Sharp Infested

Music Tutor (Garland) is a menu-driven musical composition program meant to be used in conjuction with a teacher or a book about notation.

You can input up to 75 notes either by code, or by using two rows of the BBC keyboard configured as a piano.

With the second method notation appears on the screen as you compose. This is an important and useful feature though a keyboard overlay, rather than a diagram in the manual, would have been an obvious enhancement.

You can listen to your composition - at one of 10 different tempi - edit it, and save it.

The documentation is com prehensive and clearly set out. But there begins the rub. Notes, we're told in the manual, are "correctly located on the clef (not the stave).A slip of the pen?

No, the mistake occurs several times, in different forms. It would appear that the author is no musical theorist — a suspicion confirmed by the program itself.

> In input mode the treble clef doesn't encircle the G line of the stave. Not a cosmetic matter — the position of clefs should be part of basic music tutoring. You then find that the only accidental available is a sharp, though there are good musical grounds for using flats and naturals too.

Indeed, one of the reasons why the screen notation looks unusual is that it becomes so sharp-infested.

Worse, however, is that the sharps appear, incorrectly, above their notes rather than next to them. Formatting accidentals in music programs is difficult, but you can't just sidestep the problem by misplacing the signs. p> There is more. The pitch of each note is changed individually, preventing a begin ner getting a "feel" for key signatures. You can't experi ment with harmonies. There's no choice of clef. Dotted notes can't be input in keyboard mode. You can't input bar lines at all.

The editing procedure is a positive discouragement. If you make a mistake at input you have to go into edit mode. Here, the notes of your tune are presented, in order, one by one - with a cleared screen, so you can't see the notation and edit it at the same time.

Unless you've written your tune down by hand - there's no facility for hard copy - it's virtually impossible to remember which note to change. p> And if you switch back to look at the notation you have to start editing again from scratch. Such a user-hostile approach is calculated to create the impression that learning music is a chore.

To cap it all there are two rather serious bugs in the program - I assume they're bugs, not further musical errors. A semiquaver rest is displayed as a semiquaver note and "top" G sharp is drawn with a ledger-line.

The general design parameters of the program are perfectly adequate for beginners. The range of notes, for example, is just over one and a half octaves, and duration is between a whole note and a one-sixteenth. p> Within such limits many teachers are waiting for an easy-to-use, musically accurate and creative learning aid. Music Tutor could have fitted the bill. As it stands, it does not.

Gabriel Jacobs