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Kirk Kassner
Kirk Kassner teaches general music, Music Performance Club, and Composers' Club in the Federal Way Public School District, Washington.
When I first saw Carry-a-Tune demonstrated at the 2004 MENC National Conference in Minneapolis, I suspected it might be very useful software. Now that I've had a chance to run it for scores of hours with children, I'm even more convinced that this software represents a fundamental breakthrough in the development of technology for music instruction. Carry-a-Tune samples students' singing and represents pitch and rhythm as a series of dots that form a line on a graph or standard staff. Students and teachers can review the pitch line to see precisely where the singing was too high or too low, too early or too late. When the line falls inside the target boxes (representations of the song's pitches), the program assigns points and reports a final score at the end of each song. Thus, the program provides easy-to-read and easy-to-understand authentic, formative, and summative assessment of student performance.
This program is an improvement over the standalone Pitch Master machine of the 1980s because it does not require a separate machine and set of tapes and because it provides the student with split-second by split-second feedback on pitch. One of the Pitch Master's developers, Ron Thomas, reported in 1991 that, ''Today, new generations of computers and software can deal with procedural skills in fluency and literacy far more efficiently and productively than could have been imagined twenty years ago. In fact, there is no longer any excuse for students to sing or hear inaccurately, to lack a functional understanding of rhythm, or to be inept in basic music literacy abilities'' (p. 29). The Pitch Master, wonderful though it was, only reported a final assessment number, with no helpful information about where the singing was off-target. Carry-a-Tune is also a big improvement over programs such as Sound Lab for the same reason, and also because the graphics, cartoon characters with distinct personalities, and humor strongly intrigue students. They regard Carry-a-Tune as a game or challenge, much like their video games or jumping to see if they are tall enough to touch the door sill. Students ask over and over to sing with Carry-a-Tune, gladly singing...