John R. Clevenger taught music theory and aural skills for three years as the music theory lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his doctorate in music theory from the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester. He also holds a master's degree in music theory from the University of Texas at Austin and a bachelor's degree in music education from the University of Michigan. Dr. Clevenger received considerable national recognition for his dissertation research into the Paris Conservatory training and early music of Claude Debussy, most notably a four-year Jacob K. Javits National Graduate Fellowship from the US Department of Education and both an honorary AMS 50 Dissertation Fellowship and a Paul A. Pisk Prize from the American Musicological Society. But his passion has always been devising innovative and potent new ways to learn about music. Having gone into music theory originally to pursue such goals in the mid-1980s, Dr. Clevenger began working actively in 1995 on what will become the Virtual Conservatory's initial suite of products. Early fruits of this endeavor were presented at three major music conferences, of the Society for Music Theory at Baton Rouge in 1996, of the Association for Technology in Music Instruction at Toronto in 2000, and of the Society for Music Theory at Philadelphia in 2001. The latter demonstration of the paradigm-changing use of Hearing Tonal Music for teaching aural skills in a smart classroom took place under the scrutiny of a panel of leading experts as part of a special session entitled "Innovative Approaches to Teaching Aural Skills." Dr. Clevenger resides in Santa Barbara, California, where he divides his time between authoring high-end multimedia instructional software and polishing his skills as a black belt and occasional instructor in Tae Kwon Do.