Decoding Caplin - Mapping His Music Theories

William Caplin is a music theorist specializing in classical form. If that sentence hasn’t bored you already, then try reading an entire textbook for your classical music theory course.

So how do you make dense, academically written material easy to apply for your students? This was a question that Tery helped Dr. Rolf Boon at the University of Lethbridge answer when teaching Caplin theory.

After reading through the analysis, it came down to deduction and reduction. Essentially the Caplin theory rules are just a “choose your own adventure”. So we made a treasure map with six true endings.

CHALLENGE

To turn concepts from Caplin’s textbook into an infographic map that is easy for students to navigate instantly.

OUTCOME

After sharing the infographic with students, Boon noticed a significant boost in comprehension of the material through test scores.

Information Parsing

Caplin’s textbook is written more like a thesis with every concept having its own essay. Not only is it extremely dense, it suffers from the curse of knowledge. The curse of knowledge occurs when an individual is such an expert in the subject, that they have difficulty seeing it from a beginners perspective. The expert might think that they are introducing a simple idea, when in fact a ton of background context and experience is needed for a beginner to understand.

In Caplin’s case, the material assumes the reader is familiar enough with the musical themes and definitions that they can easily pull from an internal rolodex and apply as needed when analyzing a piece of music.

In reality, Boon saw students were overwhelmed with these ideas. A lot of the difficulty came from the way the material was presented in the textbook. Good news was, the concepts were quite formulaic and formulas can usually be applied in a repeatable algorithm, just like a math equation. Bad news was, the concepts were written in long paragraphs over many chapters with complicated terminology. It’s like explaining algebra in paragraphs.

What students needed was a map; a map that provided a guide on how to reduce all the musical possibilities into one of the six of Caplin’s analyses.

Here are some snapshots of the textbook:

Here is the final infographic given to the students: