Animated Listening Maps

Abstract

usic software has proven useful for advancing most of MENC’s National Standards,1 although a great deal of software has concentrated on National Standard 5: Reading and notating music. Software for Standard 6 (listening) has been available for many years, but it’s usually aimed at college students. Now public school general music teachers have a useful resource for helping children listen intelligently to music through animated listening maps. All good listening maps, whether animated or not, draw attention to important elements and nuances of the music and thus help students perceive, understand, and make connections about the composer’s intentions for the piece. With paper and overhead listening maps, the teacher needs to point to events on the map as the music plays. Animated maps have a notable advantage over static maps in their ability to highlight musical events as they occur, without teacher input. Animated maps also intrigue students via interesting graphics, icons, cartoons, line drawings, color changes, as well as musical notation and terminology. The recent publication of Animated Listening Maps 2 by Silver Burdett opens up a new medium for the general music classroom. Animated listening maps are particularly good for teaching skills and concepts outlined in the National Standards for K–4 and 5–8, especially melodic contour, texture, patterns, formal sections and overall form, timbre, beat, rhythm, meter, tempo, dynamics, mood, standard music notation, and notational terms. Animated listening maps can also help students understand different cultures and historical periods. The table below outlines each of Silver Burdett’s 46 animated listening maps, gives the National Standards addressed, type of animation shown, and specific concepts taught. Although I found most entries quite useful, I gave a * rating to those items I found exceptionally interesting and informative, and I gave a ** rating to three maps I thought to be really extraordinary. This technology is just in its infancy. I hope to see many more creative uses in the future. With our students’ technological capabilities increasing every year, we should even be thinking of using such software to have students create their own animated listening maps. Please let me know if you are having students make their own maps using this or similar technology or if you know someone who’s doing this. I’d like some follow-up contributions to this column on this subject.