Music to their ears: perhaps the world's first palm computer-powered orchestra debuted this spring when Spokane students composed and performed original music using their handhelds.

Tchaikovsky probably wouldn't known what to make of the scene in the auditorium of the Libby Center in Spokane, Wash., this March. Home to Spokane Public Schools' Odyssey gifted magnet program, the center hosted what music educator Bryan Bogue calls the first Palm handheld-powered orchestra. For the event, 56 of his fifth- and sixth-grade students from a Music Technology class collaborated with four students from Central Washington University to produce a spontaneous musical performance using their Palm handhelds and electronic synthesizers. The entire campus gathered to hear the music, which Bogue laughingly classifies as non-traditional composition. "It was fascinating, very computer sounding. It wasn't like it was a Tchaikovsky symphony or anything," he says. "Some people thought it was incredibly cool. Others said, `You call this music?' But it was actually very educational in terms of new composition. If all we do is write like what we've heard before, we'll never find anything new."

The Libby Center, which offers gifted students in Spokane School District No. 81 magnet programs like Odyssey, also delivers special-education classes to disabled students. Their reaction to the musical performance was notable: they sat still and attentive "like never before," says the teacher.

Bogue, a percussionist with the Spokane Symphony, has been an innovative music teacher in the Spokane schools for more than 15 years. In the early 1990s, for example, he became one of the first music educators in the area to equip his classroom with Musical Instrument Digital Interface, or MIDI, keyboards. Initially, he used them merely to create sheet music for his band students. "If you needed some scale exercises you could just write them on the computer and print them out," he says.

"But education has always wanted to go beyond what the teacher could get out of it to what students could get out of it." In fact, it's only been during the last several years, he says, that he has been able to truly bring his passion for technologically generated music into his classrooms.

By 2000, Bogue had acquired seven complete music stations, which consist of an Apple Macintosh equipped with music software, a MIDI keyboard and headphones. Each station costs nearly $4,000 to create, and Bogue knew he was fortunate to have so much equipment. But with an average class size of 28, his students were still spending so much time waiting to use one of the seven stations that the technology was more gimmick than a fully realized learning tool.

"We weren't able to get as in depth as I would have liked because you could only have so many kids on a computer," Bogue explains. It was still a limiting experience.

The Originating Vision

Near the beginning of the 2000 school year, Bogue saw an advertisement in a magazine for software that transformed Palm handheld computers into handheld orchestras and portable composing studios. When coupled with add-on hardware like a tone module, Bogue realized he could create and play music on his personal Palm handheld, mimicking the sounds of trumpets, pianos, drums and countless other instruments. Suddenly he had a vision of creating handheld music labs for one-tenth the cost of the setups currently deployed in his classroom.

"When I saw some of the software coming out for Palm computers and the attachments, a light bulb went off," he recalls. "This would be a perfect way to get technology in all of [my students'] hands."

Inspired, Bogue drafted a music-education proposal that he called the P.A.L.M. (Potential Artists Learning Music) Pilot Program. When he returned from spring break, the middle-school teacher found a box with 15 Palm III handhelds on his piano bench in response. As is often the case, this initial donation spurred others. Before long Bogue had raised enough money to buy another 15 Palm III units--enough to equip an entire class--as well as to purchase the necessary add-on tone modules from Swivel Systems.

San Francisco, Calif.-based miniMusic donated their music software for Palm handhelds to Bogue's class in exchange for access to his lesson plans. And while the handheld setups don't have all of the composition, recording or editing capabilities of full-scale music labs, with a sticker price of less than $400 in total for all hardware and software, the advantage is clear.

Bug Bands and Melodies

Even before the P.A.L.M. Pilot program, Bogue had created a high-level curriculum for his fifth- and sixth-grade gifted students, teaching them not only note reading and music-composition theory, but also how to record and produce a CD. It was at the beginning of the 2001 school year when the handhelds were introduced--that the visual, audio and mathematical processes of reading music suddenly became fun.

Though parents might have been surprised to see their progeny in school with headphones on playing video games during class, Bogue says that the BugBand software from miniMusic produced dramatic results. The program for Palm handhelds has little bugs crawling across a musical staff with an image of a piano keyboard at the bottom. In what may appear to be the quietest music class ever, students learn to knock the bugs off the screen by tapping the correct musical note on the digital keyboard at the bottom of the screen. As each level progresses the bugs crawl more quickly across the staff, which encourages rapid note reading.

Curious about how the technology would affect absorption and retention, Bogue gave his students a pre-test of their music note-reading ability before introducing use of the handhelds. When the unit was finished, he gave them a post-test.

"I wanted to see whether they were really learning, or whether it was just a little game," he explains. "After the post-test, I realized they really were learning these notes pretty quickly. It's amazing how it works and how quickly the kids pick up on it."

After note reading, Bogue moved on to counting and rhythm. It's safe to say his students found miniMusic's BeatPad software, which translates each note into graphical form, far more interesting and fun than the metronomes of old. BeatPad transforms sixteenth notes, whole notes and everything in between into squares on a screen. Students can see on their handheld how selecting different fractional notes literally adds up, turning what was primarily an audio concept into a visual representation.

"Standard music notation is oftentimes kind of confusing," Bogue says. "But if students can see it in a grid, they start to understand subdivisions and counting, and the mathematical approach of how music is divided in a measure."

Impressed by his young students' progress, Bogue next challenged them to write their own eight-measure, multiple instrument percussion pieces. NotePad software, also from miniMusic, allows one to do traditional musical notation by tapping the stylus on a handheld's screen to place notes on a digital staff. Bogue had devised a system where each student would use the same Palm In handheld each class and could save their work on it. Bogue then transferred each student's composition from his or her handheld to his computer with HotSync. Finally, using an overhead projector and Palm emulator software on his laptop, the teacher was able to play his students' music while the entire class could view the notes add discuss the rhythms created.

Grade School Meets Grad School

Around this time Bogue saw an article in the local Seattle Post-Intelligencer newspaper about a music professor at Central Washington University who was using Palm handhelds with music-composition students to experiment with new creative techniques and processes. Bogue contacted Mark Polishook and the two began brainstorming ways to have their classes collaborate. From this, sprang the notion of a Palm-based orchestra. They held an assembly in which Bogue's grade-school students performed their compositions, parts of which had been created beforehand and parts of which were spontaneous reactions to what was going on in the music. Polishook's college students then performed their more advanced compositions for the assembly.

Comparisons are difficult to come by, but Bogue says the resulting creations by his fifth- and sixth graders was something akin to the musical genre known as "chance music" or the music of chance composer John Cage.

"Each seed you have of an idea is more composed on the fly, in the moment. So it could never happen the same way twice," he explains. "I just sat there and watched with a big grin."

After the performance, which also gave his students insight into the creative processes involved into putting a performance together, Bogue moved back into his composition curriculum. Students examined the components of melodies and the roles of tension and resolution in music. Using their Palm handhelds, his students next began to think about the shape of melodies and to draw the shape of music they enjoyed. After that they began to write their own notes to follow those shapes, which transformed their composition abilities.

"Once we started to talk about tension and release, their melodies began to sound more like what we're used to hearing (in Western-style music)," Bogue says. "It started to get them to thinking about what they were doing, not just randomly throwing notes out."

For a final project, each student was instructed to create a 32-note melody with a second-voice harmony and a drum or rhythm component, a task that seems impressive for just about any middle schooler. On the last day of class, students played their compositions for their peers.

"You could tell the students had really thought it through, you could hear real form happening," Bogue says. "It wasn't just random stuff. They had motifs repeating throughout; some had taken a melodic idea and shifted it up or down. And not just a few kids," he adds. "A lot of kids were really taking off with this."

Students' affinity for, and abilities with, the Palm III units probably explains why many of them requested Palm handhelds for birthdays or Christmas last year. "I would meet with parents and they would say, `So, that's why Johnny's asking me for a Palm handheld,'" Bogue recalls.

Symphony in School

For next year, Bogue plans to have the class follow the season of the Spokane Symphony examining themes in the larger works the orchestra performs. Using the Palm handhelds, his students will also take a stab at reworking those themes to create their own versions. In addition, Bogue envisions creating biographies of composers and downloading those text lessons into the handhelds. He will also use the handheld computers outside his Music Technology classes, taking them on the road to the bands he instructs at various elementary schools. By creating lessons in advance, for example, students who happen to forget their instrument can work on a Palm-based music-theory assignment during the class period.

Bogue says he's eager to try a variety of new lessons next year.

"It's just such a valuable tool for me," he says. "I used to wonder if the kids would catch on to what I was trying to get across because I didn't have enough hardware. Now I don't worry about that. For me, it has meant more time to think of new ideas to present to [students] rather than getting over the hurdle of hardware."

His reaction to the first year of the P.A.L.M. Pilot program is one that most teachers would envy.

"I would walk away from class just amazed at how great everything went," he says. "The kids are getting so much out of it.... It's a real natural fit for what I'm trying to do in teaching music and the appreciation and understanding of it."

PALM-POWERED MUSIC LAB

Bryan Bogue assembled a select variety of hardware and software components to help teach note reading, rhythm, melodies and composition to his Music Technology students. He estimates each pocket-sized music lab setup could be purchased for between $300 and $400, without the help of donations. Here's what the students used:

Palm III handheld computers: From Santa Clara, Calif.-based Palm Inc., this model accepts the clip-on tone modules that Bogue wished to use.

Miniature tone modules: From San Francisco, Swivel Systems' SG20 tone module clips onto the bottom of the handheld to allow it to play notes by 128 musical instruments and 140 drum sounds. It is actually a miniature MIDI synthesizer, similar to the electronic keyboards that became popular in the 1980s. The SG20 unit fits onto Palm III and VII series handheld and costs about $200, including some software. They also feature a stereo headphone jack, crucial when it comes to allowing students to concentrate on their own creations during class, www.swivelsystems.com

Music software: Programs that turn Palm handheld computers into miniature orchestras are made by third-party providers. For example, Bogue opted for a trio programs from miniMusic of San Francisco, www.minimusic.com He used BugBand to teach note reading. To teach rhythm, he relied on BeatPad. And he used NotePad to create basic musical composition on a digital staff. Individuals may download these titles for less than $30 each from the Palm Education Web site; go to the Software Solutions link. The Palm Education Web site and many other handheld Web sites offer dozens of music-education titles and hundreds of educational programs, many at no charge: www.palm.com/education/; www.palmgear.com; www.handango.com

Palm OS Emulator software: Available for free, this software for Apple Macintosh or Windows computers simulates running the Palm OS desktop and its applications. Bogue has it loaded onto his laptop for handling presentations to his classroom. To download, search for it by name at www.palmos. com/dev/tools (Warning! This application is essentially a programmers debugging tool and is not supported by the technical helpline at Palm Inc. You must read the manual.)

Headphones: Each handheld-based music lab also included Sony Discman headphones ($10 each).

Rebecca Sausner, [e-mail], is a freelance education writer based in Brooklyn, N.Y.