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Tales From The Podium

The personal weblog of Chad Criswell, MusicEdMagic Webmaster.

Instrument Alternatives For Special Needs Students- The Soundbeam

Tales From The Podium
Written by Chad Criswell
I've been a fan of the Beamz virtual musical instrument for quite a while now, and had mentioned how it was a perfect opportunity for students with special needs to create music both in a classroom environment and also as a recreational activity. Now I have been exposed to another virtual instrument called the Soundbeam that works in much the same way only using ultrasound instead of laser beams to detect the movement of the person playing it. It reminds me a lot of the old Theramin musical instrument that I used to play with as a kid at the local science center. The closer you are to the device the higher the pitches will be while as you move away from the device the sounds go down. The difference is that the Soundbeam sends MIDI data to a MIDI keyboard or other device to produce the sounds while the Theramin uses pitch modulation. I first heard about the Soundbeam in a blog post by Dr. Jim Frankel of Soundtree (Soundtree also sells the device in the USA). In his blog post about the Soundbeam he also has an embedded video of a wheelchair bound student using the device that is worth taking a look at. For even more information about the music therapy benefits of the product take a look at the Soundbeam web site.

Microphone and Sound Reinforcement Guides at McCormicks

Tales From The Podium
Written by Chad Criswell
In going through my email I came across some information about some new gadgets over at the McCormick's music web site. I never found the gadget I was looking for but I did find a really useful page of PDF links to articles on a lot of very informative music technology topics. On their Educational Tech Guides page they list several dozen articles on topics related to microphones and their use. Some of the sample topics include things like Critical Distance and Microphone Placement and Antenna Setup for Wireless Microphone Systems. The page is worth a quick glance if you ever have microphone problems while recording your ensembles or if you just want to learn how to record things more effectively. Kudos to McCormicks for providing this resource!
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Google Steals My Idea and Makes It Better... Go Figure!

Tales From The Podium
Written by Chad Criswell
A few years ago I started a little (huge) project on MusicEdMagic called the Music Composer Database. I spent countless hours collecting information and integrating it into a great program that was created by a grad student over at MIT. My intent was to create an easy to use and navigate place for people and students to find resource information about all of the major composers of history while not directly giving away the answers. In other words, I didn't want to make things too easy for my students but yet I wanted to give them an alternative to Wikipedia. Well, after months of work on it I was fairly happy with the results and posted it online to fairly good reviews. Now though, almost a year later, Google as one-upped me.
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Skype Virus Records Your Conversations

Tales From The Podium

Written by Chad Criswell

Today's topic may be a rather strange thing to be discussing on MusicEdMagic, but it potentially affects a large number of users of the site. Many viewers of MusicEdMagic also use the online videoconferencing program Skype for giving music lessons or for simply making cheap phone calls. Infoworld announced today that the first known Skype trojan horse virus has been seen "in the wild" as a piece of malware that allows an evildoer to intercept and record any calls made over Skype by an infected computer. Apparently the virus started out as a program written for the Swiss government (WHAT???) to use for remote spying.

InfoWorld is saying that the virus is considered a very low grade threat, and anti-virus companies are sure to be writing new updates soon to capture the little bugger, but it is still just another reason to avoid visiting untrusted web sites. For those that crave even more security for their computer think about installing something like NoScript for Firefox (a program that allows you to turn javascript on and off for individual web sites to prevent accidentally getting infected by a rogue web site).

Let's just hope that if one of MEdM's viewers does get hacked that the only thing the hacker gets is audio files of someone giving a beginner oboe lesson!

Santized Instruments- The Debate Continues

Tales From The Podium
Written by Chad Criswell
A few days ago a fellow music ed blogger named Thomas West tweeted about a news story he read about the Massachusetts legislature considering a law to require schools to santize their instruments each school year and to promote band instrument cleaning and hygiene practices to prevent infection. When I first heard it I thought it might be just something that was a knee jerk reaction to the H1N1 Swine Flu stuff. Chances are that the flu pandemic did have something to do with it but after reading the story I still wonder how people can be so badly misinformed as to recommend a proceedure that costs hundreds of dollars per instrument versus the chemical cleaning job that my local music store does for less than $75.
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