Information and communication technologies in schools: a ...

oriented approach influences the way children think about systems of all kinds:
physical, political, and economic. But the most important thing is how this
process influences the way students think about themselves as human beings who
create systems, not the other way round.
Basic music composition
Let us consider an example of a design and construction activity in music.
Traditionally, music classes in elementary school concentrate on performing and
not on composing. On the other hand, children aged 7 and up, with no knowledge
of formal musical notation, can learn how to create simple melodies in one
or two years by operating a computer with an audio synthesizing and editing
microworld used as a medium and tool for structuring and shaping the material
of sound. A microworld of this kind provides a choice of musical notes in the
range of seven octaves and commands that set a desired pitch, volume, and duration
to consecutive strings of sounds (and pauses). Further, the sound can be
given the coloration of any particular instrument and be made to simulate the
sound of an ensemble of several instrumental voices.
The student’s musical work with the computer is divided into three stages
with well-defined features: a musical scrawl, musical sketch, and musical project.
The first stage is indiscriminate exploration: each student produces various
sounds for the sheer pleasure of it and without paying much attention to their
quality. After a while, they limit themselves to playing with low or high sounds,
with an emphasis on the duration of the sound. Then students can start to build
small melodies that lack formal structure since they are chosen at random. At this
point, they are usually more concerned with the duration of the melody than
with the actual sounds. At the end of the first stage, students select the sounds
they like most, name them, and create melodies based on these sounds. In this
way, they learn to program the sounds and melodies in a natural way, because
they have a need to do so. They start to exercise auditory perception and to pay
more attention to pitch than to duration.
In the second stage, students usually discover short sounds by chance and
they start to glimpse the effects of sounds’ parameters (pitch and duration). Thus
begins a period of discriminate exploration of the musical microworld as they
reflect on each sound’s qualities. The sounds are not chosen at random anymore.
Duration is the most prominent sound quality at this stage. The development of
sound appreciation is apparent in the expanding selection of meaningful words
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