Note for
By Katie Grieze
Dana Zenobi, Assistant Professor of Music, couldn’t have another semester of bad karaoke. That’s what she told Butler’s Information Technology (IT) staff in a late-July email about the difficulties of teaching voice lessons during a pandemic. In-person singing just wasn’t an option, as safe distancing and mask-wearing would prevent instructors from observing technical details like mouth shape or jaw position. They tried holding rehearsals over Zoom when Butler first moved classes online last spring, but the video conferencing program wasn’t fast enough to support the immediacy needed for collaborative music-making. There was always a beat or two of delay between singer and pianist. Zoom also couldn’t capture the full range of vocal harmonics. So, students were stuck singing along to pre-recorded accompaniments. “Instead of having a pianist who could respond to what we were doing in the moment, everything felt very rigid,” says Sophie Strasheim, a senior Music Education and Vocal Performance Major. “It was hard to be expressive.” By the start of the fall semester, Music faculty and IT staff had teamed up to find a solution. Zenobi attended a virtual summer conference—the Acoustic Vocal Pedagogy Workshop at New England Conservatory—where she
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BUTLER MAGAZINE
learned about a free, high-speed audio platform called SoundJack. The tool is designed specifically for realtime, online music-making. If Butler could just build a few mini-computers to run only that software—and throw in some professional-grade audio equipment—the experience would be even better. “I know nothing about computers,” Zenobi says. “My knowledge of microphones back in August was, ‘Is it shaped like an ice cream cone, or is it shaped like a pencil?’ I knew nothing about networks, nothing about IP addresses, but the New England Conservatory course showed me that something very exciting was possible. Oliver Worthington, Butler’s Vocal Area Coordinator, quickly jumped on board. He and I built Fastmusic Box prototypes using Raspberry Pi processors, which are basically customizable mini-computers. And that’s when I contacted IT and said, ‘Alright, here’s my problem, and here’s a potential solution.’” IT staff didn’t hesitate. Excited to be involved with an innovative fix to a teaching problem, they held meetings nearly every day until the technology was up and running. They requested some tweaks that would allow the software to better serve a university environment. To avoid the “nest of wires” needed to connect with regular monitors and keyboards, they designed a Raspberry Pi touchscreen that attaches directly to the mini-computer,
