Music Technology Education and a Plugin-Based Platform as a Tool to Enhance Creativity, Multidisciplinarity, Creative Design, and Collaboration Skills

Music technology is known to have the ability to enhance creativity and creative development among students. A high level of engagement has been shown among students who studied and developed musical projects, and among students who were intellectually involved in the process of meaningful exploration. When students develop a music technology project, they use their software design skills to build and combine different artistic and computational components. Here we present a creative education method for computer science and software engineering students, it uses Muzilator, a plugin-based web platform that enables developers to develop a project as a set of independent web applications (plugins). Students can share their plugins with others or use plugins developed by others. We examined 75 projects of teams of computer science students who participated in a Computer Music course. We studied the characteristics of these projects and Muzilator’s effectiveness as a creative education and collaboration tool. Some of our results show that Muzilator-based projects received higher creativity and multidisciplinarity ratings than did other projects, and that high-risk projects were more creative and artistic than low-risk ones. We also found a gender-dependency: women tended more than men to develop interactive applications, while men tended to choose more theoretic (algorithmic), non-interactive projects. Keywords: educational method, creativity, music education, software design, multidisciplinarity. DOI: 10.7176/JEP/12-11-01 Publication date: April 30th 202

Human-Computer Music Performance: From Synchronized Accompaniment to Musical Partner

Live music performance with computers has motivated many research projects in science, engineering, and the arts. In spite of decades of work, it is surprising that there is not more technology for, and a better understanding of the computer as music performer. We review the development of techniques for live music performance and outline our efforts to establish a new direction, Human-Computer Music Performance (HCMP), as a framework for a variety of coordinated studies. Our work in this area spans performance analysis, synchronization techniques, and interactive performance systems. Our goal is to enable musicians to ncorporate computers into performances easily and effectively through a better understanding of requirements, new techniques, and practical, performance-worthy implementations. We conclude with directions for future work

Musical Aesthetics of the Natural World: Two Modern Compositional Approaches

Throughout recorded human history, experiences and observations of the natural world have inspired the arts. Within the sonic arts, evocations of nature permeate a wide variety of acoustic and electronic composition strategies. These strategies artistically investigate diverse attributes of nature: tranquility, turbulence, abundance, scarcity, complexity, and purity, to name but a few. Within the 20th century, new technologies to understand these attributes, including media recording and scientific analysis, were developed. These technologies allow music composition strategies to go beyond mere evocation and to allow for the construction of musical works that engage explicit models of nature (what has been called ‘biologically inspired music’). This paper explores two such deployments of these ‘natural sound models’ within music and music generation systems created by the authors: an electroacoustic composition using data derived from multi-channel recordings of forest insects (Luna-Mega) and an electronic music generation system that extracts musical events from the di↵erent layers of natural soundscapes, in particular oyster reef soundscapes (Stine). Together these works engage a diverse array of extra-musical disciplines: environmental science, acoustic ecology, entomology, and computer science. The works are contextualized with a brief history of natural sound models from preantiquity to the present in addition to reflections on the uses of technology within these projects and the potential experiences of audiences listening to these works

Music Neurotechnology: a natural progression

Music has always had a connection with science, which is facilitated by the latest technologies of the time. The 16th century luthier’s savoir faire to manufacture violins and the plethora of software available these days to compose and analyse music with sophisticated modelling and statistical methods, are only two examples of this. This chapter examines how this connection is progressing nowadays, in particular with relation to musical creativity and Biology. The term ‘Music Neurotechnology’ appeared for the first time in Computer Music Journal in 2009, to refer to a new research area that is emerging at the crossroads of neurobiology, engineering sciences and music. After a brief introduction to Music Neurotechnology, the chapter discusses the authors’ own projects in this field, including the development of a technique to synthesise sounds representing the behaviour of neurones cultured in vitro and the composition of orchestral music using rhythms generated by computer simulations of brain tissue. Research into brain-computer music interface (BCMI) is introduced as an example of the potential impact of Music Neurotechnology to biomedical engineering in addition to musical creativity. The conclusion suggests that Music Neurotechnology holds a tremendous potential to harness the benefits of music to society and human development

SCRATCH LANGUAGE OF PROGRAMMING VS ENGLISH LANGUAGE: COMPARING MATHEMATICAL AND LINGUISTIC FEATURES

This paper focuses on Scratch language of programming and traces its math and linguistic features. From a complex consideration about Scratch language programming in linguistic paradigm, focusing on structural, semantic and syntactic features and logic of its narration, this research attempts to clarify specifics of the language and correlate it with the English language features. Global integration of ideas and sciences underline the crucial importance of programming and language conglomerate. Human-computer interfaces, software systems, and development of various programming languages depend on well-balanced structure, shape, logic, and appearance of the actual code. Dynamic characteristics of the Scratch programming environment sustain the creation of interactive and media-rich projects. Ad expansion of Scratch for mediation of animated stories, music videos, science projects, tutorials, and other contents necessitates multifaceted analysis of this programming environment and evokes the interest of researching Scratch from the math and linguistic perspective as one possible projection on various aspects of the considered programming language

Musical expertise as a scaffold for novice programming

textThis study addresses the role of musical expertise on novice computer programming. Engaging novices with computer programming is one of the great challenges of computer science education. Although there is extensive research focusing on constructionist approaches to programming education and creative entry points to programming, little research addresses the topic of how musical expertise informs an unstructured programming activity. To answer this question I focused on the role of participant talk during programming, patterns in participant programming, and evidence of computational thinking in participants’ final Scratch projects. For this interpretivist study, I worked with a dozen novice programmers from a variety of musical backgrounds: classical musicians, jazz musicians, composers, and non- musicians. Each participant worked on a free-form musical project in the Scratch programming environment. I collected data including participant talk, screen recordings of participant programming, and participants’ final Scratch projects. Overall, musical participants more readily took to the numeracy involved in programming music in Scratch. Also, musical participants were able to use musical concepts and techniques as jumping-off points for programming challenges. Considering my results by participant group, composers stood out in a number of ways: working the longest, testing their programs the most often, adding Scratch objects the slowest, v removing the most Scratch objects, creating projects of the greatest nested depth, and unanimous use of operators and random numbers. Non-musicians, on the other hand, worked for the shortest amount of time, added the fewest Scratch objects, and created projects of the lowest nested depth. In addition to adding to the body of research around chunking and tinkering, this study reinforces the importance of context and comfort in an introduction to computer programming. Composition may be an especially rich area to leverage, given the design- like programming activity of the composers here. Future research projects could resemble this one while focusing on younger learners, explicit musical concepts like those invoked by participants, or alternative performing arts framings such as theater or dance.Curriculum and Instructio

Straddling the intersection

Music technology straddles the intersection between art and science and presents those who choose to work within its sphere with many practical challenges as well as creative possibilities. The paper focuses on four main areas: secondary education, higher education, practice and research and finally collaboration. The paper emphasises the importance of collaboration in tackling the challenges of interdisciplinarity and in influencing future technological developments

A Symbolic Music Transformer for Real-Time Expressive Performance and Improvisation

With the widespread proliferation of AI technology, deep architectures — many of which are based on neural networks — have been incredibly successful in a variety of different research areas and applications. Within the relatively new domain of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), deep neural networks have also been successful for a variety of tasks, including tempo estimation, beat detection, genre classification, and more. Drawing inspiration from projects like George E. Lewis\u27s Voyager and Al Biles\u27s GenJam, two pioneering endeavors in human-computer interaction, this project attempts to tackle the problem of expressive music generation and seeks to create a Symbolic Music Transformer as a real-time musical improvisation companion, exploring the potential of AI to enhance the human experience of music. We successfully manage to implement the first iteration of a Transformer that can generate musical output. While the model struggles to generalize to a variety of inputs — likely due to limited training resources and data used while training — it can learn the structure of encoded midi-sequences and can generate expressive MIDI performances. We also present a working prototype of a performance environment built with Max/MSP which can parse auditory information in real-time and serve as the interface between the model and the musician.Senior Project submitted to The Division of Science, Mathematics and Computing of Bard College