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And at the same session—a gold mine! —a rousing stump speech by Carolyn Chiterer Gilboa, a medievalist turned teacher of remedial English at the Herbert H. Lehman College of the City University of New York. She is a sturdy, funny, pugnacious and acutely intelligent woman in the middle of middle age, the sort of teacher every student should have a constitutional right to at least one of. She points out that a student can be graduated in the top third of a New York City high school class and be a functional illiterate. If you have a bright illiterate who has had twelve years of education, she says, something in the educational system is out of phase with something in the student. Suspecting impoverished vocabularies, she ran computer tallies on essays written by freshmen— blacks mostly, with a few Southern whites and New York City blue-collar whites— who clearly required remedial teaching. What she found was something quite different. "And that's where computers are so useful," she says. "You start out with a hunch, but the computer shows you patterns that you never suspected were there." The patterns she found —repeated use of proverbs and formulaic expressions, use of capitalized words for emphasis, and the simplification of hard-to-say consonants at the ends of words (wealf" for wealth," "could" for couldn't" —were those of people to whom a composition meant a speech or sermon, not an essay written down on paper. These students had heard a lot of fundamentalist preaching, but they had not read much literature. What had seemed simply wrong in the cadences of their own writing began to make sense when compared with those, say, of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. "Well," says Gilboa, "you start with what they have, which is not simply a bunch of mistakes, but an oral tradition."
Musicians are among the liveliest of the interfacers. The Hanover star is Jon Appleton, 40, a Dartmouth music professor and co-inventor of a portable electronic synthesizer called a Synclavier. This machine uses a small but very powerful $7,000 computer. A musician can perform as a soloist at the Synclavier keyboard, then assume the role of conductor and call up and blend recorded sounds from the computer's memory.
The Synclavier is larger than a breadbox. It is smaller than a piano. It is not portable in the one-armed sense. But two arms will heft it. The complex sounds produced can resemble drums or clarinets or bassoons or sound like no instrument ever invented. Once, in Dartmouth's Spaulding Auditorium, Appleton's wife Elisabeth danced an austere and elegant accompaniment while the professor played.
A complete Synclavier costs $14,700. The Tangerine Dream, a German rock group, has one. So does Jazzman Herbie Hancock. Somewhat bemusedly, Appleton notes that research now going on probably will teach the Synclavier to talk. But, he adds, it will not be able to talk and play music at the same time. The observer thanks Appleton and goes home to consider parameters.
— John Skow