a limited-liability
corporation and will soon be trying out software such as GNUcash to
help manage my money matters. I haven't decided on a particular
scheduling tool, so I welcome any advice for that software. And if
you're a teacher of any subject who uses Linux for your class or
studio, please let me know what software you find useful and/or
indispensable in your work.ResourcesBlank manuscript and tablature paper:
www.lib.virginia.edu/dmmc/Music/Musicpaper/GRip:
www.nostatic.org/grip/Gcombust:
www.abo.fi/~jmunsin/gcombust/XMMS:
www.xmms.org/Xmcd:
ibiblio.org/tkan/xmcd/.htmlSnd:
ccrma.stanford.edu/software/snd/RhythmLab:
www.panix.com/~asl2/music/RhythmLab/Solfege:
www.solfege.org/Harmony Central
www.harmony-central.com/Dave Phillips is a musician, teacher and writer living in
Findlay, Ohio. He has been an active member of the Linux audio
community since his first contact with Linux in 1995. He is the
author of The Book of Linux Music & Sound, as well as numerous
articles in Linux Journal.

email: dlphilp@bright.net