Resource: Musical Scrambles with Canvas

Introduction

In the fall of 2022, I was inspired by Alan Gosman's essay "Finding One's Place: Musical Scrambles and Formal Function" in The Norton Guide to Teaching Music Theory (2018) to gamify my teaching of musical form. The idea is simple: chop up a piece or phrase into short bits, jumble them up, and present the scrambled segments to students to rearrange into a sensible order. I'll leave it to Gosman to extoll the pedagogical benefits of this exercise, but I'll say that I personally found it to be a refreshing and challenging (in a good way!) way to engage students actively in questions of musical form.

When I teach form (whether at the undergraduate or graduate level), I use scrambles in conjunction with three other exercises: 1.) statistical learning through immersive listening to large corpora of short excerpts, through which I try to get my students to articulate the norms of a practice for themselves (while I mix up the ordering of the other activities, this particular activity always comes first), 2.) drop the needle exercises where students identify the likely function of an excerpt isolated from its surroundings, and 3.) making formal diagrams using Brent Yorgason's wonderful Variations Audio Timeliner tool. Together, I hope these exercises promote a way of listening to musical form that feels rich with detail, flexible yet specific, and deeply intuitive.

On this page, you will find a set of resources that can allow you to implement musical scrambles in your classroom. I made this resource for three reasons.

Gosman's essay presents readers with visual score excerpts, which is great for a written theory class, but less than ideal for aural skills. I have spent some time making .mp3 snippets to make scrambles into an aural skills activity, which I'd like to share with my colleagues to use as they wish.
After the success I found copying Gosman's scrambles directly for a unit on phrase structure (sentences/periods/hybrids), I then made up some new excercises for use in a sonata form unit. These are scrambles of entire sonata expositions, which I made from sonatas by Cimarosa, Myslivecek, and others. I thought this might be of interest as well.
Following an exchange on Twitter, I figured out a way to implement the scramble idea through Canvas quizzes, creating a very naturalistic, puzzle-based assessment mechanism. A tutorial for setting this up is provided below.

I hope these resources are useful!

The Audio Files

Below, you will find google drive folders containing a number of scrambles suitable for units on Caplinian phrase structure and sonata form. A google doc within these folders contains an answer key with identifying information for each scrambles. 10 scrambles are provided in total, 8 designed to be used for in-class activities, and 2 that can be used as quizzes or graded assessments. No answer key or identifying information is given for the 2 quiz scrambles (in case my own students stumble upon this post).

A quick note, I usually found it advantageous to use VSTs over recordings (mainly to prevent harmonic information from spilling across segments). I used NotePerformer for this purpose, exporting my files through this engine directly from Sibelius.

How to Implement Scrambles on Canvas

The "New Quizzes" feature of canvas contains a question type called "ordering" that is great for scrambles. The one drawback is that, as of this post, canvas cannot provide partial credit when auto-grading this question type. If you want to implement partial credit, you must do so manually. Nevertheless, I think this quiz creates a really naturalistic environment for scramble activities, where students can really feel like they are piecing a puzzle together. Moreover, you can set up the quiz to provide Wordle-like feedback that can guide students gradually toward the correct solution. Here is a step-by-step tutorial for creating this activity.

Step 1: Create your quiz

On the quiz page, create a new quiz, selecting "New Quizzes" as your quiz engine. This feature will not work on classic quizzes.
Set title, grading options, and due date as normal. For in-class exercises, I set the point value to 0.
Click Build at the bottom of the page to launch the "New Quizzes" engine.

Step 2: Create an "Ordering" question with audio examples

Within the Build engine, select + to bring up the "Insert Content" window.
Select "Ordering" to add an Ordering question type. Describe the question in the required "Add Question Stem..." box and set the point value using the box to the bottom-left of the page.
Select the text box for one of the answer spaces, then, on the right side of the formatting options, select "Upload Media" (NOT "Insert/Edit Media," which is right beside it). This will bring up the "Import Content" window.
Navigate to the Audio tab of the "Import Content" window. Use browse or drag & drop to upload one of the audio segments.
- It is important to note that Canvas will allow students to download the audio files you upload here. For this reason, it is crucial that you avoid giving away the correct order in either the file name or the metadata of the audio you use. This is why the audio files linked above are named using suffixes that are already scrambled.
Repeat this process for all audio files in the given scramble, adding new answers as necessary.
Drag your audio files into the correct, unscrambled order. This is the ordering Canvas will use to judge the single correct answer. Canvas will automatically randomize the answer order on every quiz attempt.
- As far as I'm aware, there is no way to allow for multiple correct orderings, which is unfortuante given the ubiquity of exact repetition in so much music!

Step 3: Wordle-ize your scramble

Wordle is a nice pedagogical model for scrambles, since it guides you gradually to the correct answer by noting what you got right on each attempt. This allows for students to tinker gradually: guided by positive reinforcement, they place things into more and more sensible orders until everything snaps into place in a sudden "aha" moment. We can use settings and additional text in the answer slots to bring this feature into our quiz. Though we have to fenangle things a bit to get this to work.

Go to the settings tab at the top of the New Quiz engine.
Enable "Allow multiple attempts" and adjust the parameters as you like. By default, it is set to keep the highest score and allow unlimited attempts. I set mine to 3.
- Note that if everything else is left untouched, Canvas will show them the correct answer after the first attempt. See the step below to change this.
Enable "Restrict student result view" and adjust the parameters you like. By default, nothing will be selected, meaning that students will only be shown confirmation that they've submitted the quiz. To provide Wordle-like feedback, you want to enable "Show items and questions," "Show student response," and "Indicate response as correct/incorrect." You want to leave UNCHECKED the option to "Show correct answer with incorrect response." Return to the build tab.

Step 4: Provide visual feedback with text

Because each answer box contains only an audio file, and all the audio files look the same, there is no visual aid to help students remember what they get correct and incorrect on each submission. You can help by adding descriptive text alongside the audio file. Personally, I like to include the complete file name, so that students can keep track of where they are placing excerpts A, B, etc.
By including the file names in each answer box, you also have a way (though admittedly clumsy) to incorporate exactly-repeating segments into your scramble. I add an instruction like "If any two segments are exactly (note-for-note) the same, order those segments alphabetically. For example, if Segment B and Segment F are the same, assume Segment B occurs earlier in the piece." Because of how clumsy this is, I make sure to go over these instructions in class and incorporate an example into in-class activities.

Step 5: Preview & publish

If you want to preview the quiz, there is an option in the top-right of the window within the New Quizzes engine. This is different from where the preview option is in old quizzes. The image below captures a test submission that illustrates the Wordle-like visual feedback we've created: Excerpts D and C were incorrectly ordered, because the student did not follow the instructions to order exactly-alike segments alphabetically.
When you are finished, click "Return" to exit the New Quizzes engine and return to the main quizzes page. This will not publish the quiz, so make sure you do so!

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