New Titles in Music Technology: Textbooks, Software Guides, and Historical and Critical Works

31 August 2005 Textbooks: Experiencing Music Technology, by David Brian Williams and Peter Richard Webster. 3rd ed. Belmont, CA: Thomson/Schirmer, 2006. xxix + 467 p. ISBN 0-534-17672-0. Essentials of Music Technology, by Mark Ballora. Upper Saddle River, NJ:...

To Lease or Not to Lease, That Is the Question!

01 September 1998 Dear Squeak and Blat, We've had various computer hardware vendors on campus, like Dell, Compaq, Apple, and the like and they keep pushing us to consider leasing our computer purchases. Can you give this penny-pinching music prof some guidance on the...

Have Screaming Laptop and MIDI, Will Travel

01 September 1998 Dear Squeak and Blat, I am starting to travel a lot these days and give talks on music software. I understand that you two do the same thing and was wondering if you had any tips about making my load lighter and my work more efficient. It seems I am...

The Development, Implementation, and Supervision of Online Music Theory Courses

24 May 2016 Colleges and universities are under increasing pressure to develop online courses for a variety of classes that have traditionally been offered only through face-to-face (F2F) classroom instruction.1 The process of developing these online classes, as...

Mac Users Would Rather Fight Than Switch!

01 June 1999 Dear Squeak and Blat, My campus is insisting that our music department switch to Wintel machines from the Mac. We are reluctant to switch largely because of tradition but is there any real reason that we should not do this? Winny MacDonald Blat: Well,...

Does Music Teaching Lose Its Flavor on the Internet Overnight?

01 September 1998 Dear Lazy-and-On-Sabbatical Duo, Sure glad to see you back? Where did you go and hide out for the past six months? My students and I need some help. We are eager to start developing some instructional materials for our music classes and put them on the...

ITunes U Coming to a Campus Near You?

28 February 2006 Many of us in college music have been grappling with issues surrounding digital delivery of music, both for listening activities for students in our courses and for downloading and copyright concerns for student and faculty music listening in general....

Burning Your Toast CD-ROM Style

01 April 1997 Dear Squeak and Blat, A few of my students asked me the other day to make them a CD-ROM of their music and some of the software files they have created in my multimedia class. I've heard that this is now possible to do with modest cost. What do I need...

Cookie, Cookie, Lend Me Your Data

01 April 1997 Dear Squeak and Blat, I thought I was doing real good trying to understand all the acronyms floating around the Internet. I mean, I think I know TCP and FTP and HTTP and IP and ISP. But, now we've got crazy terms like "Java" and "Cookies." Give me a...

Squeak and Blat: Crossing Ponds and Breaking Ice

01 May 2011 Dear Squeak and Blat: Hola! I just read Blat’s column in the latest CMS Newsletter about the successful pre-conference on technology at the last national conference in Minneapolis. He spoke about the next one of these coming up at the Richmond,...

American Singers in Germany

01 October 1982 Voice teachers of the College Music Society, rejoice! Your efforts, far from being lost in the cultural wilderness of middle America, are instead bearing fruit in the distant vineyards of the European opera houses. Opera is alive and well and making a...

CMS Visits the Duke

30 April 1991 In 1988 the Division of Musical History, National Museum of American History of the Smithsonian Institution acquired the musical estate of Edward Kennedy "Duke" Ellington, a purchase made possible by the generosity of his son Mercer and the support of...

Fire Your Workstation, Hire a Laptop!

01 September 1999 Dear Squeak and Blat, I'm thinking about investing in a new laptop computer. Are laptops as good as a workstation for music computing? Signed, On-the-Road Squeak: Dear Roadie, Absolutely! Just so long as you are comfortable with the keyboard typing....

Telling Your AU from Your MIDI from Your WAV

01 February 1997 Dear Squeak and Blat, I'm really confused. I've been looking at music files on the Internet and most of them have .AU after the files. But then I've found .WAV and .AIF and .MID and most recently .RA. Can you guys help. This is confusing as heck and...

Squeak and Blat Return: To Rap on Music Technology

28 February 2009 Editor's note: David and Peter ran an online music technology column called "Squeak and Blat Rap on Music Technology" (a take off on Click and Clack of course) from 1996 to 1999. Due to popular requests we welcome them back as "Squeak and Blat"...

Composers' Revisions and the Creative Process

01 October 1993 How do composers write music? To what extent can we explain their thought processes? Ever since Nottebohm's pioneering excavations of Beethoven's sketchbooks, musicologists and theorists have tried to find answers in composers' sketches and drafts....

Leavin' the Jaggies in Your Notes Behind You

01 June 1997 Dear Squeak and Blat, I am preparing a multimedia presentation for class using Powerpoint and I want to put music notation on one of my slides. I am using my favorite music notation program to create the notation. I try to copy the notation graphics,...

Technology for the Teachers Who Teach the Teachers

30 April 2006 Editor's Note: The author points out that this article was adapted, with permission, from an article originally published in the TI-ME newsletter (Fall 2005, www.ti-me.org). The college music experience of today reinforces the need for our students to...

A Thousand Multimedia Tongues! Which Should I Speak?

01 November 1996 Dear Squeak and Blat, I ran across some notes on a presentation you two gave on HyperCard a few years ago. I've been thinking about writing some multimedia software for my music history classes. I'm especially interested in authoring some software that...

Making Music with Computers and Disabilities

01 June 1997 Dear Squeak and Blat, I am a relative newcomer to computing and software music-making. A spinal cord injury leaves me unable to perform but still wanting to make music. This kind of injury is very expensive, so I'm using a lot of hand-me-down and...