Faculty Spotlight
June - July 2001
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Learning to Listen: Music and TechnologyDr. Donald PedersonProfessorCollege of Music |
Room 217 in the music building is filled with computers, boxes full of newly arrived equipment and shelves of books and manuals. Dr. Don Pederson is Professor of Music, Coordinator of Theory and Composition, and Coordinator of Computer Activities. His title clearly reflects the dual role he plays in the School of Music: music theorist as well as master technician and programmer.
Music and technology began their marriage for Don 36 years ago when he was writing his doctoral dissertation and programming in "SNOBOL," a project which translated musical scores. Some time after that, he worked on a "dumb terminal," and notes that "I thought I had died and gone to heaven."
The next step, in the late 1970s came when he acquired his first Apple II computer. The committee which, at that time, would have had to authorize the purchase for his department would not do so, because they didn't see the potential of this piece of hardware for music education. Sometimes it's difficult to be ahead of one's time. But he persevered and arranged to purchase an Apple II for experimentation in the musical teaching field. In the days before the availability of tidy graphics he designed shapes and characters for musical notation, at the pixel-level.
Together with his colleague, associate professor Mark Boling, he developed new computer music teaching ear training and theory applications for the UT Music Computer Assisted Learning Lab. Along the way, the team also worked with Apple Computer to demonstrate the potential of the equipment in their field.
Together, they would put on presentations for Apple. Mark would play the guitar to draw in the audience. His guitar was connected to the computers by a midi controller and the computers magically played orchestral backgrounds and accompaniment to the guitar. They chose Gustav Holst's haunting "The Planets" as the premiere piece of music to display the computer's capabilities.
Apple then invited Don to help plan a national presentation in Nashville. They could not pay him for the creative publicity his work brought to the platform but they offered him hardware, enough Mac Plus computers to build his second music lab.
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