Active essays on music

We had our first real "lecture" with my Active

Essays today, and it worked quite well. I did a lecture Monday, but

it was just a demo of Squeak tools. Today was the first interactive

session on serious computer music issues.

Some of the things that worked the best:

- Live code examples. I put in a little exercise to play different

frequencies, to explore Just Notable Differences in frequencies. It

was great fun and really worked for generating some surprised looks

on students' faces.

- Modifiable code examples. We could tweak things, print them, and

re-execute them live, in class, in the middle of the slide.

- Adding and computing new things. We got off in a discussion of

even-tempered tuning, so we were able to compute ratios and play with

2^(1/2) by typing in examples in the middle of the slides.

We'll see how it goes as we go deeper, but I received several

comments about how well the medium worked. Particularly interesting

were the comments like, "It felt really natural, and then I thought

about it, and I realized what an amazing thing we were doing!"

"really natural" is what we are aiming for. All on this list should

try their hands at active essays on ideas they particularly like ....